Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1886 Katanga Expedition: Belgium's Bloody Land Grab
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know that Belgium's presence in the Congo didn't just happen with a stroke of a pen at Berlin. The Leopoldian project was built on expeditions — and few were as brutal, or as consequential, as the one that carved out Katanga. Luna: Katanga — that's the copper-rich region in the southeast, right? We've mentioned it in passing before. Lucas: Exactly. And it was huge — about the size of France. In the 1880s, it was ruled by a single man: Msiri, the king of the Yeke people. He'd built his kingdom through a mix of slave trading, gun-running, and shrewd alliances with both Arab traders from the east and Portuguese from the west. Lucas: Msiri was no naive local chief. He was a savvy political operator who played European powers against each other. When Leopold II's agents first showed up in the late 1880s, Msiri greeted them politely but refused to sign over his sovereignty. He knew what the Congo Free State meant — he'd heard stories from the Manyema. Luna: So Leopold couldn't just claim Katanga by treaty. He needed a military expedition. Lucas: Right. But there was a complication: Cecil Rhodes. The British mining magnate had his eyes on Katanga's copper belt too, through his British South Africa Company. He dispatched his own expedition, led by a man named Alfred Sharpe, to get Msiri's signature first. Sharpe failed — Msiri basically laughed him off. Lucas: Leopold saw his opening. He quickly funded a rival expedition under a Canadian-born British officer — William Stairs. Stairs was a veteran of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, famous, tough, and willing to use force. With him came a Belgian officer named Jules Lefèvre and a force of about 400 men, mostly Zanzibari porters and askaris. Luna: Four hundred men to conquer a kingdom? That seems incredibly risky. Lucas: It was. Stairs's plan wasn't to fight a war — it was to intimidate Msiri into submission, or if that failed, to assassinate him. The expedition arrived at Msiri's capital, Bunkeya, in December 1891. Msiri again refused to sign. Negotiations dragged on for days. Then, on December 20, Stairs lost patience. Lucas: He sent a small party to Msiri's compound — ostensibly to deliver an ultimatum, but really to capture or kill him. What happened next is still debated. According to the official Belgian account, Msiri attacked a Belgian officer named Captain Bodson, who shot him dead. But Yeke oral tradition says Msiri was unarmed, that he was simply executed. Luna: Either way, Bodson was killed in the chaos by Msiri's bodyguard. Lucas: That's right. And then Stairs's men did something appalling: they beheaded Msiri's body, stuck his head on a pole as a warning, and paraded it through Bunkeya. Then they decapitated his son too. The heads were later sent to Belgium for phrenological study — a pseudo-scientific attempt to measure African skulls to 'prove' racial inferiority. Luna: That is grotesque. And those skulls — I think some of them were only returned to Congo recently, weren't they? Lucas: Yes, in 2021, Belgium repatriated a number of skulls taken during the colonial period, including several from Katanga. They were held in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren — the same museum we talked about in episode 94. But there's still a long way to go for full accountability. Lucas: After Msiri's death, Stairs declared Katanga part of the Congo Free State. But the Yeke didn't just bow down. Resistance continued for years, and the region was brutally pacified. The Force Publique — which we've covered many times — was deployed to crush any rebellion. Villages were burned, people starved, entire clans displaced. Luna: And all of that for copper. Because that's what it was really about, wasn't it? Lucas: Absolutely. Katanga's mineral wealth — copper, but later uranium and cobalt — became the economic engine of the Belgian Congo. Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the company we discussed in episode 101, was built on the land Stairs seized. Without the 1891 expedition, the entire history of the Congo — and Belgium — would be different. Luna: You know, one thing that strikes me is how this story keeps repeating — a small group of Europeans, with local allies, topple a powerful African kingdom through a combination of diplomacy and violence. It's the same pattern as the Congo-Arab War, as the conquest of the Luba and Lunda. Lucas: That's a really sharp observation. And it's because Leopold's system was built on speed and terror. He didn't have the manpower for a slow, methodical conquest. So he relied on shock tactics — decapitation of leaders, mass executions, and a propaganda machine that painted African rulers as brutal slavers who needed to be 'liberated'. Lucas: But the irony, of course, is that Msiri was a slave trader himself. He'd built his power by capturing people and selling them to Zanzibari merchants. So the ethical lines are messy — but that doesn't excuse what Stairs did. It was a land grab, pure and simple, dressed up as anti-slavery. Luna: I want to ask about the Scottish connection — Stairs was Canadian-born but of Scottish descent. And Cecil Rhodes was of course British. How did the British feel about Belgium taking Katanga? Lucas: There was tension. Rhodes was furious. The British government initially protested, but Leopold had diplomatic skill. He'd already secured recognition of his claims from the major powers at Berlin. And the British didn't want a full-blown crisis over a region they hadn't formally claimed. So they backed down, and the borders were finalized in 1894. Luna: And meanwhile, the Yeke people were left with nothing. Lucas: Exactly. The Yeke kingdom was dismantled. Many Yeke were forced into labor on the very mines that had attracted the Europeans. Their language, their political structures — all suppressed. Today, the Yeke are a minority in their own ancestral land, and the memory of Msiri is complicated. Some see him as a hero, others as a tyrant. Luna: It's a reminder that these histories don't have simple heroes and villains. Lucas: That's something we try to keep in view on this show. And it's also why we keep making these episodes — because understanding the complexity matters. And we're able to do that because we don't run ads. No sponsors, no commercial breaks. If you value that independence and want to support it, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small gesture that helps us keep digging into stories like this one. Luna: Yeah, it's one of the things I love about this show — we can go anywhere the research takes us without worrying about advertisers. Lucas: Exactly. So back to Katanga — one last piece I want to share. The expedition's official reports were written by Stairs, but there's a lesser-known account by a young Belgian officer named Jules Lefèvre. He wrote candidly about the brutality, about the starvation of porters, about the moral compromises they made. His diary was suppressed for decades. Luna: Suppressed by whom? The colonial administration? Lucas: Yes, by the Ministry of Colonies. It didn't fit the narrative of a peaceful, civilizing mission. Lefèvre's account only came to light in the 1990s, and it's still not widely known. It's a rare window into the conscience of a colonizer — someone who knew what he was doing was wrong but did it anyway. Lucas: That tension — between duty and morality, between ambition and humanity — runs through the entire Belgian colonial project. And the Katanga expedition is one of its darkest, most revealing chapters. Luna: It makes you wonder what other stories are still buried in archives, waiting to be told. Lucas: Plenty, I'm sure. And we'll keep looking. Thanks for listening.