French anti-colonial activist Félicien Challaye, who had spent decades exposing the bottomless barbarism of French imperialism in Africa, with an essay on that history in light of Andre Gide’s 1927 diary ‘Travels in the Congo.’ In 1928, Challaye was a leading French activist in the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression.

‘French ‘Honor’ in the Congo’ by Félicien Challaye from New Masses. Vol. 3 No. 9. January, 1928.

Translated by Fanny Craig Ventadour.

“THE honor of French colonization is to have totally transfigured the spirit of colonial enterprise by going into it from a profound sense of human right. Colonization is no longer for France an operation of a mercantile character: it is essentially a creation of humanity.”

Thus did the Minister of the Interior, Mr. Albert Sarraut, former governor of Indo China, express himself in his discourses of last April in Constantine.

The minister becomes indignant at the thought of a revolt of “the French subjects and proteges upon whom tutelary France has never ceased to spread benefactions.”

The same theme is developed by Raymond Poincare in the discourse delivered at the General Council of the Meuse on the 2nd of May, 1927:

“Our country has always brought honor upon itself by its constant effort at the amelioration of the living conditions of its colonials.”

***

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the negroes in French Equatorial Africa have been under the yoke of a regime of forced labor, worse than slavery in certain respects.

About 1890 certain capitalists and politicians began to demand the formation of privileged companies for the purpose of exploiting the natural resources of the colonies in general and the French Congo in particular. The principal defender of this scheme was Eugene Etienne, then secretary of state to the colonies.

Another secretary of state to the colonies, Delcasse, accorded discreetly, without official publication of contract, a concession of eleven million hectares (one-fifth of the area of France) situated in the Haut-Ogooue. Then from March to July, 1899, Minister of the Colonies Guillain accorded by decree, forty concessions in the French Congo. The concessionaries were to receive, for a period of thirty years, immense domains varying from 200,000 to 14 million hectares. During this time all the natural resources were to belong to the concessionaries. Ivory, rare wood and rubber. The company must pay to the colony a fixed ground-rent and fifteen per cent of its benefits.

The lands that the state, in conceding them, baptized “vacant lands” were in reality the collective property of native tribes. These tribes utilized to their profit those vast stretches of swamps and forests upon which they reserved the exclusive rights, rights recognized and respected by neighboring tribes.

As a result of the establishment of the concessionary regime, the blacks have become the victims of an immense expropriation. By a stroke of the pen, all their natural resources have been taken from them. And the companies, finding they could not count on the voluntary cooperation of the negroes because the work is so badly remunerated, have used threats and then violence.

The companies themselves fix as low as possible the price of the rubber they buy. Deciding that the latex belongs to them by virtue of the act of concession, they refuse to pay except for the actual work of gathering the crop; and they value this work at the lowest possible figure. They buy the rubber at five or ten times less than the price paid by the merchants in the regions of free commerce. Also the companies often pay for the products of the soil or rather the work necessary to gather the produce, not in money but in merchandise valued at the highest price, often at 300 per cent to 500 per cent more than its real value, and frequently compel the negroes to accept merchandise of which they can make no possible use.

Thus in exchange for their rubber, valued at a ridiculously low price, the natives receive merchandise valued at exorbitant prices.

The concessionary companies cannot count on the voluntary work of the negroes. From the beginning the companies have demanded the right to force the negroes to work for them. Having acquired by concession the products of the soil, they take for granted that the state has accorded them likewise the man power necessary to cultivate the lands; they regard the natives as their property, their tools. The state does not officially accord them the right to force the negroes to work but as often as possible they usurp it.

When threats do not suffice, violence is employed to force the negroes to gather the rubber. They are imprisoned, they are whipped with the chicotte (a huge whip of hippotamus hide which inflicts horrible suffering). The chief of the village is sometimes arrested, and the women and children taken away as hostages and only released after a certain amount of ivory or rubber has been gathered. The insubordinate ones are shot. When a village as a whole remains obstinate a “punitive expedition” is organized. The cabins are burned, plantations destroyed, and men, women and children massacred as an example to the others.

The state exacts from the blacks, to whom it renders no service, a tax per head payable in rubber. And then turns this rubber over to the concessionaries.

In April, 1904, an administrator sent a commissioner of colonial affairs from Bangui to collect taxes in the environs of Mongouba. The commissioner, accompanied by an agent of the concessionary company, ordered sixty-eight hostages (58 women and 10 children) to be taken from two villages which had not paid sufficient taxes. Sent to Bangui these hostages were herded into a narrow cellar without light, polluted by bad air and excrement. They were then forgotten and were scarcely fed. When a young doctor, a recent arrival, demanded the liberation of the survivors it was testified that there remained 21 hostages out of the 68 (13 women and 8 children). Forty-seven hostages were dead from hunger and lack of air. One woman, whose child had died, found and nourished the child of a dead woman.

In spite of the efforts which were made in France by the “League for the Defense of the Natives”, little by little silence settled upon the miseries of the blacks of the Congo.

The war put an end to the activity of the “League for the Defense of the Natives.” Little is now known of the true situation of the Congoleans: ministers and governors continue to repeat the habitual banalities upon the benefits which the natives enjoy under the protection of the French flag.

However, quite recently a tourist visited Africa on a pleasure trip — a well known writer, endowed with a keen spirit of observation, absolute independence and sincere audacity, Monsieur Andre Gide. His Journal de Route was published by the Nouvelle Review Francaise.

