BELGIUM: Majesties to Congo

(See front cover)

Along that riverbank a thousand miles Tattooed cannibals danced in files. . . . Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom! Boom, steal the pigmies. . . . Boom, kill the white men. . . . From the mouth of the Congo To the Mountains of the Moon.

—”The Congo.” (Vachel Lindsay.)

More than three miles tall, the “Mountains of the Moon” tower above Central Africa, regal in tremendous ermine robes of perpetual snow. Last week a white King & Queen passed with the pomp of a state visit before the white Moon Mountains. Black buck Negroes and black buxom Negresses prostrated themselves, as was fitting, before His Majesty Albert I, King of the Belgians and of Belgian Congo Blackamoors—and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. The white Sovereigns, complacent, were on tour through their Afric domains, which are larger in area than all Western Europe and contain almost as many Blackamoors as does the U. S.

. . .

Like some prodigious bended bow the River Congo curves away from the Moon Mountains and flows 3,000 miles across Africa to the Atlantic. Of all rivers whatsoever, only the Amazon, in Brazil, is greater. Every time a second ticks, prodigal Mother Congo empties into the ocean more than a million cubic feet of water. Stopping last week beside a river of such magnitude, Their Belgian Majesties must have given many a thought to the cold, relentless businessman who first exploited good Mother Congo and her Blackamoors as his hirelings, slaves and strumpets. The strumpeteer was King Leopold II of the Belgians (1835-1909), detested uncle and immediate predecessor of beloved King Albert I. Uncle Leopold went wickedly a-travel-ing when he was Crown Prince, to India, to China, to Japan and home around Africa, with a momentous visit to Mother Congo. Memories of Congoland germinated in the shrewd brain of Uncle Leopold and flowered when he became King. The master move of his long and wily reign was to call the International Conference of 1876 at Brussels, where he piously proposed to the Great Powers a program for “civilizing” the Congo and suppressing slavery there. The expense of these good works was to be generously defrayed from His Majesty’s privy purse. Not until a generation later did the Powers fully realize that they had allowed Uncle Leopold to seize, under humanitarian pretexts, one of the richest colonial empires on the Globe. Astounding is the story of how British-born & U. S.-bred Henry Morton Stanley, greatest African explorer, sought to convince U. S. and British statesmen of the boundless worth of the Congo; of how he was feted as an explorer but had his practical suggestions ignored, and finally joined reluctant forces with Belgium’s Leopold. Belated exposures of “Belgian Atrocities” in the Congo—true tales of Blackamoors whose hands were hacked off when they failed to bring in sufficient rubber or ivory—were utilized by the Powers to compel Uncle Leopold to grant them more favorable trading privileges in his Congo. Thereafter, as before, the fabulous wealth wrung from strumpeteered Mother Congo was lavished by Wicked Uncle Leopold chiefly upon public works* in Belgium ; secondarily upon his many and riotously extravagant mistresses; and lastly upon his Queen, Marie Henriette, “The Rose of Brabant,” a great-niece of Marie Antoinette, a great-granddaughter of Maria Theresa, and “lovelier than either” —as gallant King Leopold often told her. . . . Uncle Leopold visited the Congo as Monarch about 1860, receiving abject homage. Nephew Albert toured the Congo in 1909 as Crown Prince. This, the present state visit of King Albert, is a reap-parition royale after 19 years. Significant was the cordial approval of Queen Elizabeth which was manifested, last week, by inhabitants of Ruanda, Africa, a onetime German colony now held by Belgium under a League of Nations mandate. Ruandans approve the present Queen of the Belgians because they know her to be 100% German, know that her father was Duke Charles of Bavaria (Germany), know that she married King Albert in Munich, Germany. For her sake generous Ruandans overlook her husband’s anti-German sentiments. . . .

