The year is 1897 or 1898. Try to imagine, briskly stepping off a cross-Channel steamer, a forceful, burly man in his mid-20s, with a handlebar mustache. He is confident and well-spoken, but his British speech is without the polish of an Eton or an Oxford. He is well-dressed, but the clothes are not from Bond Street. With an ailing mother and a wife and growing family to support he is not the sort of person likely to get caught up in any idealistic cause. His ideas are thoroughly conventional. He looks--and is--every inch the sober, respectable businessman.

Edmund Dene Morel is a trusted employee of a Liverpool- based shipping line. A subsidiary of the company has the monopoly on all transport of cargo to and from the Congo Free State, as it is then called, the huge territory in central Africa that is the world's only colony claimed by one man. That man is King Leopold II of Belgium, a ruler much admired throughout Europe as a "philanthropic" monarch. He has welcomed Christian missionaries to his new colony; his troops, it is said, have fought and defeated local slave-traders who preyed on the population; and for more than a decade European newspapers have praised him for selflessly investing his personal fortune in public works to benefit the Africans.

Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him over to Belgium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo run. Although the officials he is working with have been handling this shipping traffic for years without a second thought, Morel begins to notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big Belgian port of Antwerp he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch-covers with immensely valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes with horror that there can be only one possible explanation for their source: slave labor on a vast scale.

Brought face to face with evil, Morel did not turn away. to the Times on the Congo would be signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops, 76 Members of Parliament, the presidents of 7 Chambers of Commerce, 13 editors of major newspapers, and every Lord Mayor in the country. Angry speeches on the horrors of King Leopold's Congo would be given as far away as Australia. In Italy, two men would fight a duel over the issue. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a man not given to overstatement, would declare that "no external question for at least thirty years has moved the country so strongly and so vehemently."

This is the story of that movement, of the great crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it, and the way the world has managed to forget one of the great mass killings of recent history.

* * *

I myself knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo until a few years ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I was reading. Often when you come across something particularly striking, you remember just where you were when you read it. On this occasion I was sitting, stiff and tired, late at night, in one of the far rear seats of an airliner crossing the United States from east to west.

The footnote was to a quotation from Mark Twain. Twain had made this comment, the note said, when he was part of the worldwide movement against slave labor in the Congo, a system that had taken at least five to eight million lives. Worldwide movement? Five to eight million lives? I was startled.

Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But even if this number turned out to be only half as high, I thought, that would still make the Congo one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not included in the standard litany of our century's horrors? And why had I never heard anything about them before? I had been writing about human rights for years, and once, in the course of half a dozen trips to Africa, I had even been to the Congo.

That visit had been in 1961. In a Leopoldville apartment, I had listened to a CIA man who had had too much to drink describe with great satisfaction exactly how and where the newly- independent country's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had been killed a few months earlier. He assumed that any American, even a visiting student like me, would share his pleasure at the assassination of a man the U.S. government considered a dangerous leftist troublemaker. In the early morning a day or two later I left the country by ferry across the Congo River, that conversation still ringing in my head as the sun rose over the waves and the dark, smooth, greasy-looking water slapped against the boat's hull.

Several decades later, I could not get that footnote about those millions of deaths at the turn of the century out of my mind. After a time, it occurred to me that, like so many other people, I had actually read something about that time and place, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian overtones, mythic echoes and inward vision, I had mentally filed the book away under fiction and not fact.

I now began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was unmistakably clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions. At the same time, quite unexpectedly, I found myself totally absorbed by the extraordinary characters who peopled this patch of history. For although it was Edmund Dene Morel who ignited a movement, he was not the first outsider to see King Leopold's Congo for what it was, and to try hard to draw the world's attention to it. That role was played by George Washington Williams, a black American journalist and historian who, unlike anyone before him, inter- viewed Africans about their experience of their white conquerors. And it was another black American, William Sheppard, who recorded a scene he came across in the Congo rain forest one day which would brand itself on the world's consciousness as an unforgettable symbol of colonial brutality. There were other heroes as well, one of the bravest of whom would end his life on a London gallows. Then, of course, sailing into the very middle of this story came the young sea captain, Joseph Conrad, expecting the exotic Africa of his childhood dreams and finding instead what he would call "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." And looming above them all was King Leopold II, a man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and charm, as any of the more complex villains of Shakespeare.

As I followed the intersecting lives of these men, I began to realize something else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to surround it. The Congo was the first international atrocity scandal of the age of the telegraph and the camera, and in its mix of bloodshed on an industrial scale, royal- ty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying and media campaigns that raged in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic, it often feels strikingly closer to our time than one would expect. Furthermore, unlike some of the other great preda-tors of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never even set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.

Although today Europe has long forgotten the victims of Leopold's Congo, in reconstructing their fate I found a vast supply of raw material to work from: Congo memoirs by explorers, steamboat captains, military men; the records of mission stations; reports of government investigations; and that peculiarly Victorian phenomenon, accounts by the gentleman (or sometimes lady) "traveler." The Victorian era was a golden age of letters and diaries, and sometimes it almost seems as if every visitor or official in the Congo kept voluminous journals and spent each evening on the river bank writing letters home.

One problem, of course, is that virtually all of this vast river of words is by Europeans or Americans. There was no written language in the Congo when Europeans first arrived. And this inevitably skews the way history has been recorded. We have dozens of memoirs by the territory's white officials; we know the changing opinions on Congo matters of key people in the British Foreign Office, sometimes on virtually a day-by-day basis. But we do not have a full-length memoir or complete oral history of one single Congolese during the period of the greatest terror. Instead of African voices from this period, there is largely silence.

And yet, as I immersed myself in this material, I began to see how revealing it was. The men who seized the Congo often trumpeted their killings, bragging about them in books and newspaper articles. Some kept surprisingly frank diaries that show far more than the writers realized, as does a voluminous, amazingly explicit instruction book for colonial officials. Further- more, several officers of the private army that occupied the Congo came to feel guilty about the blood on their hands. Their testimony, and the documents they smuggled out, helped to fuel the protest movement. Even on the part of the Africans who were so brutally suppressed, the silence is not complete. Some of their actions and voices, even though filtered through the records of their conquerors, we can still see and hear.

Although the worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890 and 1910, its roots lie much earlier, when Europeans and Africans first encountered each other here. And so for the headwaters of our story we must leap back more than 500 years, to a time when a sea captain saw the ocean change its color, and when a king received news of a strange apparition that had risen from inside the earth. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.