King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

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King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

4.15 of 5 stars 4.15 · rating details · 9,415 ratings · 933 reviews

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation...more

Paperback, 376 pages

Published September 3rd 1999 by Mariner Books (first published September 21st 1998)

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Jan 31, 2009 Eric_W rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-historiography

The Belgian Congo, as Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were formerly called was the creation of King Leopold of Belgium who desperately wanted a colony. By the late 19th century there was little land left for the taking except in Africa and it had become obvious that taking over independent lands was neither wise nor practical. King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a man of enormous appetites both for land and food—he once ate two whole pheasants at a restaurant in Paris,...more The Belgian Congo, as Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were formerly called was the creation of King Leopold of Belgium who desperately wanted a colony. By the late 19th century there was little land left for the taking except in Africa and it had become obvious that taking over independent lands was neither wise nor practical. King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a man of enormous appetites both for land and food—he once ate two whole pheasants at a restaurant in Paris, and it was not unusual for him to order several entrees. His colony was 75 times larger than Belgium.

Stanley’s explorations in Africa were becoming well known and sensational, and Leopold carefully wooed him into striking a bargain--Stanley wisely requested his payment in advance – that would have Stanley lead an expedition to build a road into the heart of Africa. He had learned an important lesson during his search for Livingston: there was little military threat from the local inhabitants who were small in population, encompassed more than 200 ethnic groups speaking more than 400 languages making a joint effort against the white man distinctly unlikely.

Leopold was being more than a little disingenuous. In addition to sponsoring Stanley’s expedition, he paid for several others who were attempting to reach the interior from the east. He also used several front organizations in an attempt to hide his financial interest. Stanley himself was unaware that one of the “committees” had expired over a year earlier and was being used by the King in name only.

The cost of maintaining the expeditions and building infrastructure to get the immense natural resource wealth out of the Congo soon depleted most of Leopold’s fortune, so he managed to obtain a loan from the Belgian parliament at the same time obtaining permission to become the sovereign of another country while King of Belgium.

The rape of the Congo assumed, in Hochschild’s words, “a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.” Despite Leopold’s use of anti-slavery rhetoric to gain acceptance for his strategies, the people of the region suffered horrible enslavement. Any resistance to the country’s plunder was met with strong measures. Failing to meet quotas was a capital offense. Hands of dead Congolese were cut off and kept in storage to account for expended ammunition, although often the natives were killed just for sport. It has been estimated that 50% of the population died between the 1870’s and 1919, approximately 10 million people were killed most often from sickness and starvation.

Leopold was a genius at public relations and he knew how to accumulate supporters in other countries through flattery and marketing. Civilization and suppression of the slave trade were words often used to describe his motives He insisted he wanted to create a free state similar to Liberia, an idea that appealed to American white racists who were still looking for places to export America’s blacks. John Tyler Morgan, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Henry Shelton Sanford, wealthy Florida orange planter and strong supporter of President Chester A. Arthur, were easily
manipulated by the King into gaining American support for his efforts.

Reading this book reinforced my view that, as a society, our values and standards are far superior to those of the nineteenth century. The discovery of rubber and its immense number of uses for an increasingly industrial society made it a valuable commodity that would make Leopold immensely rich. He did so on the backs of the black population of the Congo. He could not countenance slavery, of course, so his soldiers would take hostages, usually women and children, to be returned when the natives had supplied their quota of rubber. Gathering the rubber was dangerous and very painful -- the usual method was to let the rubber sap dry on one's skin and then peel it off. People in communities that showed resistance were shot. The good generals, fearing that soldiers might be saving cartridges for hunting or mutiny, demanded that the soldiers supply the right hand of each victim they killed for each cartridge, presumably only one being needed per victim. One person was in charge of smoking the hands to preserve them so they would remain in condition to be counted by the appropriate authorities. Often soldiers would use bullets to kill animals to eat and sever the hand off a living person to account for the bullets.

Women hostages were difficult for the commanders because their men would often demand the prettier ones to rape and this lead to morale problems. I suspect some of the savagery know going on in Africa may have be learned from western Europeans.
The savagery did not go unnoticed and several men were notable in their opposition. Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” fictionally revealed the corruption while Edmund Morel, Roger Casement, and George Washington Williams, among others, formed the strongest public opposition to Leopold’s savagery.

