Latest / The History of Belgium: A Small Country with a Giant Colonial Legacy — Fexingo History / The 1900 Force Publique March on the Aruwimi: Belgium's Ivory War
Transcript
- Lucas: Welcome back to The History of Belgium. I'm Lucas, and as always I'm here with Luna. Today we're going back to the year 1900, right in the heart of the Congo Free State era, and we're looking at something we haven't touched on directly before—the ivory wars. Luna: Ivory wars—that sounds like a sequel to the rubber terror we covered last season. Lucas: Exactly. And in many ways it was. You'll remember from earlier episodes that Leopold II's Congo Free State was built on forced extraction—first ivory, then rubber, then minerals. By 1900, the rubber boom was in full swing, but ivory hadn't gone away. In fact, it was still the main source of revenue for the king's personal projects back in Belgium. The problem was that the most accessible elephant herds had been hunted out near the major trading posts, so the colony had to push deeper into the interior. Luna: So they launched military expeditions to get the ivory? Lucas: Exactly. And one of the most infamous was the Force Publique campaign into the Aruwimi River basin—a tributary of the Congo River, about a thousand kilometres upstream from the coast. The Aruwimi region was home to the Mangbetu people, among others, and it was known for its large elephant populations. The local chiefs controlled the ivory trade, and they weren't eager to hand it over to the Belgians at gunpoint. Lucas: So in early 1900, the Governor General, Théophile Wahis—we've mentioned him in the rubber episodes—ordered a 'pacification' of the Aruwimi. The official goal was to stop inter-tribal warfare and open up the region to commerce. But the real aim, as internal Belgian documents later showed, was to secure a steady flow of ivory for the king. Luna: And who led this expedition? Lucas: The Force Publique column was commanded by a Belgian officer named Commandant Charles Lemaire—though he's not the main figure in our story today. The key characters are actually two others: an Anglo-Belgian trader named John Henry Harris, and a Mangbetu chief named Okondo. Harris was working for the Compagnie du Congo pour le Commerce et l'Industrie, a big concession company, and he was tasked with sourcing ivory for export. But he also kept a detailed diary—one that later became crucial evidence for the Congo Reform Association. Luna: So he was both a trader and a whistleblower? Lucas: In a way, yes—though he didn't start out that way. Harris was complicit in the system for years. But in 1900, as he accompanied the Force Publique column, he began to document what he saw: villages burned, hostages taken, and men forced to porter ivory loads that could weigh up to fifty kilograms over hundreds of kilometres of jungle trail. These porters were often shackled at night to prevent escape. And if a tusk was lost or damaged, the porter could be beaten or shot. Luna: That's horrifying. And chief Okondo—what was his response? Lucas: Okondo was a Mangbetu chief who controlled a network of villages along the Aruwimi. He initially tried to negotiate, offering a tribute of ivory in exchange for leaving his people alone. But the Belgian demand was too high—they wanted a regular quota, not a one-off payment. So Okondo turned to guerrilla warfare. He used the dense forest to ambush supply columns, and he organised a network of spies to track Force Publique movements. For a few months, he was remarkably effective. Lucas: The Force Publique responded with a scorched-earth campaign. They burned Okondo's main village, destroyed food stores, and took women and children as hostages to pressure the men into surrender. In June 1900, after a series of skirmishes, Okondo was captured. He was tried by a military tribunal in Stanleyville and executed by firing squad. His head was reportedly sent to the Tervuren museum as a 'scientific specimen'—though I should say that's contested by some historians. Luna: That's very similar to what happened with other resistance leaders we've covered. Lucas: Absolutely. It's a pattern across the Congo Free State: resistance, brutal repression, and then the display of body parts as trophies. But what's specific to the Aruwimi campaign is the scale of forced porterage. Historians estimate that between 1899 and 1901, the Force Publique conscripted at least 15,000 men as porters in the Aruwimi basin alone. Thousands died from exhaustion, disease, or execution. Luna: And all for ivory that ended up in Brussels? Lucas: Much of it did. A lot of the ivory from the Aruwimi was shipped to Antwerp, processed, and sold to piano key makers, billiard ball manufacturers, and luxury goods companies. Some of it was carved into decorative objects and displayed at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris—right alongside exhibitions celebrating Belgium's 'civilising mission.' But a significant portion also ended up in Leopold II's personal collection, which he later donated to the Royal Museum for Art and History in Brussels. Lucas: I want to pause here for a moment, because this connects to something I find really striking. If today's conversation has given you a new angle on this history—maybe you didn't know about the Aruwimi ivory campaign, or about Okondo's resistance—then that's exactly the kind of thing we try to do here. These episodes take a lot of digging, and they stay ad-free because of listener support. If you find value in that, you can help keep it going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, I think that's a good point. It's easy to overlook these smaller campaigns, but they really show how the system worked on the ground. Lucas: Exactly. And the Aruwimi campaign also reveals another layer: the role of Zanzibari slave traders. By 1900, the Belgians had officially outlawed slavery—that was their stated mission, after all—but they routinely allied with Arab-Swahili traders from Zanzibar who had been operating in the region for decades. These traders had their own networks of enslaved porters, and they supplied the Force Publique with both ivory and manpower. The Belgians turned a blind eye as long as the ivory kept flowing. Luna: So the 'anti-slavery' colonial project was using slave traders? Lucas: Precisely. It's one of the great hypocrisies of the Congo Free State. After the 1890s, when the Arab War had supposedly crushed the Zanzibari slave trade, the Belgians still needed their commercial connections. So they contracted with traders like Tippu Tip's former lieutenant, Sefu bin Hamid, to supply ivory and porters. This was all documented in the 1905 commission of inquiry, but it was buried for decades. Lucas: I want to come back to Harris, the trader-whistleblower. After the Aruwimi campaign, he left the Congo and joined the Congo Reform Association in Britain. He gave testimony to the British parliament and published a pamphlet called 'The Congo: A New Civilisation?' that included his diary excerpts. But he also had a complicated legacy—he later became a missionary in West Africa and defended other colonial practices. Still, his 1900 diary is one of the few first-hand accounts of the ivory extraction system. Luna: Does his diary describe specific incidents? Lucas: Yes, and they're brutal. He writes about a village called Bumba where the chief refused to provide porters. The Force Publique surrounded the village at dawn, shot six men, and took the chief's wife as a hostage. The ivory was then confiscated. Another entry describes a porter who collapsed under a tusk weighing over sixty kilograms. The Belgian sergeant shot him on the spot and left the body on the trail. Harris notes that the sergeant later joked about it over dinner. Luna: And this is someone who was part of the system, not an outsider. Lucas: Right. That's what makes his account so powerful. He wasn't a missionary or a journalist; he was a company man. And even he was horrified. His diary was used by E.D. Morel—who we've talked about in the rubber episodes—to build the case for reform. Lucas: By 1908, when the Congo Free State was annexed by Belgium, the ivory trade had already peaked. Elephant populations were decimated, and the focus shifted to rubber and then minerals. But the Aruwimi campaign left deep scars. The Mangbetu people were dispersed, their political structures destroyed. And the ivory that was taken now sits in Brussels museums—often without any acknowledgment of how it was obtained. Luna: Is there any effort to repatriate it? Lucas: There have been discussions, particularly around the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. In recent years, they've started to research the provenance of their collections. But it's a slow process. Many of the pieces were donated by Leopold II himself, and there's a lot of political sensitivity. Still, I think it's a conversation that's finally beginning—partly because of episodes like this one, I hope. Luna: It's a lot to sit with. But I'm glad we're talking about it. Lucas: Yeah. And that's where we'll leave it for today. Thanks for joining us.