In a recent post, No subject, I reflected upon our inability to empathise fully with the greater suffering of, to take but one example, the people of central Africa, because we do not know them, because they are not ours. We assume, I suggested, that they have somehow brought their sufferings upon themselves.
We assume that, I think, partly because the horrific brutality they sometimes inflict upon each other seems so alien and incomprehensible: people do not, with just a few isolated exceptions, do that sort of thing with machetes in West Kensington or North Virginia.
I should have reflected that it was, quite likely, western practice that established such horrors in the minds and experience of the people of central Africa. In the Congo Free State the Force Publique made the practice of cutting off the limbs of the natives as a means of enforcing rubber quotas a matter of policy; the practice was widespread. In this country we tend to regard such things as an aberration attributable to the infamous King Leopold II of Belgium, who made the Congo his personal possession and who was thought to have reduced the native population by half in his process of expropriating its wealth. It was indeed international pressure lead by the British, and Mark Twain, that forced the Belgium government to take over responsibility for the territory and turn the Free State into a government administered colony, although it was not, by all accounts, exactly well endowed with infrastructure and social stability when it was granted independence in 1960.
British responsibility for the establishment of the free state is, however, not negligible, in that is was the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Welsh born but British be-knighted, who was instrumental in establishing Leopold's domain.
That, however, is history, but the present apparently finds western societies still bringing an overwhelming and malign influence onto the lives of the peoples of the Congo. A recent talk by the journalist Johann Hari at the Royal Society of Arts in London (how different a caché 'royal' bestows in this context from that of King Leopold II) shows us how intimately our personal lives connect with the sufferings of the people of central Africa.
In whose hearts is the darkness now?