This is a model account that carries several lessons for us today. The distance consumers are from the location of the raw materials needed to fuel their thirst for ever more goodies—I count myself among the worst offenders, that new PalmPilot is really cool—permits the rape of the less fortunate to proceed behind a fog of marketing and public relations, that bane of the twentieth century that celebrates mendacity as its highest ethic. One has only to review pictures of “smart” weapons and high altitude bombing to understand how savagery has become a game. But, the speed of international communications and the camera have also played a part in exposing and revealing the travesties, so one can still hope that they might belong to the not so distant past.(less)

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Aug 17, 2007 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 5q

Horrifying story, rivetingly told. Regrettably, much of my reading of history has been centered primarily on the history of Europe and of the U.S. Hochschild's account of Belgium's exploitation of the Congo left me appalled. Despite the accounts of some truly savage atrocities, I ended up reading it in a couple of marathon sittings. A disturbing book, but one so well-written, I highly recommend it.

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Sep 03, 2007 Rashmi rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone, especially Belgians

Shelves: africa, non-fiction, history, 2006

This book took me several months to read because it was so disturbing. After reading a chapter and having nightmares, I'd put it away for something else, and then return to it once I'd finished with the other book.

The atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo were nothing short of diabolical. And yet, shockingly, one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century remains relatively unheard of.

I am a big fan of Adam Hochschild; he makes you feel like you're reading a novel rather than a historic...more

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Mar 01, 2008 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: political

A profoundly disturbing account of one of the modern era's forgotten atrocities. The book is written with great empathy yet manages to eschew pity or melodrama, a balance that highlights the horrific, tragic tale of King Leopold's colonization and rape of the Congo. An unnerving reminder of man's inhumanity to man, and how the 20th century was built upon the corpses of tens of millions of African natives.

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Jan 09, 2009 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is a thorough, brutal, historical account of the Congo State as formed by the King of Belgium in the nineteenth century. The author is clear about where historical knowledge of the time is lacking, whose voices are noticeably missing from the account, and where his own commentary and speculation begins and ends. It's not only your "historical vegetables," or a "should read" book, it's an enjoyable read, as long as the reader does not mind being immersed in horrific accounts of humiliat...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had 2 interesting experiences relating to this book while I was reading it. First, I recieved a call from an Airmiles rep who spoke with a thick African accent, he had no difficulty spelling my last name. He told me he came from the Congo, previously a Belgian colony where many names start with "van", hence his ease with my name. After telling him I was reading "King Leopold's Ghost", we talked for quite some time about the state of his homeland. He remarked that the people of the Congo are in...more

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Jan 04, 2012 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Lisa (Harmonybites) by: The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Shelves: 2012-around-the-world, crime, history, non-fiction, ultimate-reading-list

If you ask an educated American to name the worst despots and atrocities of the twentieth century, you'll immediately hear such names as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Very few would name Leopold II, King of the Belgians and absolute master of the Belgian Congo. I wouldn't have before reading this book, yet a man thousands of miles from a land he never visited is charged with instituting policies responsible for 10 million deaths in the course of a couple of decades, sparking the "first great...more If you ask an educated American to name the worst despots and atrocities of the twentieth century, you'll immediately hear such names as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Very few would name Leopold II, King of the Belgians and absolute master of the Belgian Congo. I wouldn't have before reading this book, yet a man thousands of miles from a land he never visited is charged with instituting policies responsible for 10 million deaths in the course of a couple of decades, sparking the "first great international human rights movement of twentieth century." Hochschild tells us in the introduction that the book "is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of recent history." The first third of the book sets out the background--the explorations of the brutal Henry Morton Stanley of "Stanley and Livingston" fame, and the machinations of Leopold to gain a colony. The story of almost every monster of history seems to lie in a hunger for fame, glory or a twisted patriotism or ideology. With Leopold, as he's presented, the motive seems to be pure greed. The next third begins to set out how Leopold's military dictatorship used forced labor to meet demands for ivory and rubber. It explains how Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness was inspired by his own experience in the Congo. Finally, Hochschild tells the story of the protest movement, especially the story of Edmund Dene Morel, "an obscure shipping-company official" who became Leopold's most dangerous enemy.

After reading this I certainly will never again be able to see Stanley as a hero or read Heart of Darkness in the same way. Given the material, this is an absorbing book--a five star in terms of the importance of the story, but not, I thought, in presentation. Hochschild, a former editor of the Marxist Ramparts and a co-founder of the far-left Mother Jones, often lets his socialist biases peek out. For instance, he bizarrely expresses his bewilderment over how a businessman like Morel with no attachment to socialism could be so passionate about fighting injustice! Even more than the intrusive socialist lens, I was left uneasy by the whiff of sensationalist journalism in his psychoanalysis and unsupported speculations about motives and actions and focus on scandal. I think in a lot of cases like that, less would have been more. And in the case of what happened in Congo, more would have been more. I felt I got a better sense of how Leopold conducted his affair with his teenage mistress than how he governed the Congo. Hochschild's chronology and evidence for the numbers he claimed killed in the introduction and analysis of what part could be pinned down as due to the direct effect of colonial rule felt sketchy, as did the exploration of Leopold's role beyond press relations and lobbying. (Admittedly, as Hochschild related, difficult precisely because so many documents were ordered destroyed by Leopold.) When I contrast King Leopold's Ghost to say Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I just can't rate Hochschild as impressive as a writer or historian.(less)

