I
want to explore the career of the Congo metaphor, and contemplate how it might
be used in the American context, and how it is used in Nan Elizabeth Woodruff’s
American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta
(Harvard University Press, 2003). In Woodruff’s work, it seems to me that
the idea of the American Congo is grafted onto an excellent monograph and
intricate study of the Mississippi Delta and African American resistance. My
feeling, though, is that had the notion of the Congo not been deployed, but a
more thorough comparison with colonialism been undertaken instead, along with
an analysis of the location of subalterns in such systems of oppression, then
her attempt to internationalize American history might have worked better
still. Though, this is not intended to diminish the accomplishment,
already noted by many other reviewers of this book.
Clearly,
the Congo metaphor refers to an area of the world and a time that was
considered the worst of empire – on a continuum of empires it would be located
down one end as the one that manifested the harshest, cruelest conditions, where
laborers and the indigenous peoples were treated most deplorably. It was “the
nadir of Europe in Africa”, the ultimate product of the scramble for Africa,
the place where the desire to make money quickly came together with the desire
to create an instant empire for Belgium and King Leopold to allow people to be
treated in the most barbaric fashion. This was, as Joseph Conrad put it in the
Heart of Darkness, “the horror of it all,” “the vilest scramble for loot
that ever disfigured the history of human conscience;” for W.E.B. Du Bois,
writing in The Negro in 1915, “the valley of the Congo [would] long
stand as a monument of shame to Christianity and European Civilization.”
The
history of the Congo is described admirably in Adam Hochschild’s King
Leopold’s Ghost, and Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate all the Brutes,
the two sources used by Woodruff to describe the Congo on the opening page of
this book. Woodruff argues that the descriptions of the Congo apply to the
Mississippi Delta also, so that, if we accept the description of an imperial
continuum, the Delta would be located down towards the same end as the Congo.
She writes:
Planters
in the [Mississippi Delta] had forged an ‘alluvial empire’ in the early
twentieth century that, like Belgian King Leopold II’s African Congo in the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, wore the face of science
and progressivism, yet was underwritten by labor conditions that were anything
but progressive. King Leopold used the rhetoric of uplift and benevolence
to mask his relentless search for ivory and rubber in the Congo. Leopold’s men
burned villages and their inhabitants, raped the women, cut off the hands and
heads of thousands of Congolese, and worked them in chain gangs until they
dropped from hunger and exhaustion.
Woodruff
then proceeds to make the link between Delta planters and the Congo, writing:
[Delta
planters] may not have cut off the heads and hands of their African American
workers, but they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and other forms of terror
to retain their labor. Some of the meanest corners of the “heart of
darkness” were found in the Delta during the first half of the twentieth
century.
Woodruff
seems to want us to read this connection literally and accept the
comparison. When she describes the capitalists creating their alluvial
empire, she outlines their progressive intentions tempered by their racism and
desire for profit at the expense of African Americans. Lynch spirit and
convict labor, through which they maintained their power, stand in for the
barbarity of King Leopold’s vassals.
There
may be a couple of problems with this. First, when people referred to the
Congo they did not bring to mind the progressive aspect of the project as
outlined first by Stanley and then promulgated by King Leopold. Whatever
the merits and intentions of the original project, what people referred to was
just the horror of a state run imperial project that deprived people of lives
and limbs in the name of simple profit. It was the image described by
William Sheppard in 1899 of 81 hands smoking on a slow fire in order that they
would be preserved as evidence that cartridges supplied by Europeans had not
been wasted. So the progressive intentions of Delta planters do not really help
to make the Congo metaphor stick for their region.
Second,
once Woodruff describes the development of the alluvial empire it is clear that
the way that the empire became established was not simply on the basis of
exploitation and brutality as the Congo metaphor suggests. Indeed, it was
founded in negotiation, to which African Americans were a party – particularly
in their demands, which were met, that they be given land as
sharecroppers. As the planters began to push for greater profits and
consolidation of their position at the expense of their laborers, when they
faced resistance from those workers, and when they found themselves blocked by
the federal government from imposing outright peonage on their labor, they then
turned towards violence. By contrast, violence was the basis for the
system of capitalist accumulation in the Congo. Leopold’s goons used
terror against whole villages to ensure that they produced the labor and goods
that were desired.
