MISTAH KURTZ — HE DEAD. That, at least, is what most of us prefer to believe. But deep in the Congo, the heart of darkness described by Joseph Conrad in 1899 beats blackly on. Last week brought reports of slavery, rape and mutilation in eastern Congo that might have come straight from the pages of Conrad. Thousands of Hema tribespeople have been brutally rounded up by armed militiamen of the rival Lendu ethnic group, driven into slave camps, and forced to work in illegal gold and mineral mines. UN peacekeepers managed to free some 3,000 slaves this year, but no one knows how many more have been forced into slavery. And few, it seems, really care.

Some four million people have died in Congo’s messy civil war over the last decade, making this the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Yet the carnage, and past week’s fresh evidence of slavery, has prompted little reaction or protest from the rest of the world: that is a testament to how far humanitarian conscience has shifted from Africa in one short century.

One hundred years ago, enlightened Britons erupted in moral outrage over atrocities in the Congo. The private regime of King Leopold II of Belgium was then at its sadistic height, and the Congo was ruled, not as a colony, but as a personal fiefdom or corporation to line the royal coffers. Leopold wanted ivory, and above all rubber to feed the huge new market created by John Dunlop’s invention of the rubber tyre. His mercenaries systematically raped the Congo: villages were each set enormous quotas of wild rubber, and the slaves kept in line with the dreaded chicotte, the lethal hippo-hide whip. Anyone attempting to escape was shot. Leopold’s officials suspected that the guards might be using ammunition to hunt forest game for themselves, so to ensure that the bullets were being used on humans, they were required to sever the hands of anyone they killed and bring them back as evidence. Often, the guards simply cut off the hands of live workers or children, and saved the bullets for themselves. Because flesh decays fast in the climate of the Congo, the severed hands would be smoked over bush fires to preserve them before being taken back to head office in a seamless Belgian blend of bureaucracy and brutality.

By the lowest estimate, the years of Leopold’s reign (1885-1908) reduced the population of the Congo by at least five million. The death toll was probably far higher. Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, condemned “the blackest pages in the history of Africa”, and reckoned that 12 million people perished directly or through the famine and disease that resulted when families were made to gather rubber instead of tending their crops.

Eventually, but then dramatically, the holocaust was noticed by the West. Edmund Morel, a young British shipping clerk, spotted that the ships coming from the Congo arrived packed with ivory and rubber, while those going the other way contained only soldiers, guns and ammunition.

There was no trade going on, merely extortion through slave labour on an imperial scale. Campaigners such as Morel, photographers such as Alice Seeley Harris, and diplomats such as Roger Casement exposed the sepia-tinted atrocities of the Congo to an astonished world. The writers and journalists followed: Mark Twain published his biting King Leopold’s Soliloquy exactly one hundred years ago; Conrad journeyed upriver and found “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the human conscience”; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet denouncing Leopold’s regime, and sold 25,000 copies in the first week of publication. An open letter of condemnation thundered in the pages of this newspaper, signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops, 13 newspaper editors and 76 MPs.

This was not merely fashionable outrage from the great and good. Thousands of ordinary people attended rallies organised by the Congo Reform Association across the country, questioning the central tenets of imperial policy. Viscount Grey, the Foreign Secretary, declared that the Congo scandal had stirred the passions of the British public more radically than any foreign issue for 30 years.

The pressure worked. In 1908, Leopold reluctantly transferred the Congo from his personal ownership to the Belgian Government. It was a sign of how far the moral climate had shifted that the King took the precaution of burning his entire Congo archive: “I will give them my Congo but they have no right to know what I have done there,” he declared. Not until the 1980s did the Belgian state archives open to reveal the minutiae of the horror, and much documentary evidence remains sealed. No colonial power has proved more reluctant to acknowledge its historical guilt.

Today armed slavers are once more terrorising the people of the Congo, stealing lives and enforcing their control with whips, rape and amputation. True, these are rival ethnic militiamen, not white oppressors. Yet that alone cannot explain the passivity with which this, and other modern atrocities in Congo, have been received. In 2005, few foreign issues have stirred the British public less.

The tangled civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which officially ended in 2003, but still rages on in the east) has killed ten times as many people as last December’s tsunami. Relief agencies describe this as the worst humanitarian tragedy since the Holocaust itself. Ten million people have been displaced from their homes, and more than three million are beyond the reach of aid groups. Yet there are few letters of outrage in the papers; the novelists and pamphleteers have barely lifted a pen; you could count the number of angry bishops on the fingers of one, mutilated hand.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is too often deployed as a cliché for black savagery on the dark continent, when it is truly an indictment of the black hearts of the white men who came to enslave and steal, and were utterly corrupted by their own greed. The heart of darkness belongs to Mr Kurtz, dying surrounded by the severed heads of Africans.

It took a concerted campaign of moral indignation to shine a light into that darkness, and Leopold’s legacy continues to ensure misery in the most dramatically failed state in Africa. The tragedy of the Congo lies not just in the terrible events taking place there, but also in our own acceptance of the horror, the horror with a shudder, and a shrug.

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