FRANCAISAnti-Slavery International - History
1870-1889
-1884-1885, Germany: under pretence of fighting slavery, the Berlin conference divides up the Black continent between the European colonial powers. The abolitionist cause is thus used as an alibi for the colonisation of Africa. Hence in Britain, the BFASS supported the conquest of Sudan by General Charles Gordon (1833-1885), who rose an army of slaves to fight against slave trade!
-1888-1890, Belgium: the BFASS, which initiated in Britain a parliamentary debate to incite governments to organise and finance an international conference on slavery, brings off an important victory in 1890, with the signature in Brussels of the first treaty planning to fight against the slave trade in the African hinterland. Under the influence of Henry Richard Fox Bourne (1837-1909), the organisation’s new secretary general since 1889, the Society changes its focus to the exploitation of indigenous peoples like the Indians in Peru. This new strategy leads the BFASS to move closer to the Aborigines Protection Society (APS). Founded in 1839 by Quakers, this Society had paradoxically received the support of King Leopold II of Belgium, celebrated at the Berlin Conference in 1885 as a philanthropist concerned with fighting slavery and civilising the African continent through his International African Association. Now the Congo Free State, created in 1884 and placed under the personal sovereignty of the king, had become the private domain of the companies who had won concessions there and who starved and decimated the natives through forced labour. So the APS had to distance itself from Leopold II and even ended up campaigning against him with the BFASS and the Congo Reform Association, set up by the journalist Edmund Dene Morel (1873-1924) who had gathered evidence of the crimes committed in the Congo Free State.