If
there is a problem here it may lie in the fact that Woodruff wants to use
“American Congo” as a synonym for “Mississippi Delta,” and does so on about
twenty occasions throughout the book. Doing so suggests that there really
is some equivalence between the two places. However, it seems to me that
she is closer throughout the book to establishing a more general comparison
with empire and colonialism. A passage at the end of the chapter,
“Forging of the Alluvial Empire,” makes this case perfectly. She writes:
As
the alluvial empire materialized on the eve of WWI, its contours were not so
much different from those of other western empires: a wealthy and powerful few
lived off the sweat of a predominantly “coloured” labor force. The
accumulation of capital in the Delta had led, as it had in other regions of the
world, to oppressive labor conditions that drew on peonage, convict labor, and
eventually murder and torture. As in other colonies, workers were
stripped of any access to citizenship. They had no legal rights, and not
only did they lose the fruits of their own labor, but they also lacked the
basic protection of civil rights. People worked without pay, people
disappeared, and no one was held accountable. The enlightened face of
progressivism and science that characterized the early-twentieth-century culture
of the region masked an oppressive racism.
What
this really describes is colonialism, or at least one interpretation of
it. This is not the Congo metaphor; this is empire. Now, where
Woodruff enters into debates about empire and colonialism she does so using Cooper
and Stoler, as the title of her chapter “Tensions of Empire,” would
suggest. But doing this, I think, further weakens the Congo metaphor as
this approach is very much tied to notions of agency, a point I will return to
in a minute.
The
origin of the Congo metaphor lies in the campaign undertaken by E.D. Morel, a
former British shipping clerk who had worked in Brussels, in the report
published by Roger Casement in 1902 of widespread mutilation, forced labor, and
murder occurring in the Congo Free State, and in the publication of Joseph
Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, also in 1902. It is important to
note, I believe, that Casement was a consular official sent to investigate
conditions in the Congo by the British Government. As such, the origin of
the metaphor was tied more to the continuance of empire, than to any conception
of its eradication. The report was generated to promote reform of
outright abuses, and reflected the self-satisfaction of the British with regard
to what they did in their own empire. The Congo report, and the metaphor
derived from it, validated empire more than it threatened it. Those
nations who were quick to admonish the Belgians, especially the British, could
describe their own empires as much different from, and more progressive than,
that of King Leopold. Indeed, the idea of an imperial continuum, and its
appeal to us even today, is in part a product of an archive that was put in
place to situate the British and their empire at one end, and everyone else and
their empires along down the line towards the Belgian Congo.
This
comparative frame is a key aspect of empire and colonialism that needs to be
remembered. The horrors of one fragment could be used to validate other
not quite so horrific instances of abuse. Past excesses, like slavery,
could be used to make anything not quite so blatantly inhumane, not quite so
systemic, seem more palatable. As such, there is a very real way in which
empire and colonialism depend upon the metaphorical Congo for their continued
existence – so that the metaphor of an American Congo, were it to have been
used liberally at the time, would be very powerful indeed, just as the notion
of Mississippi itself as the worst area of the South was very powerful both for
those who opposed the Jim Crow South and those who, while wanting it to
continue, wished to validate their progressive version of it. Indeed,
even the proponents of the alluvial empire clearly wished to promote their
South as different, and not as bad as other sections of the South.
This
use of the Congo, I think, helps explain Roger Casement’s own trajectory into a
position of being at war with the British Empire. It seems clear that he
came to see his work as not bringing about change, especially after the failure
to convince the British and American officials to reform their capitalists who
were establishing their own shop of horrors in the Putamayo, and that he began
to realize that reform within empire would not work – certainly not for the
Irish anyway. As such, the idea of a Congo, or at least the continuum
that is implied within it, needs to be questioned, and I think the evidence in
Woodruff’s book speaks admirably to this problematic.
The
way in which metaphors are used is very important indeed, and, as I said, if
this metaphor of the Congo had traction at this time it would be very revealing
about who was using it and for what purpose. And, clearly, one would
think that since Mississippi was often considered the worst area of the Jim
Crow South, such a metaphor would have had some purchase; and yet this does not
appear to be the case. The basis for the use of this metaphor in this
book is an article by a member of the NAACP in “The Nation.” William
Pickens called the Mississippi River Valley the American Congo in his article
describing the lynchings that had occurred in 1921. The article itself
appears to have been focused on the lynchings and did not elaborate the ways in
which the region actually resembled the Congo. All the other newspapers
that make appearances in this work, the Chicago Defender and the NAACP’s
and Du Bois’s The Crisis in particular, apparently failed to make this
comparison, even though to have done so might have been effective
politically. As such the metaphor does not seem to have had much
traction, and the reason why it may not have done is that it wasn’t evident to
people that the comparison actually worked in the case of the Mississippi
Delta.