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Tim With respect, I disagree. I found Dee Brown's book difficult to read, the writing style unengaging, regardless of how well researched it no doubt was....more
Apr 28, 2012 09:00am

Lisa (Harmonybites) Tim wrote: "I found Dee Brown's book difficult to read, the writing style unengaging, regardless of how well researched it no doubt was."

It's been dec...more
updated Apr 28, 2012 02:46pm

May 18, 2011 Lady rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: own

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Like most readers, I'd no idea of the horrors that took place in the Belgian Congo under the rule of Belgium's King Leopold II. (Other reviewers have mentioned coping with nightmares during the time it took them to read this book.) I have been ruminating on this most remarkable book for a bit, thus delaying my review. The book's complexity, its imagery, its brutal honesty, and its fairness have all taken their respective turns in my conscious consideration, and I want to give each of them their...more Like most readers, I'd no idea of the horrors that took place in the Belgian Congo under the rule of Belgium's King Leopold II. (Other reviewers have mentioned coping with nightmares during the time it took them to read this book.) I have been ruminating on this most remarkable book for a bit, thus delaying my review. The book's complexity, its imagery, its brutal honesty, and its fairness have all taken their respective turns in my conscious consideration, and I want to give each of them their due in my written response to this book. It is each of these things, in fact, that makes this review so difficult for me to write.

Hochschild writes history in a way that reads like a novel. He tells the story of Leopold and the Congo in facts, statistics, logic, and analysis, and somehow weaves these together with narrative flair. Yes, there is pathos - how could there not be, given the atrocities that were carried out by human beings against other human beings? - and Hochschild makes clear his grief and anger for the suffering of the native Congolese, but the book is written overall with something akin to detachment. Hochschild, despite his grief and despite his anger, wanted to tell this story of the 20th century's first holocaust as clearly and as factually as he could, for two reasons: 1. The truth deserves to be told as it is and as it was, without romanticising it or distorting it in any way. 2. Hochschild has so many detractors, most prominently Belgian authorities and Belgian citizens, that the only way for him to convince them of the accuracy of what happened is to stick to the facts. People still refuse to believe that Leopold's regime led to such a prolonged waking nightmare for the Congo, despite ample evidence of this nightmare staring directly into their cowardly eyes.

Hochschild's words draw a minutely detailed picture of Leopold himself, starting with Leopold's emotionally starved childhood, whence began his burning dream of besting his overbearing, cruel father by garnering a colony for himself. (Remember this was the "Golden Age" [I say that with deep scorn] of European imperialism. I also have to look to Freud to wonder if Leopold had a sense of masculine inferiority.) Leopold's scheming, manipulative, utterly cold-hearted persona is revealed through a series of actions he undertook during his early years on the throne - attempting without success to buy other European colonies, treating his daughters appallingly and as objects rather than people (a portent of what was to come, I suppose), heaping cruelty on staff and family alike, and many other vicious things. It is unclear whether his craftiness drove his desire for a colony per se, or vice-versa - perhaps both - but it soon became clear to Leopold that his only choice for a colony lay in the as yet mostly unexplored continent of Africa, and he manipulated the Belgian parliament into loaning him tens of millions of francs in order to finance a colony in Africa. His choice: the Congo, as Henry Morton Stanley (a brief biography of whom is also included in this book) had explored much of the Congo already. Leopold financed another, more detailed exploration of the Congo by Stanley, and Stanley inadvertently made possible the holocaust to come by his traversal of the entire Congo River - the first by any European. An ominous foreshadowing of what is going to transpire in the Congo is revealed in the brutal way Stanley treats his Congolese porters - he ordered them to move, move, move! for days without end, without food or water, viewing them all the while with contempt and calling them lazy and manipulative.

Hochschild breaks his narrative of Leopold's schemes in the Congo to describe to us the little that is known of native Congolese societies before the arrival of the Europeans. There was no writing or other evidence of scholarship, but oral tradition was strong and people generally lived and ate well. They allowed fields to lie fallow after harvesting a crop so that the soil could recuperate; women practised birth control in order to avoid overpopulation, which, the Congolese wisely understood, would lead to the depletion of natural resources; surprisingly modernistic systems of justice existed in Congolese tribes. Hochschild is careful and fair enough to point out that African societies were not all sunshine and roses; he does describe intertribal warfare that could be quite brutal, as well as a deep-seated misogyny that seemed to permeate all of the Congo. Nonetheless, these societies lived more peacefully and healthfully than they ever would following waves of European invasions.

