A while ago I wrote an application for an arts scholarship with something called The Leverhulme Trust. It looked like a sweet deal: I could formulate an idea for a dramatic production and they would provide some cash to help me to research the thing. It struck me, though, that I should find out what this “Trust” thing was. A quick Google landed me on the Wikipedia page of someone called William Lever, 1st Viscount of Leverhulme, who, I learned, was an industrialist, a philanthropist and a man who had built much of his fortune on cheap labour and Palm oil concessions in the Belgian Congo.
This disturbed me, but I knew it shouldn’t be surprising. Trusts and foundations are built on large amounts of money, and large amounts of money rarely spring from pure sources. Given that William Lever’s Congolese operation has long since folded, one would no more be complicit in its deeds in profiting from his legacy than students of Christ Church are complicit in the sacking of the monasteries. What annoyed me, though, was the discreet avoidance of the subject by the institutions that now carry Lever’s name. The Leverhulme Trust remembers him as being a man of “exceptional creativity and energy”, while Unilever, which he founded, hails his “projects to improve the lot of [his] workers and [create] products with a positive social impact”. In taking their money, then, I thought, one might not be complicit in evil but in obscurantism.
This was somewhat pious. William Lever was a creative, industrious man, and a philanthropist, as well as being responsible for suffering in the Congo and one can hardly expect his heirs to dwell upon the latter. He was a man of his time and, all in all, I see no reason not to use his money to improve our times. It struck me, though, that while some dead philanthropists have had their darker deeds quietly acknowledged – Cecil Rhodes, say, or Henry Ford – the Viscount of Leverhulme has had his overlooked. AN Wilson, writing in the Daily Mail, ranked him among old millionaires whose public spirits shame the plutocrats of our day. His most recent biographer, Adam MacQueen, grants that Lever was not exactly a model employer but asserts that “by the standards of the day he was exemplary”.
It took a Belgian, Jules Marchal, to decisively prove that this was not the case. Marchal was a diplomat who was disturbed by the colonial past of his nation, and documented its history in a series of books. One of them, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts, details the work of Lever’s company, the Huileries du Congo Belge.
The HCB, as it was known, sought palm oil as the raw material for soap, on which Lever’s fortune had been built. The death of King Leopold had marked the end of the most intense atrocities of Belgian occupation but even though some powers had been transferred to Congolese chiefs it was Belgian administrators who ran the country. With their help, the HCB monopolised palm oil production: strong-arming the Congolese people into agreeing to contracts that robbed them of any benefits of competition and forced them to work for less than equitable remuneration.
The HCB needed workers, and these could be hard to find. The Congolese people distrusted their Europeans at the best of times, and once they understood what they had been signed up for they were even less enthusiastic about being employed. Some agreed regardless, as they had to have the money, while others had little choice. Forced labour had characterised Leopold’s Congo Free state, where failing to meet rubber quotas was punishable by death or the amputation of one’s hand, and it continued in less blatant forms. William Ormsby-Gore, a Conservative politician, delicately but disapprovingly observed that there were “some elements of coercion”, while Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian colonialist who was sympathetic to the work of the HBC, was uncomfortable about the means by which chiefs were encouraged to make their subjects sign up by hook or by crook: “tear[ing] from their village[s] old men who were not up to doing anything at all”.
Once they had been recruited, workers generally had to leave their homes and families and travel to HBC bases. The standards in these camps cannot have made that dislocation less painful. Dr. Emile Lejeune prepared a report on one of them, modestly named Leverville, in 1923. Workers, he found, were not given blankets to guard them from the cold, and many of them were struck down with pneumonia and bronchial infections. The houses in which men slept were overcrowded, and not equipped with latrines or rubbish pits. The rations consisted of a meal’s worth of rice and dried fish, “[providing] far too few proteins, carbohydrates, fats and calories”. If that sounds like a meager diet to us, most of whom spend our working days in chairs, imagine how unsatisfying it must have been for people who cut and carrying fruit from six in the morning to nightfall.
It was not only men who had to bear these hardships. Lejeune observed “children or young adolescents…pushing wagons, and on boats…loading timber and fruit”. This continued even as other conditions improved, and wives and daughters were also roped in to help the men keep up with the formidable demands. Pierre Ryckmans observed women who were “pregnant or burdened with children“ yet had to “go and find the fruit in the forest, shell it, carry it from the early morning onwards to the reception centre and return exhausted to perform her domestic duties”.
