“Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts – Colonial Exploitation in the Congo” by Jules Marchal, 2008
Remember Lever Bros. soap?
It was made by a British company mostly out of palm oil, initially using
Congolese forced labor and much more. Lord
Leverhulme was its ‘CEO.’ The company
that made it is now called Unilever. This
is the story behind that apparently innocent commodity in the period 1911 to
about 1960. It is certainly the most
extraordinarily detailed study of colonialism in Africa ever written. It took Marchal 20 years to go through
documents from the Lever firm, Belgian Colonial office, law courts, colonial
administration, the Catholic Church, journalism, the Belgian government and
independent reports written by observers to get at the various facts about how
the palm oil industry worked in what is now the ‘Democratic’ Republic of the Congo.
It is common knowledge about the cruel rule of Belgian King
Leopold II prior to this, who instituted coerced slavery on the peoples of that
area for the production of rubber.
Leopold actually personally owned the land he exploited. The ‘explorer’ Henry Stanley was one of the
factotums and constructors of Leopold’s brutal colonial regime, which lasted
from 1884 to 1908 and killed millions. Prior
to Leopold the area was a hunting ground for European and Arab slavers, aided
by local chiefs. The Congo is rich in
natural resources to this day, and is fed by a huge network of rivers that flow
to the ocean, providing a means of transport for ivory, rubber, timber, palm
oil and now coltan, cobalt, uranium, diamonds and other rare earths. The pattern set by Leopold continues, as the present
capitalist Congo is affected by war and war lords, debt and virtual labor
slavery, corruption and exploitation of natural resources even under its own 'independent' government.
THE
HCB
Back to Lord Leverhulme. As a British capitalist, his company Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) got a concession from the Belgian Colonial office to use 750,000 Congolese hectares for palm oil production and harvesting, which is about 2.5 acres per hectare, or about 1.875 million acres. Belgium was the colonial ruler at the time, with the colonial government in Kinshasa. Surveyors could never actually measure the land blocks conceded and didn’t really want to as it would give ‘legal’ status to local land claims. What is interesting about the colonial situation in the Congo is that it mirrored what had already happened in Britain in several ways with the advent of capitalism: 1) the famous private enclosure of the common land; 2) forbidding tribal people from using the forests; 3) forcing them into grueling and badly paid labor in palm oil mills and groves; 4) the state playing a role in enforcing all this.
One note on the author.
Marchal is not a full-throated anti-colonialist, as he several times
makes the remark that if the pay had been better, and the conditions better,
forced labor would not have been needed.
He praises the next-door operations of the British palm oil industry in
Nigeria, which avoided many of the criminal practices of the Belgian Congo. Nor is there a mention of deforestation, which
is the result of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. (China is now the biggest importer of palm
oil. Try not to buy products with palm
oil, which is ubiquitous in U.S. products too, as deforestation is the result.) The biggest missing facts in the book are
those of HCB profit rates, share price rises, exploitation rates, executive
pay, Lever’s own wealth and other financial details. This would show what kind of money
was being made out of colonial exploitation. After all, this was not just a
function of cruelty or racism, there was a basic money motive underlying the
whole operation.
 |
| Climbing for palm nuts |
This book is so detailed in references, names and geography
as to be almost unreadable except as source material for a diligent researcher
or someone with vast knowledge of the Congo, which I am not. So I’m going to highlight some key points, a
summary so to speak, which might miss the wholesale cruelty of the whole operation, the forest for the trees:
1. Local chiefs were paid or bribed to provide or
coerce labor from their villages.
2. The
Belgian Colonial government in the Congo and back in Brussels flip-flopped over
how to treat the indigenous people, but always backed HCB and others in the
end. They ignored 4 key critical reports
and the ‘laws’ in place.
3. HCB
wanted a monopoly on palm nut procurement, so edged out Portuguese traders in
Bumba who were buying directly from locals.
They also forbade locals from selling palm nuts themselves.
4. Lever
tried to paint himself as a philanthropist and good capitalist, talking about
eliminating sleeping sickness, encouraging Catholic missions, healthcare and
building brick huts in ‘model villages.’
All this was P.R. and humanitarian-washing.
5. The
wages paid in the Congo were the lowest in Africa according to Marchal. With the consistent devaluation of the
Belgian franc, the tiny wages of around 25 centimes a day or the piece rates
for crates of nuts remained the same, losing value every year.
6. HCB
built villages along the rivers near their factories and groves, which were
mostly crowded grass huts. HCB wanted to
force villagers to leave their original homes in the ‘chefferies’ and settle in new places near the palm groves, thus
displacing thousands, separating families and emptying villages. This displacement led to a huge drop in
babies born. These new villages were on
HCB land and not owned by the people themselves. It was a company ‘town’ situation, so villagers
were dispossessed from their land again.
