In March 1905, the French government sent the explorer and former colonial administrator, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, to France's Congo colony to inquire into journalists' allegations that indigenous people were being abused and killed. After spending four months in the Congo, Brazza died in Dakar on his return trip to France, having collected extensive documentation and written elaborate notes, but not the report itself. For that reason, the title of Bellec book is not exactly right. What it reproduces, wonderfully and with an illuminating preface and helpful notes, is not the ‘Brazza Report’, something that never existed, but a report by another top colonial official, Jean-Marie de Lanessan, the former governor general of French Indochina. After Brazza's death, the government charged Lanessan and an ad hoc committee composed of current and former colonial figures to summarize the findings of the Brazza commission.
Brazza was not the compliant bureaucrat Etienne Clémentel, the Minister of Colonies, had wanted to lead the commission, and in one of the revealing documents included in Bellec's appendix, the minister makes clear how little he trusted the former explorer. He ordered Brazza to demonstrate that ‘any acts of violence committed against indigenous people [were] attributable purely to individuals and were not part of any organized system’, adding that his inquiry must not ‘confuse what we are doing in our Congo possessions with what the Congo Free State does’ (pp. 255–6).
French officials were worried that E. D. Morel's exposé of the Free State's atrocities would spill over onto them. They knew, of course, as Brazza did, that the French Congo resembled nothing so much as the Leopoldian one. But Brazza, who had been fired as the Congo's chief administrator for ‘negrophilia’ and opposition to the colony's mis en valeur by concessionary companies, did not share the government's desire to keep the murder, hostage taking, and exploitation of the Congolese under wraps.
In preparing its report, the Lanessan committee relied heavily on the self-serving testimony of Emile Gentil, France's chief administrator in the Congo. But the committee also examined more than a dozen accounts of the situation in the Congo written on the spot by Brazza and his team. These accounts were extraordinarily thorough and amounted to some 1,400 manuscript pages. They revealed, among many other crimes, Gentil's complicity in a series of abuses as well as his attempts to cover them up.
The abuses were serious. Of the best documented cases, the most egregious was one in which agents of a concessionary company in the Bangui region took sixty-eight women and children hostage to force their men to harvest wild rubber. With a French colonial official looking the other way, the hostages were held in appalling conditions and most starved to death, their bodies dumped in a nearby river. By the time one of Gentil's subordinates arrived to investigate, only thirteen women and eight children were still alive. Gentil was fully informed of the situation and appears to have traveled to the Bangui region shortly after learning of the hostages' deaths. But he did nothing to punish those responsible, and when members of the Brazza commission tried to question him or obtain information about the Bangui affair and other abuses, he stonewalled them at every turn.
Despite Gentil's lack of cooperation, the Lanessan committee, whose members shared his strongly pro-colonial orientation, largely ignored the evidence against him, as they did a huge amount of corroborating testimony by dozens of Congolese. In its final report, the Lanessan committee blamed the Congo colony's problems not on the French administration, but on the concessionary companies, which, the committee ruefully said, operated with only minimal government oversight. Although no French officials were disciplined, it was nonetheless significant that Lanessan and his colleagues reproduced, even if in muted form, many of the Brazza commission's findings about the companies' crimes, incompetence, commercial failures, and violation of international agreements.
Referring to this evidence, the minister of foreign affairs wrote in a confidential memo to the prime minister, ‘the [Lanessan] report demonstrates that we have done what the [Berlin Agreement of 1885] forbade us to do [create monopolies and forced labor] and have not done what it required of us [protect les indigenes]’ (p. 36, pp. 292–7). This, as the book makes clear, is almost certainly the key reason why, in the end, the French government refused to publish the Lanessan report. Even with its silences and obfuscations, what the report documented about the colonial situation in the French Congo invited the very comparisons with the Free State that the government wanted to avoid.
By suppressing the report and especially by burying the much more explicit supporting documents submitted by members of the Brazza commission, the French government ensured the persistence of the abusive practices these papers revealed. Although the publication of these materials had been suppressed, the documents themselves did not disappear. They were accessible in the archives of the colonial ministry until 1920 and in those of the foreign ministry after 1950. That essentially no one thought to look for them until the mid-1960s suggests that historians, whether consciously or unconsciously, did not want to look very closely into France's colonial past.
