A description of continued and cruel French abuses in the Congo colonies

A retired concessionary company manager told France’s fourth-largest-selling paper, Le Journal, that his firm routinely forced Africans to deliver ivory and rubber to them by “tying them down and whipping them 50 times with a chicotte” —a cruelly ingenious lash made of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, twisted to form hundreds of razor-sharp spokes. “After each blow, the victims screamed in pain, their blood spurting out”. The next day, “they returned with ivory and rubber”. Le Journal’s source also claimed to have frequently seen the companies’ armed agents “enter into villages, where they forced terrorized blacks to give them their ivory”. The Africans received not a sou in payment, a common practice, the former official said
Worse, another popular paper not only confirmed the prevalence of such extortion and theft but also reported, “The administration [of the colony] tolerated such things; judicial officials left them unpunished; and successive [colonial] governors hid them from authorities in Paris”‍‍.

With reports such as these persistently being leaked, the colonial ministry must have been horrified when Challaye’s detailed and compelling dispatches began to appear in Le Temps. The special correspondent, who doubled as Brazza’s personal secretary for the mission, was a socialist openly hostile to the concessionary companies and suspicious from the outset of France’s Congolese regime. It is unclear why Le Temps hired him, but impressive that it did. His remarkable series of articles, written between April and September 1905, added to the explorer’s legend and, most important, confirmed the extent of French abuses in the Congo. Challaye also made a notable contribution to French travel literature, painting perhaps the best portrait to date of equatorial Africa, albeit replete with the era’s racial stereotypes. Other members of the Brazza commission wrote about the Congolese mission, but without Challaye’s journalistic flair and his front-page access to the mainstream press.

Clear hints of those atrocities surfaced during a bizarre “native dance” staged for the Europeans’ benefit. Brazza saw in that dance “a symbolic representation of the Calvary the inhabitants of this region had had to suffer”. Strangely, Challaye fails to mention an element of this scene reported by another member of the commission, an inspecteur des colonies named Saurin. According to him, Brazza also understood from the dance that a great many villagers had recently been taken captive. Questioning the local administrator, who had hoped to hide this crime, Brazza found evidence of a nearby “concentration camp” with 119 women and children held hostage under miserable conditions‍‍. The women appeared to have been raped, and press accounts depicted them as suffering from venereal diseases contracted from their captors.

The dance scene, occurring on June 30, 1905, constitutes the turning point of Challaye’s story‍‍[53]. Over the following six weeks, Brazza would uncover the full extent of the crimes and horrors that had turned his once peaceful colony into a grotesque hell on earth. The 119 hostages represented in the dance were at least still alive; descending further toward Bangui, Brazza unearthed a history that had not ended so well. In the town of Mongoumba, just south of Bangui, the commissioners discovered that members of the colony’s paramilitary regional guard had “brutalized the natives and taken advantage of the women they desired”‍‍. Terrified, the villagers began to flee across the river into the Congo Free State.

Desperate to collect a quantity of rubber before everyone left, the top colonial official in the region had his guards seize fifty-eight women and ten children from the different villages. He agreed to release them only after their husbands and fathers paid the elevated taxes he had imposed on them in the form of rubber. The chief of one village had his mother, two wives, and two children taken by the guardsmen, who locked them and sixty-three other hostages in a building in Mongoumba. Male villagers then began to deliver the rubber required of them, which the colonial official immediately handed over to an agent for the local concessionary company. (Companies gave the colonial government cash in exchange for rubber). Weighing the product collected, the government agent judged the quantity too small; he decided not to release the hostages, taking them back to Bangui. There, he locked all sixty-eight in a windowless hut six meters long and four meters wide. During their first twelve days in captivity, twenty-five hostages died, their bodies dumped in the river. Several days later, a doctor, newly arrived in the town, heard cries and moans coming from the hut. He pushed open the door and to his horror found a small number of skeletally thin women and children barely alive amid the stench of dead bodies and human excrement. “The skin was peeling away”, wrote Dr. Fulconis, “muscles atrophied, intelligence gone, movement and speech no longer possible”‍‍[55]. Of the sixty-eight hostages originally squeezed into the makeshift prison, only twenty-one had survived. One of the women gave birth before passing away, and a woman survivor adopted her child. “In this horrible drama”, Challaye wrote, “it was the women cannibals who gave the cruel white men a lesson in humanity”‍‍[56].

