Exotic Discoveries in the Belgian Congo at the beginning of the 20th century
An Essay by Jon Saggerson, Naturalist
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Belgian Congo did not simply yield its gorillas, its okapi, its dwarf elephants and its Pygmy peoples to European science in a tidy sequence of discovery. It was forced to surrender them under duress.
Anyone writing about this period is obliged to hold two realities in the same hand.
The first is that the naturalists who explored the eastern Congo between roughly 1900 and 1925 made genuine, lasting contributions to zoology by describing the gorilla, the okapi, and at least a half-dozen other species including elephant and antelope.
Secondly, almost everything they did was conducted inside a system of occupation so violent that the territory’s own name had to be changed to distance it from what had been done in it.
Both things are true at once.
The Belgian Congo – a State That Was Neither Free nor Belgian
The Belgian Congo region did not start out as either “free” or “Belgian”.
From 1885 to 1908 it was named the Congo Free State, the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, held not by the Belgian government or parliament but by Leopold himself (as though a European monarch could simply file a private claim to a landmass a third the size of the United States and have the other powers nod along!). As if to add insult to injury, King Leopold never set foot in the territory he had stolen.
What followed under his private rule is now reasonably well documented, though the documentation took two decades of campaigning to force into daylight. The Force Publique, Leopold’s private army, enforced rubber and ivory quotas through a system of hostage-taking, village-burning, and mutilation; the severed hand became the regime’s signature atrocity, collected by soldiers as proof that bullets had not been wasted on game.
The Congo Reform Association, founded in 1904, ran a sustained international campaign against Leopold’s rule; by 1908, under pressure it could no longer absorb, the Belgian parliament reluctantly annexed the territory from its own king, paying him handsomely for the privilege and renaming the colony the Belgian Congo.
Not much changed. Everything that follows here, the gorillas and the okapi and the Pygmies paraded through the London Hippodrome, happened either in the dying years of the Free State or in the colony that replaced it. “Belgian” is, in that sense, a piece of administrative cosmetic surgery.
The small world of the Naturalists visiting the Congo
By the time the eastern Congo opened to European exploration in the early twentieth century, the model of the gentleman hunter-naturalist was already well established elsewhere in Africa, transplanting itself into the Congo forests and the Virunga bamboo.
Those explorers who arrived there on missions to discover and come back with trophies were usually interconnected, although they were not employed by an establishment like a museum in any salaried sense; more often they were sponsored usually by a patron with a private collection to fill, or by a learned society wanting a paper and a lantern-slide lecture, or by the likes of a London taxidermy firm with a private commission to complete.
Alexander Barns is the central figure for any account of cataloguing the Congo’s exotic fauna and he is directly responsible for the capture of the Kivu gorilla shown in my own collection of photographs and ephemera that I rescued from the discarded archives of Rowland Ward company.
Barns’ journeys to the eastern Congo with his wife in 1920-21, were financed by James John Joicey of the Hill Museum of Lepidoptera at Witley and the expedition was “made on his behalf for entomological purposes.”
Barns’ earlier career matters more than his book entitled “The Wonderland of the Eastern Congo” reveals. In 1905, acting on commission from the Natural History Museum at South Kensington arranged “through the auspices of Sir E. Ray Lankester,” then the Museum’s director, Barns undertook to shoot and skin the elephant that still stands, mounted, in the museum’s central hall, one of the largest mounted mammals in any British collection. He recounts the commission in some detail in Wonderland: Rowland Ward and Co. of Piccadilly had been approached first and had taken the contract, but the requirement was that the skin had to arrive in London in one piece. Since the animal stood a full eleven feet at the shoulder, the job had put off more than one hunter before Barns accepted it. The skin’s journey out of Africa – porters refusing it as too heavy, a transport company declining to carry it, weeks lost on the road from Fort Jameson to the Zambezi - reads as a small epic of logistics in its own right, and it establishes something the later gorilla story confirms: Barns was, by 1920, already a known quantity to Rowland Ward’s workshop and to the Natural History Museum’s senior staff. The Kivu gorilla he shot fifteen years later did not go to a stranger’s firm. It went to the people in his network, to Wards, to those who had already handled his elephant.
