The subject of this intriguing, gracefully written study is historian Arwen P. Mohun’s great-grandfather. American Imperialist reminds us that in the slice of history it covers—the Scramble for Africa at its voracious peak—the actors included not just Africans and Europeans, but Americans.
One was Richard Dorsey Mohun, born in 1864 to a middle-class family in Washington DC. To help support his widowed mother, he went to work as a civilian clerk for the Navy Department, serving first in Washington and then as an assistant paymaster on board an aging wooden-hulled vessel in the Mediterranean. An ambitious résumé-inflator, he later portrayed the latter job as being an officer in the Marines. Then came work as an auditor for the abortive effort to build a canal across Nicaragua, with various side hustles to supplement his low pay. When the canal project collapsed, family connections won him a position in 1892 as US “commercial agent” to the new private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, l’État Independant du Congo, or the Congo Free State.
At times hundreds of miles away from the nearest telegraph station and always thousands from the nearest critical journalist, Mohun tasted the immense power available to a well-armed white man at this imperial moment. After traveling more than 1,000 miles up the Congo River by steamboat he accompanied a Belgian military commander on a campaign against the Arab traders who were Leopold’s rivals. The short-handed officer put the American—whom he believed to be a former Marine—in command of two mobile cannons and their 70-man crew. Mohun loved combat, had deserters shot, ordered whippings for disobedient porters, and sold an article to the Century Illustrated Magazine. The diaspora of imperial adventurers was worldwide, for in the Congo rainforest he ran into an American friend from Nicaragua days, now managing rubber-gathering stations. Mohun flew both the American and Congo Free State flags from his river launch, and came back home with photographs, artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution, a leopard cub, and a medal from King Leopold.
Some State Department officials disapproved of their commercial agent shelling African villages, but that didn’t prevent Mohun’s next appointment as US consul to the British protectorate of Zanzibar. The records of his time there allow the reader a glance into a different part of the Scramble, where Britain, less heavy-handed than Leopold, ruled indirectly through the local sultan, controlling a crucial trading hub while competing for influence with Germany, which had a colony on the nearby mainland.
Mohun then had two additional long stays in Leopold’s Congo. The first was on an expedition to clear a path through the rainforest for a telegraph line in the territory’s east, an exhausting effort slowed by hundreds of workers dying of smallpox, plus battles with mutinous soldiers fleeing Leopold’s army of African conscripts. In a later expedition, he worked for a group of American companies to whom the king had given the right to prospect for various minerals. In between, based in Brussels, he served in Leopold’s powerful public relations operation, speaking and writing for British and American audiences to combat the international campaign denouncing the king’s notorious slave labor system. The movement’s charges, as Mohun well knew from seeing slaves bought and sold in the Congo, were completely true.
Whether she is evoking the “low hum of malevolent incompetence” at a remote outpost in eastern Congo, or the winter rain glistening on the streets of Brussels, the writing of Mohun’s great-granddaughter is beautifully evocative. From a rich array of primary and secondary sources, she complements Mohun’s own diaries and reports with accounts from others who left a record of the same voyage, place, or campaign.
Above all, she has an astute sense of how the glory and wealth of the imperial age were a magnet for “the kind of liminal person” otherwise destined for a drab and undramatic life. “Africa … offered—at least in theory—the opportunity for anonymous men from middling social backgrounds to elevate themselves in ways they never could have done back home,” since Europeans and Americans, reared on the books of Rudyard Kipling and Henry Morton Stanley, “worshipped soldiers and explorers as quintessential heroic figures.”
Such were the temptations that drew Richard Dorsey Mohun to the African continent. American Imperialist shows that a thoughtful biography of a quite minor official can be as revealing as one of a prime minister or king. Sometimes more so, for although Leopold amassed a vast fortune from his colony, he never went there. He knew a statistic he long kept secret: with few defenses against tropical diseases, one out of three of the white men who went to the Congo to work for him never came home.
Mohun did make it back to the United States but without either the great wealth or fame he had hoped for. And he paid a price. His body ravaged by repeated bouts of malaria, he died suddenly at the age of 51. The full state of his conscience we will never know.