After freeing the survivors, the young doctor notified the colonial administration of the atrocities he had seen. The court in Brazzaville took up the case, only to dismiss it on grounds of insufficient evidence. The lone action taken was to transfer the administrator responsible for the hostage taking. He was, however, moved from the outback of Bangui to the capital city of Brazzaville, where everyone wanted to be. Having uncovered this atrocity, Brazza and his colleagues proceeded to accumulate evidence of one chilling abuse after the other. “The book one needs to reread here”, Challaye remarked, “is Dante’s Inferno”‍‍. Shortly before the Brazza commission left for Africa, the colonial ministry shipped Toqué to Brazzaville, hoping that the proceedings against him would occur offstage, outside the French press’s range. Officials did not expect that Challaye, as special correspondent for Le Temps, would be on the spot. The young philosopher was in fact the only journalist to cover the trial; his dispatches stood as the lone public account of the event.

Both Toqué and Gaud faced charges of murdering or ordering the murders of several Congolese men and women. The two defendants denied all accusations leveled by Africans, admitting wrongdoing only when a European, including either Toqué or Gaud, had endorsed or brought a charge. Since Toqué had himself accused his colleague of blowing up the African, Pakpa, Gaud could not deny responsibility. He did, however, claim that Toqué had told him to execute the man. Asked why he had used dynamite, his only response was that he had a few sticks in his hut and thought they would work well as a method of execution. In the pretrial phase, Gaud had testified that death by dynamite would be an ideal form of exemplary violence. The natives would see Pakpa’s demise as a magical, divine intervention, something that would instill fear in their hearts and prevent future rebellions. So he hung the dynamite around Pakpa’s neck, lit the fuse, and the man exploded. “Gaud recounted his crime”, Challaye wrote, “with a stupefying calm”‍‍.

On the witness stand, Toqué confirmed what he had said during the pretrial investigation. His superiors had told him that nothing was more important than recruiting porters and collecting taxes. Finding the natives unwilling to work or pay imposts voluntarily, Toqué sent his agents to round up porters by force and take their wives and children hostage. Members of the regional guards routinely raped the women hostages, many of whom later died, along with their children, of hunger and disease. Toqué testified that he believed himself authorized to render justice and even execute Africans he judged guilty of rebellion or insubordination. When he told his superior that he had summarily shot a “rebel” named Pikamandji, Toqué claimed his boss had replied, “You have done the right thing; in the future keep such information to yourself”‍‍[59]. Only later would the younger man be charged with murder.

After hearing all the testimony, the court took a full day to reach a verdict. It declared Toqué guilty as an accomplice to murder and Gaud guilty of murder without premeditation. In both cases, the court found “extenuating circumstance”, sentencing the pair to five years in prison. Most white residents of Brazzaville found the penalty outrageously harsh. “Accustomed to treating blacks as machines or slaves”, Challaye wrote, “to exploiting them and abusing them, they [the white population] were amazed that anyone could judge the lives of these ‘dirty niggers’ so valuable”‍‍[60]. On leaving the courtroom, the journalist heard a young civil servant cry out: “It’s as if we have been naturalized as niggers”‍‍[61].

Challaye’s observations about the trial and his revelations of atrocities and colonial abuse turned him against the existing regime in the Congo. But he nonetheless retained his allegiance to the most fundamental ideological pillar of the French colonial system, the mission civilisatrice. For him, it was the hero Brazza who incarnated and legitimized that mission. Brazza’s was “the only form of colonialism compatible with a democracy such as ours, a democracy that civilizes and liberates”. His successors had allowed his achievements to collapse, leaving an angry and terrified population that no longer recognized the greatness of French civilization. Whether Challaye believed a new civilizing mission could have redeemed the Congo is unclear, but given the views of other socialists at the time, it’s likely he did. Only in the 1930s did Challaye become an ardent opponent of colonialism in all its forms‍‍.

