Leopold no longer needed the façade of the
association, and replaced it with an appointed cabinet of Belgians who would do his bidding. To the temporary new capital of
Boma, he sent a governor-general and a chief of police. The vast
Congo Basin was split up into 14
administrative districts, each district into zones, each zone into sectors, and each sector into posts. From the district commissioners down to post level, every appointed head was European. However, with little financial means the Free State mainly relied on local elites to rule and tax the vast and hard-to-reach Congolese interior. In the Free State, Leopold exercised total personal control without much delegation to subordinates. African chiefs played an important role in the administration by implementing government orders within their communities. Throughout much of its existence, however, Free State presence in the territory that it claimed was patchy, with its few officials concentrated in a number of small and widely dispersed "stations" which controlled only small amounts of hinterland. In 1900, there were just 3,000 Europeans in the Congo, of whom only half were Belgian. The colony was perpetually short of administrative staff and officials, who numbered between 700 and 1,500 during the period. Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to local villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the CFS . Leopold further decreed that merchants should limit their commercial operations in rubber trade with the locals. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves. Four main problems presented themselves over the next few years. • Leopold II ran up huge debts to finance his colonial endeavour and risked losing his colony to Belgium. • Much of the Free State was unmapped jungle, which offered little fiscal and commercial return. •
Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the
Cape Colony (part of modern
South Africa), was expanding his
British South Africa Company's charter lands from the south and threatened to occupy
Katanga (southern Congo) by exploiting the "Principle of Effectivity" loophole in the
Berlin Treaty. In this he was supported by
Harry Johnston, the
British Commissioner for Central Africa, who was
London's representative in the region. • The Congolese interior was ruled by Arab
Zanzibari slavers and sultans, powerful kings and warlords who had to be coerced or defeated by use of force. For example, the slaving gangs of
Zanzibar trader
Tippu Tip had a strong presence in the eastern part of the territory in the modern-day
Maniema,
Tanganyika and
Ituri regions. They were linked to the
Swahili coast via
Uganda and
Tanzania and had established independent slave states.
Early economy and concessions '',
Boma, capital city of the Congo Free State, 1899 Leopold could not meet the costs of running the Congo Free State. Desperately, he set in motion a system to maximize revenue. The first change was the introduction of the concept of , which was any land that did not contain a habitation or a cultivated garden plot. All of this land (i.e., most of the country) was therefore deemed to belong to the state. Servants of the state (namely any men in Leopold's employ) were encouraged to exploit it. Shortly after the
Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference (1889–1890), Leopold issued a new decree mandating that Africans in a large part of the Free State could sell their harvested products (mostly ivory and rubber) only to the state. This law extended an earlier decree declaring that all "unoccupied" land belonged to the state. Any ivory or rubber collected from the state-owned land, the reasoning went, must belong to the state, thus creating a
de facto state-controlled monopoly. Therefore, a large share of the local population could sell only to the state, which could set prices and thereby control the income the Congolese could receive for their work. For local elites, however, this system presented new opportunities, as the Free State and concession companies paid them with guns to tax their subjects in kind. Trading companies began to lose out to the Free State government, which not only paid no taxes but also collected all the potential income. These companies were outraged by the restrictions on free trade, which the
Berlin Act had so carefully protected years before. Their protests against the violation of free trade prompted Leopold to take another, less obvious tack to make money. company is shown in dark red. A decree in 1892 divided the
terres vacantes into a domainal system that privatized extraction rights over rubber for the state in certain private domains, allowing Leopold to grant vast concessions to private companies. In other areas, private companies could continue to trade but were highly restricted and taxed. The domainal system enforced an in-kind tax on the Free State's Congolese subjects. As essential intermediaries, local rulers forced their men, women and children to collect rubber, ivory and foodstuffs. Depending on the power of local rulers, the Free State paid prices below the rising market prices. In October 1892, Leopold granted concessions to a number of companies. Each company was given a large amount of land in the Congo Free State on which to collect rubber and ivory for sale in Europe. These companies were allowed to detain Africans who did not work hard enough, to police their vast areas as they saw fit and to take all the products of the forest for themselves. In return for their concessions, these companies paid an annual dividend to the Free State. At the height of the rubber boom, from 1901 until 1906, these dividends also filled the royal coffers. The Free Trade Zone in the Congo was open to entrepreneurs of any European nation, who were allowed to buy 10- and 15-year monopoly leases on anything of value: ivory from a district or the rubber concession, for example. The other zone—almost two-thirds of the Congo—became the . In 1893, Leopold excised the most readily accessible portion of the Free Trade Zone and declared it to be the . Rubber revenue went directly to Leopold who paid the Free State for the high costs of exploitation. The same rules applied as in the
Domaine Privé.
