In 1865 King Leopold II of the Belgians came to power on the death of his father, Leopold I. He resented the fact that when Belgium had been created in 1835, it had been given no foreign colonies to exploit. He knew that central  Africa was virtually unexplored and set up a conference in Brussels to persuade the other major countries of Europe and the US that a joint commission should be set up to open up the  Congo and bring wealth  and Christianity  to  the  poor  forgotten natives. Having gained their approval with a draft protocol, Leopold took charge and set about modifying the protocol and related documents so that the ‘joint commission’ became his sole fiefdom. He recruited John Rowlings, aka Henry Morton Stanley, as his ‘field commander’ with orders to recruit an army of mercenaries, move into the country and strip it of everything of value

As early as 1890 a young black American missionary, called James Washington Williams, had condemned Leopold’s actions with a phrase that was soon to enter the world’s conscience, describing  them  as “a  crime  against Humanity” but he died a year later before he could activate much external opposition to Leopold’s actions.
           

Edmund Dene Morel

Thus we arrive at Edmund Dene Morel. Morel, who, at the age of seventeen, moved from Paris to Liverpool to  become a  clerk  in  the  Elder-Dempster shipping line. The line had plied the routes to Africa for a number of years and held the contract for all  cargo  to  and  from Leopold’s Congo.  Being  bi-lingual  he soon  became the liaison officer between the line and the Congo officials in Belgium. It did not take him long to realise  that  all was  not  right  in Leopold’s world. Firstly, fraud was obvious. Leopold’s various trading companies and the Congo Government published certain trade figures for exports whilst the amounts of  ivory  and  rubber unloaded at Antwerp  greatly  exceeded  them. Millions of pounds were going missing.  Secondly,  there  were  regular shipments of guns and ammunition out of Antwerp into the Congo which were assigned to either the State itself or to various named trading companies. Coupled to this was the fact that over 80% of the goods being shipped to the Congo were of no benefit to the natives, who were unpaid slave labour.

At the end of the century Morel discovered his conscience and set out to destroy  Leopold and his operation in the Congo. He first revealed his suspicions to Sir Alfred Jones, head of the shipping line who was also the Honorary Consul in Liverpool to the Congo, but was more concerned with keeping his lucrative contract than on displaying moral principles. In 1901, aged twenty-eight,  Morel resigned and    started his onslaught. Unfortunately the  newspapers seemed reluctant to publish his stories so two years later he started his own paper ‘The West African Mail’ over which he had total editorial control.

One of Morel’s supporters was Sir Charles Dilkes MP and in 1903 the Congo question was raised in the Houses of Parliament. A resolution was passed making clear Parliament’s belief in Morel’s writings and protesting over the treatment of the natives. The Foreign Office sent a telegram to HM Consul in the Congo and asked him to investigate. The consul was the thirty-nine year old Roger Casement who had been in Africa for much of the last twenty years.        

The two men struck up an immediate friendship. Out of this came, in 1904, the ‘Congo Reform Association’, the intention of which was to persuade European governments to take  action  against  the abuses of human rights in the Congo. To promote this, Morel wrote ‘Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906’ in which, in a central section of thirty-six pages, he documented close to 100 reports which he had received from a broad spectrum of sources concerning atrocities committed  on  the  Congolese  natives between 1890 and 1905.

A speech from the throne by King Edward VII in 1908 represented the ultimate  approval of the work of Morel and his colleagues. The King hoped  that  negotiations  between Belgium and the Congo State would result in a humanely administered state. On November 8th 1908 the flag of the Congo Free State was lowered for the last time but it took several years yet for the Belgian government to dismantle the ‘Leopold Legacy’. The human cost of the Congo rubber saga is difficult to calculate but there is general agreement that 10 -15 million natives ‘vanished’ in the Congo during Leopold’s rubber-grabbing years. If we take a not-unrealistic weight of rubber to come out of the Congo as 75000 tons (75 million Kg) and the rubber-related loss of native life as just half the figure of 15 million we have the value of a Congolese native life - 10Kg of rubber.

What of Morel after his prolonged campaign and ultimate victory? He became an active member of the Liberal Party and in October 1912 became its prospective parliamentary candidate in Birkenhead. In  1917 Morel was sentenced to six months in prison for a technical violation of the Defence of the Realm Act and never regained  his  full  health.  On his release  from  prison  he  left  the Liberal   Party   and   joined   the Independent Labour Party where, in 1922, he defeated the Liberal Party candidate at Dundee – One Winston S Churchill. He had little time to enjoy his victory, dying of a heart attack tow years later in 1924.