As for Brazza, he was destined to die on the continent long dear to his heart. He became so sick on the last leg of the journey back to Brazzaville that he could barely stand up. He forced himself, Challaye writes, to hold one final meeting with Gentil, who appeared increasingly evasive, increasingly unwilling to let Brazza’s commission do its work. In a letter written just before his return trip home, Brazza claimed that Gentil had attempted to block his efforts at every turn. In the Ubangi-Chari region, where Brazza had discovered “the destruction pure and simple of the population”, local officials, doubtless acting on the governor’s orders, “went to great lengths to prevent me from seeing what had happened in the past and especially what is going on now”‍‍. Brazza could understand why: he found evidence of serious abuses committed even after his commission had sailed for Africa. Worse, he had caught the commissaire general in an outright lie. Although Gentil had loudly announced the end of portage, the commission saw that it had continued even more ruinously than before. Brazza’s conclusion was that Gentil should be removed from office. “I return home”, Brazza wrote, “with the belief that my mission was necessary. Without it, we would have had a scandal on our hands worse… than those of the Belgians”.

After locking horns one last time with Gentil, Brazza headed back across Stanley Pool and down to the Atlantic coast via the Belgian railway. His illness became so severe on the steamship home that he was taken ashore at Dakar, where he died on 14 September 1905. The explorer, Challaye wrote, was so brokenhearted by what he had seen in the Congo, so upset over the ruin of the great humane colony he had built, that he could no longer soldier on. Having presciently refused early on to serve King Leopold, he had been horrified to discover in the French Congo the same evils that shamed its Belgian neighbor. Brazza’s “heroic sorrow”, Challaye wrote, “his sublime sadness, sapped his strength and hastened his death”‍‍. He died a martyr to the mission civilisatrice.

Brazza had long been portrayed as a martyr, working selflessly and at the cost of his health and well-being to create a great empire for France. His death allowed this figurative martyrdom to come true. The great man, this “laic missionary” and “apostle” of freedom, wrote the Petit Parisien’s Lucien Vrily, had anticipated, even embraced, his sacrifice to a larger cause. Before leaving for the Congo, he had told the journalist, “I will happily surrender all my remaining strength” to prevent the moral ruin of the colony‍‍[65]. In announcing Brazza’s death, the mass-circulation press and pictorial weeklies depicted the martyr in quasi-religious terms. They showed a saintlike, emaciated Brazza being helped toward his deathbed. Photographs pictured him lying there, his withered face looking old far beyond his fifty-three years, his blank eyes about to close for good. Brazza’s biographer and brother-in-law, Jacques de Chambrun, later put these pictures to words: “Those who kneel before his emaciated body, stretched out on the whiteness of a small narrow bed, were struck by the expression on his features seemingly frozen in anguish. Suddenly, they perceived a new look to this face they all had known for so long. No longer was it the face of a hero; it was the face of a martyr”‍‍.

Brazza had hoped that the prestige of his name would add strength to his findings and move the Republic to make amends. Now his fame would have to exert a posthumous force. Colonial Minister Clémentel, who had never wanted the truth of the Congo to come out, decided to play down Brazza’s findings, even while associating himself —and France as a whole— with the saintliness and martyrdom of the great man. With Brazza out of the picture, the colonial minister appears to have decided on a three-pronged strategy: extol the martyr Brazza, silence the returning members of his commission, and bring Gentil to Paris to defend his colonial administration. In the short run, the strategy did not work. A member of Brazza’s commission gave copies of documents and other information to the prominent writer Robert de Jouvenel, who then leaked this material, much of it written by Brazza himself, to the press‍‍[67]. The explorer’s notes sharply criticized Gentil, whom he accused of heinous crimes. Brazza charged not only that Gentil had been complicit in the Congo’s atrocities but that he had committed many himself.

The popular press jumped on the sensational new controversy, creating another episode in the ongoing Congo scandal. What could be juicier than a set of disturbing accusations coming “from beyond the grave”, as one paper put it? According to “an individual well placed for being perfectly informed [Jouvenel]”, Brazza had explicitly charged that Gentil’s demands for ever increasing tax receipts and a huge force of porters had led to the hostage camps, the burning of villages, and the constant native rebellions, all repressed with excessively harsh tactics. Worse, Brazza’s occult voice was now accusing Gentil of having personally “chicotted” a Gabonese man to death. Gentil had also ordered a woman flogged and then hung by her feet and several others whipped severely and placed in irons for theft and other petty crimes. Summarizing this damning information, the Petit Parisien’s article gave what it said was a direct quote from Brazza: “Tortures and summary judgments proliferated. M. Gentil paraded through the streets with a personal bodyguard whose members whipped people who failed to salute the Governor”‍‍. Such quotations seemed all the more eerily real when Brazza’s letter, mentioned above, surfaced in Le Temps the following day (September 27).

