WHEN THREE WRITERS TOOK ON A MONARCH

 Popular writers and advocacy have a long history dating back to Jonathan Swift’s incendiary modest proposal. Since then, writers ranging from Mary Shelley to Upton Sinclair used the pen as a clarion. The tradition continues but the turn of the 20^th century, perhaps inspired by Sinclair’s The Jungle (weak literature but potent muckraking), saw a rise in literary activism and one cause that seemed to unite an assortment of writers was a horror that was hidden from most of the world by a powerful imperial force.

But the literary world was almost unanimously aghast at the terror King Leopold II was reigning on the Congo in the name of Belgium. It is evidence of the King’s acknowledgment of the inhumanity of his crimes that he allowed few foreign correspondents into the Congo Free State since taking over in 1885 and the punishment for those caught enlightening the outside world of the human butchery was often deadly.

A few missionaries and reporters did manage to alert the world of the human slaughter that was taking place for the sake of rubber but three literary giants shook their readers. In different ways they conveyed the same horror.

Perhaps the best known is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which has become a staple of high school reading curriculums and a chilling work. For reasons that are not hard to guess, Conrad never mentions the Belgian king by name or even specifies the area in Africa the narrator, Charles Marlow, traverses in search of Kurtz, the deranged tyrant ruler of an ivory post. Conrad’s descriptions are so vivid, however, and the clues given in descriptions of maps, the route of the river and even the mannerism of the imperial presence that there is little doubt he is describing the Congo Free State. Arriving at Kurtz’s camp, Marlow is disgusted with the treatment of the locals, the living conditions and the barbaric punishments (he is greeted to the camp by severed heads posted on poles serving as the gateway to Kurtz’s encampment.

When the novel was published in 1899 whatever public knowledge existed of the horrors of the Congo were sadly too remote to stir action and while Conrad’s descriptions undoubtedly made readers uncomfortable and even repulsed it is likely many took it (perhaps because that is how they wanted to take it) as literary exaggeration. Nonetheless, Heart of Darkness did trigger the first international outcry against the Belgian monarch and a vocal opposition.

Six years later, Mark Twain, an outspoken critic of imperialism, published King Leopold’s Soliloquy. Expectedly, Twain chose satire as his weapon. Indeed, his career was built on taking down institutions of injustice through humor. This slim pamphlet paints the king as a blundering brute who has no business running a country, much less two. Knowledge of the evil of the king’s ways was picking up considerable traction by 1905 and Twain’s sound of alarms was noted.

However, the most direct attack on King Leopold, his cronies performing unspeakable acts in his name and the dire situation in the Congo came from the man who created Sherlock Holmes.

By the time he published The Crime of the Congo in 1909, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was moving at an accelerated pace toward social writings. Not until 2004’s King Leopold’s Ghost was there a more moving, shocking and stomach turning account of life in the Free State than The Crime of the Congo. It was the most complete documentation of the king’s rule in the Free State from its inception in 1885 sparing none of the brutal details. Doyle includes a plethora of letters, documents and articles written by the few foreign visitors who managed to get into the Free State and report back, detailing the maiming not only of the locals forced to hunt for rubber in the forest but also of the women and children, the massacring of entire villages, the floggings and the resulting decimation of the local population.

Most impressively, Doyle includes the testimony of some of the natives themselves and these personal accounts make for some of the most powerful passages in the work. A reader can feel the despair in the quotes. There are accounts from locals who witnessed their entire families murdered because they failed to meet the rubber quota and others who saw their wives raped before their eyes.

The Crime of the Congo was a direct call to arms with testimony that could no longer be ignored. Indeed, the year before its publication, Belgium had already taken the step to annex the Congo. Doyle, however, dismissed this as a performative step that did little to redress the abuses detailed (though he concedes that the flagrant murders did subside). But the word was out, the world took notice and Doyle was left with one more bit of satisfaction. His book was published in November of 1909. The following month King Leopold II would be dead, Doyle’s expose one of the last testaments to his legacy he would witness.