But
were people at the time overlooking the potential of a metaphor that seemed to
characterize this region? It is interesting that Woodruff’s work tries to
do two things: one is highlight the plight of people in the Mississippi Delta,
comparing them to the Congo, and the other is describe the ways in which these
people resisted their conditions and brought about change – bringing the
tension to empire. Is there perhaps a contradiction in these two
impulses? For the ability to bring about change, that Thompsonian agency
effect, is in many ways one of the things that distinguishes the resident of
the Mississippi Delta from that of the Belgian Congo, at least in terms of
situating them on our imperial continuum. Woodruff writes of the brand of
imperialism she is describing:
And
yet the imperialism and the human carnage it wrought did not go unchallenged by
those whose lives were being transformed or destroyed. Slaves, peasants,
plantation workers, and those who labored in other extractive industries, such
as mining, timber, and rubber, fought their oppression in numerous ways,
seeking to protect their land and families against the intrusion of capitalism
and white racism.
But
does this Social History model, which we seem comfortable applying to
colonialism and imperialism and through which we feel obliged to empower our
workers, work for the real Congo? It may or may not have done, but
empowerment was certainly not on the minds of those who created and deployed
the Congo metaphor: the heart of darkness was supposed to be a black hole for
human agency, it was a severed head on the end of the pike, agency was entirely
absent. Here again, the use of the metaphor might be very instructive in
telling us, not so much about real representations of human agency, whatever
that abstraction might translate into, but rather about who could gain
empowerment and under what circumstances. Indeed, there are hints of this
in the quote that I just used. People, according to Woodruff, “fought
their oppression in numerous ways, seeking to protect their land and families
against the intrusion of capitalism and white racism.” The historian’s
denial of agency, the denial of historiographical rights, of particular kinds
would register as being unwarranted, if they were directed against the
capitalist or white supremacist system. But the oppression of someone
within the family who is being protected from capitalism might not register;
nor perhaps would the effort of someone who, instead of fighting against the
oppression, worked within the system to protect him or herself and his or her
family, by exploiting and humiliating others who were oppressed.
A
related point to this is the fact that lynching is a specific phenomenon tied
to time and space. I am reminded of the similarities drawn between the
Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa, once in vogue. John Cell, if I
recall correctly, questioned the comparison, pointing to the fact that the
South African system was constitutionally guaranteed and protected by the state
with the backing of the police, whereas the Jim Crow South was tempered by the
Constitution, by laws against peonage and notions (even if not adhered to) of
separate but equal. In such a situation, where the oppressed had certain
rights – the right to move and ownership of property, for example – lynching,
mob rule, and other forms of terrorism stepped in to ensure that such rights
remained circumscribed. In South Africa, pass laws and residential
apartheid, backed up by the police made such informal terror largely
unnecessary. The police could kill a Steve Biko if necessary, they didn’t
need a mob to do the work for them; they also didn’t need to stage the
humiliation of black labor – it was written into everyday existence.
Similar comments might be made about the Congo and the Mississippi Delta.
State functionaries were doing the killing and maiming in order to establish
certain labor conditions. The violence was not done in response to
perceived advancement of Africans protesting particular conditions and bringing
political pressure to bear in their favor. The irony here, then, is that
what makes the Mississippi Delta seem most akin to the Congo is the very thing
that distinguished the two regions and brings into question the notion of a
Congo continuum altogether. For it is the growing power of the African
American labor that provokes the anxiety for the planter, which in turn leads
to the massacre at Elaine and the various horrific lynchings described
throughout the book.
Where
does this all lead? It may lead us to wonder whether the Congo metaphor
itself, with its implicit assumptions about degrees of harshness of different
systems of exploitation, is something that we may need to move beyond – for the
anxious planter can produce conditions of terror in many different environments
and conditions of exploitation – from the seemingly liberal and progressive to
the draconian and reactionary. It may also lead us to wonder about the
historically contingent nature of labels and metaphors. They are used for
specific purposes and with different effects in different times and places.
These have to be understood and analyzed closely. We have to be careful
how we might use a particular metaphor to characterize a region, as for all its
descriptive strengths it may blur as much as it is reveals.
