Amnesia in the Archives: Representations of Colonial Violence and the Gendered Silence of Suffering in the Congo Reform Association’s Campaign

"Maps from the Belgian Congo and Congo Free State 42" by Lvovsky is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0[LS1]   https://openverse.org

Content Warning: This blog contains mentions of violence and sexual abuse.

The 1884-85 Berlin Conference was a critical event in the Scramble for Africa, whereby European Powers sought to divide the continent. A particular dispute between various European nations centred on the ownership of the Congo Basin, which was not yet under a singular colonial power’s administration. Both France and Portugal sought to expand their control within the Congo region. The Belgian King, Leopold II, saw the Congo as an opportunity to establish his own empire. Consequently, Leopold established the International African Association in 1876; a philanthropic organisation which promised to suppress the slave trade and introduce legitimate trade into the Congo. Under this promise, the 1885 Berlin Act granted the administration of the Congo Free State to Leopold, who, whilst a constitutional monarch, was permitted absolute sovereignty independent of Belgium’s imperialist rule. Under the guise of philanthropy, Leopold introduced a brutal regime of forced labour and taxation, to maximise the colony's abundant resources of rubber and ivory for profit. To enforce this system, Leopold’s personal army, Force Publique, employed violent tactics of mutilation, flogging, kidnapping, sexual violence and destruction, to ensure labour compliance and the attainment of high rubber quotas. From this context, the Congo Reform Association (CRA) emerged in 1904, founded by Edmund Dene Morel, Roger Casement, and Henry Gratton Guinness, as an international humanitarian effort to expose and reform the violent practices of Leopold’s regime. 

My undergraduate dissertation research examines how the CRA’s representational strategies deliberately prioritised visible forms of bodily suffering, such as mutilation, flogging, and forced labour, while omitting references to sexual violence. Despite the prevalence of gender-based violence in the Congo Free State, these acts were largely excluded from the public campaign. Drawing on archival sources, including the CRA’s own publications and the 1904 Commission of Inquiry, I argue that this omission reveals a gendered hierarchy of suffering rooted in the cultural, racial, and political assumptions of the time.

To understand the strategic choices underpinning CRA representations, it is crucial to examine how atrocity was framed. Central to the CRA’s campaign was the mobilisation of what historian Thomas Laqueur (1989, 315) refers to as the ‘empathy thesis’: the idea that successful humanitarian action relies on invoking a common bond between those who suffer and those who help. Roger Casement’s 1904 Report and the CRA’s pamphlets, such as Henry Grattan Guinness’s Congo Slavery (1904), repeatedly emphasised mutilation, particularly the severing of hands, as the most evocative symbol of colonial cruelty. Casement’s Report (1904, 72) details how even ‘a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles,’ and ‘a boy of 11 or 12 years old, whose right hand had been cut off at the wrist’ were subjected to such brutal practices. These representations were further reinforced by atrocity photography, which, as historian Sharon Sliwinski (2006, 335) argues, acted as a form of ‘forensic evidence’, providing irrevocable proof of colonial barbarity. CRA materials consistently portrayed women and children as ideal victims, utilising what historian Matthew Norton (2011, 324) terms ‘powerful cultural tropes’ to evoke emotional responses. The 1904 ‘Special Congo Supplement’ to The West African Mail, a newspaper created by Morel to provide a dedicated space for whistleblowers exposing Leopold’s brutality, featured frequent representations of women with babies ‘chained by the neck,’ or ‘children mutilated for failing to meet rubber quotas’ (1904, 57). Such representations aimed to produce outrage in the European readership while reinforcing a paternalistic narrative of the need for European intervention.

Yet, amid the wide range of visual and textual representations, sexual violence remained largely absent. While mutilation was described in explicit detail, rape and gender-based violence were referred to only in euphemistic terms, if at all. Casement’s Report includes testimony from a woman named Ncongo, who said: ‘a soldier put me in the house; he wanted to kill me. Then another soldier came and took me’. Though suggestive of sexual violence, the meaning remains obscure. As historian Kevin Grant (2015, 64) argues, humanitarian narratives had to adhere to the ‘culturally specific and historically contingent mores’ of their audiences. Victorian moral codes rendered sexual violence unrepresentable in public discourse. Within this moral landscape, the CRA’s silence on rape functioned as a strategic form of respectability politics. Even where references do occur, such as in Edmund Morel’s (1904) book, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa, they are brief and exceptional. A letter from Reverend A.R. Williams recounts how soldiers would ‘rape the women and clear the villages of livestock’ (1904, 233). However, this account stands out precisely because of its rarity. Morel’s broader publications within the CRA Organ, particularly those intended for wide distribution, avoided such language entirely.

