LITMIR.BIZ

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would tour the country, taking our prison with us and then we’d call the villagers to assemble and we would beat three or four of our prisoners to show them what could happen to them,’ he recalled, with a rueful shake of the head. ‘I used that punishment very sparingly. But its effect was terrible. We were so proud to be members of the administrative service, we felt so powerful. But all our power had its roots in the chicotte.’

      Shame and guilt have a long reach. Nearly half a century after the events, Marchal was still trying to expunge what he did as a thoughtless young administrator flush with the excitement of an exotic posting and overwhelmed by new responsibilities. Long since retired, he had dedicated the previous twenty years to contradicting the version of history presented at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, a white-washing so clumsy it prompted an explosion of exasperated contempt. ‘It’s ridiculous! They even show an Arab trader whipping a slave! Absurd,’ he snorted.

      I had spotted Mr Marchal’s name in the historical section of one of Brussels’s bookshops, something of a miracle in itself, I was subsequently to discover, given his self-imposed low profile. His name had also cropped up in King Leopold’s Ghost, the bestseller by US author Adam Hochschild, which was creating a stir amongst the Brussels intelligentsia in 1998. After my visit to the museum, I wanted to meet the man campaigning, virtually single-handed, to awaken a slumbering national conscience.

      He had given me careful instructions over the phone, speaking with that slight Belgian twang that always sounds vaguely comic to anyone used to hearing French as spoken by Parisians. ‘You want to get off at St Truiden. But make sure if you take the train to Liège that you sit in the right part, as the train splits in two and some of my visitors have gone missing that way.’

      An hour and a half out of the capital, I was already a world away from the smart shopping streets of French-speaking Brussels. This was fruit-producing Flanders, proud of its Flemish identity and language, resentful and suspicious of Francophone dominance. The train slid past frosty piles of mangelwurzels, snow-dusted fields and rows of denuded orchards, stopping at every sleepy station.

      Now a portly pensioner, Mr Marchal had a distinguished career behind him. After nearly two decades in Zaire, he became a diplomat, rising to the rank of ambassador. His were not the easy postings: he served in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Chad, Niger and Liberia. His wife, who nonetheless remembered their years in Africa with huge nostalgia, still drove the ageing blue Mercedes that was the ambassador’s car on their last foreign assignment.

      His earlier responsibilities made his new role as iconoclast all the more unexpected. For Mr Marchal, the former career diplomat, was busy energetically kicking the system that had sustained him. Trawling through the national archives, basing his findings on official memoranda, private correspondence, diaries kept by Belgian colonial agents, he was bent on exposing what he believed was the most brutal colonial system ever practised on a continent which saw more than its fair share of oppressive regimes.

      While he worked with passionate commitment, he felt unhappy enough about the devastating light his discoveries shed on his former employers to shun the public stage. His first books had been published under a pseudonym. Some, printed by a company set up by his wife, verged on vanity publishing. Resolutely factual, the bare bones on which other, more florid writers – Mr Marchal hoped – would some day base their work, the volumes only featured on the shelves of the largest and most specialised Belgian bookshops. In the absence of active promotion, sales of 700 counted as a good result and Marchal was happy to hand out remaindered stock. ‘I have to tell these things because they are true, I want to put history right. But I cannot promote my message as an ordinary author does. It is too sad,’ he explained. ‘Whatever you do, please don’t present me as a traitor who is trying to bring down my country.’

      Marchal had been accused by academic contemporaries studying the era of drawing up a ‘personalised charge sheet’. Indeed, he was near-obsessed with the qualities, or lack of them, of the man he saw as holding the key to Congo’s dark story. Certainly, the huge central African land mass that today occupies 905,000 square miles, nearly eighty times the size of Belgium, its colonial master, would never have been defined as a nation at all had it not been for the determination of the Duke of Brabant to acquire a colony.

      Even as a young man, waiting in the wings for his father to die, the man who was to become Leopold II had taken careful note of how England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands had all built their power and wealth on a panoply of colonies, using foreign resources to rise above what often seemed the limitations of geography and natural assets.

      His country was young, its sense of self-identity distinctly shaky. He was only the second monarch of an independent Belgian state, whose people had staged a revolution in 1830, turning their backs on centuries of Spanish, Austrian, French and Dutch rule. Despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of the population, he was determined to use a colony to transform his tiny country, divided by religion and language, into a world power commanding respect.

      ‘No country has had a great history without colonies,’ Leopold wrote to a collaborator. ‘Look at the history of Venice, of Rome and Ancient Greece. A complete country cannot exist without overseas possessions and activity.’ Scouring the world, he had looked at China, Guatemala, Fiji, Sarawak, the Philippines and Mozambique as possible candidates, but had been stymied at every turn. Then, cantering to the rescue like a moustachioed crusader, had come Henry Morton Stanley.

      Stanley was a poor Briton who had emigrated to America, where he had reinvented himself as a war correspondent known for his racy copy and fearlessness under fire. An illegitimate child, he had been abandoned by his mother and sent to the workhouse, circumstances that left him with a deep need to prove himself. Fated to spend his life in a swirl of controversy, Stanley had first seized the public’s imagination by penetrating darkest Africa in 1871 and tracking down David Livingstone, the British missionary who had gone missing five years earlier. Their legendary meeting was one of the great journalistic scoops of all time.

      In 1877 he pulled off an even more impressive feat. Proposing to settle the dispute that had festered for years between British explorers John Speke and Richard Burton over the source of the Nile, he set off once more from Zanzibar, tracing the course of the Lualaba river for 1,500 miles. Braving rapids, ambushes, smallpox and starvation, he followed the river, emerging at the Atlantic Ocean after a journey that lasted nearly three years. He had not only established that the Lualaba had no connection with the Nile, which he had shown to spring from Lake Victoria, he had also opened up a huge swathe of central Africa until then known only to the ‘Arab’ merchants (in actual fact Swahili-speaking, Moslem traders from Africa’s east coast) to greedy Western eyes.

      In the books Stanley wrote after each extraordinary trip he showed a near-obsession with the dangers posed by perspiration and sodden underwear, which he blamed for malarial chills. But his eccentricities did not prevent him from accurately sizing up the potential of the land he had passed through. Its forests were full of precious woods and ivory-bearing elephants. Its fertile soils supported palm oil, gums and, most significantly, wild rubber, about to come into huge demand with the invention of the pneumatic tyre. Its inhabitants presented a ready market for European goods and, once the rapids were passed, the river offered a huge transport network stretching across central Africa.

      Stanley was far from being the first white man to reach this part of central Africa. Late fifteenth-century emissaries from Portugal, looking for the fabled black Christian empire of Prester John, had stumbled on the Kongo kingdom, a Bantu empire spreading across what is today northern Angola, western Congo and edging into Congo-Brazzaville.

      A feudal society led by the ManiKongo, this kingdom proved surprisingly open to the arrival of the white man, perhaps encouraged by a spiritual system which identified white, the skin colour of these strange visitors, as sacred. It had welcomed missionaries, embraced Christianity and entered into alliance with the Portuguese. But by the time Stanley was tracing the course of the river, the Kongo kingdom had been in decline for more than two centuries, devastated by endless wars of succession, attacks by hostile tribes and, above all, the flourishing slave trade.

      Although it was clearly in his interest to play up the horrors of what he found, for it made the alternative of

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