Barns finds the Kasiba Forest (also called Bugoie, on the edge of the Virunga bamboo belt) as gorilla country on the strength of local report and a photograph shown to him by a White Father at a Catholic mission. He then goes in with a single native guide armed with a spear and his own .303 rifle. The kill of a gorilla itself is described without much embellishment: a troop disturbed at close range, a chest-beating stand-off resolved by Barns crawling into the bamboo after the animal, and then two shots at point-blank range into an exposed chest. The carcass, weighed afterwards at “over 32 stone” or about 450 pounds needed twelve porters to carry it back to camp. His own men, as hungry as they were on the march, refused to eat the meat out of what Barns calls superstition, though it is at least as likely they recognised the animal as something closer to themselves than to ordinary game. The skin was cured, packed, and brought home; the research notes accompanying this collection’s own Kivu gorilla photograph trace its onward journey to Rowland Ward’s London workshop for mounting.
Ben Burbridge, an American, worked the same Kivu gorilla country in roughly the same period and published Gorilla: Tracking and Capturing the Ape-Man of Africa. His expedition differed from Barns in one significant respect: Burbridge brought several gorillas back alive, including infants captured after the shooting of an adult – the book’s illustrations include “the author and four captive gorillas” and a young animal nicknamed Bula Matadi who had, according to the captions, “severely wounded” Burbridge in the taking.
The live-capture trade in young apes, orphaned by the deliberate killing of the adults guarding them, is one of the uglier undercurrents of this entire period of natural-history collecting, and Burbridge’s book is unusually candid about how it was done.
Carl Akeley, working for the American Museum of Natural History, crossed paths with Barns directly in the Kivu region and left the most useful third-party account we have of how Barns was regarded by his contemporaries. Akeley’s 1923 book In Brightest Africa records arriving at Kisenyi to find Mrs Barns waiting for her husband, who Akeley records “was in the interior hunting gorillas for the British Museum” and describes borrowing Barns own gun-bearer, vouched for by a note of recommendation in Barns’s hand, after his own guides proved useless.
Later, mounting his own group of five gorillas for the Roosevelt African Hall in New York, Akeley records Barns visiting the studio and pronouncing himself satisfied.
Frederick Courteney Selous
Selous represents the fully institutionalised “endpoint” of the gentleman-hunter model: his collection went to the Natural History Museum in its entirety, catalogued after his death in 1921 by J. G. Dollman as The Selous Collection of Big Game, with the formal weight of “Printed by Order of the Trustees” on its title page.
His own great collecting grounds lay in different regions of Africa to the Congo – further south and east in Rhodesia, German East Africa, those regions that the covered in his African Nature Notes and Reminiscences, and he belongs in this account as the figure against whom every Congo hunter-naturalist of the period measured himself, whether they said so or not.
Barns, Burbridge, and the rest were working in Selous’s shadow, trying to produce a body of work that might earn the same institutional embrace.
London: Ward and the British Museum
The popular image of the Victorian and Edwardian collecting trade puts a single institution at its centre. That was Rowland Ward and Co. of Piccadilly. Ward was the obvious destination for any major mounted specimen with a London buyer in mind.
But it would be a mistake to let Rowland Ward stand alone as the destination for the Congo’s treasures, because the more interesting and more specific connection, for Barns at least, runs to the British Museum (Natural History) directly, and it runs through two men: Sir E. Ray Lankester, who as the Museum’s director in 1905 commissioned the elephant that established Barns’s professional reputation, and Sir Harry Johnston, who had no formal museum position but functioned as the era’s clearing-house of Congo natural-history knowledge. Johnston had crossed into the Congo Forest himself in 1900, he had corresponded with Stanley and with the missionary George Grenfell about gorilla sightings on the upper river for over a decade before Barns ever set out.
