Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1897 Congo Free State Railway: Leopold’s Iron Road to Ruin
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know we've covered a lot of Leopold II's Congo — the rubber terror, the Force Publique, the human zoos. But there's one piece of infrastructure that made it all possible, and it cost thousands of lives even before a single train ran. Luna: You're talking about the railway from Matadi to Kinshasa, aren't you? Lucas: Exactly. The Congo River is navigable from the Atlantic up to Matadi, about 150 kilometres inland. Then there's a series of rapids and cataracts — the Livingstone Falls — that make the river impassable for another 350 kilometres until you reach Stanley Pool, where Kinshasa sits today. So any goods coming from the interior had to be carried by porters around those cataracts. That was slow, expensive, and deadly for the porters. Lucas: Leopold needed a railway to bypass the cataracts and connect the upper Congo to the coast. Without it, his whole colonial project — the rubber extraction, the ivory trade — was economically unviable. So in 1887, he created a company called the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Congo, or CCFC, and put a Belgian engineer named Albert Thys in charge. Luna: Albert Thys — I've heard that name before. He was kind of Leopold's railway tsar, right? Lucas: That's right. Thys was a military engineer who'd worked on railways in Belgium and Argentina. He took on the Congo project with a mix of idealism and ruthless pragmatism. He knew the terrain was brutal — steep hills, dense jungle, torrential rain, and endemic diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness. But he also knew that the only way to build it fast was with forced African labour. Lucas: The railway was 390 kilometres long, and it was built almost entirely by hand. African workers — many of them conscripted from villages along the route or brought in from as far away as the Kasai region — dug cuttings, built embankments, laid sleepers and rails. They worked from dawn to dusk, fed meagre rations of rice and dried fish, and lived in squalid camps. Luna: What were the conditions like exactly? Lucas: Brutal. Mortality rates were staggering. Contemporary estimates suggest that between 1,800 and 2,000 African workers died during the construction, but some historians put the figure much higher, maybe 4,000 or more. They died of dysentery, smallpox, beriberi, exhaustion, and accidents — landslides, falling rocks, derailments during construction. The company didn't keep careful records, and workers who tried to escape were hunted down by the Force Publique. Lucas: European engineers and overseers also died — about 130 of them — but they had better food, medical care, and quarters. For the Africans, it was a death sentence. And yet, the railway was completed in 1898, just eight years after construction began — an astonishing feat of engineering under the circumstances. Luna: Was there any resistance from the workers themselves? Lucas: There was. In 1892, about two years into the project, African workers at the Matadi end went on strike. They demanded better food, shorter hours, and an end to the beatings. The strike spread to other camps, and for a few weeks, construction ground to a halt. Thys responded by bringing in armed Force Publique troops to crush it. The ringleaders were flogged — the chicotte — and some were executed. The strike collapsed, and work resumed. Lucas: But there's another layer to this story: the railway wasn't just about rubber. It was also about control. Leopold knew that if he could move troops and officials quickly from the coast to the interior, he could project power more effectively. The railway was a military asset as much as an economic one. Luna: And it also opened up the Kasai and Katanga regions, which were rich in minerals and rubber. Lucas: Exactly. Once the railway was operational, the cost of transporting goods from the interior dropped by about 90 percent. Rubber exports soared, and the profits poured into Leopold's personal coffers. But the human cost of that railway was enormous, and it's a part of the Congo story that often gets overshadowed by the more well-known atrocities. Lucas: I want to take a brief step back here, because honestly, if today was worth a coffee to you, that's the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. This show stays ad-free thanks to listeners who chip in that small amount. And it really does keep us going, so if you've been getting something out of these conversations, that's the easiest way to give back. Luna: Yeah, and every little bit helps. We don't run ads, so it's just listener support. Really makes a difference. Lucas: Anyway, back to the railway. One of the most remarkable — and darkest — aspects of the construction was the role of the so-called 'liberated' slaves. The Congo Free State had banned the Arab slave trade in the 1890s, and some of the slaves who were freed were then forced to work on the railway. So they went from one form of bondage to another. Luna: That's terrible. So it was essentially forced labour under a different name. Lucas: Exactly. The railway was also a source of tension with other colonial powers. The Portuguese, who held Angola to the south, had their own plans for a railway linking the interior to the Atlantic at Lobito Bay. And the British were pushing for a line north from South Africa. Leopold's railway gave him a strategic advantage, but it also deepened the scramble. Lucas: When the line finally opened on April 1, 1898, there was a big ceremony at Kinshasa. Leopold was celebrated as a visionary. But the railway's legacy is deeply ambiguous. It was a marvel of engineering, but it was built on a foundation of suffering. And it directly enabled the rubber terror that killed millions of Congolese in the years that followed. Luna: It's one of those things where you can't separate the achievement from the atrocity. Lucas: Right. And that's why it's so important to talk about it. The railway is still there today — it's still the main rail link between Kinshasa and the port of Matadi. But the names of the thousands of African workers who died building it are mostly forgotten. There's no monument to them. Luna: Is there any surviving record of their names or where they came from? Lucas: Very little. The company kept some payroll books, but they listed workers by number, not name. And many of the villages that supplied labourers didn't keep written records. So we have a sense of the scale of the death toll, but not the individual stories. That's part of the challenge of writing colonial history — the voices of the colonized are often silent in the archives. Lucas: There is one story, though, that survived. A man named Nsaku, a Kongo chief from the lower Congo region, was forced to supply workers for the railway. He protested to the local administrator, and when that failed, he led a small revolt. He was captured and executed. But his name appears in a few Belgian colonial reports. He's one of the few individuals we can identify. Luna: And that revolt — was it part of the 1892 strike, or separate? Lucas: Separate, I think. The 1892 strike was more organized, with workers from multiple camps coordinating. Nsaku's revolt was smaller, more localized. But both were crushed. And both show that Africans were not passive victims — they resisted, even when the odds were hopeless. Lucas: The railway also had a strange afterlife. During World War I, it was used to transport Belgian colonial troops to fight against German forces in East Africa. And during the Congo Crisis in the 1960s, it was a strategic asset for both the central government and Katangese secessionists. So it's been a thread running through Congo's modern history. Luna: It's almost like the railway is a character in its own right, with its own story. Lucas: It really is. And it's a story that connects directly to the broader narrative of Belgian colonialism. The railway wasn't an isolated project — it was part of Leopold's grand plan to extract wealth from the Congo at any human cost. And understanding that helps us see the whole system more clearly. Luna: I'm glad we covered this. It's one of those details that fills in the picture. Lucas: Absolutely. And I think it's a reminder that history isn't just about big events and famous names. Sometimes it's about the infrastructure — the roads, the railways, the ports — that made those events possible. And the people who built them, often with their lives. Luna: Well said. Thanks for walking through that. Lucas: Thanks for listening. Next time, we'll look at another piece of the puzzle — the role of the Catholic missions in the Congo, and how they collaborated with and resisted colonial rule.