Once Leopold had the nuts and bolts in place for running the colony (the land for which he literally stole from local chiefs), he eagerly searched for a product to - and this is the only honest word for it - steal from the Congo for profit. His first chosen product was ivory. At this stage in history, ivory (and, by extension, elephants) was so prevalent that it was used as doorposts in villages. Elephants were thus slaughtered en masse and ivory was shipped to Europe, with healthy profits for Leopold. Scarcely a dime of these profits ever found its way back to the Congo. Native Congolese men were forced to help gather and guard ivory, and methods of ensuring they do so included holding wives and children captive to force men to aid the Belgians. Congolese women held in captivity were raped, beaten, and murdered. The men were also beaten and murdered. It even became a sport for Belgian officers to shoot Congolese people for no reason whatsoever other than vile cruelty (and boredom). At some point, to account for each bullet used by soldiers (which had come to include native Congolese amongst their ranks), a right hand was required to be cut off of each victim. And here we have the infamous widespread collection of hands, which did happen occasionally during intertribal warfare before the arrival of the Europeans but which had never before happened on such a monstrous scale. Some of the victims were still alive when their hands were cut off by soldiers who needed a hand to account for a bullet that went to procuring food for the soldiers rather than to murdering a Congolese person.

If things were bad during the ivory period, they got infinitely worse when it was discovered that rubber vines grew rampantly in the Congo. Men were required to present so many kilos of rubber per day to Belgian officials; if they ran short, they were either beaten severely, mutilated, or murdered. One man was murdered because only one of his fifty baskets of rubber was slightly short of the requisite amount. Men were murdered for cutting a rubber vine in two (which kills the vine), because they were desperate to meet the required kilos of rubber.

Profits were unbelievable. Leopold made over USD1 billion in today's dollars from the Congo. He was so crafty with his investments that historians today still can't quite put an exact number on how much he made from the Congo. After over 10 years of looking through his financial records following his death (and before he died, he ordered that all Belgian records pertaining to the Congo be burned; this took over 7 days, and miraculously some documents survived due to having been stored away from the hands of these early 20th century "eraser-men"), it was discovered that Leopold was a major investor in the financial excursions by the French in the neighbouring French Congo. Not even the French knew this at the time of Leopold's involvement with the Belgian Congo.

At some point, people like George Washington Williams, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and E. D. Morel realised that things in the Congo were not as they were trumpeted to be in Europe. Europeans thought that Leopold's efforts in the Congo were humanitarian in nature. The individuals mentioned above mounted an aggressive campaign to expose the truth behind Leopold's motivations for his involvement in the Congo. Williams wrote several treatises on what was happening in the Congo, but was primarily ignored because he was black and because his claims seemed so outrageous. Conrad wrote his famous short novel, Heart of Darkness, not as a work of fiction but as an expose of the Belgian Congo as it really was at that time; his infamous villain, Kurtz, who collected Congolese heads in his garden, was based primarily on Leon Rom (and a few other notorious Belgians), a Belgian officer who really did collect Congolese heads in his garden. Casement and Morel, with the help of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries who had seen the truth behind Leopold's "humanitarian" Congo, mounted a worldwide human rights campaign against the horrors being inflicted on natives there - the first worldwide human rights campaign in history to gain such strength and prominence. Leopold responded to these attacks on his humanitarian intentions by commissioning an Official Belgian Investigation (I write these three words with great sarcasm) into what was happening in the Congo. In a great irony, his own officials broke down and wept at the testimony of native Congolese, and submitted a report that supported rather than refuted the claims of Williams, Conrad, Casement, and Morel. (This naturally infuriated Leopold.) The testimonies collected from native Congolese were kept hidden from public view for almost 100 years after Leopold's Congolese colony was begun; it was only at the insistence of a Belgian historian who himself didn't find out about Leopold's Congolese Chamber of Horrors until the late 1970s that these documents were finally released. Hochschild quotes a few of the testimonies; they are beyond heartbreaking and, aside from other things described in miserable detail in this book, help explain why so many reviewers reported nightmares and emotional disturbance while reading this book.

Conservative estimates, based on contemporary records and the study of today's anthropologists, indicate that at least 10 million native Congolese died - from disease, from overwork, and from blatant mass murder - as a result of Leopold's desire to establish a colony that would inflate his ego and his bank accounts. Some modern-day anthropologists have estimated that as many as 13 million native Congolese died during Leopold's Congolese exploits. Either way, this would make what happened in the Congo during the late 19th and early 20th centuries the world's first known holocaust.

