Colm Tóibín reviews ‘The Dream of the Celt’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman · LRB 13 September 2012
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/colm-toibin/a-man-of-no-mind
By 1895 there were seven million bicycles worldwide, using most of the world’s rubber. Soon the automobile created even more demand: in 1910 the United States was building two hundred thousand cars a year; by 1920 the figure was two million. The problem was that rubber didn’t grow in places where it could easily be collected: it grew most abundantly in the tropical forests of the Congo and Amazon basins. Since there were no roads in these areas, the rubber would have to be carried long distances under appalling conditions. The Congo was under the direct and personal control of Leopold II, which meant that the treatment of those who did the carrying was not tempered by any law or set of humane rules. The transporters were flogged and tortured, had their hands amputated, were raped, held hostage and murdered as a matter of course. Their fragile society was decimated. More or less the same happened in the Putumayo in Peru, organised by a company registered in London. This is how we got the bicycle and the car until rubber was planted in more accessible places.