Leopold II of the Belgians was born in Brussels on the 9th of April 1835 and succeeded his father Leopold I to the Belgian throne on the 17th of December 1865, aged thirty. The kingdom he inherited was thirty-five years old (Belgium had become independent of the Netherlands in 1830), was a constitutional monarchy with substantial parliamentary restrictions on royal power, and was, by the standards of the major European monarchies of the period, a modest political position. Leopold was tall (1.93 metres), strongly built, restless, and substantially better educated than most of his royal contemporaries. He spoke fluent French, German, English, Italian, and conversational Spanish. He had toured extensively in his early manhood — Egypt, India, China, Ceylon, the Ottoman Empire — and had returned from these tours with a settled conviction that the wealth and prestige of the leading European powers depended on their colonial possessions. He considered Belgium's lack of an empire a national and personal humiliation that he intended to remedy.
The view was not, in itself, unusual among European royal heads of state of the 1860s. What was unusual was Leopold's commitment to remedying the situation on his own initiative, with his own financial resources, and against the substantial opposition of his own parliament (which had no interest in colonial adventure) and Belgian public opinion (which was divided between explicit anti-colonial sentiment and indifference). The Belgian constitution gave the king substantial personal authority over the royal household's finances and over the conduct of foreign affairs, with restrictions on the use of state finances for non-domestic projects. Leopold's strategy was, accordingly, to operate at the borders of his constitutional position: to use his own personal funds (he had inherited a substantial fortune from his father; he would supplement it through personal investment and through the patient accumulation of returns on the colonial venture itself), to operate through nominally philanthropic and scientific organisations rather than through the Belgian state, and to seek international recognition for an overseas territory as the personal sovereignty of the king rather than as a Belgian colony. The arrangement, as it developed, was novel.
The early decade
The first decade of Leopold's reign (1865–1875) was a period of patient preparation. He commissioned studies of every available colonial opportunity. He wrote letters to the foreign ministers of every major European power inquiring about possible territorial acquisitions. He sent emissaries to the Ottoman government to investigate the possible purchase or lease of the Sublime Porte's African possessions. He inquired into the purchase of the Dutch East Indies from the Netherlands. He inquired into the purchase of the Philippines from Spain. He inquired into the lease of a Chinese coastal concession. He inquired into the Argentine and Brazilian governments about possible colonisation of unsettled territory. The inquiries all came to nothing — no European or non-European government was willing to sell or lease territory to him on terms he could afford and that his own parliament would accept — but the persistent pattern of investigation gave him an extensive knowledge of the practical mechanics of colonial acquisition that he would draw on in the 1880s.
By the mid-1870s, Leopold's attention had narrowed to central Africa. The region had two specific features that made it attractive. First, almost none of it had been formally claimed by any European power; the interior of the African continent was, at the start of Leopold's reign, almost entirely unknown to European geography (the headwaters of the Nile had been identified in 1862; the upper Congo would not be mapped until Stanley's 1874-1877 expedition). Second, the available accounts of the region — by the British missionary-explorer David Livingstone, by the German explorer Heinrich Barth, by the various French and Portuguese officials operating on the coasts — suggested substantial unexploited resources, particularly ivory, palm oil, and (after vulcanisation's 1839 invention) wild rubber.
The Brussels Geographical Conference
The decisive single event of Leopold's preparation was the Brussels Geographical Conference of September 1876. Leopold convened, at his palace at Laeken, a meeting of the leading European explorers, geographers, and humanitarian figures associated with African affairs: Sir Bartle Frere (the British colonial administrator), Cameron (the British explorer who had just completed an east-west crossing of Africa), Nachtigal (the German explorer of the central Sahara), Quatrefages (the French anthropologist), Henry Stanley (who had recently completed the relief expedition that found Livingstone). The meeting's stated purpose was to coordinate European efforts at exploring central Africa and at suppressing the East African slave trade.
The conference produced the founding of an organisation — the Association Internationale Africaine — ostensibly devoted to scientific exploration, geographical research, and humanitarian work in the interior of Africa. The organisation was to be financed by national subscriptions from the European countries represented, was to operate stations across central Africa for the relief of explorers and the support of scientific research, and was to coordinate (through its central executive committee, with Leopold as the presiding officer) the activities of its various national affiliates. The arrangement provided Leopold with a formal international platform for African operations that did not require the consent of his own parliament. The Association's central committee was substantially Leopold-controlled. Its operations were financed substantially from his personal funds. Its activities, in the years that followed, would be entirely directed by his agents.
The strategic deception
The Brussels conference and the subsequent operations of the Association were, in retrospect, a sustained deception of European public and diplomatic opinion. The stated purposes — geographical exploration, scientific research, anti-slavery work, the introduction of Christianity and Western civilisation — were used to develop a substantial European reservoir of moral support for the project. The actual purposes — the establishment of a Leopold-controlled territorial sovereignty in the Congo basin, exploited for commercial returns, with no effective external oversight — were not disclosed to the European publics or governments whose support was solicited. The Association itself dissolved or was renamed in successive stages over the following decade, with each successor organisation more clearly Leopold-controlled, less internationally accountable, and more focused on territorial acquisition rather than scientific or humanitarian work. By the time of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the original Association had been superseded by the so-called International Association of the Congo, which was, in effect, a personal commercial venture of Leopold's with a deliberately misleading name.
The pattern of strategic misrepresentation that began at the Brussels Geographical Conference would, with variations, continue throughout the operation of the Free State. Leopold consistently presented the project to European audiences as a humanitarian and scientific enterprise, devoted to the suppression of slavery and the bringing of civilisation to the African interior, while operating, in practice, a commercial extraction system of unusual brutality. The disjunction between the stated and the actual character of the project was, by 1900, one of the principal complaints of the reform campaign that would eventually end the regime. It was foreshadowed in 1876.
The decade of patient preparation between 1865 and 1875 produced, in this sense, two things: an unusually thorough knowledge of European colonial practice on Leopold's part, and an institutional infrastructure for an African venture that did not depend on Belgian parliamentary support. The next chapter takes up the use to which Leopold put these resources at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.
End of Chapter I