It is Johnston’s introduction to Barns’ Wonderland, not anything in Barns’s own narrative, that places the gorilla specimen in its proper institutional context: he identifies the large specimen Barns shot as belonging to the same species as “the magnificent specimen now exhibited at the British Museum,” obtained by the German engineer the British literature of the period called “Oscar Beringer”. In fact this was Captain Robert von Beringe of the German colonial forces, whose 1902 shooting of two gorillas on Mount Sabinyo had first brought the eastern mountain species to the attention of European science, and after whom it was formally named Gorilla beringei by the Berlin zoologist Paul Matschie. Akeley’s own account confirms that Barns was understood by his contemporaries to be collecting specifically “for the British Museum,” not merely for a private patron, which suggests an institutional arrangement somewhere between Joicey’s entomological funding and a more formal Natural History Museum commission.
One further piece of evidence ties Rowland Ward’s firm to the Congo material more systematically than any single gorilla or elephant commission could. In 1908 the firm itself published, under its own imprint at “The Jungle,” 167 Piccadilly, Richard Lydekker’s own The Game Animals of Africa. This was a reference work attempting, as Lydekker’s preface puts it, to do for the continent’s fauna what an earlier volume had done for the game of British India.
Rowland Ward’s business was never simply mounting trophies for drawing rooms: the firm functioned as a genuine clearing-house for zoological knowledge about the Congo and the rest of colonial Africa, with its own imprint putting that knowledge into systematic, citable form. This was what Ward excelled at; he was a master at creating himself and his firm as the de facto reference point.
The treasures of the Congo revealed
The roll call of Congo specimens that reached London and other Western collections in this period is an extraordinary scientific harvest, however uncomfortable the truth is.
The Gorilla is the obvious centrepiece, and the eastern Congo yielded two distinct waves of discovery rather than one.
Von Beringe’s 1902 specimens proved the mountain population as scientifically distinct from the West African gorilla long familiar from Paul du Chaillu’s 1850s accounts;
Barns’ 1920 Kivu specimen, alongside Burbridge’s and later Akeley’s own series for the American Museum, extended and complicated that picture through the 1920s, by which point the animal’s range, diet, and temperament were finally being described from direct observation rather than from frightened porters’ folklore and the inflated “ferocious monster” tradition that had defined the description of the species since du Chaillu’s accounts.
The Okapi belongs to the same Congo moment, discovered by the same Sir Harry Johnston whose introduction frames Barns’ gorilla, though by an entirely different route.
Sir Harry Johnston, as Special Commissioner in Uganda, intervened in 1900 to rescue a group of Ituri Pygmies. They had been kidnapped by a German showman intending to show them at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
The rescued men repaid Johnston with information about the Okapi, and eventually with strips of striped hide. So a complete skin and skull, obtained via a Swedish officer in Belgian service at the Mbeni station in 1901, reached the British Museum, where Sir E. Ray Lankester, the same Lankester who would commission Barns’ elephant four years later, recognised the animal as being no relative of the horse at all, but as an unsuspected forest-dwelling cousin of the Giraffe, and named the new genus Okapia in Johnston’s honour. The okapi’s discovery is, in other words, inseparable from an act of human rescue that was itself only necessary because the same forest and the same Pygmy population were already being treated as exhibition material by other Europeans.
Beyond gorilla and okapi, Barns’ own catalogue of Congo natural history runs to a long list of lesser known but genuinely significant finds including:
- a probable new subspecies or species of forest Elephant, distinct from the savanna animal, observed across the eastern Congo right up toward Lake Albert, including reports of unusually small “bamboo” elephants in the Bugoie forest;
- new and undescribed species of butterfly and moth, collected for Joicey’s Hill Museum in numbers Barns describes as exceeding his expectations despite persistently foul weather;
- the white-headed lion and a lake-region antelope
- assorted reptile and bird material that fills out the natural-history chapters of Wonderland without ever quite matching the gorilla and the okapi for public attention.
Lydekker’s Game Animals of Africa, published the previous decade by Rowland Ward’s company, had already been quietly building the same picture from the trade’s accumulated specimens rather than from any single expedition: an elephant race he names Elephas africanus albertensis, known locally as the forest elephant and distinguished by unusually long, slender tusks, ranging the Semliki and the country west of Lake Albert - precisely the territory that Barns himself would cross a decade later , and a separate, still only provisionally identified Pygmy race somewhere in Congo territory, on the evidence of a single immature specimen too incomplete to describe in full.
