St. Canisius Library at Kimwenza
Last week I finally made it to the library of a nearby seminary at Kimwenza, about which I had heard some good things. There is not much in terms of libraries on campus, though there are some efforts to improve the situation. I genuinely like the history professor who has recently been put in charge of the university libraries, which makes me optimistic. (His daughter is one of my best students too.)
A six-month library card for St. Canisius Library at Kimwenza can be had 2000fc (slightly less than $5). After you pay the fee, they take your picture with a digital camera and print out a real library card. I don’t know of anyplace else here that does this. It is a research library, which means the books do not circulate, but the reading rooms are so comfortable, I wouldn’t want to read them anywhere else anyway. The reading room compares favorably to my campus office, which is in the basement with bad light. While I appreciate the energy on campus, the noise and traffic at the university can be distracting.
St. Canisius has a computerized catalog, and five workstations where you search for a title. Patrons, mostly seminarians and other students, fill out a request slip, and someone retrieves the book for you. For my own research, its holdings are pretty good, not great. Their materials are a bit denominational, meaning mostly Catholic, which is only surprising because I found the holdings of another nearby seminary library affiliated with the same order to be remarkably non-denominational. My research is on the work of Americans in Congo, which, in terms of religion, means Protestant missionaries. But, not surprisingly for a Catholic country, the best libraries are run by the Catholics.
There was one extraordinary book I came across, prepared by a Belgian priest, Father Bontinck, who was a history professor here and who ran the more secular Catholic library that I mentioned. He compiled an anthology of materials from American archives about Leopold II’s Etat Indépendant du Congo. Most of the material in this collection relates to Henry Shelton Sanford, a scoundrel of the first order, who was the US delegate to the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference while secretly on Leopold II’s payroll as a lobbyist. The Bontinck volume is a sourcebook of materials that includes many documents that I had trouble tracking down in the US (even though they should all be in US archives). The book has a section on historian George Washington Williams who came to the Congo in 1890 and was one of the first outspoken critics of Leopold’s regime. Williams, who is the subject of a wonderful biography by John Hope Franklin that includes some of this same material, traveled to the Congo anticipating many collaborative projects with the State. But these letters reveal that as he was preparing for his departure, he began to meet severe opposition from Sanford and some of the Belgian concession companies operating there. As Williams wrote to Sanford,
A six-month library card for St. Canisius Library at Kimwenza can be had 2000fc (slightly less than $5). After you pay the fee, they take your picture with a digital camera and print out a real library card. I don’t know of anyplace else here that does this. It is a research library, which means the books do not circulate, but the reading rooms are so comfortable, I wouldn’t want to read them anywhere else anyway. The reading room compares favorably to my campus office, which is in the basement with bad light. While I appreciate the energy on campus, the noise and traffic at the university can be distracting.
St. Canisius has a computerized catalog, and five workstations where you search for a title. Patrons, mostly seminarians and other students, fill out a request slip, and someone retrieves the book for you. For my own research, its holdings are pretty good, not great. Their materials are a bit denominational, meaning mostly Catholic, which is only surprising because I found the holdings of another nearby seminary library affiliated with the same order to be remarkably non-denominational. My research is on the work of Americans in Congo, which, in terms of religion, means Protestant missionaries. But, not surprisingly for a Catholic country, the best libraries are run by the Catholics.
There was one extraordinary book I came across, prepared by a Belgian priest, Father Bontinck, who was a history professor here and who ran the more secular Catholic library that I mentioned. He compiled an anthology of materials from American archives about Leopold II’s Etat Indépendant du Congo. Most of the material in this collection relates to Henry Shelton Sanford, a scoundrel of the first order, who was the US delegate to the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference while secretly on Leopold II’s payroll as a lobbyist. The Bontinck volume is a sourcebook of materials that includes many documents that I had trouble tracking down in the US (even though they should all be in US archives). The book has a section on historian George Washington Williams who came to the Congo in 1890 and was one of the first outspoken critics of Leopold’s regime. Williams, who is the subject of a wonderful biography by John Hope Franklin that includes some of this same material, traveled to the Congo anticipating many collaborative projects with the State. But these letters reveal that as he was preparing for his departure, he began to meet severe opposition from Sanford and some of the Belgian concession companies operating there. As Williams wrote to Sanford,
If the Congo is what you have claimed it to be, there need be no uneasiness about travelers visiting it on their own account; I am now, as ever before, a true friend of the State of the Congo but I shall discharge my mission without fear or favor and if anything should happen to me, you will be held responsible.Seven months later, after seeing the territory firsthand, he changed his assessment. In an 1890 letter to Secretary of State (and sometime Presidential candidate) James G. Blaine, Williams wrote,
The State of Congo is in no sense deserving of your confidence or support. It is actively engaged in the slave trade and is guilty of many crimes against humanity.(I am struck by his use of the phrase “crimes against humanity”; I wonder when this phrase was first used, by whom, and in what context.) In addition to this letter, Williams wrote a series of pamphlets which were condemned by Belgian parliamentarians, ministers, and US diplomats--all of this, significantly, more than a decade before the organization of the Congo Reform Association brought international attention to Leopold’s brutal misrule.