Scramble for Katanga attempted to expand the territory of the British South Africa Company northward into the
Congo Basin, presenting a problem for Leopold II Early in Leopold's rule, the second problem—the British South Africa Company's expansion into the southern Congo Basin—was addressed. The distant
Yeke Kingdom, in
Katanga on the upper
Lualaba River, had signed no treaties, was known to be rich in
copper and thought to have much gold from its slave-trading activities. Its powerful
mwami ('King'),
Msiri, had already rejected a treaty brought by
Alfred Sharpe on behalf of
Cecil Rhodes. In 1891 a Free State expedition extracted a letter from Msiri agreeing to their agents coming to Katanga and later that year Leopold II sent the well-armed
Stairs Expedition, led by the
Canadian mercenary
William Grant Stairs, to take possession of Katanga one way or another. Msiri tried to play the Free State off against Rhodes and when negotiations bogged down, Stairs flew the Free State flag anyway and gave Msiri an ultimatum. Instead, Msiri decamped to another
stockade. Stairs sent a force to capture him but Msiri stood his ground, whereupon Captain
Omer Bodson shot Msiri dead and was fatally wounded in the resulting fight.
War with Arab slavers In the short term, the third problem, that of the
African and Arab slavers like
Zanzibari/
Swahili strongman
Tippu Tip (actually Ḥamad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jumʿah ibn Rajab ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al Murjabī, but mainly known by his nickname) was temporarily solved. Initially the authority of the Congo Free State was relatively weak in the eastern regions of the Congo. In early 1887,
Henry Morton Stanley had therefore proposed that Tippu Tip be made
governor (wali) of the
Stanley Falls District. Both Leopold II and
Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar agreed and on 24 February 1887, Tippu Tip accepted. In the longer term this alliance was indefensible at home and abroad. Leopold II was heavily criticized by the European public opinion for his dealings with Tippu Tip. In Belgium, the
Belgian Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1888, mainly by Catholic intellectuals led by Count
Hippolyte d'Ursel, aimed at abolishing the Arab slave trade. Furthermore, Tippu Tip and Leopold were commercial rivals. Every person that Tippu Tip hunted down and put into
chattel slavery and every pound of ivory he exported to
Zanzibar was a loss to Leopold II. This, and Leopold's humanitarian pledges to the
Berlin Conference to end slavery, meant war was inevitable. Open warfare broke out in late November 1892. Both sides fought by proxy, arming and leading the populations of the upper Congo forests in conflict. By early 1894 the Zanzibari/Swahili slavers were defeated in the eastern Congo region and the
Congo Arab war came to an end. The Belgians freed thousands of men, women and children slaves from Swaihili Arab slave owners and slave traders in Eastern Congo in 1886–1892, enlisted them in the militia
Force Publique or turned them over as prisoners to allied local chiefs, who in turn gave them as labourers for the Belgian conscript workers; when Belgian Congo was established, chattel slavery was legally abolished in 1910, but prisoners were nevertheless conscripted as force labourers for both public and private work projects.
The Lado Enclave , ca. 1900 In 1894, King Leopold II signed a treaty with the United Kingdom which conceded a strip of land on the Free State's eastern border in exchange for the
Lado Enclave, which provided access to the navigable Nile and extended the Free State's sphere of influence northward into
Sudan. After rubber profits soared in 1895, Leopold ordered the organization of an expedition into the Lado Enclave, which had been overrun by
Mahdist rebels since the outbreak of the
Mahdist War in 1881. The expedition was composed of two columns: the first, under Belgian war hero
Baron Dhanis, consisted of a sizeable force, numbering around three-thousand, and was to strike north through the jungle and attack the rebels at their base at Rejaf. The second, a much smaller force of only eight-hundred, was led by
Louis-Napoléon Chaltin and took the main road towards Rejaf. Both expeditions set out in December 1896. Although Leopold II had initially planned for the expedition to carry on much farther than the Lado Enclave, hoping indeed to take
Fashoda and then
Khartoum,
Dhanis' column mutinied in February 1897, resulting in the death of several Belgian officers and the loss of his entire force. Nonetheless, Chaltin continued his advance, and on 17 February 1897, his outnumbered forces defeated the rebels in the
Battle of Rejaf, securing the Lado Enclave as a Belgian territory until Leopold's death in 1909. Leopold's conquest of the Lado Enclave met with approval from the British government, at least initially, which welcomed any aid in their ongoing war with Mahdist Sudan. But frequent raids outside of Lado territory by Belgian Congolese forces based in
Rejaf caused alarm and suspicion among British and French officials wary of Leopold's imperial ambitions. In 1910, following the Belgian annexation of the Congo Free State as the
Belgian Congo in 1908 and the death of the Belgian King in December 1909, British authorities reclaimed the Lado Enclave as per the Anglo-Congolese treaty signed in 1894, and added the territory to
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. ==Economy during Leopold's rule==