None of this carries the same cultural weight today as the gorilla, but it represents the bulk of what these expeditions were actually for, that the gorilla made the lecture circuit and the newspaper notice, but the steady accumulation of smaller specimens was the real, grinding economic logic of the trade, paid for case by case, skin by skin, through firms like Rowland Ward’s and museums like the one at South Kensington.
Exotic specimens were not confined to the animal kingdom.
It would be a serious failure of honesty to end the inventory there, because the Congo’s “exotic specimens” were never confined to the animal kingdom, and the era did not pretend otherwise – it simply didn’t trouble itself with the distinction in the way a modern reader instinctively does.
The clearest and most damning instance is recorded in the early 20th century when James Harrison of Brandesburton Hall in Yorkshire, a military man, explorer, and big-game hunter became the first European to document several Pygmy tribal groups in the Ituri Forest.
In 1905 he brought six Pygmies back to England to live at Brandesburton Hall. They stayed for nearly three years, and they were actually exhibited at the London Hippodrome and at Olympia. Incredibly, they were also paraded through the House of Commons and Harrison even built them a glasshouse intended to replicate equatorial conditions! The estate’s wider collection of specimens including a white rhinoceros horn, Abyssinian zebras, a hippopotamus, a Congo buffalo, a Nubian ibex actually sat alongside them as part of the same undifferentiated trophy display. The arrangement was treated, at the time, as a matter of public curiosity rather than the scandal it was.
The shocking thing is that Brandesburton did not happen in isolation. The official guide to the Congo Free State’s own section at the 1897 Brussels-Tervuren exhibition records that one branch of the organising committee organises the construction and staffing of several “native villages,” These included a children’s settlement modelled on Abbé Van Impe’s mission school at Gyseghem, two further villages representing the Bangala and Mayombe peoples, and a detachment of the Force Publique, were all installed in the park at Tervuren as living exhibits alongside mounted animals, ivory, and ethnographic objects catalogued elsewhere in the same guide.
Modern research by the museum that grew out of this exhibition — the institution at Tervuren is today known as the Royal Museum for Central Africa, has established that 267 Congolese men, women, and children were brought to Belgium for the display, housed behind fencing in three constructed villages, and that seven of them died of pneumonia and influenza during the exhibition’s run and were buried at Tervuren.
The 1897 guide itself, naturally, frames all of this as straightforward colonial administration, filed in its index alongside sections on geology, ivory, and rubber; it gives no more weight to the villages than to the display of Congo buffalo horns a few pages later.
It is difficult to read the Brandesburton story without making the comparison to Johnston’s okapi rescue. In 1900 Johnston had personally intervened to stop Ituri Pygmies being trafficked to the Paris Exposition by a German showman; five years later an English country gentleman did, with full publicity and no apparent objection from anyone who mattered, very much the thing Johnston had interrupted only domesticated into a Yorkshire stately home instead of a foreign fairground. This seems to have made it respectable rather than scandalous. Brandesburton was not an aberration, and neither was it simply an English eccentricity transplanted from the Congo. It was the same logic Tervuren had already put on an industrial, state-sponsored footing two years before Harrison’s Pygmies arrived: a forest and its inhabitants treated as a single undifferentiated category of resource, to be brought home, exhibited, and in Tervuren’s case sometimes buried, by whoever had the means to arrange the transport.
This matters for any honest account of “exotic discovery” in the Congo because it exposes the unstated assumption sitting underneath every gorilla skin and okapi hide that made it to a London museum case: that the territory and everything in it —mineral, animal, and human — was available for extraction on the same terms, distinguished only by which department of a metropolitan institution eventually received the crate.
Any history of exotic discovery in the Belgian Congo that leaves the fact of the Pygmies in a footnote has not told the whole story of what, exactly, was being discovered, or by whom, or for whose benefit.
The animals, at least, did not know they were being collected. The people did.
This image is taken from The Wonderland of the Eastern Congo by T. Alexander Barns
The Pygmies of Brandesburton Hall
This article is part of the Before the Glass section. Explore more research here →
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