‘Swindle! Fantasies!’ sneered Bismarck, disgusted by Leopold, who ‘displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything and give nothing in return’. The Iron Chancellor, facing resentment even from social democrats that Germany was missing out on empire, was being pressured by a sinister clergyman’s son from Hanover, Carl Peters, a twenty-six-year-old philosophy graduate who, after hearing of British colonial gains while staying in London, founded a German East African Company and travelled to Zanzibar to claim territories. Twice Bismarck refused to accept Peters’s claims over parts of Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. But in November 1884 he invited all the African contenders to Berlin for the dissection of a continent, as Leopold waited in Brussels. Europe, particularly in the Balkans, was so tense that the powers, accustomed to fierce competition, pivoted their rivalries on to Africa: British and French ‘explorers’ – usually imperial soldiers – raced to claim slices of the ‘cake’ if only to deny it to the other. Ideology and religion always reflect political contingency: Christian mission and mission civilisatrice, justified by theories of racist superiority and eugenics, dovetailed perfectly with imperial ambition and commercial avarice.*
Yet at that very moment, in the same city, a scientist was laying the foundations that would disprove this pseudo-science. In 1869, in Tübingen, Germany, a Swiss scientist, Friedrich Miescher, had borrowed pus-soaked, bloody bandages from a local hospital and, analysing the white blood cells, had identified a new substance that he called nuclein. He did not yet know it but nuclein contained deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA – that revealed how family and heredity really descended through ancestral lines over thousands of years. While Bismarck was dividing up Africa at the Berlin chancellery, a chemistry professor across town at the university – Albrecht Kossel – sensed the importance of these nucleins. ‘The processes of life are like a drama,’ Kossel said, ‘and I’m studying the actors, not the plot.’
The plot remained in the hands of Bismarck. Germany, Britain and France each backed Leopold to prevent Congo going to the others. The Belgian king took personal possession of Congo, a million square miles, seventy-six times the size of Belgium with ten million inhabitants. Almost declaring himself ‘emperor of Congo’, he called it Congo Free State, but first he had to conquer it. Ordering its commercial exploitation, he formed a private army, the
Leopold wanted to expand eastwards to grab Sudan. He ordered Stanley to reach the beleaguered governor of Egyptian Equatoria, Emin Pasha, a German-Jewish doctor convert to Islam, but to do so they needed Zanzibari help. Leopold and Stanley joined forces with the warlord Tippu Tip, appointing him a local governor. Emin was rescued and Equatoria claimed. ‘Now what do you say,’ the king asked Stanley, ‘about taking Khartoum?’ As host of the Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference, Leopold was criticized for his alliance with Tippu. The ailing Tippu soon retired to Zanzibar, succeeded by his son Sefu and nephew Raschid, who ruled large parts of Congo with other slaver-warlords. In 1890, Msiri, king of independent Katanga, was approached by British, French and Belgian emissaries, who negotiated with his Luso-African wife, Maria de Fonseca.
