Some questions about pre-WW1 Congo

Kyriakos

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I have a few questions about the "Free Congo State" and (secondarily) the early part of "Belgian Congo" from 1908 till the outbreak of the first world war.

Congo appears to have been awarded to King Leopold II of Belgium, following the treaty of Berlin, so as to help negate the tension for european powers going to colonial war between themselves in unclaimed sub-saharan Africa around the line of the Equator.
Leopold II created the facade that his philanthropic company was meaning to develop Congo and better the lives of the natives, along with furthering the ability for trade in the African heartland.
In reality, as became evident pretty quickly, the land was to be run as his personal estate, and his greed and lack of any care for the locals led to massive attrocities, including the routine maiming of workers or their family members as punishment for not getting the rubber quota.

Estimates are that many million people died in the era of colonial controlled Congo, until 1908 when it became officially a colony of the nation of Belgium.

My questions are the following:

1) What was the make-up of the police/army forces of Congo during its control by Leopold II? I read that virtually all of the soldiers were 'askari', that is either locals or other native people from bordering african regions. The officers were european.

2) What was the uniform worn by the officers, and the one of the askari? I saw some images where the officrs wear colonial white clothes with white pith helmets. The askari wear blue clothes and red caps, which mostly are fez-like.

3) Is there any other term for "pith helmet"? I ask this cause it is not readily translatable to Greek. Pith is the softer part of the inside of a plant. Not sure why that hat is called a "helmet"? It has the shape of a helmet, i suppose (largely at least) but obviously is not going to protect one against physical hits; only protects from the heat.

4) How far inside the congo were the small ships able to travel in this timeline? Originally the capital of the colony was Boma, a town very near the only exit of the colony to the sea. The Congo river reaches far inside the country, up to the massive tropical forest.

5) Kautsouk harvesting (natural rubber) seems to have been the main focus of that time in regards to the economy (along with some iron mining). Where was the primary region of this industry? I suspect near the tropical forest border, but i am particularly interested in the distance from the Congo River outside of the forest.

6) How was Kautsouk extracted and prepared? I read that after its extraction from the local plants (which i would really want a name for...) the milky residue was further solidified with the use of Formic acid. Was that happening already in 1908 and shortly before that? Formic acid was in use industrially (but not much, i think) from the end of the 19th century.

I think these are my main questions :) I will possibly use the colonial era Congo as the symbolic part of a new story.

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3) Is there any other term for "pith helmet"? I ask this cause it is not readily translatable to Greek. Pith is the softer part of the inside of a plant. Not sure why that hat is called a "helmet"? It has the shape of a helmet, i suppose (largely at least) but obviously is not going to protect one against physical hits; only protects from the heat.

I've heard the term salacot used. They're actually pretty hard and rigid so I'd still call one a "helmet" even if they wouldn't hold up against a weapon strike.
 
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, that's all I've got to say.
 
Yeah, i know of that short novel. My own work (if written) would only allude to Congo of that era as part of the allegory going on. Neither the actual setting of the story, or any of its reality, will have to do with the Congo.
 
King Leopold's Ghost is the book you actually want.

With regards to point 4, I believe there was a set of rapids just below Kinshasa that made further penetration of the river impossible. Manpower was used to move goods from the top of the impasse to the bottom. Once you were above the rapids, river boats could travel pretty much throughout the watershed. Stanley Falls was an obstacle, but if memory serves it was a manageable one.
 
HB is right, that book will answer most of your questions regarding the Belgian colony. I seem to remember an image from KLG with a soldier whipping a slave tied down on the ground and he was wearing a light colored uniform.

With regards to shipping, the rapids prevented river travel, so they used columns of porters to move the goods (marching enslaved Africans carrying the goods, if any died they would leave the bodies where they fell). Pack animals would catch malaria and other jungle diseases and die too quickly. Eventually, there was a railroad built to improve transportation between the one port and I think Leopoldville, and by the time rubber was the main commodity they was a basic rail system to transfer goods to the coastal port. If you are talking about the early days when they were after gold and ivory, then porters (and maybe canoes) were used almost exclusively.

The raw rubber itself is basically tree sap (called rubber latex). To extract it, you either had to install a tap on the tree or cut into the tree and collect the rubber latex as it flowed out. There was a bit of tension for native towns to reach their quota, because if they extracted only a little from a tree using a tap they could return to that tree in the future to extract more, but if they chopped the tree down they could get a lot of rubber latex quickly. The Belgian quotas were so high they were often forced to chop down the rubber trees to meet them per month, which forced them to travel further to collect more sap for subsequent months. The failure to meet a quota was often a brutal whipping or chopping off a hand.

To process the stuff, they would likely dry it outside to reduce the water weight and coagulate it, then ship it. Not much refining was done in the Congo itself. Any acid will coagulate the rubber latex, formic acid is one of several products they could have used to do this.
 
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