posted by irad at 9:52 AM
3 Comments:
A quick internet search led to the following:
"First of all, it is incorrect to state that the phrase "crimes against humanity" originated in the preamble to the 1907 Hague Convention, because what is really being referred to there is the Martens clause which mentions the "laws of humanity...and the dictates of public conscience." If one is interested in finding the first use of the words "crimes against humanity, that source would be the 1915 Declaration by the governments of France, Great Britain and Russia denouncing the massacre of Armenians taking place in Turkey." (http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/430/430lect12.htm)
"According to Raphael Lemkin, the expression 'mass murder' that was being used at the time to describe what had happened was an inadequate description of the totally new phenomenon witnessed in Nazi-occupied territories. It was inadequate because it failed to account for the motive for the crime, which arose solely from 'racial, national or religious' considerations and had nothing to do with the conduct of the war. War crimes had been defined for the first time in 1907 in The Hague Convention, but the crime of genocide required a separate definition as this was 'not only a crime against the rules of war, but a crime against humanity itself' affecting not just the individual or nation in question, but humanity as a whole. Raphael Lemkin was the first person to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.
The definition of what constitutes a crime against humanity was established at the Nuremberg Trials. However, despite the significance of this, the jurists at Nuremberg had invented nothing new. They were simply advancing Montesquieu's ideas on international law, which he described as 'universal civil law, in the sense that all peoples are citizens of the universe.' Killing someone simply because he or she exists is a crime against humanity; it is a crime against the very essence of what it is to be human." (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/reports/dsetexhe.html)
Following Jodi's example, I did a little Internet search too:
Fun in the sun...from Congo to Florida! The Mr. Sanford Ira writes about founded the town of Sanford, just northeast of Orlando, Florida, and maybe a 20-minute car ride from where I grew up. These days Sanford is a charming place where you can see a bit of old Florida in the historic district and go antique shopping along the waterfront. It's a brunch town. Florida tourism is often characterized by ahistorical historical tourism or collective selective or full-blown amnesia, permitting celebrations of deaths and firsts. Below are excerpts from Florida's tourism literature on Sanford's town, showing how Florida and Congo are connected:
"Sanford is the County Seat of Seminole County, situated on the south shore of Lake Monroe. Less than an hour from the Disney area to the south and Daytona Beach and Kennedy Space Center to the east, this historic town was established in the 1830s as a U.S. Army post to keep the Seminole Indians in check. First named Fort Mellon, after Captain Charles Mellon who was killed in an Indian attack, then Mellonville, Sanford transformed into a booming trade center after commercial steamboat service arrived ten years later.
Sanford became more accessible to settlers after the Native Seminole Indians were expelled. In 1870, Henry Shelton Sanford, President Lincoln's Minister for Belgium, bought 12,500 acres and decided to attract settlers from as far away as Sweden to farm the area.
The old town of Mellonville was incorporated in 1877 and Sanford began to grow in importance, becoming by 1910 one of the largest vegetable shipping centers in the U.S., commonly known as "Celery City"." (http://funandsun.com/1tocf/allgosf/seminole/semat1.html)
"The first doctor arrived in 1867. In 1869 the first fruit packing plant was built. In 1870, General Henry Shelton Sanford, former Minister to Belgium, purchased 12,535 acres of land and laid out his namesake community, Sanford. General Sanford arranged for a colony of Swedes to settle the area, work an orange grove, and experiment with fruits and flowers from all over the world. The first county fair was held in 1881 on land donated by General Sanford." (http://www.visitseminole.com/tourism-cvb/about/history.asp)
1869-77, the US President was Ulysses S. Grant.
So, Williams used the phrase several decades before it was common parlance. For Williams, as an African American, to assert that Leopold's rule was a "crime against humanity" simultaneously asserts the denied humanity of Africans and establishes a non-national, non-racial basis for fighting these crimes. For 1890, this was uncommonly radical speech.
Yes, you are right that Florida is at the root of it all, even more than what tourist websites admit! In the 1870s, Sanford went to Florida to get into the orange business with the financial backing of William Mackinnon, the founder of the British India Steam Navigation Company, and later the Imperial British East Africa Company. Mackinnon went to the Brussels Geographic Conference in 1877, which was where the Association Internationale d’Afrique (AIA, which morphed into the Etat Indépendant du Congo at Berlin in 1884) was established. Sanford probably got interested in Central Africa via his Florida association with Mackinnon. By the late 1870s, Sanford was actively advocating for the AIA in the US, and personally got Stanley involved in Leopold’s enterprise. The rest of the story is that of a “crime against humanity.”
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