These accusations against Gentil turned the scandal into an “affair” when the commissaire and his associates, having returned to France a few days earlier, adamantly rejected Brazza’s charges, accusing commission members of spreading outright lies. The commissaire’s men hesitated to criticize the martyred Brazza directly, focusing their attack on other members of the commission, said to be “determined adversaries” prejudiced against Gentil from the start. The commissaire’s associates implied that Brazza was too ill to conduct a genuine investigation of his own, so he took as gospel the falsehoods circulated by members of his group, and accepted suspect native testimony at face value. Since even a socialist like Challaye believed that blacks routinely made things up, the colonialists around Gentil knew they could cast doubt on Brazza’s report by impugning his native sources‍‍. If Gentil had at times been involved in violent conflict, said his chief of staff, M. Pelletier, it was only in the context of warfare against native rebels trying to overthrow French colonial authority‍‍.

In a series of interviews with the press, Pelletier denied that many of the now notorious atrocities attributed to mid-level French colonial administrators and indirectly to Gentil had actually occurred. According to Pelletier, the case of the sixty-eight women and children found in a concentration camp, many of them dead, had nothing to do with Europeans; it was a wholly African affair. In Pelletier’s account, members of an enemy tribe had kidnapped the victims in question after eating several others. Those kept alive were to be used as slaves‍‍. In other, similar accounts, Gentil’s surrogates attempted to explain away most of the cruelties attributed to the French. This tactic, combined with the widespread belief that African testimony could not be trusted, raised doubts not only about the information leaked from the Brazza documents but also about all prior reports of French abuses. Had Brazza still been alive, his fame and personal reputation might have enabled him to foil these efforts, but without him, Gentil and his allies in the colonial ministry could circulate a counternarrative designed to discredit the leaks coming from the commission of inquiry.

With two opposing explanations of the Congo situation, centering on a pair of antagonists, one deceased, the press polemic —and the affaire it had generated— continued unabated. Most vocal were the conservative newspapers and the socialist L’Humanité, which proved as thorough as it was relentless. L’Humanité’s Gustave Rouanet, who represented the Seine Department in the National Assembly, did an extraordinary job of investigating the Congo affair. He obtained access to the Brazza commission’s notes and found many sources willing to reveal what they knew. Beginning in late September 1905, Rouanet wrote no fewer than twenty-nine articles on La Barbarie Coloniale, almost one a day‍‍. Taken together, his pieces constitute a masterpiece of advocacy journalism and the effective use of anonymous sources. The portrait he painted was devastating, not just for individuals like Toqué and Gentil but for the colonial system itself, Rouanet’s real target. His articles would have been more influential had they appeared in a mainstream newspaper, and the intensity of his critique may have alarmed papers like Le Temps and the Petit Parisien, whose journalists had already revealed much of what Rouanet would say, if in less detail. The editors of these two papers likely felt uncomfortable with the socialist writer now repeating, and reinforcing, what they had published. Shortly after Rouanet’s series began, Le Temps and the Petit Parisien backed off, leaving L’Humanité to face Gentil’s counterattack largely alone. The socialists remained marginal enough in 1905 that opponents could dismiss their journalism on ideological grounds, without having to prove their information wrong.

Under these circumstances, Colonial Minister Clémentel decided to cool things down by announcing the formation of a new commission of inquiry. Its task would be to evaluate the respective claims of the two sides and recommend any reforms that might be needed. Jean-Marie de Lanessan, the former governor-general of Indochina and minister of colonies, chaired the group, and his collaborators included a well-known academic and several high-level civil servants from Clémentel’s ministry, all favorable to Gentil‍‍. It is unclear exactly how Lanessan’s panel did its work, but most members seemed eager to challenge Brazza’s view that the origins of the Congo atrocities lay in the structure of France’s colonial organization, especially as directed by Gentil. Lanessan’s 120-page report followed to the letter Clémentel’s original instructions to the Brazza commission: the abuses, deplorable as they were, resulted from the isolated acts of errant individuals. The colonial system itself was not to blame, nor was Gentil, whose career emerged from the second inquiry completely intact.