Hochschild sensibly points out that much of what we know of the Congo comes from European eyes and ears and lips, and that the voice of the Congo itself is mostly silent when it comes to this historical epoch. He also dryly explains that after Leopold's death, his second wife and his daughters squabbled over who should get the overwhelming wealth accumulated by Leopold from the Congo and its people. No one, says Hochschild, thought to argue that the money should go to the Congolese.(less)

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Apr 13, 2008 George Bradford rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to George Bradford by: John

Shelves: villains

The century that gave us Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot was ushered in by the worst criminal of them all: King Leopold II of Belgium. That's right, BELGIUM!!! For all the evil perpetrated by the 'A-List A-holes of the 20th Century', none of them outdid King Leopold II.

Between 1885 and 1908, under King Leopold II's rule, an estimated 10 to 13 Million human beings were killed in the African Congo. Those Congolese who survived were tortured, maimed, raped, forced into slavery...more The century that gave us Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot was ushered in by the worst criminal of them all: King Leopold II of Belgium. That's right, BELGIUM!!! For all the evil perpetrated by the 'A-List A-holes of the 20th Century', none of them outdid King Leopold II.

Between 1885 and 1908, under King Leopold II's rule, an estimated 10 to 13 Million human beings were killed in the African Congo. Those Congolese who survived were tortured, maimed, raped, forced into slavery and suffered horrifically under tyrannical colonial rulers.

King Leopold II was motivated by ego and greed. But he never actually set foot in Africa. The crimes were carried out by his agents and enabled by a cast of missionaries. This book documents that (1) Monsters exist and are dangerous,(2) more dangerous are the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions, and (3) inexcusable is silence in the presence atrocities against humanity.

Leave it to a young man from Liverpool and another from Ireland to discover what was happening in the Congo and announce to the world that it was wrong. This unlikely pair birthed the first global human rights campaign of the 20th Century. In doing so, they expressed the human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, or at another end of the earth.

This book is very well written and very unpleasant to read. The bad guy profits obscenely. The genuine heroes who recognize evil and rise up against it suffer unjust retribution. The unrelenting crimes against humanity perpetrated in the Congo are beyond horrific.

And it all seems to have been erased from our collective history. The efforts to forget this period of human history have been as remarkable as they have been effective.

Case in point: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was inspired by and based upon the atrocities in the Congo under King Leopold II's murderous reign. But it's never taught that way in U.S. high schools or universities. Students are given a sanitized 'anti-colonialism' frame work that never mentions 13 million murders. In light of that, all those skulls around Kurtz's residence start to make sense.

Now that I understand it's accurate historical context, the next book I am going to re-read is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.(less)

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Mar 31, 2008 Renee rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everybody

Recommended to Renee by: Chris LaMonica

Shelves: africa, history

King Leopold's Ghost is much more than a historical account of the forgotten atrocities perpetuated on the Congolese people. It is nothing less than an epic tale centred around a colonial monster and the brave men and women who fought against him.

Far from being a dry scholarly examination of African history Hochschild brings to life the complex characters who supported and opposed Leopold's Congo.

Hochschild follows the story of the Congo from pre-European contact to its devastated current state....more

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Dec 02, 2010 GWC rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A colonial morality play. The story in "King Leopold's Ghost" is a powerful one -- colonization taken to its extreme -- but the book is rendered mediocre by the author's trite moralizing, lack of historical rigor, and tiresome reliance on depicting every actor with either a halo or horns. Leopold, here an antagonist of extraordinary guile, is only weakly connected to the governmental and business interests with which he worked; the reader is given pages of anecdote concerning the king's depravit...more

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Dec 23, 2009 Nicholas Whyte added it

"http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1347740.html[return][return]More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were killed b...more "http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1347740.html[return][return]More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were killed by Leopold's regime. He got away with it by a cunning combination of concealment of the amount of wealth he was extracting for his own private hoard, wishful thinking from the white world about the heroic civilising mission of European colonialism, and the conspiratorial silence of the officials involved. For any European, and particularly for us Belgians (as I have now been for a bit over a year), it is essential reading as a reminder of the atrocities of our shared past with Africa.[return][return]Hochschild's subtitle is 'A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa'. The heroism described is mostly that of the few investigators who dared to tell the truth of the mutilations, murders and slavery that characterised Leopold's Congo, the likes of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. Hochschild regrets that there are very few accounts available from the African perspective. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is about the destructive moral effect of the Congo experience on Europeans like Kurtz; the Africans in the story do not speak, and they were rarely allowed to tell their story in real life either. [return][return]My office is a stone's throw from the Parc du Cinquantenaire / Jubelpark, created in the suburb beyond Etterbeek by Leopold II from his vast Congolese profits. It contains a rather disturbing monument to the Congo enterprise, as well as the pretentious archway which frames the end of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat. A favourite excursion for the children is to the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, where the stuffed animals are cute but the historical record is, in more than one sense of the word, whitewashed. As Hochschild points out, the legacy of the colonial enterprise is visible in the streets of Belgium today, if you know where to look, or indeed if you just look with your eyes open."(less)

