Working on a cargo steamer as a wobbly seaman George Hardy comes face to face with the super-exploitation of the colonies as he sails up the Congo River to Bomo and Matadi, the main port of what was then Belgian Congo, where the imperialist process of creating and gathering the labor commodity was a brutally primitive one. Hardy was born in England, active in Australia, New Zealand, and a leading U.S. wobbly, sent to federal prison for I.W.W. anti-war activities. who served as the group’s General Secretary in 1920-1921, was sent to Moscow as a delegate to the Profintern, became a Communist, where he returned to England and worked as General Secretary of the National Minority Movement. He would be in China during the events of 1927, working underground with the Communist Party there, developing relations that would last the rest of his life. Hardy’s memoirs, Stormy Years: Memories of the Fight for Freedom on Five Continents, was written in his 70s. He died at 81 in 1966.

‘Blacks and Whites in the Congo’ by George Hardy from International Socialist Review. Vol. 17. No. 7. January, 1917.

WE STARTED on a trip to the Belgian Congo from the east coast of England, traveling south to the English channel, at the mouth of which we were held with a cordon of torpedo boats and destroyers encircling us because a hostile submarine had escaped through the friendly channel of the mine field.

Immediately our minds ran back to the scenes we had so recently left up coast—fields of waving grain, dotted with small wooded patches amidst which rise the castles of the late feudal barons, last remnant of the old days. These grounds are everywhere encircled by neat green hedges. And then our minds come back to the cordon of torpedo boats and we wonder whether we have actually escaped those dark days of piracy and plunder after all.

As soon as we escape through hostile waters, we begin to pass the nautical milestones, lighthouses, great rocks on the rolling coast of Spain, then we cross the mouth of the Mediterranean, gliding in the sunshine past the Canary Islands, where we are no longer able to see anything but the shark infested waters and an occasional school of fish leaping and jumping in the torrid sun.

And then some morning through the misty atmosphere of the tropics we find ourselves at the mouth of the Congo River. At the port of Banana we pick up the crew of natives who will work the cargo at the ports of Boma and Matadi on the Congo River.

But here any liberty-loving person finds that, after all, he has not left behind him the barbarities of capitalism. Four foot clubs are used to drive the natives, who are paid the enormous sum of one Belgian franc (twenty cents) a day, for working from 4 a.m. to 10 o’clock at night, with two or three short periods of rest, when they receive their allowance of rice and salt junk, which is so rotten that it would be scorned by a hungry dog.

These abuses are perpetrated under the charter of the Compagnie Beige Maritime Du Congo, in which King Albert of Belgium is said to be interested.

At Boma, the capital of Belgian Congo, about forty miles up the river, the work of unloading begins. Officers armed with clubs are stationed at each hatch on board ship and on shore, and they take an occasional whack at the bare backs of the natives to speed up work or punish the black with the smoldering or contemptuous eyes.

A walk through the small town shows how many other things are exported to the Congo besides general merchandise. Catholic statues dot the extensive and beautiful grounds which surround the house of the governor-general. This house and these grounds are protected by native sentries who carry rifles and bayonets. And everywhere is evidence of the importance of cheap whiskey. And so we have the old trio—the gun, the church and the whiskey.

Night arrives and no sleeping quarters are provided for the native workers, who sleep on hard, dirty decks of the ships which brings back longings for the cosy grass-woven huts to which they are accustomed, as the rotten fare recalls the fresh fruits and nuts that make up their native fare.

The dampness of the tropic nights makes it dangerous for any one to sleep in the open. The air is full of deadly fevers. The heat of the day causes a vapor to arise every night from the snake infested grasses.

After a couple of days of savage slavery, which is hidden behind the franc a day wage, the boats leave for Matadi. A few hours’ run against the rushing current of the river and we find slavery more glaring and more open, for Matadi is the center of trade, also a railway center, where ivory, palm oil, copra and copal, etc., are brought for shipment to Europe.

