There was a rule in the Foreign Ministry archives. They were not permitted to show researchers material that was bad for the reputation of Belgium. But everything from this period was bad for the reputation of Belgium! So they showed nothing.
Jules Marchal, cited in A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998, 2006 edition), 297-8
And so the statements [on the atrocities in the Congo] continue, story after story, by the hundreds. Here at last was something the rest of the world had seldom heard from the Congo: the voices of the Congolese themselves. On few other occasions in the entire European Scramble for Africa did anyone gather such a searing collection of firsthand African testimony. The effect on anyone who read those stories could be only that of overwhelming horror.
However, no one read them.
Despite the report's conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, not was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not till the 1980s were people at last allowed to see them.
A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998, 2006 edition), 255
Bismarck, no fool, scribbled a comment in the margin beside this passage: "Swindle." Beside a passage about a confederation of free states, he put "Fantasies." When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, Bismarck said to an aide: "His Majesty displays the pretentions and naïve selfishness of an Italian who considers his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything."
A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998, 2006 edition), 83
Significantly, British and French antislavery fervor in the 1860s was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery in their colonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves. Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target: the so-called Arab slave-traders raiding Africa from the east. In the slave markets of Zanzibar, traders sold their human booty to Arab plantation owners on the island itself, and to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, and the various sultanates and principalities of the Arabian peninsula. For Europeans, here was an ideal target for disapproval: one "uncivilised" race enslaving another.
A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998, 2006 edition), 28
