320. Photos That Shook The World: Exposing Leopold in The Congo

0:00Hello, Empire Podcast listeners. Anita here. Look, this episode is going to be one perhaps if you're of a delicate disposition or you've got small children or even slightly bigger than you're a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rumpel. And we have got the most Anita-ish story ever in this episode. Yes, and I don't apologise for a second about it. It really is actually. This one tickled every nerve ending in my body. And not always in a good way, can I tell you. Because in this third of our series on photographers who change the world, we are looking at a woman.

0:58Shock, horror. That's why I'm so excitable. You almost certainly have never heard of her, but this is a woman who took on a European king and she won. And her name was Alice Seely Harris. And I bet you've never heard of her, have you, Willie? I've never heard of her, no. I know, funnily enough, the photograph she took, as is often the case in the photographers of this series, just like half the pictures that Cash took, absolutely iconic photographs, but I had no idea who took them. And ditto the horrific pictures which Alice Seely Harris took. It's just so often the case, and this is the thing that anyone who's a regular listener to this podcast will know, I find it extraordinary, aggravating, irritating, infuriating that so many extraordinary women in history just fall comprehensively through the cracks.

1:45We have never heard you say that before. No, I know. It is literally the first time I've ever heard you say that, Anita. Oh my God, I really would have a tattoo of some sort and see if I do. It'll be falling through the cracks. This is also a story that goes back with the history of cameras. So the first portable Kodak camera is the weapon of choice here. And with it, Alice Seely Harris goes on to document and bear witness to some of the most inhumane acts that this planet has ever known. Not only did she witness these things, but she also disseminated the imagery. It caused a moral revolt. But despite the fact that this is a woman who changed history, at the time, even though it was acknowledged that these photographs that Alice took were going to change everything, going to change Europe, she was never even identified in the newspapers by her own name.

2:35So, a little bit like Marie Curie was Pierre's wife for a long time. Even when she won the Nobel Prize, it was sort of, oh, Pierre Curie has won the Nobel Prize. Yeah. She was known, Alice, as Mrs. John Harris. Her husband was a man called John Hobbis Harris, and both of them were Baptists. She is somebody who is deeply religious, and that is going to be the bedrock of her morality. What does she get for being this incredibly moral and upstanding person? Well, I mean, absolutely nothing, nothing in return. I mean, she sort of has accolades at the time, but under a different name, but now completely forgotten.

3:12So, we're going to sort that out. So, she is born in 1870 in Malmesbury in Wiltshire, which, I mean, if you don't know it, is this rather gorgeous, quaint, ancient town in England. And it dates right back to the time of King Athelstan. And it was a modest Baptist upbringing. The family moves from Wiltshire to Somerset, to Froome in Somerset. And her father, again, is a sort of very middle class, lower middle class, if anything, background, is the manager of a silk mill. And they live very close to the mill. Alice is spending her teenage years there. I mean, she doesn't have to work in the mill because her father is sufficiently well off for her to be able to study.

3:51And that's really important. So if you look at early pictures of Alice, she does look like the nerdy girl. Severe plus or severe plus plus even. Yeah, she's serious minded, you know, so she's got this idea. And again, you know, I mentioned her religious foundation is really important to her. So she starts in her 20s. And again, And this is, you know, unusual for the time for a woman to think she has a future in the civil service. But she does because service is a big part of her Baptist upbringing. She moves to London. She attends college there. She gets missionary classes in when she's not studying for the civil service.

4:28And it's at the missionary classes that she meets her future husband, John Hobbis Harris. Willie, I mean, Baptists were known for proselytizing, weren't they? and it wasn't unusual for a Baptist to want to go and spread the word of the Bible around the world. I don't think it was a unique Baptist thing. I think you find lots of different missionaries at this time. You find the white fathers working alongside them in the Congo at this period. I remember even in my childhood, the white fathers used to come on Sundays once a year and tell tales of missionary activity in darkest Africa. That is the experience of many, many people in England at the time.

5:02You know, they would hear the spreading of the light in darkest Africa. I mean, that was one of the things that was prevalent at the time. But Alice had a different view because she had been hearing from previous missionaries that actually things were not as black and white, if I can put it that way, as the stories that most people were digesting. They were actually disturbing stories about the plight of the natives, that they weren't being treated well. And for seven long years, Alice, and this is why I love her right from the get-go, wants to see for herself. She wants to go and she wants to help.

