Abir Congo Company
Company type | Joint-stock company |
---|---|
Industry | Rubber extraction and manufacturing |
Founded | August 6, 1892Antwerp, Belgium | in
Founders | John Thomas North Leopold II |
Defunct | 1926 |
Fate | Unknown |
Successor | Maringa company |
Headquarters | , |
Products | Rubber |
Number of employees | 47,000 (1906) |
The Abir Congo Company (founded as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company and later known as the Compagnie du Congo Belge) was a company that
Abir enjoyed a boom through the late 1890s, by selling a kilogram of rubber in Europe for up to 10 fr which had cost them just 1.35 fr. However, this came at a cost to the human rights of those who could not pay the tax with imprisonment, flogging and other corporal punishment recorded. Abir's failure to suppress destructive harvesting methods and to maintain rubber plantations meant that the vines became increasingly scarce and by 1904 profits began to fall. During the early 1900s famine and disease spread across the concession, a natural disaster judged by some to have been exacerbated by Abir's operations, further hindering rubber collection. The 1900s also saw widespread rebellions against Abir's rule in the concession and attempts at mass migration to the French Congo or southwards. These events typically resulted in Abir dispatching an armed force to restore order.
A series of reports into the operation of the Free State were issued starting with the British Consul, Roger Casement's Casement Report and followed by reports commissioned by the Free State and Leopold II. These detailed unlawful killings and other abuses made by Abir and Leopold II was embarrassed into instituting reforms. These began with the appointment of American Richard Mohun by Leopold II as director of Abir. However, rubber exports continued to fall and rebellions increased, resulting in the Free State assuming control of the concession in 1906. Abir continued to receive a portion of profits from rubber exports and in 1911 was refounded as a rubber plantation harvesting company. The later history of the company is unknown but it was still active in 1926.
Origins
The
The Free State began using its new-found control of the region to levy taxes from the local population, gathered using similar hostage tactics to the Manyema.
Establishment
King Leopold decided to give concessions of his territory to private companies who would then collect the rubber tax and export it. With this in mind he approached British Colonel John Thomas North, who had made a fortune through speculating on Chilean nitrates, for capital with which to fund a concession company.[4] North agreed and provided £40,000 of the 250,000 Belgian francs' (fr) initial investment.[7] As a result, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (informally known as Abir) was established at Antwerp on 6 August 1892.[8] The company was divided into 2,000 shares of 500 fr value each. British investors (including North) held 1880 shares whilst Belgians held the remaining 120 shares. In addition to the 2,000 ordinary shares there were 2,000 "actions" which entitled the holder to a share of the profits after a 6% dividend was paid to the shareholders. The Congo Free State was the holder of 1,000 of these actions.[4] In return Abir received exclusive rights to all forest products from the Maringa-Lopori basin for 30 years and all land within twenty miles of eight designated posts and had police powers within the limits of the concession.[8] The Free State also had to supply guns, ammunition and soldiers to help establish the posts.[4] In preparation two State employees were ordered to establish a headquarters for Abir at Basankusu but this was barely begun before the local villagers rebelled against State rule and killed both men.[4]
The concession provided to Abir lay in the north of the country and was one of nine commercial concession areas established by Leopold in the Congo Free State. The concession was bounded to the north by the Congo River and the
The Abir concession included the
Abir re-established their headquarters at Basankusu in 1893 and its position at the confluence of the Maringa and Lopori allowed Abir to expand along the rivers and their tributaries, establishing new posts along the way. Progress was slow as the Free State's activities had made the population in the west hostile to colonisation and the east remained in the control of the Manyema and the Zanzibari slavers.[11] The company's first post on the Lopori River had to be relocated because of threats from locals and rubber collection at Befori began only after a series of bloody conflicts between the villagers and Abir's men.[12]
Post system
The post system was the cornerstone of Abir's commercial activity. Each post was run by one or two European agents to oversee local operations. The salary for an agent was 1,800 fr per year, sometimes increasing to 2,100 fr in the second year, and the standard contract period was three years. Agents also received 60 fr of trade goods each month with which to buy their food.[13] Despite the low wages the 2% commission that each agent received on rubber production made up the majority of the agents' pay, for example the agent at Bongandanga received 16,800 fr in commission in 1903. As a result, there were many applicants for each post and agents were hired with the expectation that they would increase production by 0.5–3 tons per month.[13] This was implemented by extending the post to include more villages or increasing the quotas expected from the villagers, often indirectly forcing women and children to harvest the rubber as well.[11] If production fell below the quota agents made up the shortfall in lost profits to the company from their pay.[13] Each post consisted of a residence for the agent, barracks for armed sentries and sheds for rubber drying and storage, all built using labour conscripted from the villagers. A typical post employed ten African workmen to sort and dry the rubber, seven servants for the agent and thirty canoemen for local river transport. These were paid around 36.5 fr per year in goods, commonly 5 kg of salt, one blanket, five machetes and trade goods to the value of 6.35 fr.[13] The post system was managed by the Director of Congo Operations at the central office in Basankusu.[13] He was assisted in his job of keeping production up and expenses down by the only Free State employee in the concession, the commander of the police. The police commander was in charge of suppressing revolts and punishing villages which dropped below the quota.[13] He had access to a large force of men and river steamers which were stationed at Basankusu and could redeploy quickly to the site of large scale rebellions.[11] Effective police commanders would receive bonuses paid for by Abir.[13]
Each post maintained a census of all the males from the nearby villages to implement the tax which was initially set at 4 kg of dry rubber (8 kg of wet rubber) per man per fortnight.
