The Abir Congo Company (founded as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company and later known as the Compagnie du Congo Belge) was a company that exploited natural rubber in the Congo Free State, the private property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The company was founded with British and Belgian capital and was based in Belgium. By 1898 there were no longer any British shareholders and the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company changed its name to the Abir Congo Company and changed its residence for tax purposes to the Free State. The company was granted a large concession in the north of the country and the rights to tax the inhabitants. This tax was taken in the form of rubber obtained from a relatively rare rubber vine. The collection system revolved around a series of trade posts along the two main rivers in the concession. Each post was commanded by a European agent and manned with armed sentries to enforce taxation and punish any rebels.
Abir enjoyed a boom through the late 1890s, by selling a kilogram of rubber in Europe for up to 10 fr which had cost them just 1.35 fr. However, this came at a cost to the human rights of those who could not pay the tax with imprisonment, flogging and other corporal punishment recorded. Abir's failure to suppress destructive harvesting methods and to maintain rubber plantations meant that the vines became increasingly scarce and by 1904 profits began to fall. During the early 1900s famine and disease spread across the concession, a natural disaster judged by some to have been exacerbated by Abir's operations, further hindering rubber collection. The 1900s also saw widespread rebellions against Abir's rule in the concession and attempts at mass migration to the French Congo or southwards. These events typically resulted in Abir dispatching an armed force to restore order.
A series of reports into the operation of the Free State were issued starting with the British Consul, Roger Casement's Casement Report and followed by reports commissioned by the Free State and Leopold II. These detailed unlawful killings and other abuses made by Abir and Leopold II was embarrassed into instituting reforms. These began with the appointment of American Richard Mohun by Leopold II as director of Abir. However, rubber exports continued to fall and rebellions increased, resulting in the Free State assuming control of the concession in 1906. Abir continued to receive a portion of profits from rubber exports and in 1911 was refounded as a rubber plantation harvesting company: the Compagnie du Congo Belge. The later history of the company is unknown but it was still active in 1939.
Origins
The Congo Free State was a corporate state in Central Africa privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium founded and recognised by the Berlin Conference of 1885.. What would later become Abir Company territory was the land between the Lopori and Maringa river basins, tributaries of the Congo River, in the north of the state. The local populace here were yam and cassava farmers who engaged in trade with river fishermen and pygmy hunters.. In 1885 a force of the Manyema people, followers of Tippu Tip, the Swahili-Zanzibari slave trader, arrived at the head of the Lopori River from Stanley Falls. They took hostages from nearby villages to ransom in return for ivory. By 1892 they had enrolled local people into their army and controlled the entire eastern half of the basin.. The Free State was concerned by this development and in 1889 had enacted the Monopoly Act which declared that all products in the area were to be under their jurisdiction alone. The Free State also began a campaign to drive the slavers, traders and the Manyema from the region, the first stage of which was the establishment of a supply post at Basankusu in May 1890. The campaign would be long but eventually successful and the entire basin was under Free State control by 1898.
The Free State began using its new-found control of the region to levy taxes from the local population, gathered using similar hostage tactics to the Manyema.. The taxes were initially collected in the form of ivory but when ivory supplies began to run low the Free State switched to natural rubber. The rubber was collected from Landolphia owariensis gentilii rubber vines which were relatively scarce in the area with an average frequency of around one plant in each acre.. The rubber was gathered by tapping a rubber vine and placing a pot beneath to collect the latex which could be used in the production of rubber for the European market. If the vines were a long distance from the ground the gatherer would have had to climb a tree, tap the plant and hold the collecting pot beneath the vine, possibly for an entire day.. Hence rubber collection was a labour-intensive process which made it unpopular with the villagers. Indeed, they preferred the Manyema to the Free State authorities as the Manyema only took low bulk, high value items such as ivory or slaves because of the long distances from their homeland whereas the state, with its steamboat transports, could afford to make the people harvest the low value high bulk rubber. By September 1892 the Free State was using its military forces to attack and occupy villages in the Lulonga and Maringa river valleys to expand its tax base.