5:36And it is known at the time that an African posting, particularly in the Congo, is one of the most challenging postings for a missionary. It's undeveloped. The outposts are deep sometimes in really hostile environments. There's disease, there are mosquitoes, all of that is going on. And yet this woman, of the fairest sex, as she would have been deemed at the time, absolutely has this in her head that she can do something here. And I can't stress this enough. If you look at a picture of Alice, she doesn't look like the sort. I mean, to me, she looks like a quintessential, the people I think are among the best people in the world, a librarian.

6:16Exactly the word I was looking forward to. She's absolutely the school librarian. Severe horn-rimmed glasses, slightly prim, ordered, all those sort of adjectives. Neat. Yeah, neat. Neat as a pin. So for seven years, she keeps applying, saying, can I go to Congo? And they say, no, can I go to Congo? Alice, we've said no. Can I go to Congo now? And they keep sort of knocking her back saying, Alice, for goodness sake, you are a flimsy thing. Don't be ridiculous. But finally, after a huge amount, seven years of persistence in 1897. The grand old age of 27 by this point. Which is old by those standards.

6:50Seems less and less old each year, I find. Unmarried, though. I mean, that's also unusual. She gets this answer that she's longing for. And part of the reason that she does get it is because she does finally marry. She marries John Hobbis Harris, this missionary that she meets at missionary training school. And they sort of do a quickie marriage just so that she can have partly the permission to go and do what her heart is telling her she has to do and go to Congo. Why is she at missionary school in the first place if she hasn't got the... She's at missionary school because she wants to be a missionary.

7:22she keeps getting knocked back from going to the Congo so she has to assure them no no no I am getting married and you can send me after I get married they get married at a registry office in 1898 you know so it really is one of those quickie things like look we've got to get the paperwork in order because I might be able to go if we're married that would have been quite unusual in 1898 everyone would have got married in church at that point wouldn't it everything about her is unusual Willie I can't stress this enough but John John loves her and they love each other there is definitely love there because they want to live and they want to work together.

7:52They want to be together. But they spend their honeymoon on the ship that takes them on this three-month voyage to Congo Free State. It's called the SS Cameron. As you said, the grand old age of 27, she arrives there. And this is the same sort of time that Conrad five, six episodes ago was landing up here, isn't it? 100%. A lot of people are able to travel. The stories of missionaries in particular are spreading the word that this is an interesting place, but not just that. Because remember the person that we talked about quite a lot in the Conrad episode, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, cousin of Queen Victoria.

8:29He is also very, very good at putting out propaganda of how brilliant his free state is and how wonderful the lives of the natives are in his free state. And I apologize for using the word natives. I find it jarring, but that is the nomenclature at the time. So that's what we're going to use. And she is pregnant with her first child after that voyage. So, you know, not only is she sort of this slight librarian type creature, she's pregnant and they don't turn back, they carry on. So she's stationed with John between the years 1898 to 1901 at this place. It's a mission station at a place called Ikau near the Llonga River.

9:08You may not have heard of it, but it's a tributary of the River Congo, the main sort of water thoroughfare that goes through Congo. And there is this extraordinary photo of her. And Willie, just describe it to everybody. It's a lovely photo. She is at the top of a great sort of mountain of people. And she stands out because not only is she at the top, she is the only white person. She is wearing white clothes and she's wearing a white hat. And she's probably the only person wearing clothes at all because everyone else is sort of naked as far as one can see. This is in the middle of various tropical, I think it's a breadfruit tree behind her.

9:43There must be, what, about 70 tiny little, very sweet looking kids all in a great big heap. It's one of those photographs that will jar with people because it's that kind of white saviour imagery, you know, of the angel rising up. It reinforces that thing that these are the people I've come here to help. And indeed, you know, she does what missionaries do when she first arrives. She teaches Bible stories to the local children. And, you know, she takes them through scripture. She teaches them songs. She's sort of very Maria von Trapp with a guitar and, you know, sort of singing away. But then everything changes one day.

