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American Imperialist

Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa.
 
Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the Congo Free State alike. Without men like him, Africa’s history might have unfolded very differently. How did an ordinary son of a Washington bookseller become the agent of American corporate greed and European imperial ambition? Why did he choose to act in ways that ranged from thoughtless and amoral to criminal and unforgivable?
 
With unblinking clarity and precision, historian Arwen P. Mohun interrogates the life and actions of her great-grandfather in American Imperialist. She seeks not to excuse the man known as Dorsey but to understand how individual ambition and imperial lust fueled each other, to catastrophic ends. Ultimately, she offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather’s pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans.

328 pages | 17 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023

Biography and Letters

History: American History, Discoveries and Exploration

Reviews

"Compelling. . . . This page-turner should encourage more public interest in other US imperialists, including Henry Sanford, who was instrumental in founding the Free State. One also hopes that it will stimulate more work on the African collective memory of such imperialists, to assess the lasting consequences of their nefarious actions."

Times Literary Supplement

“Mohun further pulls back the veil on American collusion with King Leopold in his brutal rule over the Congo Free State. More specifically, she exposes the ways in which men like her great-grandfather participated in the violent subjugation of African peoples and the seizure of African lands to enrich the coffers of the Belgian monarch. In telling her ancestor’s story, taking the reader from the shores of Zanzibar to Boma, Mohun reveals how Dorsey’s time in Africa embodied the ‘remarkable influence of American money and expertise’ in imperial ventures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Jeannette Eileen Jones, author of '"In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936"

“When a historian begins to untangle family myths, very interesting things emerge. Remembered as an ‘African explorer,’ the man who was simply called ‘Dorsey’ was representative, a stereotype brought to life. But Mohun’s deft and delicate recovery of a family ancestor reveals a more complicated person, at once desperate and anxious and confident, his past precarious and his future uncertain. Herein lies the all-too-human story of how one ordinary person, buffeted by the winds of change, seeks refuge in the service of the American empire and becomes its most perfect avatar.”

Matthew Guterl, author of 'Skinfolk: A Memoir'

American Imperialist is an engrossing and well-researched book that effectively draws on manuscripts, government archival sources, and contemporary print media. Richard Dorsey Mohun, the subject of the book and the author’s great grandfather, is a fascinating and little-known figure whose career instructively points to the ways that a bureaucrat’s work can be deeply entangled in the project of US imperialism.”

Ira Dworkin, author of 'Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State'

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Prologue
1: African Connections
2: Africa in Mind
3: The Journey Up-Country
4: Arab Encounters
5: The Messy Business of Hero Making
6: A Hero’s Welcome
7: The Consular Life
8: Infrastructures of Empire
9: Facts on the Ground
10: The Truth about the Congo
11: Manifest Destiny
After Africa and Conclusion
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Excerpt

He’d never intended to work for the Belgian king. But intentions aren’t actions. Still, a few years earlier, he had turned down Leopold II’s first job offer. The accusatory voices of journalists, friends, and reformers reinforced his reluctance. He recognized the truths in their dark stories. The king’s eloquent promises of free trade and an end to slavery amounted to a clever ploy, strategies designed to appease his European and American critics. Leopold’s real goals were profit and control. The king’s priorities mirrored those of many of the men who found their way into his private African colony, the Congo Free State. 

During a stint as the US Trade Agent in Congo, he’d seen with his own eyes unfettered greed and cruelty as Europeans scrambled to enrich themselves. More than seen, really. He’d done things that he now preferred to keep quiet: burned villages, brutalized men in his employ, stood by while innocent people were killed for acts they had not committed. 

Since then, he’d married, become a father, gained some prudence. He had not, however, mustered the courage to completely cut ties with Leopold. Now he was a breadwinner with what felt like limited options. The financial security of a multiyear contract would be a relief. Surely, family responsibilities mattered more than taking a vaguely humanitarian stand by avoiding any more involvement with the Congo Free State, as his friend Roger Casement had done. If he was honest with himself, he also itched for a challenge. Perhaps he thought he could do better than the other men in the king’s employ. The decision was made: work for Leopold in Africa. 

 This is how I imagine my great-grandfather, Richard Dorsey Mohun, known as Dorsey, in the spring of 1897: a tall, narrow-shouldered man hunched over his desk, weighing his options. His sweat-soaked white shirt hangs limply beneath his stiff collar. The steady pounding of monsoon rains unleashes a torrent down the street outside. He doesn’t notice. By now the discomforts of tropical places seem all too familiar. He has spent the past few years in this job, which he now disdains, sitting in the US consular office in Zanzibar’s Stone Town, writing reports and dealing with the problems of stranded sailors and dwindling American trade. Rich lunches and rounds of drinks at the English Club have softened the boredom but widened his girth. Multiple bouts of malaria bloat his features. He is weary. In photographs from the time, he looks older than his thirty-three years. 

He is not alone in the consular office. Noho bin Omari is there. Dorsey does not understand Swahili or Gujarati or most of the dozen or so languages that echo through Stone Town. He relies on Noho to translate, not just words but meanings. Like many of the Africans with whom Mohun worked, Noho’s voice is elusive. Perhaps his descendants continue to tell Noho’s story. Perhaps the American consul doesn’t matter at all in how they remember their ancestor’s life.1 Ironically, Noho bin Omari’s name survives in US records because Dorsey’s successor initially suspected Noho was a fiction. He believed Dorsey pocketed the money provided by the State Department for translation and invented Noho to cover his tracks. That was before Noho presented himself to the new consul with two years of receipts in hand. 

If you dig into the past, you’d better be prepared for what you find there. Initially, I was ill prepared to contend with an ancestor who in-controvertibly and knowingly chose a path along the wrong side of history. I also did not imagine that poking around in family history would yield an extraordinary story of one man’s involvement in one of the most notorious episodes in the European scramble for Africa: the short and brutal tenure of the Congo Free State, an enormous private colony in the center of the continent. Or that his story would reveal the remarkable influence of American money and expertise in the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it did. As a result, this book is a history of how several generations of Americans shoved their way around Africa, sometimes meaning well but too often leaving a trail of destruction behind them.

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