In contrast, testimonies collected during the 1904 Commission of Inquiry contain clear references to sexual violence. Of the 258 Congolese depositions, thirteen were from women; five of these included accounts of rape or sexual coercion. One woman described being ‘taken away by the native sergeant’ because he ‘admired her’. Another testified that women fled into the bush ‘to escape being raped and seized.’ The Commission itself, established by King Leopold II to deflect growing international criticism, was composed entirely of European officials. While it ultimately substantiated the CRA’s claims regarding the barbarity of Leopold’s practices, it also revealed the widespread nature of sexual violence. The CRA had access to these findings yet chose not to include them in its public-facing materials. Historian Charlotte Mertens (2016) identifies this as an instance of ‘sexual amnesia’, a form of erasure that not only shaped historical memory but also reinforced colonial hierarchies of gender and race. Historian Nancy Rose Hunt (2015, 41) similarly notes that by focusing on mutilation, the CRA’s campaign diverted ‘attention away from the hidden, tactile... key modality of violence: the sexual’.

The CRA’s selectivity was not limited to modes of violence; it also extended to its political aims. The organisation did not oppose the actual practice of colonialism, but sought to reform Leopold’s abuses. As historian Felix Lösing (2020, 244) notes, the CRA aimed at ‘the stabilisation of European supremacy and not its retreat’. Its campaign constructed the Congo Free State as an exceptional site of cruelty, thereby absolving other colonial regimes from scrutiny. Within this framework, representations of suffering were tightly controlled. By foregrounding visible violence and silencing gender-based violence, the CRA upheld a gendered and racialised understanding of victimhood that positioned European reformers as moral agents and Congolese women as passive recipients of rescue.

My research contributes to the growing but marginalised body of historiography that provides a more comprehensive representation of colonial violence, incorporating both the visible and invisible systems of atrocity that Congolese women experienced under Leopold’s regime. This demands a reassessment of the legacy of the CRA, noting that while it was successful in ending Leopold’s atrocities, its selective and gendered representation of suffering significantly complicates its legacy. The failure to provide a complete representation of female suffering rendered the CRA complicit in the concealment of sexual crimes. Thus, this raises the question of the extent to which imperial humanitarian campaigns inadvertently contributed to the very systems of violence they condemned.

Bibliography:

Casement, Roger. ‘The Congo Report and 1903 Diary’, in The Eyes of Another Race: Roger

Casement’s Congo Report and 1903 Diary. Edited by Séamas Ó Síocháin and Michael O’Sullivan.

University College Dublin Press, 2003 (1904).

Grant, Kevin. ‘The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Photography in the Congo Reform Campaign’. In

Humanitarian Photography A History, edited by Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno. Cambridge

University Press, 2015.

Guinness, Henry Gratton. ‘Congo Slavery: A Brief Survey of the Congo Question from the

Humanitarian Point of View’. R.B.M.U. Publication Department, 1904.

Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Nervous State, Violence, Remedies, Revive in Colonial Congo. Duke University

Press, 2015.

Laqueur, Thomas. ‘Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative’. In The New Cultural History,

edited by Lynn Hunt. University of California Press, 1989.

Lösing, Felix. A Crisis of Whiteness in the “Heart of Darkness”: Racism and the Congo Reform

Movement. Transcript Verlag, 2020.

Mertens, Charlotte. ‘Sexual Violence in Congo Free State: Archival Traces and Present

Reconfigurations’, Australasian Review of African Studies 37, no.1 (2016), 6-21.

Morel, Edmund Dene. King Leopold’s Rule in Africa. 1904. William Heinemann.

Norton, Matthew. ‘Narrative Structure and Emotional Mobilisation in Humanitarian Representations:

The case of the Congo Reform Movement, 1903-1912’, Journal of Human Rights 10, no.3 (2011),

311-338.

Sliwinski, Sharon. ‘The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo’, Journal of Visual

Culture 5,no.3 (2006), 333-363.

Author biography

Louisa Steijger is a recent MA (Hons) History Graduate from the University of Edinburgh currently studying MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies at the LSE.