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Jan 25, 2009 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Favorite passages:

The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are...more

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Jan 19, 2009 Jonathan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: development

An easily digestible story that reads like fiction of King Leopold's activities in the Congo around around the turn of the 20th century. The book is far less dense than works like the Scramble for Africa and focuses around King Leopold and the Congo, rather than the whole of Africa. The writing style makes it much more engaging than other books I have read on this time period.

An incredibly important and under taught subject, this book describes the forced slave labor that took place in the Congo...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Sofia Samatar rated it 5 of 5 stars

Subtitled "A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa," this is the history book you need to read now. Hochschild tells the story of the so-called "Congo Free State," the private fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium, as a series of mini-biographies. You'll meet the self-mythologizing explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and the insatiable King Leopold, with his massive PR machine, passion for architecture, and cavalier attitude toward the atrocities being committed for his profit ("Cut...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Elizabeth rated it 5 of 5 stars

Why did I pick up this book. It is attractively designed and was $2 at a used book sale. I'm always interested in history...how could I go wrong? I couldn't. This is a fascinating look at one man's arrogance and human greed. Nothing new there...but since we keep witnessing history repeat itself, it bears repeating.

King Leopold of Belgium was the monarch with little power and was kept on a tight budget. He longed to play with the big boys...so he kept an eye out for parts of the world that seemed...more

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Feb 28, 2013 Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Compelling and eye-opening. I knew pretty much nothing about the subject matter beforehand, beyond having read Heart of Darkness at school, and Hochschild's comprehensive yet intimate approach, contrasting plentiful historical perspective and context with first hand testimony, really brings it to life. There's a large array of colourful characters and telling, often darkly comic detail, mostly about Leopold himself and his disastrous family relations. It's also good on the hypocrisy and wilfull...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Sota Creative Writing rated it 5 of 5 stars

History is usually rendered boring and inaccessible through pedantic language and an influx of context-less facts and statistics.

Hochschild removes all that and writes the story of history as if he were writing a novel. His use of imagery and figurative language builds the reader's interest, his flow of characters make the reader greedy for the ending to find out what happens to them.

Writings about genocide frequently rely on the shocking statistics, blasted again and again in your face, intende...more

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Jan 25, 2013 Lynn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-nonfiction, africa, cross-cultural

Read this about 2 years ago for book club and I can't remember when I have absolute loathed and despised a historical figure as much as I now do King Leopold II. I realize it was a very different age and attitudes and beliefs were very different, at least among the majority of people, but I can't stand it. The exploitation of others for purely monetary gain, power, and prestige sickens me. I equate this with the present-day corporations that exploit workers outside the U.S. because they can get...more

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Jan 17, 2013 Robert J. Sullivan rated it 4 of 5 stars

King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) lusted to join the European powers in the late-19th century landgrab for colonies. After a number of false starts, he found his colony in the Congo and arranged for it as his personal property, rather than as a colony of Belgium.

The Congo was a source of the two wonder materials of the time, first ivory, then rubber. With a cover of philanthropic purposes, Leopold's mercenary surrogates wrung the territory out for these resources. The methods they used were...more King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) lusted to join the European powers in the late-19th century landgrab for colonies. After a number of false starts, he found his colony in the Congo and arranged for it as his personal property, rather than as a colony of Belgium.

The Congo was a source of the two wonder materials of the time, first ivory, then rubber. With a cover of philanthropic purposes, Leopold's mercenary surrogates wrung the territory out for these resources. The methods they used were horrific: forced labor, torture, taking hostages, mutilation, and murder. There is no sure way of telling how many people were killed during the period 1885-1906; Hochschild estimates 10 million, half the population.

The drive to expose what was being done in the Congo was the first great human rights campaign. There are heroes in the book, notably Edmund D. Morel, a shipping clerk, and British diplomat Roger Casement. Morel's shipping firm had the contract to move goods to the Congo and back to Belgium. The ivory and rubber came from Africa, but instead of trade goods, what was shipped to the Congo was munitions. In 1897 or 1898, Morel realized something was wrong and devoted himself to fixing it.