To comply with Congo law the company had to pay the villagers for bringing them rubber, these payments were often made in goods.
Boom and refounding
Abir collected 70 tons of dried rubber in 1895, rising to 410 tons in 1898 by which time it had eleven operational posts.
The Abir Company entered
Decline and abuse of power
The rubber vine could be destructively harvested by cutting up the vine and squeezing out the latex whilst it lay on the ground.[6] This was quicker and easier than non-destructive harvesting and was practised by villagers who wished to fill their quotas and avoid punishment, especially once supplies of the vine began to run low. In addition some vines were destroyed deliberately by villagers who believed that once the rubber was gone Abir would leave the concession.[19] Because of this destruction all rubber vines within 10 km of Basankasu were depleted within 18 months of that post opening.[19] In an attempt to slow the destruction of vines Abir issued orders in 1892 and 1904 which prohibited destructive harvesting methods but these were largely ineffective.[19] In 1896 the Congo Free State ordered Abir to plant 150 rubber trees or vines for each ton of rubber exported to replace destructively harvested vines. This was increased to 500 plants per ton in 1902.[19] By 1903 the plantation at the Bongandanga post held more than one million plants and by 1904 each Abir post employed around one hundred workers to manage its plantation.[19] Despite this the plantation project was ultimately a failure due in part to the fact that each Abir agent remained at a post for just two years and was uninterested in working the plantation which would only benefit his successor.[11][19] Congo Free State forestry officers also noted that Abir plantations were smaller than required or even existed only on paper.[19] Abir would also plant vines which looked similar to the Landolphia vine but did not produce rubber, as a consequence the Free State required them to instead plant the Clitandra vine which was more easily recognisable but did not produce rubber in its first eight years.[19] These vines may never have reached maturity as there is no evidence that these plantations ever produced rubber.[19] In 1904 Abir began to run out of vines to tap and rubber production fell to half of that of 1903, which was 1000 tons.[20][21] By 1904 rubber vines within 50 miles of Abir posts had been depleting, leading to violent clashes between rival villages over control of the remaining plants.[22] The entirety of the Lulonga concession, to the west of Abir, produced just 7 tons of rubber in 1905.[23]
The presence of Abir in the area exacerbated the effect of natural disasters such as famine and disease. Abir's tax collection system forced men out from the villages to collect rubber which meant that there was no labour available to clear new fields for planting. This in turn meant that the women had to continue to plant worn-out fields resulting in lower yields, a problem aggravated by Abir sentries stealing crops and farm animals.[24] The post at Bonginda experienced a famine in 1899 and in 1900 missionaries recorded a "terrible famine" across the Abir region. The modern descendants of Abir's villagers refer to the period of company control as "Lonkali", the period of famine.[24] Disease was also a problem with smallpox moving in from the east being reported in the Upper Lopori in 1893 and reaching Bongandanga in 1901. A concurrent smallpox epidemic moving from the west destroyed villages along the Lulonga in 1899, and reached Basankusu in 1902.[24] Sleeping sickness was also reported around the Lulonga by 1900 and spread up the Maringa and Lopori. Despite the arrival of these deadly diseases the main killers in the area were lung and intestinal diseases which killed twenty times as many people as smallpox and sleeping sickness combined. At least one missionary attributed the rise of disease with rubber collecting.[24]
Abuses of power over the villagers by Abir had been reported by missionaries almost since they began operations in the Congo but the first real public disclosure came in 1901 with the publication of a report, written by an ex-agent, in several Belgian newspapers.[21] The Free State began an investigation into Abir's abuses during which an inquiry established at Bongandanga heard evidence from missionaries in the concession. As a result, Abir took action against the missionaries, stopping the carriage of their mail on company steamers, stopping the missionaries' boats and confiscating any mail that they carried.[21] Abir also forbade missionaries from buying food from villagers, forcing them to buy from Abir's own stores. In 1904 Roger Casement issued the Casement Report which condemned the Abir system; this resulted in the Free State launching another investigation later that year.[21] Although evidence of unlawful killings made by Abir was uncovered the investigation had no powers of arrest and could only submit a report to the Free State authorities. This lack of action resulted in deteriorating relations between Abir and the missionaries and there was at least one attempted shooting of a missionary.[21] Evidence for Abir's abuses also came from the governor of the French Congo, to the north-west, who claimed that prior to 1903 30,000 people had been driven from the Free State to the French Congo by Abir's actions.[25]
