The Emergence of Humanitarian Activism in Africa

By Mary Wills

During the period of Colonel Harrison’s expeditions to Africa, a different aspect of Britain’s colonial past comes to light. Humanitarian activism to raise awareness of human rights abuses in Congo Free State can be linked to a tradition of British antislavery campaigns on the African continent. This can be traced back to the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and the Royal Navy’s subsequent nineteenth-century operations on the West and East African coasts to suppress the slave trades of other nations. This early British approach to humanitarianism was also rooted in preconceptions about Africa and its peoples.

Between 1885 and 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium’s absolute rule over what was then known as Congo Free State brought enormous hardship and bloodshed to its people. In response to increasing international demand for rubber and other natural resources, Leopold oversaw a horrific increase in slavery and violence as part of his plunder of the region for his own profit. Millions of Congolese are said to have been murdered or worked to death.

 While Colonel Harrison wrote in support of King Leopold II, many others worked to expose his misrule. As a result of work by the Irish diplomat Roger Casement, journalist Edmund D. Morel, the missionary Alice Seeley-Harris and others to raise awareness of the atrocities, significant international pressure was brought to bear on Leopold to end his reign of cruelty and exploitation.

Roger Casement worked as a British consular official in Congo Free State. He campaigned against rubber atrocities there, and later, in Peru, in the Putamayo region of the Amazon. His antislavery credentials were clear in 1894 when he wrote: “We all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form.”

 Casement’s Report of 1904 was a key first step in an international campaign to end abuses in Congo Free State, in what is now understood as one of the first human rights campaigns. Casement travelled through the Upper Congo Basin, engaged in field research, interviewed victims, participants and witnesses. He worked with a community of activists to expose a multitude of depredations against local people. The American missionary William Henry Sheppard, for example, reported seeing 81 severed hands collected by state officials: such mutilations served as punishment for those who had not complied with demands that they collect rubber.

Casement’s campaign against Leopold’s rule continued back in Britain, where he worked with the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society based in London. He collaborated with the British journalist Edmund D. Morel, founding the Congo Reform Association in 1904, regarded as one of the first human rights organisations. Morel established the West African Mail in which he published reports of atrocities in the Congo.

The British missionary Alice Seeley Harris travelled to Congo Free State at the turn of the century and took over 1000 photographs depicting Congolese life. In particular, her images of victims of atrocities were showcased by antislavery campaigners and became internationally famous. The ‘Congo Atrocity Lecture’, for example, was a campaign of the Congo Reform Association, using her photographs as part of a lantern show to raise awareness in Britain of some of the human rights abuses perpetrated under Leopold’s rule. The movement successfully pressured Leopold II to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government in 1908.

These impressive humanitarian endeavours should be understood in the wider context of the history of the British empire, where the spread of colonialism in Africa was justified by beliefs in European cultural superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, in terms of religion, education, technology and so on. Alice Seeley Harris’s photographs can be regarded as part of an antislavery tradition in Britain at this time in which it was believed action must be taken on behalf of passive victims, reinforcing a belief in the good work of the British Empire’s ‘civilising mission’.

Casement became a committed anti-imperialist due to his work investigating human rights abuses in Africa and South America. He retired from the Foreign Service and became involved in independence efforts in his native Ireland. Now rightly regarded as one of the first human rights campaigners, he was executed in August 1916 for high treason for attempting to lead an Irish rebellion against the British.

About the author

Mary Wills - is an Honorary Fellow of the Wilberforce Institute and author of Envoys of Abolition: British Naval Officers and the Campaign Against the Slave Trade in West Africa (Liverpool University Press, 2019)

Further Reading

1.  Alice Seeley Harris Archive, http://antislavery.ac.uk/congo