Roger Casement was sent to the Congo to investigate the reported abuses in 1903. He sought out his own transportation (a way the Belgians controlled what people saw) and spent months in the rubber producing areas. What he saw angered him. He wrote extensive reports to the British Foreign Office, then teamed up with Morel.

The public relations campaign they organized was a model, with pamphlets, recruitment of the powerful, and public speaking tours. It was also narrowly focused on the problems in the Congo, rather than the general problems with European colonization. Eventually they were able to pressure King Leopold to give custody of the Congo to the Belgian government.

Hochschild makes a case that Leopold was a villain, evil. I wasn't completely convinced. Did his actions cause enormous suffering? Yes. Did he intend to cause the suffering? It was more that he was indifferent to it. His aim was to acquire power and money. He ran a masterful campaign to get the European powers and the United States to allow him to take over the Congo, masking his intentions with humanitarian commissions and the aim of stopping “Arab slave traders,” the boogie man of the time. He recruited and used celebrities, particularly Henry Stanley (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame), who comes off badly in the book. He was a master of spin control. In his most masterful stroke, a commission he set up that he expected to paper over the problems wrote a scathing report instead. His stoke was to release a synopsis of the report several days before the report, in English, that downplayed the problems. Reporters swooped down on the synopsis and by the time the real report was released, it was old news and the newspapers had moved on.

Leopold's treatment of the natives of the Congo was little different from the treatment they received from European colonists elsewhere. A second way to look at Leopold is that he was a modern executive, focused on profit to the exclusion of all other considerations. How is that different than WalMart underpaying their workers or Bhopal gas spill at Union Carbide's Indian plant that killed 2-8,000, injured perhaps a half a million? It would take a villain speech to make him a James Bond villain. He didn't push his mercenaries to mutilate and kill the Congolese, and his employees only set quotas for rubber and ivory. For that, one would have to go to the Stanford Prison Experiment for how the mercenaries were able to treat the natives so badly. I'm not arguing that he was blameless, only that others are equally culpable.

A well-written history. (less)

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Aug 26, 2012 Cody VC rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Cody by: Prof. Schulze (way back in 2009 from hist 101)

2.5. One star docked for a profoundly weird approach to documenting sources - why would you want to make it seem like none of your quotes/facts are cited?! what the hell - and the second's docked for padding out the narrative with weird psychoanalytical digressions and titillating unnecessary details about various European principals. In the face of lack of evidence due to destruction thereof or a deliberate lack of record-keeping, just tighten up the writing so the focus is more evenly balanced...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Julee rated it 5 of 5 stars

My favorite non-fiction read, one of my favorite reads of all time. Amazing story about an easily forgotten brutality during a dark time in history and how everyday citizens in a society thousands of miles away actually could and did make a difference. They risked everything to bring light to the situation in the Congo with nothing to win for themselves; they acted out of moral conviction that what was happening in the Congo was a horrific crime, and that was enough to compel to act.

Many histor...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Laurent rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, 2012-books

An amazing accomplishment

I have written my review in two parts the first being to actually review the book itself and provide my thoughts on it. Since this is such an emotive and affecting book, I also wrote about how it affected me personally, from a Belgian's perspective who's family lived in the Congo - thought this might be of interest to some readers.

1. My Review of Leopold's Ghost

Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is an exquisite book - gripping, absorbing, well written and profoundly...more

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Apr 17, 2012 David Nadolny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Most of my friends know I write short Edwardian investigative horror short adventures. Some of them have had some pretty creepy story lines if I do say so myself. However, as is often said, truth is stranger than fiction and in this case, history is much more horrific than anything I could ever write.

The level crimes against humanity committed by the Congo regime under Leopold's rule from the 1890s to early 1900s is matched only by the similar levels in neighboring colonies at the same time wher...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Irvin Sha rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me by a friend. Prior to cracking the spine, my knowledge of Africa was pretty much nil, aside from the knowing that there was a lot of colonialism, slavery, and general badness abounding. This book is an eye-opening account of the depths of human cruelty, easily on par with accounts that I've read of the Holocaust or the Great Terror. The degree to which naked greed and Euro-centricity dictated the course of events in the region are appalling. What is even more dist...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Marcelo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: rwr

Adam Hochschild's non-fiction work was the book that I chose to go out of my comfort zone with, but still stay within my overall interests.

King Leopold's Ghost is the story of the colonization of the Congo by the Belgians, and the untold story of how a man (Koning Leopold van België) managed to create an empire that made his country rich, but also killed many along the way.

The story told by Hochschild is both chilling and extremely interesting, as the stories of explorers such as Dr. Livingstone...more

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Feb 28, 2012 Uomo di Speranza rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cooler-than-sliced-bread

*This review connects King Leopold's Ghost with Between Shades of Gray, another historical fiction novel.