10:14In a rather abrupt and horrific manner. In the summer of 1902, there is a knock on her door. And this happens to be at a time when John, her husband, has gone up country, so somewhere deep into the jungles, to preach. So she's alone at the missionary compound, Willie, and there's this commotion outside and this banging on her door. And it just seems really insistent. So she steps out onto the porch and she's greeted by the sight of this man who is sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and is obviously in emotional turmoil but looks physically damaged as well because there are two men with him who have to hold him up by the armpits in front of her almost collapsing he's in such a terrible state by her feet and finally he sort of musters the strength to hand her this package and it's wrapped in plantain leaves and this is how she recounts that moment 63 years later she's talking many years you know decades later to an audience in Surrey of all places in sort of middle England and she says their eyes were fixed steadily upon me as I unwrapped the parcel I opened it with greater care than usual because I wasn't sure what I was in for given the way they looked at me with such burden etched on each face and to my horror out fell two tiny pieces of human anatomy a tiny child's foot and a tiny hand.

11:39I mean, just imagine that, Willie. Terrible, terrible image. That's like a horror film. The man in question then is able to get the strength together to say his name is Nisala, and he comes from a place called Walla. He has failed to gather his rubber quota for the Belgians that day. The Belgian appointed overseers had killed and eaten his wife and daughter. And they gave Nisala this gory reminder, very much like the horse's head in a bed by the mafia. These are the severed limbs of the people you've loved most in the world. Remember that. Eating them, that's not a misprint or a mistake? It is not a mistake.

12:23That's what Nisala says happens. And the overseers, and we'll come to them, the capitals, are normally of the same nationality. They don't necessarily come from the same region, but they are employed by the Belgians to visit the most horror that they possibly can on the people to make sure that the quota is kept up to date. In all the times I've heard these stories from the Belgian Congo, I've never heard stories of the overseers eating people, actual cannibalism as well. The horror, the horror, as a great writer once put it. No wonder Conrad had a nervous breakdown and went home. Nisala doesn't know what else to do, so he takes it to Alice.

13:02First of all, he'd gone to the elders of his tribe and they couldn't do anything. Everybody was really frightened of these people. And so he turns to the white woman in the missionary. And Alice, in a state of utter shock and revulsion, just imagine what she's going through. She doesn't know what to do. But she knows one thing in her gut. She has to record this moment. So she gets this Kodak box brownie that she's taken with her, which is the earliest camera that normal people can get their hands on. My grandmother had one. I remember the box brownie in her house. With this very rudimentary piece of kit.

13:37And it is really very basic. It's kind of just a cardboard box with a lens. And we may talk about that a bit later, about how this Kodak box brownie changes everything. But she takes this image, which is startling in its clarity, but also its horror. I mean, just describe it for people listening. It's four figures in a tropical landscape and there are palms and a lawn and at the end of the lawn is a road and little little boys at the end of the road at the center of the frame is a sitting figure who has been placed on is it a the porch it's a porch it's the place where he was banging the door down it is like literally seconds after this interaction takes place and he is sitting there with his beard he's almost naked.

14:26He's got a tiny waist wrap around his middle. And he's sitting, looking very intently at two objects in front of him. And it takes a second to realize what the objects are, because you can't focus on them immediately. He's the focus of the picture. But then you notice what it is. And it is a child's tiny foot and an even smaller tiny hand. And he's staring at it. And there's two very grim faced guys to the right frame. And it's a very silent picture. No one is talking. And it's an image of quiet horror. Just as a piece of reportage. It looks very modern. It looks like the kind of news and war reportage that you'd see.

15:14Could be 1970s Dunn-McCullen picture or something, exactly. 100%, which is, again, an extraordinary thing. So that picture is the start of Alice's true life and true calling. That one banging on the door, that one horror will define the rest of her life because from that moment on, Alice decides that she is going to gather evidence of these terrible atrocities that are carrying on around her in the name of commerce because she acts in the name of God. She finds it just so evil and awful and this is now her vocation. She decides to do this knowing that she is living in a very dangerous world where armed men can visit any kind of violence on people like Miss Sala and also anyone who supports them.

16:05All she has is her box brownie Kodak for protection. Join us after the break when we go on with Alex's story.

