In France’s equatorial African territories, where the region’s history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the chicotte were the order of the day. Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold’s regime eventually fled back to escape the French. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold’s Congo, at roughly 50 percent. And, as in Leopold’s colony, both the French territories and the German Cameroons were wracked by long, fierce rebellions against the rubber regime.
The French scholar Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch has published a chilling graph showing how, at one French Congo post, Salanga, between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company “sentries” – nearly four hundred in a busy month.
During this period a scandal erupted in France when two white men were put on trial for a particularly gruesome set of murders in the French Congo; to celebrate Bastille Day, one had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner’s rectum.
Source:
Hochschild, Adam. "Victory?" King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 280-81. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Suret-Canale, pp. 20-28.
West, pp. 165-181.
Coquéry-Vidrovitch I, pp. 171-197.
Further Reading:
État indépendant du Congo (Independent State of the Congo) / Congo Free State
la Fête nationale (The National Celebration) / le 14 juillet (The fourteenth of July) / Bastille Day
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