Their Majesties’ present Afric tour was preluded when they left Antwerp some weeks ago on the steamer Thysville, but began in earnest as they landed at Boma, in the mouth of Mother Congo. The big black toe of Congoland was their objective—namely the city of Elizabethville, which lies 900 miles inland, at the very toe and tip of the Belgian Congo, just where it touches Great Britain’s colony of Northern Rhodesia (so named after its exploiter, Cecil John Rhodes). Between Elizabethville and Port Franc-qui (named after the rehabilitator of Belgium’s currency, former Finance Minister Emile Francqui) lie the Katanga Mountains, rich in copper, and over them runs a 660 mile long railway which King & Queen proceeded to inaugurate. Local copper executives dolefully informed His Majesty that their Blackamoor miners have tribally combined to enforce a ruinous wage of 12¢ per day — the standard pay for such labor elsewhere in the Congo being 4¢. . . .

Close to Port Francqui and duly inspected by Their Majesties hums Leverville, a famed palm-oil extracting centre of the great British firm of Lever Brothers, “World’s Largest Soap Makers.” The late, picturesque William Hesketh Lever, who became Viscount Leverhulme, was a favored business crony of Uncle Leopold, and profited accordingly. Quaint was Mr. Lever’s presentation to King Leopold II of an ivory box containing the first cake of soap made from Congo palm-oil extracted at Leverville. Uncle Leopold, whom no gift could dazzle, afterwards said that the presentation cake “stank cursedly and wouldn’t lather,” when he sought to use it “out of compliment to M. Lever.” . . .

Descending the Congo valley, last week, on their way back to the Atlantic, King Albert & Queen Elizabeth came, after passing the Mountains of the Moon, to the border of what is perhaps the Congo’s greatest wonder: the “Pigmy Forest,” also called the “Stanley Forest” and the “Great Forest of the Congo.” Strong, hearty, cheerful, white men have not seldom emerged from a journey through the Pigmy Forest with hair turned white and mind temporarily unhinged by its stark terror. Darkness. The Great Forest is always dark. So prodigious is the foliage that even at high noon deep twilight reigns. Jungle. The mass of tangled, choking creepers must be chopped through at every step, and actually closes behind the explorer within 48 hours, so that if he would retrace his steps he must again chop. Ooze. Since no drying sunshine ever penetrates, the Pigmy Forest is bottomed by a slimy ooze. Lions, tigers and all cleanly cats eschew the foul place, but snakes, lizards and—in the oozy lakes-crocodiles are noxiously at home. Branded upon memory may remain a fight between two mammoth crocodiles, each some 20 feet long—savage devils, mercilessly tearing, raking, lunging, thrashing the ooze with loud slaps of mighty tails. The eyes seem to glare with sheer hate, remorseless, soulless, infernal. The defeated crocodile, mangled and dead, is not eaten until it has partially decayed and thus become more succulent to the victor. Pigmies. Suspicious of the white man, Congo Pigmies often set thin, poisoned stakes point upward in his path. He, knowing or fearing that they are always watching, perhaps with poisoned arrows drawn, may without difficulty become crazed with fear. The few whites who claim familiarity with Congo Pigmies have reported that these four-foot folk not only claim to be descended from monkeys, but state that they know they are, because the Congo Monkeys still occasionally live with them. . . . Their Belgian Majesties of course avoided the terrors and obscenities of the Pigmy Forest, last week, merely sailing past its extremity in a prim Congo steamer. Near Stanleyville the “Seven Cataracts of the Congo” or “Stanley Falls” halted the royal steamer, and King & Queen were obliged to motor around the Cataracts. Before proceeding downstream to the Atlantic (1,500 miles) King Albert received the homage of several onetime cannibal tribes, two being notorious backsliders. A sprinkling of Pigmies had been drummed up and Their Majesties inspected with interest the cleanest, tamest, least savage. On their way home to Belgium, King Albert and Queen Elizabeth will pass a bleak spot in the English channel where, in September 1917, a German submarine torpedoed the Belgian steamer Elizabethville in the safe of which was locked the entire diamond output of the Congo for 1917, valued at $10,000,000. The Government of His Belgian Majesty has just employed an Italian deep sea diving firm which proposes to raise the safe by means of a potent submarine magnet.

* Such as the Palace of Justice, in Brussels, boasted to be the largest secular edifice in Europe.