A refrain of Europeans who feature in the book is that the natives are just idle. The problem with recruitment, HCB’s Sidney Edkins is reported as claiming, is “the natural repugnance felt by all blacks for every kind of work”. I am no expert on the work ethic of the Congolese people of that era but it seems to me that it might not have been work per se that they objected to but hard, tedious work in tough conditions on behalf of people who had effectively swindled their compatriots out of what they must have thought was their birthright. Edkins and his chums remind me of the people who campaigned for the invasion of Iraq; saw the country torn apart by violence and neglect and then blamed the unhappiness of its population on their being a load of ingrates.
In 1931 Belgian and HCB recruiters were seeking potential employees in the village of Kilamba. Its menfolk must have caught wind of their arrival as they took off into the bush. The officials promptly locked their wives and mothers in a nearby barn. Having rounded up the men and packed them off towards a camp, they travelled to another village and were met with arrows. HCB tactics, as well as those of Belgian companies, had fomented an anti-European movement that flared up in violence. Soldiers arrived and killed hundreds in suppressing the revolution.
Emile Vandervelde, a Belgian statesman who had been enthusiastic about Lever’s presence in the Congo, wrote that indirect causes of the uprising included “the recruiting operations, involving moral and physical violence, by the HCB” and “the obligation to “produce” despite the too-low prices paid”. “We are faced,” he said, “With the weighty question as to whether, behind the proud facade of Leverville, there are not…living and working conditions…so deplorable that by themselves they serve to explain the overwhelming repugnance felt by local peoples at the thought of going to this region”.
The HCB were not equivalent to, say, Japanese soldiers who worked their captives to death in the construction of the Burma Railway. Conditions did improve, despite continuing abuses, and the HCB eventually paid twice the wage that the Belgian industrialists offered. What Marchal claims, however, is that even in an era of colonialism they were profoundly regressive. In Nigeria, he writes, the British colonists allowed the natives to maintain ownership of their palm groves; did not force them to work and did not reduce women to hard labour. Forced recruitment was a feature of Kenya, he claims, but even there the wages were many times higher than they were in the Congo.
Lever was a greedy man, and many of the lessons of the Huileries du Congo Belge concern the potential rapacity of profit-seeking businesses: monopolising, corporatising and generally exploitating anything from which a little oil might be squeezed. The comfort of Westerners smearing themselves in soap ensured that few thought of its nameless, faceless producers, and exhausted workers across the world may tell us we are not entirely different.
Greedy men, however, are rarely just greedy. Lever was no cartoon industrialist: with a top hat, cigar and boot planted on the backside of some rawboned urchin. He did strive throughout his life to improve people – not as they might have wished, in many cases, but the thought was there. I suspect that he believed that he was improving the Congo, and there is evidence of his pride in constructing schools and hospitals there. What the HCB proved, however, is the potentially destructive nature not simply of greed but of the philanthropic spirit itself.
Westerners need not have been entirely dishonest in their wish to seek the “moral and material improvement” of their subjects but they showed that the desire to be beneficent is useless if it is not accompanied by respect. One has to respect people enough to acknowledge the material and emotional needs that drive them: the universal exigencies of food, shelter, security and companionship and the local habits of belief and tradition. It is the condescending disregard for peoples’ independence that led and still leads people to sulk when objects of their dreams find the material realities of their lofty ideals – “work”, say, or “freedom” – to be wanting.
Reading Marchal’s book led me to think of colonialism. The Empire makes me no more embarrassed to be English than the Belgian Free State, French Algeria, Eastern Europe, Imperial Japan and the Arab slave trade should embarrass the descendants of their architects. We are not them. On the other hand, we are not entirely unlike them. If we want to claim to have been influenced by the achievements of our ancestors we have to understand the harm that they inflicted; thus to ensure that the attitudes that lay behind them do not live again. They were not always malicious and they are more relevant for that.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, who Back Towards the Locus readers might have come across, appeared in The Observer this weekend to inform us that there is hope for the Middle East. One of his data points was the fact that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has “made a powerful statement reclaiming the faith of Islam from those who would pervert it”. A few days before this column was published, a Saudi liberal named Raif Badawi was sentenced to 600 lashes and 7 years in prison for the supposed crime of insulting Islam. This is, admittedly, a preferable sentence to the execution that had been demanded by Saudi clerics but it is still a barbaric one, and the supposed sophistication of Abdullah’s words are irrelevant as long as the acts of his regime are defined by nonsensical cruelty.
