540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)

28:10The Foreign Office give him a promotion. They promote him to consul in Lisbon. So off he goes to Portugal. Which he doesn't like because he finds it too civilised. Yes, it's boring. He and Morel are still great pals. They had a code. They had nicknames for each other. So Casement was Tiger. Morel was Bulldog. And Leopold was the King of Beasts. You see, I find that odd because I would have thought that Casement would be Bulldog because he's got John, his Bulldog. But Morel is more... He looks like a Bulldog. Yeah, he looks like a Bulldog. And maybe there's a sort of patriotic thing there. You know, he's a kind of British bulldog with his barrel chest.

28:41Maybe, but I think of John. Okay. I don't think Casement is a tiger. If you're going to be an animal, Casement's not a tiger. No. I think he's a puma. A puma? Yeah. Because he goes to South America and he's a kind of man of the shadows. Yes, I suppose. Yes, I can see that. Anyway, that's... But it's good to have a dog in the story. I love a dog on the rest of his history. We're very keen on dogs. So Morel throws himself into this new association. It has its first meeting in Liverpool. of course the great shipping port in 1904 and it gets a thousand people now this is it's slightly different from other human rights campaigns and this is perhaps why it's more effective it's a very establishment campaign he has all kinds of endorsements from earls and viscounts especially bishops he loves a bishop and he loves an mp bishops bishops very big in the anti-apartheid campaign indeed he loves an mp and he never morale never criticizes the british empire or colonialism per se he loves britain he loves britain's empire so that's not just a tactical move he genuinely thinks britain is top nation and also top nation for kindness and that that's why britain is peculiarly well equipped to lead this campaign i think he genuinely thinks this and he is for somebody who basically was a shipping clerk he turns out to be absolutely brilliant at running this campaign.

30:01He works incredibly hard. He writes 600 letters a month, which is 20 letters a day on average. He's a brilliant speaker. He will talk without notes to audiences of thousands, you know, week after week after week. He's great at tailoring his message to different audiences. So to businessmen, he will talk about Leopold as monopoly betrays free trade. To bishops, he says, it's our Christian duty. To audiences of the sort of common people. He says it's Britain's responsibility as top nation to lead the world. He always makes sure he has MPs from different parties sitting on the platform, as well as all the local bigwigs.

30:41He's great at wooing rich supporters. So the Cadbury's chocolate family, we did a podcast about them last year. They're Quakers. They see themselves as great philanthropists. He gets loads of donations from them. He likes a celebrity. So Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator. He gets Conan Doyle to rallies. He gets him to write his own book on the Congo, The Crime of the Congo. I mean, the thing about that is Conan Doyle is very keen, say, on the war against the Boers in South Africa that the British are fighting. So he sees no contradiction between supporting British imperialism in South Africa and excoriating Belgian imperialism in the Congo.

31:20What a perfect recruit. Probably the most famous writer of the day. Very patriotic. you know you can't write him off as a do-gooding bleeding-hearted you know he he loves a campaigning cause Conan Doyle but there's no doubt that he also loves Britain so the perfect perfect person to have and Morel also knows the value of the modern image so it's Morel who really pioneers the use of slideshows with all these pictures of people with their hands cut off and this is in a way the highlight of his rallies. It's the bit that everyone's been waiting for and that everyone will remember. He shows them the pictures, and that's the thing that really, really has an effect.

32:03AJP Taylor, the great historian, himself from a dissenting background, said that Morel was, in his view, the single best, most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history. And I don't think he's wrong, actually. I mean, the thing is that he is kind of going with the grain of British public opinion. Part of their patriotism is a sense that, you know, this is the country that abolished the slave trade. They're on the side of the angels, all of that. But in government, there is still a kind of a slight cynicism, a slightly more Machiavellian approach to things. So there's a Belgian newspaper editor who is quoted by Hoxell, who once shrewdly remarked that Lord Salisbury, who is, you know, prime minister for throughout much of this period, is, and I quote, is not a man to care much about the fate of the blacks any more than that of the Armenians or the Bulgarians.