16:18Welcome back, everyone. So I am sitting now looking at a picture of a Kodak box brownie. This is, as Anita said, the first portable camera in history. And what I have never seen before is the box it comes in and it is a very sort of jaunty box with Victorian writing of the sort of typeface you'd normally see with a Victorian circus or something. It's sort of jaunty and jolly. Or hot chocolate or one of those wholesome things the Victorians were into. Exactly. Born Vita hot chocolate, that sort of thing. And it says Eastman Kodak Brownie Camera and camera is in a bright yellow typeface. And there is this little brown box, which is what she took out to the Congo with her, which recorded these utterly horrific photographs that we're going to hear more about.

17:08And it was only introduced four years before Alice took that picture. I mean, it's such a new piece of tech, if you like. But it was such an important piece of tech because it democratised photography. It was making photography accessible to the masses. Before that, you had sort of daguerreotypes or you had these huge glass plates or things that were not very wieldy and certainly things you couldn't drag into the middle of the Congo. and these little cameras sold for as little as one dollar. I mean, we'll put it in dollar terms. Really, they were that cheap? Very, very, very cheap. Really easy to use.

17:40The number one brownie, which was the first of its kind, was made of cardboard and all it had was a tiny lens and shutter and it led to millions of sales over the decades. For countless people, it was their first experience of photography. The brownie was. And it's only four years after its invention that Alice is using it, wielding it this way. And so she takes the picture. John arrives back at the mission to find his wife rocking with outrage. I mean, she's in this state of apoplexy, of anger mixed with grief, mixed with horror. We are sort of used to the horrors of the Belgian Congo. I certainly heard about it probably at school and studying Heart of Darkness.

18:21I think probably at the time you mentioned that there had been rumours even before she set out that things were not being run as they should have been. But the Victorians, as we saw with Kipling in our Kipling series, really believed in a way that we don't, that empire was a good thing. They really believed empire brought benefits to the colonized peoples. And so you can imagine that not only is she outraged by this, but she's also presumably surprised by it. What on earth is going on? Sort of, Willie, but just remember that was her motivation to go. Wasn't her motivation to bring the word of God, etc.

18:56etc. But also because missionaries were coming back and telling her this is not what it seems. They'd seen this stuff. They had people, you know, she's one of many missionaries. This is one moment in time captured because of her photograph. But imagine how many others are hearing things like this. But also, you know, on the other side of that, the reason Victorians believed that, you know, this was a civilising mission, bringing God and light and education to, you know, the benighted people of the uncivilised world is because Leopold was plunging a fortune into propaganda. There are articles and pictures of happy people and all.

19:29Leopold, that was in his interest to keep his business going. So, she's up against all of that. Anyway, John comes back, she tells him about what's happened. She says, John, we've got to do something. And John says, well, actually, what I want to do is go back with Nassala to his home and collect some evidence. And I tell you what, we'll get this photo out to people in London because surely, surely if the British government knows what's going on they might do something on a national level this is not who we are we're not doing this we absolutely have the locust to condemn another country for behaving in this way so Alice and John then who are so brilliant at not just collecting because collecting evidence is one thing but actually getting it out in front of the world's eyes is quite another thing so Alice writes to the the Marquess of Bath who happens to be acquainted with her father.

20:22She tells him, please share this photo. They have this sort of shared religious motivation. And she says to the Marquess of Bath, please just get it in front of the faces of as many influential people as you can. And she also hints in this letter to the Marquess of Bath that she'll get more. So it happens, you know, it's like some miracle of connections. Nassala's picture is duly disseminated through various print media outlets, newspapers, periodicals, and it's just the start because Alice and John decide that they're going to spend the rest of their time in Congo. And remember, they were there till 1905, documenting atrocities of King Leopold's regime so that people can see what's going on.

21:03And I can't overestimate, Willie, how dangerous this is because overseers were always armed. The Harris's, Alice Seely, Harris and John find themselves shot at. They are regularly threatened with violence. As a woman, you can imagine she's threatened with worse. And the pair eventually have to travel with bodyguards. And whereas, you know, they don't shoot directly at the two white people, they shoot at the bearers. And yet they carry on. And the reason that it is imperative for the Belgians to stop these images getting out is that their empire is making enormous profits thanks to the invention of a man you've probably heard of, a Scotsman called John Boyd Dunlop.

