Nsala of Wala in the Nsongo District (Abir Concession) is a photograph published by Edmund Dene Morel in his book King Leopold's Rule in Africa, in 1904. The image depicts a Congolese man named Nsala looking at the severed foot and hand of his five-year-old daughter, Boali. The girl, her mother, and a local boy had been killed, cooked, and eaten by a group of fifteen armed guards of the Abir Congo Company, which had a concession by the Congo Free State to collect rubber in the region. The guards had arrived early and were annoyed when they found that the rubber quota requested from the village was not yet ready. Three other persons had been wounded in their attack (one of them fatally) and ten villagers, mostly women, were taken captive by the guards.
The photograph was taken by Alice Seeley Harris, the wife of a missionary, in the neighbouring village of Baringa on 14 May 1904, one day after the girl's death. Nsala had secretly picked up Boali's hand and foot as evidence of the murders while the guards were preparing the dismembered bodies for cooking. When Harris heard what had happened and that the cut-off limbs were all that remained of the child after the cannibal meal, she was so appalled that she decided to document the scene, taking the photo on the mission veranda.
The photo was subsequently employed in a media campaign against the inhumane situation in the Congo Free State, which was characterised by an exploitative policy of forced rubber harvesting. It is part of the Harris Papers, a collection owned by Anti-Slavery International.
Description The picture shows a man dressed only in a loincloth sitting on the edge of a veranda in the centre of the picture, photographed from the veranda. His gaze is directed in front of him, towards the bottom left of the picture, at the severed hand and foot of a child lying on the veranda. In the right-hand half of the picture, further back in the picture, standing in front of the veranda, two other male figures, equally clothed, can be seen looking towards the viewer of the picture. A fourth person stands in the background of the picture, also in the right-hand half (the picture was printed in various sections and partly mirror-inverted; the position and directional details refer to Morel's print).
Historical background
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 resulted in the effective grant of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II of Belgium as personal property. During the period of the Free State, the population was subjected to a systematic policy of forced rubber harvesting. The enforcement of these policies resulted in numerous instances of abuse and a significant number of deaths. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a considerable demand for rubber, which made this form of exploitation highly lucrative for Leopold. Initially, the atrocities resulting of this exploitation were either negated or concealed. The magnitude of the population decline over the period is disputed, with modern estimates ranging from 1.2 million to 10 million, based on estimates by witnesses and census data.
The coercive measures were subsequently enforced by the Force Publique, the Free State army, and by private militias from the rubber companies involved, such as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (Abir). Both forces recruited in the Free State and those from other African regions were deployed. In 1877, the first Baptist missionaries from Great Britain began work in the area that would become the Free State. They were later joined by American and Belgian groups from various denominations. According to Leopold and the missionaries, colonialism in the Congo served the purpose of "civilisation" and was largely driven by conversion to Christianity. They emphasised that this was linked to the fight against the western and eastern slave trades, cannibalism, and polygamy.
At the beginning of the 20th century, reports about the conditions in the Congo Free State began to attract significant attention in the Western world, leading to a growing chorus of public criticism of Leopold's policies. The Congo Reform Association, co-founded by Edmund D. Morel, was particularly influential. Missionaries and missionary societies also publicly denounced the situation in the state. The advent of photography made their alerts more effective, with images documenting cruelties reaching the public via newspapers, magazines, and lantern shows. The relatively new possibilities of mass reproduction of photos via printing screens and the development of faster, lighter, smaller and less expensive cameras also contributed to this.
Leopold attempted to counteract the criticism through lobbying and public relations work and by setting up a commission of inquiry. But in the end, the critics were successful and in 1908 Belgium decided to annex the Congo as a regular colony, ending Leopold's private rule.
Abir held a concession to exploit the forest resources of the Lopori–Maringa basin. The location depicted in the photograph, Baringa, is situated on the Maringa River, to the south-east of the town of Basankusu. There the two rivers converge and since 1893 Abir had its headquarters there. Following a reorganisation of the company in 1898, the Congo Free State held a 50% stake in Abir, with the remaining shares distributed among a Belgian banker and the Société Anversoise, another rubber company based in the Congo. The rubber was obtained in the Abir region through the tapping of certain vines, predominantly of the subspecies Landolphia owariensis gentilii. The repeated cutting of tendrils for tapping caused them to dry out and sometimes die. Completely severing tendrils during tapping killed them. In 1904, the year the photograph was taken, it was reported that the rubber reserves within 50 miles of most of Abir's posts had been nearly exhausted. As a result, the amount of rubber exported through Abir fell by approximately 50% between 1903 and 1904.
