Josué Henry - the Congo map-man

The history of the Congo in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not a happy one. Between 1885 and 1908 it was a personal fiefdom of Léopold II of Belgium, and then was subsumed as a colony into the Belgian state. That period when it was the Congo Free State, ruled as a separate kingdom from Belgium by the king, Léopold, was particularly brutal. Léopold’s private police force, the Force Publique, was established to maintain order, and initially to try to oust the Zanzibar-based slave traders, but itself effectively became a savage military operation to dominate and control the native population and extract the maximum value from the natural resources of the country. (Although this is not the subject of this article, perhaps those who screech for slavery reparations from the United Kingdom might educate themselves in a little history, and look at that Arab/Ottoman trade, and the Belgian one which joined it…..)   

Anyway, into this snakepit in the mid-1890s came a Belgian soldier by the name of Josué Henry. He was seconded to the Force Publique, and during his years in Congo he made many expeditions into the interior. Congo has some of the richest mineral deposits on earth, and while rubber - particularly after the bicycle and then the motor car came along and the pneumatic tyre became an essential - was the first major resource to be sought by the developed world from central Africa, the value and importance of those minerals became more and more significant (and continues so today). Henry had a military career in Congo Free State and then the successor Belgian colony, but that doesn’t really concern us here, apart from a passing comment that he seems to have been involved in the Stokes Affair; that saw the hanging without trial of an Irish trader called Charles Stokes, and - whipped up by some of the British press - led to a change in perception of Léopold as a benevolent ruler, and encouraged the final annexation by Belgium of the Free State some years later.

What Henry has to do with the metal trade, and what is happening now, is what concerns us here. On those expeditions he made through the interior of a land largely untouched by westerners he produced a series - a very substantial series - of maps of the geological resources of the country. Now, obviously, a lot of exploration has been undertaken since then, and much is known of the geological make-up of central Africa. However, Congo still has enormous untapped mineral resources - not only cobalt and copper, but also uranium, lithium, coltan and others. It happens that the records produced by Henry are held in an archive in the AfricaMuseum in a suburb of Brussels called Tervuren, and they are the subject of an ongoing disagreement between the Museum and its archive and an American exploration company called KoBold. KoBold (whose shareholders include Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and other silicon valley luminaries) has asked the Museum to release the archives, as they have been asked by the Congolese government to help it digitise and make available the information contained there.

The Museum - so far - has refused. There are two sides to this. The Museum says that to allow a private company to take over the archive - which is a national asset - would be ethically wrong. KoBold says that this is disingenuous, as it has an agreement with the DRC government to make the records digitally available to all, and that therefore it is not the same as releasing the information to one private company. It is suggesting that the Belgian refusal to make the information available to the DRC is showing the last vestiges of colonialism, and that the information morally belongs to the Congolese.

It’s an interesting dilemma; the US government is backing KoBold, presumably because it would like to see US companies having the opportunity to compete better with the Chinese strength in Congo. The Museum claims it has an agreement through the EU to digitise and publicise the information, but that this will take far longer than the KoBold proposal.

Did the Belgian soldier turned map-maker know what future geopolitical storms he might unleash?