It is also known that Abir had been forced to put down rebellions of the Yamongo, Boonde, Bofongi, Lilangi, Bokenda, Pukaonga and Kailangi peoples around the turn of the century and that five Abir sentries had been killed near Bongandanga in 1901 and 1902. The Boangi and Likeli peoples were forcibly resettled closer to the post at Bosow and in 1903 Abir troops intervened to stop the emigration of the Lika people and villagers near Samba.[24] To stop small-scale emigration Abir instigated a permit system for people wishing to visit another village.[24] At the Momponi post the Abir agent led a punitive expedition against the Seketulu tribe which resulted in 400 civilian deaths with hundreds captured and put in prison, where a further 100 died. When the Nsongo Mboyo tribe attempted to emigrate 1,000 were captured and sent to a forced labour camp.[10] The Likongo, Lianja, Nkole, Yan a-Yanju, Nongo-Ingoli, and Lofoma people all successfully fled toward Tshuapa.[10] Despite this chaos Abir managed to increase its exports for 1903 to 951 tons recording the second highest profit in its history. However, this partial recovery did not last long and soon profits were falling once more.[10]
Attempts at reform
Leopold was embarrassed by complaints made by the British government about
One important result of the Congo Commission of Inquiry was that it spurred Leopold into carrying out reforms. One of the first stages of these reforms was Leopold's appointment of
Despite this Abir's problems increased, the company reported an increase in rebellions against its rule and 142 of its sentries were killed or wounded during the first half of 1905.[30] An uprising at the post of Baringa resulted in the spearing of several sentries and the cutting off of food supplies to the Abir post. Abir's military forces proved insufficient to restore control throughout the spring and summer of 1905 and they were forced to call in state troops. Three European officers and their Free State troops toured the area threatening villages with recriminations if rubber was not harvested, but despite this the post recorded absolutely no harvest for 1905 to 1906.[30] A similar event occurred at Mompono where around half of the population fled the area, those that remained being forcibly relocated closer to the Abir post.[31] The agent at Bongandanga tried to prevent a rebellion by reducing rubber collection from once per fortnight to once every three weeks. This was only temporarily successful and an Abir outpost was later burned down. The company, unwilling to admit falls in rubber plant stocks, publicly stated that the rebellions were fomented by missionaries.[31]
When Viscount Mountmorres visited the concession in 1905 he reported abandoned villages across the territory and that villagers had fled to the deepest parts of the forest to avoid Abir's taxes.[10] These villagers were living in makeshift leaf shelters and with few comforts. By March 1906 Richard Mohun, Abir's director, admitted that the situation in the area was out of control and suggested that the Congo Free State should assume control of the concession.[31] By September of that year Abir was unable to contain the increasing number of rebellions and, facing falling profits, was forced to completely withdraw from the area and hand control of the concession back to the Free State.[10][21] At this point there were still 47,000 rubber collectors listed on the company's books.[18] The other two major rubber companies in the Congo, the Société Anversoise and the Lulonga Company, also had their concessions taken back into state control in 1906.[10]
Free State takeover and legacy
The Free State was happy to take over Abir's concession as the State had built up sufficient income to be able to afford to run tax collections by itself. In addition the Free State was embarrassed by the continuing allegations of atrocities caused by Abir and it could institute reforms more effectively if it were in control.[23] Leopold authorised the takeover in the hope that the Free State would be able to resume rubber collection and exports and on 12 September 1906 an agreement was signed which stated that all profits from the concession would go to the Free State in return for payment to Abir of 4.5 fr per kilogram of rubber harvested until 1952. Leopold told Abir's shareholders that he expected exports to return to normal levels within two years.[23] To restore control the Free State dispatched a force of 650 men and 12 European officers under the command of Inspector Gerard to the concession. They returned four months later, leaving some areas still rebellious and with news that there were almost no rubber plants left.[23] As a result, the quotas expected per man were cut to just 6 kg of rubber per year, with some struggling to find even that much. State income was therefore negligible whilst the costs of controlling the concession continued to increase. Throughout this time Abir was still making a profit by taking its share of the rubber exported for almost no expenditure.[23]
By 1901 there were so few rubber plants left in the concession that the Free State authorities granted permission for the villagers to cut down the remaining plants and grind their bark to retrieve the rubber.[32] Once this process was completed the rubber tax was abolished.[32] The Abir company merged with the Société Anversoise in May 1911 to form the Compagnie du Congo Belge and now focussed on the management of rubber plantations and the gathering of rubber from them.[18][33] However, later that year it agreed with the Belgian government to reduce the size of its operations and its monopoly status.[20] In July 1911 it was banned from collecting rubber within the confines of its old concession for 18 months and was subject to new laws introduced by the Free State.[34] The later history of the company is unknown but it continued to operate until at least 1926 when it split off its oil palm concessions into the Maringa company.[35]
Abir's rubber gathering practices made it the most notorious of all the concession companies for human rights abuses in the Congo Free State.
