02-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘A Training School for Elephants' Review: Stomping Through Africa
In 1876 Leopold II of Belgium decided to reinvent his small country as an imperial power. The vehicle for Belgium's entry into the Scramble for Africa was the International African Association. The organization's name suggested a charitable purpose, but Leopold instead went on to establish the Congo Free State, a private empire of slavery and cruelty.
Joseph Conrad called the depredation of the Congo 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.' In 1908, following British reports of atrocities, Leopold was forced to pass the Free State to Belgium's civil administration so that the looting of African ivory and rubber might continue on a more respectable footing.
In 'A Training School for Elephants,' the British travel writer Sophy Roberts revisits a false start to Leopold's rampage. Apart from being ethically challenged, Leopold had a transport problem: There were no finished roads between the entrepôts of the East African coast and the raw materials of the interior.
In 1879 Leopold sent the Welsh-born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley to the interior to strike deals with local chieftains and set up trading stations. The Belgian king hired the Scottish shipping magnate William Mackinnon, who began building a road inland from the coast in modern-day Tanzania. And he tapped an Irish adventurer named Frederick Carter to test-drive four Asian elephants west from the coast to Lake Tanganyika.
