Congo King

LEOPOLD THE UNLOVED--Ludwig Bauer --Little, Brown ($3.50).

To readers now over 50, the name of Leopold II of Belgium on the cover of a book will connote one thing--the Congo atrocities. They will remember appalling stories of hacked-off hands, of burned women, of forced labor. They will recall, perhaps dimly across the abyss of the World War, that the Belgian king who preceded Albert made millions out of "red rubber" and they may recollect that of a population of some 20,000,000 blacks living along the Congo when Henry M. Stanley first traced the river from source to sea only 10,000,000 were left alive when Leopold died in 1909.

Ludwig Bauer, in reanimating these old horrors, darts back & forth continually between two points of view: the things which Leopold II tacitly approved in the Belgian Congo were unspeakable; Leopold was admirable as a great organizer, a promoter in the grand manner, a veritable tycoon among kings, a political genius of the "rarest and most dangerous kind--the genius which does not wish to reveal itself as such." When Herr Bauer is taking morality as his touchstone, Leopold shrivels before one's eyes; when he is taking energy as his talisman, his subject swells to the proportions of a Cecil Rhodes. It is a tribute to Herr Bauer's book that the reader discovers himself possessed of the same ambivalent attitude toward the Congo King when he finishes Leopold the Unloved.

Leopold was a Coburg, son of Belgium's Leopold I, who was the uncle of Britain's Victoria. Starting with practically nothing, the Coburgs prospered mightily during the 19th Century. A go-getting son of a go-getting father, Leopold II regarded his little kingdom as a cage, and he looked to business as a field for the absorption of his surplus energies. The proper business for a king was, of course, the development of an overseas empire. It mattered little to Leopold that the world had been pretty well partitioned by 1850; it mattered little that Belgium, a buffer state, was in no position to carve out a dominion in Africa. Leopold worked well in twilight zones; he knew how to make weakness into strength when he had strong neighbors who were jealous of each other. In the end he possessed himself of the Congo because Bismarck did not want France to get it and because Britain thought Belgium would be a lesser evil in the middle of Africa. The people of Belgium, a thrifty, home-loving lot, did not want the Congo, but Leopold was working on his own. He formed a vague sort of company, the Association Internationale Africaine, and employed Explorer Stanley to work for it. He tricked France into recognizing the rights of this company in the Congo and he persuaded the U. S. that a private company had a perfect right to buy territory from the natives. The early work was done behind a screen of humanitarian phrases about suppressing the slave trade and taking the Bible to the Congo, but Leopold, the exploiter, eventually merged. Leopold guarded his health, ate well, drank large quantities of hot water, hated his wife for bearing him daughters, took many mistresses, raised fruit, read the London Times, vied with Bismarck in his talent for official propaganda, worked from dawn to dusk. To support the ego of this promoter-king, black men were mauled by leopards, ripped by thorns, drenched by tropical storms, lashed by callous or vicious agents, cheated at the scales when they brought in their rubber, and kept in perpetual slavery by a "rubber tax" which had to be worked out in default of the money that no Congo Negro possessed. In his fascinating yarn Herr Bauer has made the most of the contrast between black man and white king. When he is writing of Stanley's trip down the virgin Congo, the prose picks up speed, attains poetic concentration. The translation, by Eden and Cedar Paul, is unobtrusively good.

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