32:57And Morel himself writing about Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, of course, in the build-up to the... Great hero of yours, Tom. Great hero of mine. Great fisherman. Great bird watcher. However, Morel does say of Sir Edward Grey that he would act only when kicked. And if the process of kicking is stopped, he will do nothing. And basically, Morel sees it as his job to do that kicking. But as kickers go, he's probably the best kicker or one of the best kickers. The Johnny Wilkinson of moral kicking. And not just in Britain. So by the middle of the 1900s, there are branches of his association in France, in Germany, in the countries of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand.

33:38And he has put the issue of the Congo Free State on the front pages of newspapers in almost every country on earth. So the question is, is this enough to trouble Leopold? How will the king fight back? Can I just read what you've put in your notes, the concluding question? So just a quote. This is what you've written, Dominic. So the tide seems to be turning, but will this be enough to trouble Leopold? How will he fight back? And how does it involve one of the, and now Capitals, fattest men in history? The fattest men in history. Come back after the break to meet this extraordinary man.

34:18These meddlesome American missionaries, these frank British consuls, these blabbing Belgian-born traitor officials, those tiresome parrots are always talking. They have told how for 20 years I have ruled the Congo state, seizing and holding the state as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag. Mine, solely mine, claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves, the robber, the ivory, and all the other riches of the land. Mine, mine solely, and gathered for me by the men, the women, and the little children, under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation, and the altar.

35:13These pests, they have kept nothing back. They have revealed these and yet other details which shame should have kept them silent about since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage, and immune from reproach, by the right of his appointment to his great office, by God himself. So that was King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, as ventriloquized by Mark Twain in his satirical monologue, King Leopold's Soliloquy, which he published in 1905. Mark Twain, of course, one of the greatest American writers. And we've already had a lot of great writers in this series, but it's good to get Twain in, isn't it?

36:00Definitely. So it comes Twain a little bit because Twain joins the campaign against the Congo Free State. But first of all, well, how's Leopold? How has he reacted to all this? I mean, I think it's fair to say he probably does think what the words that Twain has put into his mouth. Leopold is now, he turned 60 in 1895. He's a very rich man, but he's very unpopular in Belgium. He has all these villas on the French Riviera. He's got a massive yacht. He spends a lot of his time in the south of France. A lot of Belgians say to themselves, well, he's got this massive, you know, colony all this money but we're not seeing any benefits from it dominic what about his love life well he's disgraced himself to him i think he's let himself he's let belgium down so he has got this new mistress who is exceedingly controversial she's a young french prostitute called caroline de la croix or la croix the different versions of her name they probably met when he was 65 and she was 16 they probably met at a brothel or hotel in paris and don't am i right that that she was probably pimped by a guy who'd been her lover.

37:07That's right. Who's a former soldier called Antoine Emmanuel Durieux. And as we will see, he remains very much on the scene. He's always lurking in the background, adding to the general quality of moral property. Now, Leopold's wife, who of course he hated, died in 1902, and he now becomes completely obsessed with Caroline. He installed her near his castle at Lacken outside Brussels. He spent millions of francs on jewels and clothes for her. He gave her a retinue of servants. I mean, disgracefully, Tom, he took her with him to Queen Victoria's funeral, which was an enormous scandal. She bore him two children in 1909 and 1910.

37:47And actually, far more than the issue of the Congo Free State, this is what destroys his reputation in Belgium. But the two issues become slightly conflated in the world's press. So when her second son was born, there was some issue with his hand. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but whether he had a withered arm or what it was. But anyway, there's an issue with his hand. And Punch magazine in England, then very, very popular, published a cartoon showing Leopold holding this baby with a kind of injured hand. And he's surrounded by African corpses with severed hands. And the caption says, vengeance from on high.

38:24In other words, God has punished you for what you've done to these people. That's pretty punchy. Yeah. Well, literally. Literally, yeah, exactly. So now Leopold is very upset by all this, of course, and he does something very modern. He employs a PR campaign of his own. They place articles in the newspapers about abuses in British colonies, i.e. he's saying, you are the most dreadful hypocrites. You know, you think I'm bad. Look at what you're doing in Nigeria or Sierra Leone or Africa. He's got a point. Well, we'll discuss whether he's got a point in the bonus episode, But it's fair to say, I think it's absolutely fair to say, all European empires have skeletons rattling around in their closets.

