William Henry Sheppard - Documentation of Belgian Atrocities

Documentation of Belgian Atrocities

In the late nineteenth century, King Leopold II started to receive criticism for his treatment of the natives in Congo Free State. In the United States, the main outlet of this criticism was the Presbyterian church. In 1891, Sheppard became involved with William Morrison after Lapsley's death. They would report the crimes they saw, and later, with the help of Roger Casement, would form the Congo Reform Association (CRA), one of the world's first humanitarian organizations.

In January 1900 the New York Times published a report that said fourteen villages had been burned and ninety or more of the local people killed in the Bena Kamba country by Zappo Zap warriors sent to collect taxes by the Congo Free State administration. The report was based on letters from Southern Presbyterian missionaries Rev. L. C. Vass and Rev. H. P. Hawkins stationed at Luebo and the subsequent investigation by Sheppard who visited to the Zappo Zaps's camp. Apparently taken for a government official, he was openly shown the bodies of many of the victims. Sheppard saw evidence of cannibalism. He counted eighty-one right hands that had been cut off and were being dried before being taken to show the State officers what the Zappo Zaps had achieved. He found sixty women confined in a pen. The massacre caused an uproar against Dufour and the Congo Free State itself. When Mark Twain published his King Leopold's Soliloquy five years he mentioned Sheppard by name and referred to his account of the massacre.

In January 1908, Sheppard published a report on colonial abuses in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) newsletter, and both he and Morrison were sued for libel against the Kasai Rubber Company (Compagnie de Kasai), a prominent Belgian rubber contractor in the area. When the case went to court in September 1909, the two missionaries had support from the CRA, American Progressives, and their lawyer, Emile Vandervelde, a prominent Belgian socialist. The judge acquitted Sheppard (Morrison had been acquitted earlier on a technicality) on the premise that his editorial had not named the major company, but smaller charter companies instead. However, it is likely that the case was decided in favor of Sheppard as a result of international politics; the U.S., socially in support of the missionaries, had questioned the validity of King Leopold II's rule over the Congo.

Sheppard's reports often portrayed actions by the State that broke laws set by the European nations. Many of the documented cases of cruelty or violence were in direct violation of the Berlin Act of 1885, which gave Leopold II control over the Congo as long as he "care for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help in suppressing slavery."