Establishment
King Leopold decided to give concessions of his territory to private companies who would then collect the rubber tax and export it. With this in mind he approached British Colonel John Thomas North, who had made a fortune through speculating on Chilean nitrates, for capital with which to fund a concession company. North agreed and provided £40,000 of the 250,000 Belgian francs' (fr) initial investment.. As a result, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (informally known as Abir) was established at Antwerp on 6 August 1892.. The company was divided into 2,000 shares of 500 fr value each. British investors (including North) held 1880 shares whilst Belgians held the remaining 120 shares. In addition to the 2,000 ordinary shares there were 2,000 "actions" which entitled the holder to a share of the profits after a 6% dividend was paid to the shareholders. The Congo Free State was the holder of 1,000 of these actions. In return Abir received exclusive rights to all forest products from the Maringa-Lopori basin for 30 years and all land within twenty miles of eight designated posts and had police powers within the limits of the concession. The Free State also had to supply guns, ammunition and soldiers to help establish the posts. In preparation two State employees were ordered to establish a headquarters for Abir at Basankusu but this was barely begun before the local villagers rebelled against State rule and killed both men.
The concession provided to Abir lay in the north of the country and was one of nine commercial concession areas established by Leopold in the Congo Free State. The concession was bounded to the north by the Congo River and the Société Anversoise concession, to the east by the Lomami River and the Lomami Company concession and to the west by the Lulonga Company concession which straddled the Lulonga River, into which the Maringa and Lopori flowed. To the south lay the Crown Domain (Domaine de la Couronne), the private property of Leopold, which comprised the best land in the Free State and was the richest in rubber..
The Abir concession included the Bolombo river, Yekokora river and Lomako river which were tributaries of the two main rivers. Each concession operated independently and exploited its own area commercially. The other main rubber companies in the Congo Free State were the Société Anversoise and the Lulonga Company but Abir was the largest in the country.
Abir re-established their headquarters at Basankusu in 1893 and its position at the confluence of the Maringa and Lopori allowed Abir to expand along the rivers and their tributaries, establishing new posts along the way. Progress was slow as the Free State's activities had made the population in the west hostile to colonisation and the east remained in the control of the Manyema and the Zanzibari slavers.. The company's first post on the Lopori River had to be relocated because of threats from locals and rubber collection at Befori began only after a series of bloody conflicts between the villagers and Abir's men..
Post system
The post system was the cornerstone of Abir's commercial activity. Each post was run by one or two European agents to oversee local operations. The salary for an agent was 1,800 fr per year, sometimes increasing to 2,100 fr in the second year, and the standard contract period was three years. Agents also received 60 fr of trade goods each month with which to buy their food.. Despite the low wages the 2% commission that each agent received on rubber production made up the majority of the agents' pay, for example the agent at Bongandanga received 16,800 fr in commission in 1903. As a result, there were many applicants for each post and agents were hired with the expectation that they would increase production by 0.5–3 tons per month. This was implemented by extending the post to include more villages or increasing the quotas expected from the villagers, often indirectly forcing women and children to harvest the rubber as well. If production fell below the quota agents made up the shortfall in lost profits to the company from their pay. Each post consisted of a residence for the agent, barracks for armed sentries and sheds for rubber drying and storage, all built using labour conscripted from the villagers. A typical post employed ten African workmen to sort and dry the rubber, seven servants for the agent and thirty canoemen for local river transport. These were paid around 36.5 fr per year in goods, commonly 5 kg of salt, one blanket, five machetes and trade goods to the value of 6.35 fr. The post system was managed by the Director of Congo Operations at the central office in Basankusu. He was assisted in his job of keeping production up and expenses down by the only Free State employee in the concession, the commander of the police. The police commander was in charge of suppressing revolts and punishing villages which dropped below the quota. He had access to a large force of men and river steamers which were stationed at Basankusu and could redeploy quickly to the site of large scale rebellions. Effective police commanders would receive bonuses paid for by Abir.
Each post maintained a census of all the males from the nearby villages to implement the tax which was initially set at 4 kg of dry rubber (8 kg of wet rubber) per man per fortnight. Each post had a force of 65–100 "village sentries", often ex-slaves armed with muzzle loading rifles, which resided in the villages to enforce taxation. The sentries were kept at the expense of the villagers and often used flogging, imprisonment or execution to keep production up. Sentries who failed to enforce the quota or made mistakes could be fined up to half their salary or fired, imprisoned or flogged. In addition to the village sentries were "post sentries" who were 25–80 men armed with modern, breech-loading Albini rifles who lived on the post and were used to punish villages and suppress rebellions. Sentries were paid similar wages to the post workmen and despite the strict working conditions it was a popular job as it offered a position of power over the other villagers. The sentries had their choice of food, women and luxury items and many left after a one-year term with five or six wives which they then sold.