39:04He's not wrong about that, that's for sure. He gets his tame shipping companies to sponsor books and articles. He sets up lobby groups. I mean, all of these sort of comical names. The Committee for the Protection of Interests in Africa. Yeah. The Federation for the Defense of Belgian Interests Abroad. You know, all of these groups that, again, sound very contemporary, don't they? I mean, the kind of thing you see all the time. Well, it's what South Africa did during the apartheid campaign. Of course. And I suppose it's also, to a degree, kind of what big tobacco or big oil tend to do. Of course it is.

39:37Of course it is. Or they subsidise magazines, which he does. He has a magazine called New Africa, The Truth About the Congo Free State. You know, this is classic. You know, it's so common now, but at the time it is groundbreaking. And he spends a lot of money on journalists. And then we know about this because we have the paper trail of his attempts to bribe the German press. Entertainingly, his chief agent in Germany, who was a guy called Ludwig van Stoib, claimed that the Belgians were very slow about handing over, about reimbursing him for his costs. And he wrote to Brussels and said, where's my reimbursement?

40:12And he said, now you keep asking me for receipts. Obviously, I don't have any receipts. Yeah, it's all underhand. Because I'm giving people cash, brown envelopes or whatever. By the way, one issue for Leopold is that our old friend, the Kaiser in Germany, the Kaiser absolutely despises Leopold. He called him Satan and Mammon in one person. Is this the same Kaiser who is leading the country that is simultaneously practicing genocide in Namibia? That's the man. Right. Okay. Yeah. I think there's a fair bit of double standards. Pot, kettle. Exactly. Now, the battle moves in about 1904 to America.

40:53America, of course, was the first country to recognize the Congo Free State. It's a bit of an embarrassment, do you think? Yes, I think so. And Edmund D. Morrell says, you know, the United States has a special responsibility to address this because they are the country that basically opened the door to Leopold getting this territory. But also, as in the abolitionist movement, that there is a kind of congruity, a moral congruity between British and American takes on this. Absolutely. So missionaries will often do tours, speaking tours, British missionaries in America, American missionaries in Britain.

41:31There is a sense of, dare I say, a special relationship, a sort of moral relationship on this front. So in 1904, Morel goes to America. He meets Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He recruits Mark Twain. Twain is then in his 60s. He's probably the most famous author in America. He's all in on the campaign. And he's a man who knows the world. I mean, he's been around the world. He can absolutely understand how this could happen. And he's a great activist. He's a great campaigner, Twain. He goes to Washington three times to lobby the president, to lobby Congress. And it becomes this huge crusade.

42:05petitions signed by thousands of people, by governors, by senators, university presidents, and so on. Now, Leopold, again, doesn't take this line down. He fights back. He mounts a lobbying campaign in America. He offers Congo concessions to the Guggenheim family, to John D. Rockefeller. He gives artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History because he knows that J.P. Morgan is on the board. And he pays American academics to defend him. So to give you just one example a guy called frederick star from the university of chicago he's paid by leopold to write a series of articles for the chicago tribune called the truth about the congo free state but then leopold makes a terrible mistake and tom we promised a very large man and now he he rumbles he looms into view how large is he just so we get that he's established he's about 21 stone i don't know what that is in American measurements.

43:02So you've, you're so heavy. One journalist said he made president Taft look like a top worker in a team of acrobats. Exactly. President Taft is famously large. He's the fattest president in American history. And this bloke makes Taft look like a kind of gym. Like a sylph. Exactly. So this guy is called Colonel. I mean, you couldn't make it up. He's called Colonel Henry I. Kowalski. And Leopold takes him on as his chief lobbyist and pays him the equivalent of about a million dollars a year today, 100 ,000 francs. Now, Kowalski has a series of problems. One, he's a total fraud. And two, he's a narcoleptic.

43:38And this may be related, I think, Tom, to his fatness. So he will fall asleep unexpectedly. He's a lawyer. He'll fall asleep in court. He falls asleep when he's waiting to meet people in hotel lobbies. And he also, I read, falls asleep in the street. So he'll be like walking down the street or something. and well I don't know what does he is he still standing up is he fall over I mean he's a large man don't sheep go to sleep standing up standing up exactly so you'd hope that he wouldn't fall the sort of tremors yes echoing across New York anyway the Belgian ambassador when he hears that Leopold has employed this guy says what this man is a notorious fraud like don't what are we doing so basically after the first year the Belgians don't renew this guy Kowalski's contract You know, actually, no, we've changed our minds.