7. Cutting
palm fruit involves shimmying up a tall palm using a rope around your waist to a
thicker back rest, with your feet on the trunk.
Dangerous and difficult to whip the rope up, then walk upwards. I’ve tried to do this once in trying out for
a city park board job and couldn’t get more than a few feet up the trunk!
8. The
mortality rates were in the 9-10% range.
Healthcare was rudimentary to non-existent, in spite of exaggerated
claims. Recruits were not given blankets
or adequate clothes. Sick people
sometimes fled the camps so accurate mortality numbers were difficult to
acquire.
9. Payments
of food in kind were sporadic. Hunger
was endemic in the labor camps.
10. Women
and children were used as sorters and porters, many unpaid. This was part of the forced
‘proletarianization’ of the Congolese.
11. Legally
workers signed contracts for 3 months up to 3 years, committing them to
harvesting ‘X’ amount of palm nuts per month or working in a nut-crushing mill. If they reneged on the contract by not
showing up or picking less, they were put in jail for months and whipped with a
‘chicotte,’ a razor-sharp whip made
of hippopotamus hide, the same weapon used by Portuguese slavers.
12. A
rebellion of the Penda people broke out in 1931, which was ‘cured’ by a massacre
using machine-guns. An HCB employee had raped a village woman and stolen items,
but this was only a last straw. This set
off a ‘religious’ rebellion called ‘satana’
opposing all Europeans, their jobs, their money, their religion. their taxes. A similar rebellion was based on the lukusu sect who refused to work for the
Europeans, pay taxes or fix roads. The
locals had bows and arrows, with few having guns. 550 died in the Penda
rebellion. Oddly they did not use guerilla warfare, only frontal assaults. A pity.
13. Africans
were expected to pay a head-tax to the Belgian colonial authorities. At one point almost 50% stopped paying. It is unclear what the Africans got in return
for their tax payments, but it looks like almost nothing.
14. The local state authorities vacillated between
backing HCB ‘recruiting’ drives for labor and not doing so. But they usually sent local government representatives
with HCB recruiters, which implied military support for HCB to the unwilling
villagers.
15. When
‘recruiters’ showed up, some whole villages ran into the forest to hide. Desertion from fruit cutting and HCB work was
high even after being impressed.
16. HCB later required locals to plant palm oil
trees and work the plots for the firm, though allowing the farmers to grow
vegetables between the palms for their own use.
This was pictured as an ‘educational’ act. This form of share-cropping was permitted by
the colonial government but never took off in a big way due to its coercive
nature.
17. HCB was not the only firm allowed to plunder
the Congo, with some Portuguese ones like the Compagnie du Kasai (CK) also
involved. The CK was if anything even
worse than the HCB, but smaller.
18. The
‘rent’ paid by HCB to Belgium for their land was minuscule, a few centimes a
hectare, sort of like U.S. grazing fees to millionaire cattle barons or fees
for logging companies and mining concerns.
19. One of the most desperate tribes, the Luba,
provided many laborers and were later attacked in 1959-1961 by other tribes.
20. The
HCB cried bankruptcy when the government suggested they treat the workers
better.
21. The
legal basis for the concession throughout its life was a ‘tripartite agreement’
consisting of A) The company could choose the land it wanted in each ‘territoire’; B) the State would manage
the blocks of land under joint ownership with ‘native communities,’ with
control by the Colony; C) the HCB had exclusive right to the palm fruit in
these land areas. Re B, no one actually consulted the Africans.
22. The
piece rates for fruit were not adjusted for seasons all the time, which made it
almost impossible to meet goals during those periods.
23. Catholic
missions supported the goals of the Belgian colonists, though some priests were
critical of the treatment of the Congolese.
24. The
State became a major shareholder in the companies doing business in the Congo,
including HCB and CK. So they had a financial
interest in the profit-rate too.
25. During
World War II, with Belgium’s occupation by the Third Reich, the colonial Congo
administration made a deal with Britain to supply palm oil and increased
demands on impressed workers for even more production.
This book, because of its
obsessive detail, is an eye-opener. For
any study of colonialism on the African continent, it is essential.
Prior blog reviews on this
subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive,
using these terms: “Not a Nation of Immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz);
“Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “The Red Deal,” “Land Grabbing,” “The
Convert,” “Guns, Germans and Steel” (Diamond); “Silence,” “The Jester and the
Sages,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Blood and Earth,” “Slave States,” “Siege of
Jadotville,” “The Dream of the Celt” (MV Llosa); “Secrets of the American Empire”
(Perkins); “Black Panther” or the words
‘colonialism, slavery, Congo or
Africa.
And I bought it at May Day
Books!
Red Frog / September 12, 2024
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