Red Rubber

My two last welly purchases, though snazzy in appearance, turned out to be useless at what they were supposed to do. This time I went for classic Dunlops. A name to inspire confidence, and, like Michelin, Goodyear and Firestone synonymous with the rubber industry that has underpinned human existence for  over a century.


John Boyd Dunlop was a Scottish vet with a practice in Northern Ireland when in 1888 he had the idea of cushioning the wheels of his 10 year old son’s trike by fixing inflatable rubber tubes around the metal rims.  (It was not for nothing that early bikes were known as bone-shakers.) The other kids laughed – but not for long, and so the pneumatic tyre was born. Soon every cyclist wanted them and with the bicycle craze at its height there was an immediate boom in the market for raw rubber. Within a few years the demand increased astronomically as motor vehicles took over the roads, each one using pneumatic tyres. Rubber manufacturing became a major industry, its products indispensable not only for transport but for a whole range of human needs (medical, military, domestic, sexual…)


I’d never given this any thought until I found the book Red Rubber by E.D. Morel in a second-hand bookshop. It was first published in 1906 but mine is a 1919 edition, coming just at the end of the 20 year period during which rubber was extracted from the wild in the two great river basins of the Congo and the Amazon. (In 1920 rubber plantations were established in Asia and a different sort of operation ensued.) Sourcing wild rubber from these two immense areas of forest on either side of the Atlantic, I discovered, brought huge profits to investors in the companies formed to undertake the production, but along with it came exploitation, corruption, brutality, atrocity, genocide and bloodshed on a scale barely credible.


Of the many villains that can be fingered, the blackest must surely be King Leopold of the Belgians who, with the assistance of the unscrupulous adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, laid claim to a vast area of central Africa, naming  it the Congo Free State. Through a system of forced labour controlled by King Leopold’s private army the indigenous people were forced to extract the raw rubber under extreme duress, the women held hostage while the men were sent miles into the forest to tap the vines, process the raw material and carry it out in weights barely tenable. Their hands were chopped off if they failed to meet the quota, as a message to others.  Famine and disease ensued as the entire social fabric of the forest people disintegrated. 


E.D. Morel was a lowly shipping clerk in Liverpool when he began to wonder about the shipments of rubber arriving from the Congo and why the vessels set sail again loaded with guns and ammunition. He followed the story and blew the whistle, turning journalist and campaigner along the way. Right-thinking, left-leaning people and famous names became involved and outraged until the British government appointed a well-regarded civil servant named Roger Casement to investigate. His report on the atrocities he discovered would be instrumental in turning world opinion against King Leopold and his private fiefdom in the Congo was rescinded.


After illuminating Congo’s heart of darkness (he got to know Joseph Conrad there) Casement was dispatched on a similar mission to the Amazon basin of South America. Another whistle blower, a young American engineer and adventurer named Walt Hardenburg who had travelled south to seek work on the Panama Canal, happened to land up in the Peruvian valley of the Putumayo,  empire of the ruthless rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana. His rule of terror took a dreadful toll of the native population who were forced by sadistic overseers to collect huge quantities of rubber on pain of torture, rape, starvation and death. Women and children were enslaved and brutalised. Some tribes never recovered but vanished into the jungle to dwindle away in isolation.


Subsequently the Peruvian Rubber Company’s activities were brought to a halt following Casement’s report and many of its local employees were convicted, although Arana himself escaped prosecution and died wealthy, as did the British directors of the company. Walt Hardenburg wrote a book The Devil's Paradise and  never returned to the USA. ED Morel  opposed the First World war as a pacifist and served a prison sentence for it.  Roger Casement (surely overdue for a biopic!) was so affected by the sights he had witnessed and by the poisonous consequences of colonialism that he morphed from a British diplomat of great distinction (he was knighted) into a passionate supporter of Irish independence. In 1915 he enlisted German help to land in southern Ireland shortly before the Easter Rising but was arrested, tried and hanged as a traitor in Pentonville prison in August 1916. A huge public campaign for clemency on the strength of his humanitarian record was scuppered by the release of his private diaries which revealed him to be an active homosexual. Whether these documents were fact, fantasy or forgery is still the subject of debate.  In 1965, fifty years after his execution, Casement was given a state funeral in Dublin and  his remains were re-buried with full military honours.


The Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a maelstrom of oppression, human rights abuses, war crimes, violence, rape and bloodshed, where the heart of darkness continues to beat. Some of the 'uncontacted bands of forest dwellers deep in Amazonia are the remnants of the indigenous slave labour force whose societies were ravaged by the rubber company's activities , Others, more in touch with the modern world, are today fighting to prevent oil and gas extraction from further damaging their environment and their way of life.Rubber is no longer produced in either of these two regions. Indeed most of the wild rubber trees were destroyed by over-extraction.

 If you have read this far you may wish to explore the history of rubber in greater detail by searching online for any of individuals whose names I have mentioned. However there a short piece on the Gongo story here and the Putumayo situation here.