44:28Kowalski, when he's not asleep, is outraged by this. And do you know what he does? He goes straight to the newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst, and he says, I've been working as a paid lobbyist for King Leopold II of Belgium. Would you like the story? And to Leopold's horror, in December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers, banner headline on its front page. King Leopold's amazing attempt to influence our Congress exposed. And Kowalski has told them everything, including the fact that he's been paying a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to basically derail congressional resolutions on the Congo.

45:09And for every day for a week, Hearst's papers lead with the Congo. Pictures of the severed hands, shocking missionary accounts, the works. It's a massive story. and basically by the time it's all over, Leopold has comprehensively lost American public opinion. Because I remember when that campaign is launched that leads to the United States being the first country to recognise Leopold's jurisdiction over the Congo, somebody said, oh, he's the kind of person who gives kings a good name. Yeah. But presumably the fact that he is a king actually just makes him seem even worse in American eyes. Yeah, an evil, corrupt European king.

45:52I mean, he's the perfect villain, isn't he? With his sort of 12-year-old mistress or whatever she is. I mean, it's a terrible... He is a very bad standard bearer for European colonialism, I think it's fair to say. So Leopold has probably only one card left now. Remember that he had set up one of his little fake commissions to investigate the casement report. So this has three judges on it. There's one Italian, there's one Belgian, and there's one Swiss. And Leopold is pretty confident that they will fall into line because the Italian bloke already works in the Congo as his chief appeal court judge.

46:29So he thinks, well, what could possibly go wrong? And unbelievably, to his complete horror, the judges, they take it far too seriously. They say, well, we'll obviously go to the Congo and we'll investigate the abuses. It's like, you know, oh, no. They go up the river by steamboat, Joseph Conrad style. They talk to 400 witnesses. They talk to Africans who've been flogged with the chicot. They talk to people who've been held hostage, all of this kind of thing. Leopold, meanwhile, is lurking back in Brussels, waiting for their report. And he starts to hear rumours that one of the judges, we don't know which one, has started crying during the interviews, has been so moved by the stories.

47:11That's a very bad sign for Leopold. Then a terrible sign. The churches come back and they go to brief the governor general. So that's in Leopoldville. I guess it's in Leopoldville at this point. Or Boma, the original capital, I'm not sure which. This is a guy called Mr. Costumans. They go to brief him about their findings. Costumans, when they leave Costumans' office, Costumans is so shocked that he doesn't speak to anybody for days. And then two weeks later, he cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself. I mean, it's interesting that it seems genuinely to have shocked him. Well, of course, if he's the governor general, he probably hasn't even gone upriver into the interior and seen what's going on.

47:52But the impression I've had is that everybody there knows what's going on. I think there are people who probably work in the, who are, as it were, civil servants, who perhaps have just closed their eyes. Do you think? I don't know. He perhaps, in part of it, I think it's very common in history. You have people who are part of their mind. They kind of know what's going on. But they've closed that door. Maybe it's guilt. Maybe it's guilt, yeah. As well as shock. I don't know. So the report came out in November 1905. And again, it's a very lawyerly kind of report. Not sensational at all. The individual statements were not released, the witness statements.

48:32They actually weren't open to researchers until the 1980s. but they do preserve the voices of the congolese so throughout this story we've been saying we haven't got them but now we do have them yeah do you want to read a couple of extras tom um to give you a sense so you yeah so you've not included the most shocking but here's a flavor so he's talking about an official he told his sentries to tie us to two trees with our feet off the ground our arms were stretched over our heads we were hanging in this way several days and nights whilst we hung there three sentries and the white man beat us in the private parts on the neck and other parts of the body with big hard sticks till we fainted when i was very small the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber a soldier used a knife to cut off my right hand and took it away so again there is testimony to living people having their hands cut off it's not just corpses i saw that he was carrying other cut-off hands the same day my father and mother were killed and i know that they had their hands cut off so i mean living dead it's all about the hands and then a final one i knew jungi well the white man held his head while nikoi standing at his feet hit him with a cane finally nikoi kicked jungi several times and told him to get up when he didn't move akate said to the white man this man is dead you've killed him the white man replied i don't give a damn the judges are white men like me so no wonder they kept him hidden in belgium so that report really was leopold's last chance to recapture of the narrative and obviously he completely failed.

