You don't notice them at first. In the center of the photo, in a beautiful black and white with high contrast, there is a man, crouched on a threshold. An African. Slender, very long legs, he sits absorbed. One foot in the doorway, the other down. The look down, in front of him. To the left, behind him, standing on the ground behind a thorny succulent plant in a pot, perhaps an agave, perhaps an aloe, two frowning kids look straight at the camera. Further away, beyond one of the palm trees that give the image an immediate exotic touch, a child. The photo appears to have been taken from an interior.
The right side of the photo is empty: grass, which in black and white is a jagged expanse of silver, and behind what could be a dirt road. On the threshold, just where the man in the center of the photo is looking, there is something. Two small dark spots. The eye, even today, takes a while to transmit information to the brain: the human race, says a verse of the poet TS Eliot, “cannot bear too much reality”. It takes an effort for the information to arrive: those dark objects are a foot and a hand. A small foot, a small hand.
We know many things about this photo. First of all we know when and where it was taken: the year 1904, in what four years later this photo and others like this would become the Belgian Congo. At the time, however, it was still a private colony belonging to the king of Belgium, Leopold II: a huge concentration camp, established in 1879 and internationally recognized in 1884-85 with the grotesque name of the Congo Free State. The natives were obliged to collect the precious rubber on behalf of the European ruler and master, and those who did not obey orders were subjected to corporal punishment. Mutilations were the most frequent.
The man in the center of the image, we still know, was called Nsala. The foot and hand were her daughter's little foot and hand. His name was Boali and he was five years old. His father, Nsala, had not reached the minimum daily amount of rubber to be harvested. The child was killed after the amputation of a hand and a foot. Nsala's wife, Boali's mother, was also killed.
The photo was taken by a woman who with her Kodak machine changed the history of that country by slamming the horror of western colonization in Africa before the eyes of the world, eyes that, as still today, struggled to convey those information.
She was called Alice Seeley when she was maiden, but she went down in history with her married surname: Alice Harris. He was English, and last year we celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth (24th May) and the 50th anniversary of his death (24th November). Alice, a missionary, was in Congo with her husband from 1898 to 1901. The building on which Nsala sat at the time the photo we are talking about was taken was the house where the British couple were staying, in the village of Baringa : here, said the same photographer, two men brought the macabre finds, wrapped in a bundle of leaves. Alice Harris suggested that Nsala pose for that photo. The man accepted. That photo changed history.
The British missionary and photographer was not only able to bear to see those horrors but also to document them with her extraordinary and terrifying photos. Photos that, initially published in a magazine, the Harris spouses took around the world, in a traveling exhibition that, in the United States alone, had 200 exhibitions in about fifty cities.
King Leopold II, who escaped an attack organized against him by an Italian anarchist named Gennaro Rubino, in 1908 was forced by the Belgian parliament to cede control of the Congolese colony to the state: the African country, since then, has been called Congo Belgian. Alice and her husband visited him in 1911-12 and were delighted to see how the conditions of the natives had improved. In 1933 the Harrises were knighted. Alice, until her death, which caught her at the age of one hundred and a half, always refused to be called Lady.