The Congo Rubber Atrocities -- A Case Study

Abstract

When was traveling in the Congo in 1962 it was suggested to me that in the Bolobo region there was a lively folk memory of the rubber atrocities committed in the period of the Etat Independant du Congo. The following year was able to go to Bolobo, but by that time my original intention of simply collecting oral tradition had become somewhat more ambitious. Preliminary investigation led to the discovery that, although Roger Casement's original report was not in the place in the Foreign Office correspondence where one would expect to find it, the Confidential Print of it was .1 Of course this famed report has always been available in the published version,2 but in that version symbols are substituted for the names of individuals, tribes, regions, and places wherever it was supposed that informants might otherwise be victimized. And because charges against officials did not amount to legally satisfactory proof, their names were suppressed as well.3 Understandably, therefore, the discovery of the unexpurgated version was of some importance. All that the parliamentary paper tells one of the rubber policy in the Bolobo region is that Casement collected information from refugees in a portion of the domaine de la couronne somewhere in the vicinity of Bolobo. In the paper, he makes statements of such limited value as I spent three days on this journey, visited two large villages in the interior belonging to the K tribe, wherein found that fully half the population now consisted of refugees belonging to the L tribe who had formerly dwelt near I. 4 In the confidential print, on the other hand, is an untouched account of one of the detailed investigations undertaken by Casement.

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