King Leopold's Ghost
King Leopold's Ghost (1998) is a book by Adam Hochschild. It describes the exploitation of the Congo Free State by Leopold II of Belgium. ISBN 0-330-49233-0
In Hochshild's impassioned book, King Leopold takes his place with the great tyrants Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, having reduced the population of the Congo Free State -- literally his private fiefdom -- from twenty million people to ten million in forty years. Leopold's motive, as Hochschild tells it, was simply a desire for the money to be made from rubber. Rubber harvesting in the Congo was not rubber cultivation with indentured labor on plantations as in other colonies, it was ripping the rubber vines out of the trees with slave labor under the whip.
Although the Congo Free State ended its existence just before World War 1, just in time for Belgium's defeat by Germany to be used for propaganda purposes, the oppression of the Belgian Congo continued into modern times. For example, Hochschild reports that 80 per cent of the uranium in the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mined in the Congo by forced labor.
The heroes of the book are Leopold's enemies, those who told the story of the Congo Free State:
- George Washington Williams, an African American writer, the first ever to report the atrocities in the Congo.
- William Shepherd, another African American, a Presbyterian missionary who led European and American missionaries, virtually the only independent actors in the Congo, in a steady attack on Leopold and his policies.
- Edmund Dene Morel, a British shipping agent who observed that while millions of dollars worth of rubber and ore were coming out of the Congo, all that was going back was rifles and chains. From this evidence, he inferred that the Congo was a slave state, and devoted the rest of his life to destroying it.
- Sir Roger Casement, British diplomat (and later Irish martyr), who put the force of the British government behind the international protest against the Belgians. Casement's involvement had the ironic effect of drawing attention away from British colonialism, Hochschild reports.
- Joseph Conrad, Anglo-Polish sea captain assigned to a Congo steamer who was so sickened by what he saw on a single trip up the river that he quit on the spot. Eight years later he wrote Heart of Darkness.
The work of these people led to the establishment of the very first international human-rights campaign, direct ancestor of the Anti-Slavery Society and Amnesty International and other such groups.
Hochschild tells the story well, with closely controlled rage and impeccable documentation. The documentation was not easy to come by, the furnaces in Brussels burned papers for two weeks when Leopold turned over his private Congo to the Belgians. Most of the information about Leopold's torture-murderers was accumulated by his enemies.
One peculiarity: While Heart of Darkness is the most reprinted and studied short novel of the 20th century, its psychological and moral truths are so profound as to overshadow its literal truth. Hochschild even found two likely models for the insane villain Kurtz -- heads on sticks and all -- who have been ignored by Conrad scholars.