See also
References
- ^ "The Congo Free State, the advantages offered to this country" (PDF), The New York Times, p. 5, 26 May 1885, retrieved 29 November 2009.
- ^ a b Harms 1983, p. 125.
- ^ a b c Harms 1983, p. 126.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Harms 1983, p. 128.
- ^ a b Harms 1975, p. 81.
- ^ a b c d e f Harms 1983, p. 133.
- ^ Ewans 2002, p. 170.
- ^ a b c Harms 1975, p. 78.
- ^ Louis 2006, p. 173.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Harms 1983, p. 136.
- ^ a b c d e Harms 1975, p. 79.
- ^ a b c Harms 1983, p. 130.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Harms 1983, p. 132.
- ^ a b c d e Harms 1983, p. 134.
- ^ Gondola 2002, p. 71.
- ^ a b c d e f Harms 1983, p. 131.
- ^ a b Vangroenweghe, Daniel, The 'Leopold II' concession system exported to French Congo with as example the Mpoko Company (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 27 March 2009, retrieved 4 February 2009
- ^ a b c d e Christopher 1984, p. 92.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Harms 1975, p. 82.
- ^ a b Ewans 2002, p. 236.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Harms 1975, p. 83.
- ^ a b Harms 1975, p. 84.
- ^ a b c d e Harms 1975, p. 87.
- ^ a b c d e f Harms 1983, p. 135.
- ^ Ewans 2002, p. 190.
- ^ Congo Commission of Inquiry (1905), Evidence laid before the Congo Commission of Inquiry, retrieved 4 February 2009
- ^ a b c d e "The Appointment of an American", India Rubber World, p. 114, 1 January 1906
- ISBN 0-16-070993-8
- ^ "African Explorer Dead" (PDF), The New York Times, p. 9, 15 July 1915
- ^ a b Harms 1975, p. 85.
- ^ a b c Harms 1975, p. 86.
- ^ a b c Harms 1975, p. 88.
- ^ Buelens, Franz; Marysse, Stefaan (April 2006), Returns on Investments during the Colonial Era: The Case of Congo (PDF), University of Antwerp, p. 17, archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016, retrieved 21 February 2009
- ^ "HC Deb vol 30 cc986-7". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). House of Commons. 2 November 1911. col. 21–23.
- ^ Professional Scripophily Traders Association, Catalogue (PDF), retrieved 21 February 2009
- ^ Harms 1975, p. 77.
- ^ a b c Harms 1983, p. 137.
Bibliography
- Christopher, AJ (1984), Colonial Africa, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-389-20452-7
- Ewans, Martin (2002), European Atrocity, African Catastrophe, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-7007-1589-3
- Gondola, Ch. Didier (2002), The History of Congo, Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-313-31696-8
- Harms, Robert (1975), "The End of Red Rubber: A Reassessment", The Journal of African History, 16 (1): 73–88, S2CID 162546555
- Harms, Robert (1983), "The World Abir Made: The Maringa-Lopori Basin, 1885–1903", African Economic History (12): 122–139, JSTOR 3601320
- Louis, William Roger (2006), Ends of British imperialism: the scramble for empire, Suez and decolonization, New York: IB Tauris and Co, ISBN 978-1-84511-347-6