Exposing the Congo: The First Human Rights Campaign

Reports of abuse in the Congo began to spread in the 1890s. In 1890 the African American historian George Washington Williams wrote an open letter to Leopold condemning the regime after visiting the Congo. Missionaries, including Alice Seeley Harris, took photographs of mutilated people that shocked audiences in Europe and the United States. The British shipping clerk E. D. Morel noticed that ships arrived in Antwerp full of rubber and ivory but returned carrying mainly guns and soldiers, evidence that the Congo was not trading but being plundered.

The British consul Roger Casement investigated in 1903, and his report, published in 1904, confirmed widespread abuse. That year Morel and Casement founded the Congo Reform Association, which used mass meetings, photographs and publications, including writing by Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle. Historians often describe this as one of the first international human rights campaigns.