Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber Company

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.

Boom and refounding

Abir collected 70 tons of dried rubber in 1895, rising to 410 tons in 1898 by which time it had eleven operational posts. At the same time the price of rubber also increased from 6.30 to 6.50 fr per kilogram in 1894 to 8.04–10.00 fr per kilogram in 1898. Abir's costs in 1897 amounted to 0.25 fr per kilogram to purchase the rubber from the collectors (in lieu of tax), 0.4 fr for transportation, 0.25 in export duty paid to the Congo Free State and 0.45 for storage for a total cost of 1.35 fr per kilogram. In the same year Abir could sell on the rubber in Europe for up to 10 fr per kilogram. Abir's profits rose with the increasing quantity and price of rubber, for the first two years (1892–94) the company recorded a total profit of 131,340 fr, this had increased almost twentyfold by 1898 when they recorded a 2,482,697 fr profit just for one year. As a result, the dividend paid in 1898 was 1,100 fr per 500 fr share. These profits were made in spite of increasing costs due to the doubling of export duty in 1892 and the construction of the Leopoldville-Matadi railway in 1894 which increased the cost of moving rubber to the coast to 0.63 fr per kilo, more than the entire trip to Antwerp had taken in 1892.

The Abir Company entered liquidation in 1898 as a means of tax avoidance and to escape Belgian business regulations. It was immediately refounded in the Congo Free State as the Abir Congo Company. The name was no longer an acronym of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and was instead a name in its own right. This change was because the company was no longer supported by British investment, partly because Colonel North had died and his heirs had sold their shares. The new company had a simpler shares system with just 2,000 shares (of 14,300 fr value each) divided between investors. The Free State held 1,000 of these shares. As Abir was now tax resident in the Congo the Free State received 2% of their profits through corporation tax, in addition to the 0.5 fr per kilogram export tax. All initial capital investments had been amortised by 1899 along with material expenses in Africa and property and equipment expenses in Antwerp. In 1900 Abir reached the boundaries of its concession which covered eight million hectares. The next three years were spent filling gaps between existing posts and by 1903 Abir controlled 49 posts, managed by 58 agents. 1900 was Abir's most profitable year and the Congo Free State's shares and taxes provided 2,567,880.50 fr of revenue for the state, 10% of that year's total. The share dividend in 1900 was 2,100 fr, in the early 1890s it had been around 2 fr per share.

The Free State was happy to take over Abir's concession as the State had built up sufficient income to be able to afford to run tax collections by itself. In addition the Free State was embarrassed by the continuing allegations of atrocities caused by Abir and it could institute reforms more effectively if it were in control. Leopold authorised the takeover in the hope that the Free State would be able to resume rubber collection and exports and on 12 September 1906 an agreement was signed which stated that all profits from the concession would go to the Free State in return for payment to Abir of 4.5 fr per kilogram of rubber harvested until 1952. Leopold told Abir's shareholders that he expected exports to return to normal levels within two years. To restore control the Free State dispatched a force of 650 men and 12 European officers under the command of Inspector Gerard to the concession. They returned four months later, leaving some areas still rebellious and with news that there were almost no rubber plants left. As a result, the quotas expected per man were cut to just 6 kg of rubber per year, with some struggling to find even that much. State income was therefore negligible whilst the costs of controlling the concession continued to increase. Throughout this time Abir was still making a profit by taking its share of the rubber exported for almost no expenditure.

By 1901 there were so few rubber plants left in the concession that the Free State authorities granted permission for the villagers to cut down the remaining plants and grind their bark to retrieve the rubber. Once this process was completed the rubber tax was abolished. The Abir company merged with the Société Anversoise in May 1911 to form the Compagnie du Congo Belge and now focussed on the management of rubber plantations and the gathering of rubber from them. However, later that year it agreed with the Belgian government to reduce the size of its operations and its monopoly status. In July 1911 it was banned from collecting rubber within the confines of its old concession for 18 months and was subject to new laws introduced by the Free State. The later history of the company is unknown but it continued to operate until at least 1926 when it split off its oil palm concessions into the Maringa company.

Abir's rubber gathering practices made it the most notorious of all the concession companies for human rights abuses in the Congo Free State. Abir was only involved with primary resource gathering and, despite being owned by European industrialists, operated in a style similar to warlords such as Tippu Tip. Abir was supported in its operations by the Free State which required the enormous profits generated to strengthen its control over the country during its formative years. The concession companies gave the Free State the time and revenue required to secure the Congo and to plan a long-term and more stable program of colonisation. Abir ultimately failed as its harvesting process valued high production over sustainability and it doomed to live out its own boom and bust cycle. Despite this the Abir production model was used by the French government as the basis for its concession system in the French Congo.