The continuing tragedy of the Congo—defined by decades of overlapping resource wars for bodies, ivory, rubber, oil, copper, wood, coltan, diamonds, uranium, and the like—is subject matter that appeals to few historians. Ignorance and confusion still abound over what actually happened in central Africa after planned colonization of the interior began in the 1880s. Thousands of unsorted boxes of documents detailing Belgian administration of the region from the time of the Berlin conference (1884–85) through to the flash point of decolonization in 1960 gather dust in the basement of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères in Brussels, and access remains complicated. In recent years, a few historians have started to chart the production and diffusion of Belgian colonial history by examining the intimacies between the archive and the apparatuses of state power. Belgium is haunted by ghosts from its colonial past, ghosts that haunt the archive. This translation of Jules Marchal's study Travail forcé pour l'huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme brings another such ghoul into the limelight.

Marchal, after his retirement as an ambassador from the Belgian diplomatic corps, delved deep into his country's colonial past, and before his death published various interventions revealing the hidden history of the Belgian Congo. Much of this research focused on the rule of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State, which led, in the decade before the First World War, to one of the first international single-issue campaigns for human rights of the modern age. But Marchal also began to pry into later periods, after Leopold's handover of his territory to the Belgian government in 1908.

While there was little appreciation in Belgium to disseminate Marchal's research, his work was noticed and reworked by the American writer and academic Adam Hochschild, who published in 1998 King Leopold's Ghost, a damning indictment of Leopold II's regime, which reawakened widespread controversy over European colonial practices in sub-Saharan Africa.

Hochschild provides the introduction to this translation of Marchal's study of a subsequent cycle in the tragic history of the Congo: the palm oil trade established by the British industrialist Lord Leverhulme. This is another “story of atrocities hidden from view,” part of colonial Africa's history that “is only beginning to be told” (xxii). The omission of a good map is a significant editorial oversight and leaves the reader grasping for the small print of atlases, which most of the time do not include many of the place names mentioned in the text.

In 1911, Lord Leverhulme, eager to build up his soap-manufacturing empire, based at Port Sunlight in England, looked around for a region of Africa where he might extract large quantities of palm oil. Nigeria, long the mainstay of the palm oil industry, was briefly considered, but a deal was quickly struck and land obtained for use by the Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), the name of Leverhulme's Congo company. Following in the footsteps of King Leopold II, Leverhulme proclaimed his philanthropic intentions, which amounted to nought and cloaked systemic appropriation of territory. Within a decade, native entitlement to the land was ignored and a widespread scheme of forced labor imposed through the scandalous “tripartite contract.”

Tracking the story in a dry and deliberate way, Marchal unpicks the matrix of complicity linking commercial interests with military and administrative power and a policy that despoiled the Africans of their palm groves. The large labor force required to cut the fruit and process the oil was treated with a callous unconcern for humanity. Key reports speaking out against the commercial practices of the HCB started to appear in the 1920s and took issue with the hiking of prices, head taxes, the relocation of villages, and the widespread use of child labor.

In 1926, the under secretary of state for the colonies, William Ormsby-Gore, after a visit to the region, wrote, “The type of concession from which Lord Leverhulme benefits in the Congo, is unthinkable in a British Protectorate” (83). But the British government did little to apply pressure on the Belgian government as it had done two decades earlier when pressurized by the Congo Reform Association. The following year, reports on the Compagnie du Kasai described widespread abuses. In some districts 80 percent of the total population was employed in palm fruit cutting and processing. But the state rallied to Lord Leverhulme's defense. In 1930, Pierre Ryckman, a future governor-general of the Belgian Congo, provided an investigation praising the HCB, defending the forced labor of women and children and justifying the use of corporal punishment and harsh prison sentences for cutters who failed to meet the quotas. The year after that, the revolt of the Pende resulted in the type of disproportionate punitive expedition that often defines retreating colonial regimes: intensification of coercion strategies and the consolidation of monopolies. In the late 1950s, the administrative center at Kikwit still controlled almost three hundred productive “Lever camps.”

Beyond what this story reveals about a continuing system of corporate irresponsibility, the activities of the HCB and the Leverhulme legacy demand a careful reexamination of a view, widely held to this day, that maintains that after Leopold II's demise, the Belgian Congo became a model colony.

By the end of this book it is hard not to feel a sense of outrage. There is the chilling contradiction that while Lord Leverhulme's factory in Britain at Port Sunlight was held up as a beacon for best practice among manufacturers in Britain, his company used feudal systems to extract palm fruit. The Leverhulme Trust continues to be one of the most generous patrons of research education in the United Kingdom, with an annual budget of around £40 million. But how many academics who proudly embark on research courtesy of Leverhulme funding are even aware that they should thank in part the palm oil cutters of the Belgian Congo for their academic freedom?