The white population sleeps from 11 to 3 o’clock, but there is no respite for the natives, who toil until their bodies look as though they had been dipped in oil, so covered are they with sweat.

The writer saw an officer go down into the hold of the ship and beat a native without mercy because he did not work, fast enough in this heat. Another officer stood on the toes of a native worker who had squatted to rest during the rest period, and beat the bare legs of the native to make him draw his foot from beneath the hob nailed boots of the noble (?) white man. Meanwhile the officer twisted the ear of the black man. It was easy for anybody to recognize the superiority of the Caucasian race over the ethiopian. The attitude of the natives is one of manufactured smiles and European salutations and barely concealed curses.

It is a pleasant little custom of the officers to throw the dregs of their glasses of lime juice into the faces of the Congo boys who serve them. I saw a native injured internally by a sling of sacks weighing nearly a ton. He was allowed to lie dying on the bare deck of a boat. The quartermaster declared he could not endure the groans of the unlucky man and he was removed the next day, a physician expressing surprise that he still lived.

Very naturally it occurs to the stranger to inquire why the natives, who possess land and plenty of fruit and nuts for food, submit to such treatment. You wonder why they labor. One of the answers is the system of taxation which the modern capitalist class has seen fit to lay upon them to force them to work. Without this tax of twelve francs a year the natives would be able to live in ease upon their own land, in their own fresh huts, and live upon the plenty provided by a generous Nature. This tax makes the capitalists independent of foreign workers.

And yet, strange as it may seem to you, my dear civilized reader, some of these natives hate work so much, or work for the Belgian capitalists so very much, in particular, that they refuse to earn and pay their 12 francs annually to the Belgian government.

Such natives are quickly taught the benevolence of that government. They are arrested and placed in gangs with chains around their necks and forced to work for three months for the state. They carry the mail on their heads to the boats; also bear the trunks and luggage of the white parasites to and from the boats and perform municipal labor. You can see them lugging vegetables home for the Europeans, the white person in front and the black offender twelve paces in the rear, and an armed guard trudging behind the loaded slave.

A trip to the Mission Station will convince any fair-minded investigator that they are centers for introducing trade for they carry articles of commerce inland where it is impossible to set up stores. For these commodities the natives exchange antelope horns, tusks of ivory, etc., etc. Needless to say the capitalist class does not permit even these Faithful Servants to grow rich. The slogan of the missionaries is “Teach the native God and Work.” The task is a difficult one. Natives are “often so ignorant that they are satisfied with the bounty provided by Mother Nature.” Strange, isn’t it?

Once, however, the majority of the natives are convinced by a desire for European trinkets and the words of the missionaries, customs and standards change, short work is then made of the defaulters who, as a missionary admitted to me, are placed in contract slavery under strict supervision on a plantation owned privately by absentee slave and land owners. And thus the good work of teaching the unregenerate black man to love to labor (for the profit of his superior white master) goes merrily on.

Missionaries have strange excuses to make for the brutalities of the ship officers. The “condition of the country makes men cranky,” etc., etc.

Here, too, we have prostitution in the name of 12 francs a year taxes. Natives, married on the European plan, forced by unnatural conditions to produce so much money annually, solicit white men to cohabit with their wives. And so, along with prostitution, and whiskey and religion, the great white man brings syphilis and other diseases into the Congo. “But then,” says the Belgian, “these natives are of a lower order, so it does not matter.”

But, brother workingman, it is not the natives nor even the Belgians who are to blame for such things. It is the capitalist system, the profit of wages system, that is to blame. Abolish this system and it will be unnecessary to make criminals out of aborigines in order to “show them the way to progress” in the world’s coming progress, where neither war nor slavery shall exist and where men shall work for the collective development of the people of all countries, when all shall enjoy the pleasures of life and all forms of slavery be abolished in the new Socialist Industrial Republic.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v17n07-jan-1917-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf