Alice Seeley Harris


Alice Seeley Harris was an English missionary and an early documentary photographer. Her photography helped to expose the human rights abuses in the Congo Free State under the regime of Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

Family and origins

Alice Seeley was born in Malmesbury to Aldred and Caroline Seeley. Her sister, Caroline Alfreda, was a school teacher.
Alice married John Hobbis Harris at a registry office in London. They had four children: Alfred John, Margaret Theodora, Katherine Emmerline and Noel Lawrence. Alice spent many years in Frome in Somerset and died at the age of 100 in 1970 at Lockner Holt in Surrey.

Career

In 1889, aged 19, Alice entered the Civil Service and was later appointed to the Accountant General’s office in General Post Office, London. Alice gave her spare time to Frederick Brotherton Meyer’s mission work at Regent’s Park Chapel and later Christ Church in Lambeth.
Alice left the Civil Service to enter Doric Lodge, the training college of the Region Beyond Missionary Union. In 1894, she met her future husband John Hobbis Harris. Finally in 1897, after seven years of trying, Alice was accepted to go out to the Congo Free State. Shortly afterwards, Alice and John got engaged and were married on 6 May 1898.
Four days later, as her honeymoon, Alice sailed with John on the SS Cameroon to the Congo Free State as missionaries with the Congo-Balolo Mission. They arrived in the Congo three months later, on 4 August 1898, and then travelled to the Mission Station Ikau near Basankusu.
Alice was appalled and saddened at what she witnessed there and began campaigning for the human rights of the Congolese natives to be recognised.

Campaigner

Alice was stationed with her husband John from 1898 to 1901 at the Mission Station at Ikau, near the Lulonga River, which is a tributary of the River Congo in the Balolo Tribal region. Later, from 1901 to 1905, they were stationed at the Mission Station at Baringa, a village in Tshuapa District, Befale Territory, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It stands on the banks of the Maringa River, approximately 100 km upriver from Basankusu.
During her time in the Congo, Alice taught English to the local children, but her most important contribution was to photograph the injuries that were sustained by the Congolese natives at the hands of the agents and soldiers of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold was partly exploiting the local population so fiercely to profit from increased rubber demand after the invention of the pneumatic or inflatable tyre by John Boyd Dunlop in Belfast in 1887. Methods of coercion included whipping, hostage-taking, rape, murder and burning of gardens and villages.
The most famous and shocking atrocity, whose aftermath Harris captured in her photography, was the severing of hands. In 1904, two men arrived at their mission from a village attacked by 'sentries' of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company after failing to provide sufficient rubber. One of the men, Nsala, was holding a small bundle of leaves which when opened revealed the severed hand and foot of a child. Sentries had killed and mutilated Nsala's wife and daughter. Appalled, Alice persuaded Nsala to pose with his child's remains on the veranda of her home for a picture.
Initially, Alice's photographs were used in Regions Beyond, the magazine of the Congo Balolo Mission. In 1902, the Harrises returned to Britain temporarily. In 1904, Alice's photographs reached wider distribution including Congo Slavery, a pamphlet prepared by Mrs. H. Grattan-Guinness, wife of the editor of Regions Beyond, and in King Leopold's rule in Africa by E. D. Morel. The same year saw the founding of the Congo Reform Association by Morel.
In 1906 Alice and her husband began working for Morel's Congo Reform Association. In early 1906, Alice and her husband toured the United States. John wrote that they had presented her images at 200 meetings in 49 cities via magic lantern screenings. In December 1906, the daily paper New York American used Harris's photographs to illustrate articles on atrocities in the Congo for an entire week.
In 1908, Alice and John became joint organizing secretaries of the Congo Reform Association and, in April 1910, they became joint organizing secretaries of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society. Alice soon relinquished her official position, but assisted John at the Society until his death in 1940. She continued her active speaking career and was listed with Christy's Lecture Service alongside luminaries such as Winston Churchill and Ernest Shackleton.
In November 1908, Leopold II ceded administration of the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, thus creating the Belgian Congo. The Harrises returned to the Congo from 1911–12, following the handover of the Congo to Belgium. They noted improved conditions in the treatment of natives and later produced a book, Present Conditions in the Congo, illustrated with Alice's photographs. Soon thereafter, hundreds of Alice's African documentary photographs were displayed at an exhibition at the Colonial Institution.
In 1933, she became Lady Alice when her husband was knighted, but was known for saying, "don't call me Lady!" Some commentators think that Alice should have received an honour for her services, in her own right, having been one of the first people to use photography in a human rights campaign.
In 1970, Alice reached 100 years old and was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on a programme called Women of Our Time. She was the first centenarian to be a member of the Frome Society for Local Study, which has placed a plaque near where she lived in Frome.

Legacy