The first photographic campaign in support of human rights

Alice Seeley Harris/ J.H Harris, Alice Seeley with a large group of Congolese children. Congo Free State c.1904.

Image by Courtesy Anti-Slavery International/ Autograph ABP

Congo was the subject of “probably the first photographic campaign in support of human rights”, according to the catalogue of a haunting exhibition at London’s Rivington Place.

The pictures exposing atrocities – including hacking of limbs – committed under King Leopold 11’s regime were by a missionary, Alice Seeley Harris, in the early 1900s. They provoked an outcry, fundamentally shifted public awareness of Belgium’s bestiality, and ultimately forced the king to relinquish his absolute rule over the Congo Free State.

Many photojournalists must wish their exposures could bring about such significant change.

A fascinating catalogue for an earlier exhibition by the charity Autograph ABP suggests that the outrage caused by the photos was submerged by the even bigger killings of the First World War and by the new propaganda need to martial support for tiny, brave Belgium against the nasty Germans.

The writer of that piece, Sharon Sliwinski, quoted another author as saying “the Allied press even (falsely) reported that Germans were cutting off the hands and feet of Belgian children”.

In ‘When harmony went to hell’, Congo Dialogues: Alice Seeley Harris and Sammy Baloji, Autograph and Rivington have performed an important task in reminding us of these historic pictures. They deserve further praise for showing Harris’ black and white shots together with work by Congolese photographer Sammy Baloji, who “uses photography as a medium to interrogate current political concerns with reference to the past.”

His photos include townscapes of rubbish-strewn streets, colourful homes, offices stripped to their barest essentials.

It’s an exhibition best absorbed slowly, or you may miss, for example, the mirrored images of the great white hunter sitting bravely behind his dead lion and the everyday black salesman with a crocodile draped over his shoulder, the snout pushed forward in lifelike pose. Or the sadness of the undistinguished pile that marks the execution site of Congo’s independence Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, and two of his ministers, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito.

Baloji also has a work based on a 1931 quote from a Belgian engineer about the “neutral zone that avoids contact between whites and blacks. An almost empty area measuring a minimum of 500 meters separates their two areas of settlement, this distance corresponding to that which a malaria-carrying mosquito will normally cover.

“The neutral zone thus divides the lives of blacks from those of whites: it keeps the latter safe from the source of malaria, and from the rowdy activities of blacks, so creating completely independent living conditions for each race … it is a true cordon sanitaire, placed at a right angle to the prevailing winds.”

Once again, this depravity, as so often in contemporary history, is meticulously recorded.

And once again, I find it impossible to look at colonial-era photographs of Belgian atrocities in the Congo without thinking about their relationship to the activities and atrocities of the country’s current warlords, homegrown and foreign.

·         ‘When harmony went to hell’, Congo Dialogues: Alice Seeley Harris and Sammy Baloji is at Rivington Place, EC2A 3BA, until 7 March. The exhibition is free. It is presented by Autograph ABP, a charity that works internationally in photography, cultural identity, race, representation and human rights.

+ 1 February, Curator's exhibition tour, 2-3pm, free