50:02By this point he's become an even more grotesque figure than ever. He's in his early 70s. He's a massive hypochondriac. He's riding around Belgium on a gigantic tricycle drinking decanters of hot water which he thinks are good for his health. Everyone in Belgium hates him and once this Kowalski business comes out in America and then the reports obviously by his own tame judges he realizes the game is up and effectively at this point, he realizes, I'm going to have to get rid of the Congo and I want my money back. And so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state. The one thing, of course, at the beginning, he didn't want to do.

50:40Now, unfortunately, for those of us who would like to see justice done, Leopold is in a very strong position here. This has been horrendous publicity for Belgium. Dominic, I mean, important just to say that there are a lot of Belgians who have also been participating in this campaign. A lot of journals, a lot of magazines, a lot of newspapers. So it's not like there are Belgians who are not appalled by what's been going on, just like everyone else. Of course, especially in their Belgian politicians who are absolutely mortified by this and horrified that the name of their country has been associated with this.

51:17Absolutely. I mean, this isn't because this has been King Leopold's project. There have been Belgians involved. We're absolutely right. There have been Belgians who have blown the whistle and there have been Belgians who have been really, really shocked and campaigned against it. but for the belgian government i mean could you get worse publicity for a small country obviously you couldn't and the british and the americans are putting them under intense pressure you cannot let leopold sell this to france or germany we don't want the french or the germans to get hold of the congo and all of its rubber and all of this so the belgians decide under this anglo-american pressure they're going to have to buy it off him themselves and they do because of his dodgy accounts the negotiations take ages more than a year but in March 1908 they finally agree they will pay him 50 million francs which is the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars today.

52:09Thankfully Leopold doesn't have very long to spend his winnings because he died in December 1909 probably of cancer. Of course Leopold being Leopold his death is a massive scandal because it turned out that he'd secretly married his mistress Caroline just before his death and he'd left her most of his fortune, not his daughters. Because we talked about that this was the great ambition of his life, was to disinherit his daughters. And also, just to add that seven months after Leopold's death, Caroline, who is now enormously rich, marries Durieux. The pimp. The pimp. And I think Hochschild says that Durieux may well be the most successful pimp in the history of pimping.

52:52My words. He kind of reaps in the largest financial reward. because basically, I mean, he's made millions and millions and millions. There's a massive scandal, a huge legal battle, three-way legal battle between Leopold's daughters, Garoline, and the Belgian government for control of his estate. I can't believe Robert Harris hasn't written a novel about this. But the thing is, it ends up being forgotten because just five years after his death, plucky little Belgium becomes the casus belli for Britain in the First World War. And it has a new king now, his nephew, Albert. And he becomes the great symbol of Belgian resistance, doesn't he?

53:30So everybody is like, let's forget Leopold ever existed. So the Belgian royal family get, what, kind of great war washed, I suppose. They do get, yes, they do get great war washed, exactly. So let's just say very quickly about what happened to the other characters in this story. Stanley, at the time, actually, came out of this pretty untainted by the Congo scandal. He'd become an MP, a liberal unionist MP. He died in 1904. So around about the time, the furore is reaching its peak. But it never really seemed to sort of engulf him. Although, of course, now, you know, modern historians and biographers, when they write about Stanley, I mean, obviously, the Congo plays a very large part in his story.

54:09There was a big debate, wasn't there, whether to remove a statue of him from his birthplace in Wales. That's right. Yeah. I think they kept the statue. I think it's still there. Casement, who we'll be hearing lots more about next week with you and John Banville. he ended up becoming the champion of another great humanitarian campaign so rubber workers in the peruvian amazon he's a great champion of them uh he's knighted in 1911 but then he becomes absorbed by another cause which is irish freedom an extraordinary story and he ends up on a u-boat with a load of guns trying to smuggle weapons in kind of three days before the easter rising i mean spoiler alert he's hanged for high treason most of his congo allies plead for clemency.

