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February 28, 2020.
Peter Bate (Director). Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death (2004, English/French/Dutch with English subtitles).
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death documentary brings to the silver screen the unspeakable horrors of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. It begins with scenes of terror; Congolese children, men, and women without hands. Their hands were cut off by the colonizers and their puppet troops in a macabre system of accounting. Hands were severed because ‘workers’ didn’t work fast enough. Even children’s hands were chopped off as punishment for late deliveries of rubber.
Units of mangled hands were used by the puppet troops to “prove” they hadn’t wasted bullets on hunting game, an offense in the eyes of the colonialists. Later in the film, an African chief employs another kind of accounting: a fact-finding commission views a huge bundle of sticks representing the chief’s many missing villagers. Such stories about the destruction of villages, rape, and torture abound in the film.
The fanatical rush for colonies, rubber, and other raw materials were essential aspects of the drive to industrialize Europe. Africa’s valuable resources helped usher in Europe’s motorized transportation industry and the proliferation of many other commodities. During the Belgian reign of terror (1908-1960), John Dunlop created the pneumatic tire, setting off a surge in bicycle sales and creating a huge demand for rubber latex and wild Congolese vine rubber.
In order to maximize the exploitation of Africa and to ease conflict among themselves, fourteen European imperialist powers sat around a table in Berlin, Germany between 1884 and 1885 to carve up the continent into areas of domination. Like butchers with knives dripping blood, this imperial scramble for Africa partitioned the continent into spoils. No regard nor consideration was given to existing traditional borders or other historical factors. It was to Congo’s misfortune that King Leopold was given the largest and, soon to become evident, richest chunk of the richest continent.
The film presents in almost elementary fashion the machinery of colonialism. It sheds light on how Belgium used European soldiers, administrators, businesspersons, missionaries, journalists and African collaborators, to set in motion a system that transformed the huge, resource-rich, heart of Africa into a zone of death and conflict. Over the next 20 years of direct Belgian rule (beginning in 1908), 10 million Africans would die by murder, disease and from the ensuing deplorable conditions.
Resistance was put down by wanton murder, the results of which should be rightfully recognized as an “African Holocaust”. In the meantime, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company racked up 700 percent profits on shipments of rubber from the Congo. The company’s stock-market valuation increased 30 times in six years, while King Leopold was celebrated in European capitals as a humane and progressive pioneer of Christian values in “darkest Africa”.
The film includes intermittent scenes from an imagined trial of Leopold, placing the responsibility for ‘civilizing’ the Congo on his shoulders. Leopold’s role in the documentary however was given too much emphasis, while a wider concert of complicit sadistic players in a global system, got too little attention. Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death reminds us though that the hunt for the Congo’s enormous riches, including metals for the burgeoning telecommunications, gaming, and electronic industries, is not over.
While the criminal exploitation of the Congolese people and their resources, particularly, rubber, transported western imperialism towards wider and more profound industrialization, the continuing rape of Congo today, through the pillaging of the region’s rare earth minerals such as cobalt etc, is providing key foundations for what is already being dubbed a 4th industrial revolution.
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death is showing at the NY African Diaspora International Film Festival, Teachers College, (525 W 120th Street, New York, NY, 10027), Saturday, February 29, 2020, at 2:00 pm.
Martin P. Felix is a visual artist and educator. He lives with his family in New York City.