He showed up the misery of the natives in the regions still occupied by the concessionary companies, notably the Compagnie Forestiere Sangha Oubangui which succeeded in obtaining the prolongation for ten years of its monopoly on rubber.

Monsieur Andre Gide has seen whole villages abandoned: all the men sent far away into the forest throughout a period of weeks to gather the rubber exacted by the company.

One day, Andre Gide encountered a group of women occupied with mending the road which served only as a passage once a month for the automobile of the representative of the Forestiere accompanied by the administrator. “The poor beasts were toiling in a drenching rain. Numbers of them were nursing their babies (tied on to them) at the same time that they worked. About every twenty yards along the side of the road there was a huge hole often nine feet deep; it was here that these miserable workers without the proper tools had to extract the gravel for the road bed. It often happened that the sandy quarry would cave in, burying under the loose sand the women and children who were working at the bottom of the hole. Often working too far from their village to be able to return for the night, the women construct huts of reeds and branches in the forest. We afterwards learned that the guard who supervises them had forced them to work all night long in order to repair the damage of a recent storm and to permit our passage.”

One evening, M. Gide’s companion, M. Marc Allegret, explored the surroundings of the camp in order to see what cannot always be seen by daylight. He returned overcome by what he had discovered.

“Not far from our camping place, in sight of the guards’ hut, a large band of children of both sexes, from 9 to 13 years were gathered around a very insufficient fire. Wishing to interview the children, Marc called Adoum; but the latter did not understand Baya. A native offered to interpret and translated into Sango so that Adoum was able to translate into French. The children had been led from their village by ropes around their necks; for six days they had been made to work without pay, and without food. Their village was not far; they counted on parents, brothers and friends to bring them food. No one had come; too bad.”

As soon as M. Marc Allegret had gone the benevolent interpreter was apprehended by a guard and thrown into prison. The next day he was hurried away by two guards to work in a distant part of the concession.

One night a native slipped into the hut occupied by Andre Gide and his friend. It was a village chief who said he desired to speak to them immediately because a black guard sent by the white administrator Pacha, had intimated that he had better return at once to his village. The chief wished to complain about a black sergeant employed by Pacha; “On the 21st of October (it was then six days later) the sergeant Yemba was sent from Boda to Bodembere in order to discipline by punishment the inhabitants of the village. The latter had refused to obey the order to transport their residence to the Carnot road, not wishing to abandon their crops. They argued also that the people already established on the road were Bayas whereas they were Bolis. The sergeant Yemba then left Boda with three guards. This little detachment was accompanied by Baoue and three men commanded by the latter. While en route the sergeant Yemba requisitioned two or three men from each village through which they passed and took them along after having put them in chains. Arrived at Bodembere the punishment began: they took and bound twelve men to trees, during which time the chief of the village was able to take flight. The sergeant Yemba and the guard Bonjo then fired on the twelve men and killed them. There then followed a grand massacre of women, beaten down by Yemba armed with an ax. Finally having seized five children all of tender age, he imprisoned the five in a hut to which he set fire. There were in all thirty-two victims.”

M. Andre Gide interrogated another native chief:

“The accounts of the chief of Bambio confirm all that Samba N’oto had told me. He recounts in particular the “ball” on the last market day of Boda. I here transcribe the account exactly as I have copied it from a notebook belonging to G — .

“At Bambio, on the 8th of September, ten rubber gatherers from the Goundi gang working for the Compagnie Forestiere were condemned, for not having brought in rubber the preceding month (even though this month they brought a double harvest), to march around and around the factory under a leaden sun, carrying heavy wooden beams. If they fell the guards beat them with the “chicotte”.

“The “ball” begun at eight o’clock, lasted throughout the long day under the supervision of Messrs. Pacha and Maudurier, the latter an agent of the Forestiere. About eleven o’clock, one Malongue of Bagouma fell, to rise no more. M. Pacha, notified, at once replied, “I don’t give a damn” — and continued the “ball”. All of this passed in the presence of the assembled inhabitants of Bambio, together with all the chiefs of the neighboring villages there for the market.”

In the diary of a white inhabitant of the region M. Gide read the following terrifying lines on the subject of the crimes of the administrator Pacha: “M. Pacha* announces that he has finished his repressions of the Bayas in the environs of Bodo. He estimates (his own avowal) the number of killed at one thousand of all ages and both sexes. In order to prove the results of the battle, the guards and partisans were commanded to bring to the commander the ears and genitals of the victims. The date of this affair was the month of July, 1924.

“The cause of all this is the C.F.S.O. (Gompagnie Forestiene Sangha Oubangui). With its monopoly on rubber and with the complicity of the local administration it reduces the natives to abject slavery.”

The courageous revelations of M. Andre Gide come at the opportune moment: for at present certain concessionaries, notably the Trechot brothers of the Gompagnie Francaise du Haut Congo are making overtures to the minister of the colonies and in parliamentary circles, even in those of the extreme left, in an effort to obtain a prolongation of their concession which is due to expire in 1929.

***

The blacks of the Congo, if they could read and understand the accounts of the ministerial discourses published by our bourgeois press, what would they think on learning from the lips of M. Raymond Poincare that “our country has always brought honor upon itself by its constant efforts at the amelioration of the living conditions of its colonials.”

And the poor negresses working to repair the road through the concession by scraping the ground with their nails, if they could hold in their poor grimy hands one of our big newspapers and translate it would they not laugh to read one of M. Albert Sarraut’s grand phrases about “the French subjects and proteges upon whom tutelary France has never ceased to spread benefactions.”

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1928/v03-09-jan-1928-New-Masses.pdf