Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1888 Congo Railroad: Building Belgium's Iron Lung
Transcript
- Lucas: So last time we talked about the 1959 Stanleyville riots, and how the push for independence really caught fire. But I want to jump back to something that made all of that possible in the first place — the infrastructure that let Belgium actually extract Congo's wealth. Specifically, the railway from Matadi to Kinshasa. Luna: That's the line that connected the coast to the river, right? Lucas: Exactly. Before it was built, everything had to be carried by porters — headloads of ivory, rubber, palm oil — trekking through the Crystal Mountains. It was slow, expensive, and deadly for the carriers. Leopold II knew that if he wanted to make the Congo Free State profitable, he needed a railway. And he needed it fast. Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know we try to make this stuff useful — understanding how the past shapes the present. If today's conversation gives you something concrete to think about, the way these stay ad-free is listener support. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep the show going. So who actually built the railway? Lucas: The contract went to a British engineer named Albert Thys. He formed a company, the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo, in 1886. Construction started in 1888 from Matadi, the port at the mouth of the Congo River, heading inland toward Kinshasa — then called Léopoldville. The distance is only about 400 kilometers, but the terrain is brutal: steep gorges, thick jungle, and the Crystal Mountains rising up to 800 meters. Luna: And they used forced labor, I assume. Lucas: Absolutely. The workforce was mostly recruited — I should say coerced — from the local Kongo and other communities. But also from farther afield: we have records of workers brought from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and even Barbados. At its peak, the railway employed about 20,000 men. The death toll is staggering: conservative estimates say at least 1,800 workers died, but some historians put it closer to 7,000. The main killers were smallpox, dysentery, and exhaustion. Luna: Seven thousand? That's almost one in three. Lucas: And that's just the recorded deaths. The company didn't keep careful records of the local workers who were essentially conscripted. The railway was called 'the iron lung' of the colony because it breathed life into Leopold's extraction machine. Once it opened in 1898 — it took about a decade — the cost of shipping goods dropped by 90%. Rubber exports exploded. Lucas: But here's a detail that's often overlooked: the railway also faced competition from the Portuguese. They had a rival line planned from the port of Luanda into the interior. Leopold actually used diplomatic pressure and bribes to keep the Portuguese from building a connecting line that would have drawn traffic away from his railway. Luna: So it wasn't just engineering — it was geopolitics too. Lucas: Right. And the railway itself became a symbol of colonial power. The Bula Matari — the 'breaker of rocks' — was the nickname for the state's brutal labor enforcement. But it was also literally what the railway did: blasted through the Crystal Mountains with dynamite and hand tools. There's a famous photo of a locomotive perched on a narrow ledge, with workers hanging off the sides. It's iconic, but it hides the cost. Lucas: The railway also changed the demographics. Matadi grew from a tiny fishing village into a bustling port. Kinshasa became the administrative capital. And the line allowed the Force Publique to move troops quickly to put down rebellions — like the 1895 Tetela uprising we covered earlier. So it's both a lifeline and a chain. Luna: What happened to Albert Thys after the railway was finished? Lucas: He became a major figure in Belgian colonialism — he was a senator, and he founded the Banque de Bruxelles. But his legacy is complicated. He was also involved in the rubber atrocities, though he never faced prosecution. He died in 1915, a wealthy and respected man in Belgium. Meanwhile, the railway continued to operate until independence in 1960, and then it became part of the Congolese national railway. Luna: So it outlived the colony itself. Lucas: It did. And today, parts of it are still in use, though in disrepair. There's a kind of irony: the railway that was built to extract wealth now struggles to carry basic goods. But it's a reminder that these colonial infrastructures don't just vanish — they shape the landscape for generations.