54:52Morel pleads for clemency. Conan Doyle pleads for clemency. But interestingly, Joseph Conrad did not and refused. And Conrad said, Casement had taken honours from Britain. He'd represented Britain. We got a knighthood, hadn't we? He had then betrayed Britain and he got what was coming to him. So Conrad's a pretty conservative figure, so that's not necessarily surprising. Morel carried on campaigning about the Congo, even after being taken over by the Belgians. We'll come to that in just a second. But he was radicalised eventually, a little bit like Casement. So in the First World War, Morel is probably the best-known pacifist in Britain.

55:28And he ended up being sent to prison for sending pacifist pamphlets to Switzerland, which was in breach of the Defence of the Realm Act. He ends up joining the Labour Party. He stood for Labour in Dundee in 1922. He beat Winston Churchill at the House of Commons. It's amazing how all these figures kind of intersect. They connect. I know there's a great book to be written about, you know, imagine a book with characters like Conrad, Casement, Morell, Churchill, all of these, Mark Twain. Anyway, he died tragically of a heart attack two years after being elected to Parliament when he was just 51. So that was the end of him.

56:02But his legacy, of course, is a tradition of human rights activism that never really goes away. And obviously, we're still very familiar with to this day. but before we close we should just a word about the congo because the real question of course is how does it change what changes after leopold is gone it's definitely true that when the belgians take it over there are fewer reports of atrocities we don't have the same reports of burned villages people being taken hostage it doesn't seem to have been the severing of hands all of that stuff However, a lot of the caste in the Congo are the same people, the same officials, the same station chiefs.

56:45The force publique continues with the same name. The rubber trade continues, and there is still forced labor. Even after the First World War, the Belgian Congo is notoriously brutal. They're still using the chicots. They're still using forced labor. The focus has moved now to mining, copper, tin, and gold. but the conditions in those mines are pretty horrific and thousands of people die and there's um uh tintin in congo herge one of the i think his second tintin book and he goes there and it turns out all to be the fault of al capone yeah and tintin in the congo you can't get it you have to order especially you can't get it now it's been withdrawn from sort of general sale in children's bookshops it's seen only as a kind of historical curiosity because the portrait of belgian colonial colonialism and of the people in the Congo is seen as inappropriate for 21st century children, which I can completely understand, I have to say.

57:44Even in the Second World War, when obviously Belgium is one of the allies, there's still forced labor. And the colonial government demands 120 days per person of forced labor from its African population to meet the allies' demands for rubber for their trucks, for their jeeps, for their tires of their airplanes and so on. So, you know, there is that dark side to the allied war effort now some scholars have made a case tried to make a case for the belgian congo and have said you know great public health campaigns trying to eliminate sleeping sickness and yellow fever and things like that and there's perhaps a degree of truth in that but one thing that people always say about their colonies is you know look at the results judge us on the legacy and the truth of the matter is if you look at what became of the belgian congo after 1960 after independence i think it would be very very hard to say that's a record to be proud of wouldn't you and the role played by belgium in upholding it as a territory supplying western needs it's taken up by the united states doesn't it yes cia sponsored assassinations um backing for mobuto who's i mean the kind of the parody yeah of of a kleptocrat and i think we said this right at the beginning that in a way mobuto is the is the real heir of of king leopold ii he is indeed he is indeed so there's obviously still loads to talk about and actually in thursday's episode we'll be going back to the book that we began with which is joseph conrad's heart of darkness a great subject for a history podcast because it's one of the most influential works of fiction ever written.

59:33Conrad himself is a fantastic character. Extraordinary man. And the impact of that book is really, really worth talking about. So that's what we're doing on Thursday. But for Arrested History Club members, a day earlier on Wednesday, we'll be discussing the deeper questions from this series. So we'll be asking about the death toll. How many people died in the Congo Free State? And is it fair to call it, as some people do, a genocide? is it fair to see it as representative of European colonialism generally so in other words does this tell us something very dark about European imperialism and should we perhaps revise the sort of canonical version and you know what are the controversies that surround Adam Hochschild's book the book on which we've based so much of the series so that's for Rest is History club members and if you want to join you can just head to therestishistory.com and then you'll hear it Thank you very much, Dominic.

1:00:26Brilliant. Amazing, amazing sweep of a terrible story. As I say, we'll be back in our next episode with Heart of Darkness. And then next week, there'll be also a bonus on Roger Casement. So lots of Congo. But for now, bye-bye. Bye-bye.