Nsala of Wala in the Nsongo District
Nsala of Wala in the Nsongo District (Abir Concession) is a photograph published by Edmund Dene Morel in his book King Leopold's Rule in Africa, in 1904.
It was subsequently employed as a tool in the media campaign against the inhumane situation in the Congo Free State, which was largely characterised by rubber exploitation.
Based on estimates by witnesses and later censuses, the number of deaths caused by colonial policy during the Congo Free State period varies widely, starting at around 2.2 million.
[8][9][10][11] At the beginning of the 20th century, reports about the conditions in the Congo Free State began to attract significant attention in the Western world, leading to a growing chorus of public criticism of Leopold's policies.
The relatively new possibilities of mass reproduction of photos via printing screens and the development of faster,[12] lighter, smaller and less expensive cameras also contributed to this.
Prior to the establishment of the Congo Free State, the region was characterised by a history of armed conflict and enslavement throughout the nineteenth century.
[18] The ABIR had posts scattered throughout the area, each responsible for a region and staffed by one or two European employees who received commissions on the rubber delivered and whose salaries were reduced if a quota was not met.
[23] The village of Wala was in the domain of Nsongo Mboyo, a collective of settlements situated within the boundaries of the ABIR concession,[24] which has since been designated as groupement.
"[28] Edgar Stannard, a medical missionary[2] in Baringa,[29] informed the Commission that the ABIR guards had utilised Albini rifles, which they were legally prohibited from carrying, to suppress riots in Nsongo.
[32] Edgar Stannard recounts statements by Nsongo residents indicating that guards from the area were originally deployed but were subsequently relieved of their duties and disarmed by "the white man" due to their failure to kill "their own people".
[33] Robert M. Burroughs posits that Harris's characterisation of the guards as "ignorant, uncivilized and to a large extent cannibal" represents an instance of a comparatively progressive-minded individual adopting the idioms of the defenders of the Free State,[34] thereby problematising the missionaries' narratives of indigenous statements as an expression of the missionaries' point of view, set against the backdrop of their opposition to many expressions of cultural autonomy.
[37] The Baringa missionaries John Harris and Edgar Stannard corresponded with the founder and then head of the Baptist Congo-Balolo Mission, which employed the Harrises,[38] and the co-founder of the Congo Reform Association, Henry Grattan Guinness,[39] on 19 and 21 May, respectively.
[40] A review of Stannard's letter reveals the following sequence of events: On 14 May 1904, the day of the shooting, John Harris had travelled to a meeting in Jikau.
One of the men presented a hand and foot, which Stannard estimated to be recent and potentially belonging to a child of approximately five years of age.
In addition to Boali, Nsala's wife Bonginganoa and a boy named Esanga were also victims of the attack, having been shot and subsequently dismembered and cooked.
[42] Historian Kevin Grant suspects that Alice Harris used an interpreter during the conversations due to her limited knowledge of the Lomongo language used in the region.
Subsequent to the intervention of Harris and Stannard, he asserted that he had not been presented with the hand and foot, a claim that was at odds with the statements made by the two men from Wala.
[41] Two days later, Bompenju and Lofiko, Nsala's brothers, visited the mission and corroborated the accounts provided by the two men from Wala regarding the incident in question.
The house labourer Bokalo provided a detailed account of how the two men, who had been asked to show the limbs at the mission, expressed fear before the encounter with Harris and Stannard.
Upon inquiring with their leader, Lifumba, as to the rationale behind the attack, noting that the scheduled rubber delivery was not due for another three days, he was met with gunfire from an Albini rifle.
Alice Harris and Edgar Stannard spoke to other residents of Wala, who said that the killings had taken place three days earlier, involving a woman, a man and a boy.
In his letter to Guinness, dated five days after the image, John Harris wrote about it:"The photograph is most telling, and as a slide will rouse any audience to an outburst of rage, the expression on the father's face the horror of the by-standers the mute appeal of the hand and foot will speak to the most skeptical.
These included a compilation entitled Lantern Lecture on the Congo Atrocities, which features the image under the title Nsala with his child's hand and foot.
[49][50] However, T. Jack Thompson from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Edinburgh[51] has stated that it is no longer possible to determine whether Guinness also used the photograph in his presentations due to the loss of the transparencies.
[52] In his 1904 work King Leopold's Rule in Africa, Edmund Dene Morel included the picture[1] and the letter from Stannard to Guinness[53] which describes the circumstances surrounding its creation.
[56] Robert M. Burroughs posits that the image acts as a witness, rather than resulting from the photographer's performance, because it emphasises the active involvement of the victim Nsalas.
[57] T. Jack Thompson, meanwhile, suggests that the Harrises' images diverge from those taken by previous missionaries, who sought to contrast "European civilisation" with "African savagery" and "Christian light" with "heathen darkness".
Sharon Sliwinski, a member of the Faculty of Information and Media at the University of Western Ontario,[58] described the image as "formally posed, almost peaceful."
"[59]Wayne Morrison from the Faculty of Law at Queen Mary University[60] described the picture as "[o]ne of the most dramatic" of the images that reached foreign countries from the Free State.
