The Heart of Darkness Sees Light at Last

The first political speech I ever gave was in support of Patrice Lumumba, first president of a Congo that previously had been a Belgian colony. This was in 1961. Soon thereafter I saw my first police riot, when a couple thousand of us demonstrated outside the Belgian Embassy in London, Lumumba having been murdered with the connivance of the Western powers and the direct assistance of the CIA station in Kinshasa. By 1964, these same Western powers had settled on the man they stoutly supported for the next 30-odd years, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Joseph Conrad set his "Heart of Darkness" in the Congo, and for many Westerners in the late 19th century, the Congo, a fiefdom of King Leopold of the Belgians, represented the ne plus ultra of colonial tyranny. Mark Twain was a leader of American agitation against Leopold and wrote a savage essay, "King Leopold's Soliloquy." In England, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle matched Twain in vituperation with his tract, "The Crime of the Congo."

It's been reckoned that as many as 5 million Congolese may have been killed by Leopold. And even if this figure is somewhat exaggerated, the victims probably exceeded the number of Armenians killed by the Turks after World War I. Leopold's agents set quotas on Congolese villages for ivory and rubber, and where these were not met, the soldiers killed all the males and often the entire population of the village. To keep an accurate count, the victims' right hands were severed, smoked to preserve them against the climate and sent back for administrative tally and to ensure that bullets weren't being wasted. Those who like to wax sentimental about the benefits of the white man's empire in Africa usually pass up the chance to include Leopold's Congo in their benign assessment.

The outrage expressed by Twain, Conan Doyle, Roger Casement and the others against the Congo of King Leopold contrasts markedly with the relative indifference of Western intellectuals to the 33-year tyranny presided over by Mobutu. By the end of the 1960s, most of them had discarded their earlier optimism about "post-colonial" Africa. The one Western intellectual who did care, and who traveled incognito to Africa to organize the guerrilla struggle against Mobutu, was Che Guevara, and within a few years he was hunted down and killed by those same sponsors of Lumumba's death.