Blood on his hands

Image: Stanley Memorial, Kinshasa, 1972

Translation of a post by Vaughan Roderick:

Denbighshire Council has launched an appeal to restore a statue of HM Stanley in Kinshasa in the Congo. They also hope to erect a copy of the sculpture in Denbigh. The council has earmarked £5,000 to pay for a campaign to raise money.

Forgive me if I don't contribute.

Have Denbighshire's councillors taken a moment to consider why the inhabitants of the Congo have left the sculpture to rot? I wonder if it has to do with Stanley being responsible for discovering a route past the Congo river's waterfalls on behalf of King Leopold of Belgium? Is it possible that the inhabitants of the Congo are not grateful to Stanley for enabling the establishment of the bloodiest colony of all the sanguinary European colonies in Africa? Do they perhaps remember that it was Stanley who drew up the agreements that allowed Leopold to enslave an entire nation? Do they feel that it isn't appropriate to honour a man who said this as he justified his bloody raids: "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision"?

Let's be completely clear here. The population of the Congo was halved in the fourty years following the day Stanley convinced the country's chieftains to reach an agreement with the Belgians. It is estimated that ten million people were killed or starved to death. Villages were burned. Hundreds of thousands of women and children were held captive in order to force their men to collect rubber to enrich the greedy Belgian king and his employed servant, Henry Morton Stanley. There's a term for what Leopold and Stanley did - genocide.

We know all this because of the amazing efforts of a philanthropist of the name Edmond Morrel - a ship clerk from a poor background who spent his life and sacrificed his health campaigning to undo the horrors for which Stanley was partly responsible.

By a strange coincidence Edmond Morrel's home isn't far from Denbigh. He lived in Hawarden. If Flintshire Council want to erect a memorial to him I'll send a cheque straight away.