Arthur Conan Doyle

This chapter traces the experience of the South African War on the later life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle, charting his agitation for military reform and for preventive health measures, especially for typhoid inoculation to be mandatory in the armed forces. It shows him defending the behavior and actions of the British troops in South Africa, and follows his involvement in various causes: the miscarriage of justice in the Edalji case; the Congo Reform Association, for which he wrote The Crime of the Congo; and his increasing proselytizing for spiritualism, in which he was encouraged by his second wife. This chapter argues that Doyle’s real achievements, as well as what he hoped to be remembered for, are overshadowed by the extraordinary vitality and adaptability of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes.

Mary Kingsley

This chapter looks at Kingsley’s post-mortem legacy: most immediately how her concern for Boer POWS was translated by her friend Alice Stopford Green into an investigation of the dire conditions in which exiled Boers were held on St Helena. Journalist E. D. Morel was a great admirer of Mary Kingsley and her ideas on indirect rule lay behind his creation of the Congo Reform Association, which campaigned vigorously against the atrocities visited on the people of the Congo by the regime of Leopold II of Belgium. Kingsley’s friends Alice Stopford Green, John Holt and Roger Casement were also closely involved with the Congo Reform Association. Kingsley’s critique of cultural imperialism was the inspiration for the African Society, which promoted the kind of ethnology she had championed, while her researches into the terrible mortality of Europeans in West Africa inspired the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Mary Kingsley Medal.

William Henry Sheppard’s Country of My Forefathers

This chapter examines the work of a former Hampton student who also traveled to the Congo in 1890 as cofounder of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM). Sheppard’s articles and speeches circulated widely through networks of HBCUs, the press, and the church. In particular, his 1899 eyewitness report on the brutal practice of hand-severing became a foundational document for Congo Reform Association (CRA) activists like E. D. Morel and Mark Twain. Sheppard’s writings tell a different story than canonical literary portraits of the region like Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by exhibiting an appreciation for the voices of the Congolese people, a point which was emphasized when, after being charged with libel by the colonial authorities, Sheppard arranged for Congolese witnesses to testify in his defense. After his forced retirement from the APCM in 1910, he continued to work on behalf of the Congo, speaking to prominent audiences throughout the United States.

Booker T. Washington’s African at Home

This chapter examines Washington’s service as Vice President of the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a means of considering more broadly the relationship of HBCUs to Africa. Although Washington never traveled to Africa, he was directly influenced by Sheppard, his former Hampton student. As the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Washington, the most prominent African American leader of his day, brings the Congo into relief as an important nexus for developing ideas about race, ideology, and empire in American culture in ways that are visible in everything from his famous 1895 address at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition to his influential collaboration with sociologist Robert E. Park. Washington’s professional mobility can help scholars expand Gilroy’s conception of the “Black Atlantic” to include HBCUs as critical contact zones for emerging understandings of a dynamic U.S. relationship with Africa.

THE CONGO OF EUROPE: THE BALKANS AND EMPIRE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH POLITICAL CULTURE

This article explores early twentieth-century British political and humanitarian engagement with the Balkans. It focuses on the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that served as the main hub for British interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. Whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, it is argued that the Balkan Committee was part of a wider movement of humanitarianism and political activism that encompassed both continental and colonial questions. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association, as well as to the Persia Committee, formed in protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement. This approach highlights how ‘Europe’ and empire were interconnected agendas within an overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience, despite the different cultural lenses through which humanitarian questions in different parts of the globe were viewed. It is suggested that research into British interaction with the Balkans offers a fruitful means by which to integrate historical analysis of the continental and imperial aspects of Britain's external relations in the ‘age of empire’.

Roger Casement and the Congo

Roger Casement's role as Irish patriot has obscured his role as Congo reformer. Travelling in the interior of the Congo in 1903 as British consul, Casement gathered evidence that enabled the British government to attack the Congo State on grounds of maladministration. He did not however regard mere diplomatic action as sufficient to redress the wrongs of King Leopold's rubber trade. Convinced that only a humanitarian crusade could abolish the evils of the Leopoldian regime, Casement inspired E. D. Morel to found the Congo Reform Association. Through his dual capacity of civil servant and humanitarian, he attempted, in his own words, to choke off King Leopold ‘as a “helldog” is choked off’. His apocalyptic vision of evil in the Congo may have been exaggerated, but his influence was of the first magnitude in bringing about Belgium's annexation of the Congo in 1908.