Fifty-six: Delta Darkness

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.