Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The Iron Road of Blood: Building the Congo Railway
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, when we walk through the Grand Place in Brussels, it's easy to get lost in the guildhalls and gilded facades. But if you look at the city's street names, there's one dedicated to the Chemin de Fer du Congo, a railway company that built one of the most brutal infrastructure projects in African history. Luna: The railway? I thought the rubber trade was the big story. Lucas: It's all connected. The Congo Free State needed a way to get rubber and ivory from the interior to the coast. The Congo River is navigable from Léopoldville to Stanleyville, but between Matadi and Léopoldville there's a series of rapids and waterfalls — the Livingstone Falls — that make the river impassable. So they had to build a railway around them. Luna: That sounds like an incredible engineering challenge. Lucas: It was. But the way they solved it was by forcing tens of thousands of African laborers to build it by hand, often without proper food or medical care. The railway was 400 kilometers long, built through mountainous terrain and tropical jungle. The death toll is estimated at over 1,800 African workers, but some say it was much higher. Lucas: The company hired local chiefs to supply workers, and if they didn't meet quotas, they were punished. The whole thing was overseen by a Belgian engineer named Albert Thys, who later became a colonial hero back home. Lucas: You know, it's because of listeners like you that we can keep exploring these stories without any ads. A few people chip in through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that funds the entire show. Luna: It really does make a difference, doesn't it? Lucas: Absolutely. So, back to the railway — its impact was immediate. Once completed in 1898, the travel time from the coast to the interior dropped from months to days. But the human cost was staggering. Luna: Were there any voices from the workers themselves that survived? Lucas: Not many in writing, but oral traditions among the Kongo people remember the railway as a 'road of blood.' There's a famous account by a missionary who described seeing workers chained together, carrying rails through the jungle. The company even used a system of fines and beatings to enforce productivity. Lucas: The railway also enabled the full-scale rubber terror. Before the railway, the cost of transporting rubber by porter was so high that it limited how much could be shipped. After the railway, the price dropped, and the demand skyrocketed. Luna: So the railway essentially facilitated the atrocities we talked about in earlier episodes. Lucas: Exactly. It's been called the 'stainless steel leash' that bound the Congo to Belgium. The railway allowed the Force Publique to move quickly to suppress rebellions and to export raw materials more efficiently. Lucas: There's also a lesser-known story about the Chinese laborers brought in to work on the railway. After the initial African labor force was decimated by disease, the company experimented with Chinese indentured workers. That didn't end well either — many died or deserted. Luna: Chinese laborers in the Congo? I had no idea. Lucas: Yeah, it's a forgotten chapter. They were brought in from Macau and Hong Kong, but the conditions were just as brutal. By 1894, the company abandoned the experiment and went back to forced African labor. Lucas: Let me give you a concrete example of the conditions. Along the railway, there were these staging camps called 'relais.' Workers were expected to carry heavy sleepers or steel rails for kilometers. If they collapsed, they were often left to die. Dysentery and smallpox were rampant. Luna: Were there any protests or rebellions? Lucas: Yes, there were. In 1893, a group of workers from the Kongo region refused to work in a particularly dangerous section near the M'pozo river. The company called in the Force Publique, who killed several workers and forced the rest back to work. It was a preview of the kind of violent suppression that would become routine. Lucas: Albert Thys, the chief engineer, wrote a memoir after the railway was done. He barely mentions the death toll. Instead, he boasts about overcoming the 'obstacles of nature and the indolence of the native.' That kind of attitude was typical of colonial engineering projects. Luna: And what about the economic impact? Did the railway pay off for Belgium? Lucas: Oh, enormously. The railway carried over 2,000 tons of rubber in its first year alone. By 1905, it was transporting 6,000 tons annually. The profits flowed back to Brussels, funding the lavish building projects we see today. The Palais de la Bourse, the Royal Palace — some of that wealth came from the forced labor on that railway. Lucas: But there's a deeper cultural legacy. The railway also enabled the spread of Christianity and Western education into the interior. Missionaries could now travel easily, and they set up schools along the line. That sowed the seeds for the évolués class we've talked about before. Luna: So it's both a tool of exploitation and, inadvertently, of change. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the tension we keep coming back to in Congolese history. The railway was both a lifeline and a noose. Today, it's still in use, though it's fallen into disrepair. There are plans to modernize it, but the memory of how it was built lingers. Lucas: I think what's important is to remember that behind every piece of infrastructure in the colonial system, there were human lives. The Matadi-Kinshasa railway is a perfect example — a symbol of progress that was built on suffering. Luna: And it's a story that deserves to be told, because it's not just about rails and ties. It's about people. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's where we'll leave it for today. Next time, we might look at how the railway shaped the labor movements that emerged in the 1920s. Luna: Looking forward to it. Thanks for this, Lucas.