Before they were forced to harvest rubber, most inhabitants of the Lopori–Maringa basin were engaged in subsistence production, mostly agriculture, but also fishing and hunting. Already in the decades before the establishment of the Congo Free State, the region had suffered from armed conflicts and raids for enslavement. In the 1880s, it was repeatedly raided by traders from Irebu, who seized ivory and took captives to sell them as slaves.
The Abir Congo Company had posts scattered throughout the area, each responsible for a region and staffed by one or two European employees who received commissions on the rubber delivered and whose salaries were reduced if a quota was not met. Based on the number of men in a village, the posts in turn set rubber quotas for each village, which the Abir guards were responsible for collecting. If the quotas were not met, the guards were threatened with pay cuts, dismissal, imprisonment, or flogging. While a few guards ("post sentries") were equipped with comparatively modern Albini-Braendlin rifles, the guards stationed in the villages ("village sentries") used muzzleloaders. The sentries were sometimes required to produce a right hand (of the person supposedly killed) for each used cartridge to prove that they had not "wasted" it. Abir was supported by the state army in the form of logistical support and weapons licences. If they encountered strong resistance from the population, they could rely on state troops based in Basankusu to suppress it.
While the men forced to collect rubber received nominal pay for it, the company had prisons where men who failed to meet their quotas were held and forced to work. Wives or other close relatives were often taken hostage instead, which had the advantage of allowing the man to continue collecting rubber. If villages failed to meet their quotas, their leaders were often taken hostage.
The village of Wala was in the domain of Nsongo Mboyo, a group of settlements within the boundaries of the Abir concession, situated east of Baringa and north of the Maringa. In 1903, over 1,000 individuals from Nsongo Mboyo who had attempted to flee the concession area were forcibly relocated to the Lireko labour camp. According to historian Ben Kiernan, Abir personnel killed 83 people in Wala alone in May 1904.
Local situation
John Harris, husband of Alice Harris, provided testimony before the Commission of Inquiry into Crimes in the Congo, an entity appointed by Leopold in 1904. "So far as we are aware, no single sentry had ever been punished by the State till 1904 for the many murders committed in this district." Edgar Stannard, a medical missionary in Baringa, informed the Commission that the Abir guards had utilised Albini rifles, which they were legally prohibited from carrying, to suppress riots in Nsongo. Harris and Stannard additionally indicated that Abir administrators had guards flogged if they had not killed a sufficient number of people. John Harris stated in 1905 that the guards in the Nsongo district were known for engaging in cannibalistic practices.
Stannard recounted statements by Nsongo residents indicating that guards from the area were originally deployed but were subsequently relieved of their duties and disarmed by "the white man" due to their failure to kill "their own people". They were then replaced by guards from areas known for cannibalism. Robert M. Burroughs posits that Harris's characterisation of the guards as "ignorant, uncivilized and to a large extent cannibal" represents an instance of a comparatively progressive-minded individual adopting the idioms of the defenders of the Free State, thereby problematising the missionaries' narratives of indigenous statements as an expression of the missionaries' point of view, set against the backdrop of their opposition to many expressions of cultural autonomy.
Events leading to the photograph's creation The events that form the background to the picture are described in detail in the letters written by the Harrises and Stannards. On 15 May 1904, Alice Harris corresponded with Raoul Van Calcken, the head of the Abir post at Baringa. The Baringa missionaries John Harris and Edgar Stannard corresponded with the founder and then head of the Baptist Congo-Balolo Mission, which employed the Harrises, and the co-founder of the Congo Reform Association, Henry Grattan Guinness, on 19 and 21 May, respectively. A review of Stannard's letter reveals the following sequence of events:
On 14 May 1904, the day of the shooting, John Harris had travelled to a meeting in Jikau. Shortly after 8 a.m. that morning, while Alice Harris and Stannard were at the Harris residence, two boys at the mission informed them that guards had killed several people and that two men were en route, bearing hands as evidence. The boys were instructed to notify Harris and Stannard if the men returned. Subsequently, the men arrived at the residence of Harris and Stannard and were requested to display the hands. One of the men presented a hand and foot, which Stannard estimated to be recent and belonging to a child of approximately five years of age. One of the two men, Nsala from Wala, identified himself as the father of the deceased Boali, whose limbs they had been.