The Free State of August 1885 controlled, in any operational sense, only the lower Congo river from its Atlantic mouth to Stanley Pool (modern Kinshasa) and a handful of stations on the navigable upper river. The territory recognised at Berlin — about two million square kilometres of central Africa — was, in the great majority of its area, still under the political control of its existing African inhabitants. The first decade of the new state was, in substance, a war of conquest against those inhabitants. The war was conducted by the new state's standing army, the Force Publique, founded in 1888 by royal decree.
The Force Publique
The Force Publique was, throughout the Free State period, the operational instrument of the regime. It consisted, by 1900, of about 19,000 troops organised into about 350 separate company-strength units stationed across the territory. The officer corps was European — initially Belgian, Italian, Scandinavian, and miscellaneous European officers, recruited on personal contracts; later mostly Belgian. The other ranks were African — initially recruited from the coastal Congo populations, then from East African Arab-Swahili sources after the campaigns of the 1890s, eventually conscripted from across the Free State's own population under a quota system in which each village was required to provide a fixed number of men for military service. The conscription system itself, in its later forms, produced substantial population displacement and was the subject of considerable contemporary complaint.
The Force Publique's training was minimal — typically a few months at one of the depot stations on the Congo river — and its standard equipment was European rifled muskets and (after the 1890s) modern bolt-action rifles. Its tactical doctrine emphasised raiding rather than pitched battle; the standard operation was to march into a recalcitrant village with a small force of African troops under one or two European officers, demand the surrender of taxes (initially in ivory and food; from 1890 onward in rubber) or the conscription of labour, and conduct punitive raids — burning houses, taking hostages, killing those who resisted — when demands were not met. The pattern was institutionalised in the regime's standard operating procedures.
The early campaigns
The principal military operations of 1885-1895 fell into three broad campaigns:
The lower Congo pacification (1885-1890) consolidated state control over the lower Congo river basin and the routes from the coast to Stanley Pool. The operations involved a substantial series of small punitive expeditions against the various Bakongo, Bayombe, Bayaka, and other peoples of the region, often in connection with the construction of the Matadi-Kinshasa railway (begun 1890, completed 1898, built largely by conscripted African labour with very high mortality — approximately 1,800 dead among the African labour force during the construction period).
The upper Congo extension (1888-1895) extended state authority along the navigable Congo river and its tributaries (the Kwa, the Kasai, the Lulonga, the Mongala, the Aruwimi, the Lualaba) through the establishment of additional state stations and the negotiation (or coercion) of agreements with the local chiefs. The principal commercial operation of this period was the ivory trade: the Free State held the legal monopoly on ivory in much of the territory and required villages to deliver ivory as taxation. The ivory trade was the principal source of Free State revenue between 1885 and 1895.
The eastern campaigns (1892-1894) — the so-called Congo-Arab War — were the largest single military operation of the Free State period. The eastern Congo (the region around Lake Tanganyika, the Lualaba river, and the surrounding territories) was, before the Free State arrival, under the operational control of a network of Swahili-speaking traders based at Zanzibar and operating through Lake Tanganyika to the Congo interior. The principal trader, Hamad bin Muhammad al-Murjabi (better known by his nom de guerre Tippu Tip), had been in operational control of much of the eastern Congo since the 1860s and had been, in the late 1880s, briefly recognised by the Free State as the governor of the Stanley Falls district. The Free State's eastward expansion, the European public's growing antipathy to the East African slave trade in which the Swahili traders were involved, and Leopold's recognition that the trader networks would have to be displaced to consolidate the Free State's control, led to the outbreak of war in 1892. The Force Publique under Francis Dhanis, with allied troops from various Congolese groups, defeated the major Swahili formations in a sequence of engagements at Riba-Riba, Stanley Falls, and Kasongo over 1892-1893. The campaign destroyed the eastern Congo Swahili trading network and put the entire upper Congo under Free State authority by 1894. It also, incidentally, provided the regime with substantial propaganda value in Europe: the anti-slavery campaign in eastern Africa had been a major focus of European humanitarian opinion since the 1880s, and the Free State's destruction of the principal slave-trader networks was presented (with substantial truth, though also with substantial omission of the Free State's own subsequent labour practices) as a major humanitarian achievement.
The administrative system
The Free State's administrative organisation, in this initial period, was distinctive in two respects. First, the state was, formally, a personal sovereignty of Leopold; all officials served on personal contracts with the king rather than as employees of a state in the modern bureaucratic sense. The senior administration was based at Brussels (in the Royal Palace's African Department), with Léon Janssens as the principal European administrator from 1885 to 1900. The on-the-ground administration in the Congo itself was based at Boma, with a Governor-General — the first was Sir Francis de Winton (1885-1886), an English officer; subsequent governors-general were exclusively Belgian — under whom were district commissioners, station chiefs, and the agents of the various commercial companies.
Second, the territory was divided into "zones" rather than colonial provinces in the standard sense. The most consequential single zonal arrangement was the so-called Domaine de la Couronne (the Crown Domain), a vast area of the central Congo basin set aside in 1893 as Leopold's personal exploitation zone, distinct from the territory in which European trading companies were permitted to operate. The Domain of the Crown was, after the establishment of the rubber-collection system in the mid-1890s, the principal source of Leopold's personal income from the venture. Its administrative regime was the most extractive of the Free State's various zonal systems. It was also, as the next chapter describes, the source of the most severe of the demographic catastrophes of the Free State period.
By 1895, ten years after the formal proclamation of the new state, the Free State controlled — in the operational sense of having station-based military presence, raising taxes, and conscripting labour — substantially the entire territory recognised at Berlin. The state's commercial output had begun to shift from ivory (which was being exhausted) to wild rubber. The Force Publique was operating at full institutional capacity. The administrative system was in place. The catastrophe that the system would produce — the subject of the next chapter — was about to begin.
End of Chapter III