21:47Now, tell us about your fellow Scott, John Boyd Dunlop, because he also has changed the world and his discovery is why King Leopold will not let go of his free state in Congo. So Dunlop, as you will remember, those of you who remember the Dunlop Tire Company, is all about rubber. He discovers rubber tires. And Dunlop is a classic Victorian in a dark suit and a long, white, carefully combed beard. And he's got a rather sort of quizzical Scots expression. You can see that he's Scots just from his expression. I don't know whether you get the same vibes as me, but it's a very Scottish face. Can you?

22:24Scotsy Scott. Born in Ayrshire, home of the Derimples, and he wanted to train as a vet. But it was his interest in inventing that would completely change his life. And he moves to Dan Patrick in Northern Ireland with his wife and young family. his total hypochondriac as the vet's practice took off making him actually a rather wealthy man in a kind of modest Northern Irish way he spends more and more time on his real passion which is tinkering in his man's shed his man cave his man cave but this is definitely a shed rather than a cave and one day in 1888 he was looking at his son's tricycle and decided he might be able to make it less uncomfortable and a lot more fun if he put a little bit of rubber between the wooden wheels and the surface of the road.

23:14And so the pneumatic tyre was born. And he has the sense and the pragmatism of a good Scotsman to go ahead and patent his invention. But I mean, the pragmatism only goes so far, because it proves to be so lucrative for everyone. But Dunlop, in the end, I mean, weirdly, as the inventor of the pneumatic tyre, just the timing of this invention is really important as well because it's coming at the same time as the development of road transport you know the victorians were great builders of infrastructure so huge roads um you know are being laid as celebrated by kipling and his odes to deep sea cables and pistons yes go back to our kipling thing i found this so funny he wrote a poem about cables in the sea only poem probably ever written about cables but the thing is the production of the car tires on mass you know the dunlop tires that you were talking about really only happened after his retirement, and he didn't make a huge fortune.

24:07He could never have imagined just how his invention would change the world. This is like poor old Tim Berners-Lee not making a fortune for the internet. The thing is, Tim Berners-Lee gave it away willingly. I don't know if Dunlop meant this to happen. Well, Dunlop, I have to say, looks very, very happy in 1915 when there's a wonderful picture of him with the fluffiest beard you've ever seen, a proper Father Christmas beard, sort of bunched left and right, and caught in the slipstream as he bicycles with his pneumatic tyres and this jacket done up on a cold Scots day and a wee hat. This dogleg into Dunlop, we're just telling you this because the world is changing and there is this sudden voracious appetite for rubber.

24:47No one can get enough of it. And because rubber comes from Congo, King Leopold has absolutely no intention of letting a mousy little woman's photographs take all of that away from her. And there's one very lucrative organisation that exists in Congo. It's a concession company working under Leopold's licence. And that's how this whole setup works. Leopold is the top of the pyramid. People buy licences from him. He takes a cut of what they sell and they make, and he gets incredibly rich. And this company, this concession company is the ABIR, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company. And it is the ABIR which has some of the worst records of coercing workers to achieve their rubber quotas.

25:29So they are not averse to physical punishment, whipping, beating. They take hostages. They come and they say, right, you have not made your quota. We're taking your family and you're not going to see them again. While they have taken these people, there's rape, murder, burning of villages. They are an appalling entity that will use anything in their power and keep raising as the world's appetite for rubber grows. They will do anything to these poor people who have no choice but to service them. How quickly does the Belgian state realise what a threat she is, that she's sending these pictures out?

26:05Almost from the first publication, because you suddenly see these shadowy men from the ABIR who start surveilling the mission, and both John and Alice, they often turn up with guns to pay their respects. There is this amazing picture of Alice on her veranda. It's 1904, so it's a year before they leave, where the ABIR turn up supposedly for their protection. But just because I love Alice in this photo, look at her. I mean, just describe what's happening here. It's a great photograph. So Alice is sitting centre stage, again, in her sort of white crinolines, very much the kind of imperial memsab.

26:39And she's at the top of the steps, presumably the same steps that we saw in the first photograph, seen from a different angle with the foot and the poor child's hands at the top. and standing, flanking Alice in this photograph are four uniformed Belgian, well, they look like policemen or soldiers, don't they? They're merceries working for the ABIR. They're their own personal army. With very fierce looking banners at the end of their rifles. It's classic. It's a classic move even in the modern era, you know, where you have sort of these oppressive regimes who pretty much put you under house arrest or say, you know, they're doing it for your own protection.