The Holocaust was one of the most despicable incidences in history. An ultimate example of how deep ethnocentrism can come to exist in the minds of humans, we all hold it as a totem of complete hell. Yes, we all hold it, for it is not only the most gruesome, but also one of the most well-remembered events of our past, which is why so many people associate the Nazi regime with such oppression...more *This review connects King Leopold's Ghost with Between Shades of Gray, another historical fiction novel.

The Holocaust was one of the most despicable incidences in history. An ultimate example of how deep ethnocentrism can come to exist in the minds of humans, we all hold it as a totem of complete hell. Yes, we all hold it, for it is not only the most gruesome, but also one of the most well-remembered events of our past, which is why so many people associate the Nazi regime with such oppression.

But the Nazis can't take all the credit.

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys describes the escapades of Lina Vilkas, a Lithuanian teenager who, along with her entire family, is deported to a Soviet labor camp after Stalin invades the Baltic region.. The NKVD-Soviet police-are absolutely brutal, trying to force able boys away from their families and into the Soviet army. Lina, her mother, and her brother are separated from her father, who is placed in a prison, and experience such ghastly phenomena as living through the Arctic winter with a horrid lack of food, drink, sanitation, and medicine. Children perish every day, parents become mentally unhinged, and all guards are forced to think of the "Fascist swine", as they so lovingly call the prisoners, as, well, swine. Animals. Less-than-humans.

The country of Belgium is not just significant for its chocolate. In the late 1800s, the Belgians had a monarch by the name of Leopold II, but that whole monarchy thing was fine because of their parliament, right? Indisputably wrong. Leopold wanted one phenomenon more than anything (by the way, "anything" included the even the happiness of his daughters, one of which he married to a man twenty years her senior): an African colony. At this time, European interest in the African continent was at an all-time high, especially because the continent could provide those raw materials needed to fuel Europe's highly demanding factories. But Leopold jumped on the bandwagon very early on, and did so ferociously. Under the guise of trying to end slavery in the African interior, he actually enslaved almost every African in the Congo river region (everything from the middle of Africa westward.) These unfortunate souls were forced to grow crops, carry steamboats (yes, carry them) along the Congo river, and act as personal manservants to Europeans living in the region. Most Europeans were encouraged to kill any insubordinate individuals and cut off the hand or foot of a corpse as proof. Adam Hochschild's nonfictional account, King Leopold's Ghost, describes a brutal, African Holocaust.

And remember that attitude I talked about? The one where other humans are animals, not even worth a glance? Well, as Hochschild states in his book, such an attitude is key to such systems as Leopold's in the Congo and Stalin's in Siberia. Out of respect for themselves, people won't treat other people in such horrible manners because both parties are indeed human. This is because other humans deserving such treatment justifies your deserving of such treatment-you're a human too, are you not? However, if the victims are inhuman, such as "swine", the treatment can be dished out guilt-free.

Can you believe that a weaker version of this phenomenon is present in the United States?

One word: education. Standardized tests are being used to determine the futures of teachers, the manner and degree differing between states. Now, it is agreed that no two human beings are the same, yes? Each human, and therefore each student, has different needs and different situations that relate to those needs. But in this system of adjudication, this quality of students is completely ignored; apparently, the affluence of students in the educational setting is not influenced by anything but the teacher's ability. How hilariously untrue. Imagine: one teacher has a class predominantly composed of priveleged, gifted students, and another one has a class of predominantly at-risk children who struggle with the fundamentals of education. Guess which class is going to perform better on standardized examinations.

And when one says that the fault is with those who organize the classes, I must disagree. Many a time it is that there are only at-risk stragglers in the population (probably because of an impoverished community). In such a situation, the greatest teacher on Earth cannot make three quarters of the class pass. However, she can make one half do so, but in many states, one half isn't good enough. The greatest teacher on Earth gets fired. Now who is being oppressed there?(less)

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Feb 26, 2012 Happyreader rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history-politics

King Leopold would have made an excellent Halliburton CEO. If he were alive today, he would have been a constant presence on Fox News, extolling the benefits of torture and environmental devastation for national security and the greater good. This is essentially the story of a business brutally run amok, hiding behind the smokescreen of a constant positive PR barrage orchestrated by a corrupt king/business owner. As the author points out, even though Leopold’s administration likely led to the de...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Robert Strandquist rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: while-in-belgium

Ohhh, had I read this when it was published in 1998, my teaching of Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness" and Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" would have been more passionate and clearer in purpose. Hochschild's extensive research powerfully combines with his narrative to form a book that trembles like a volcano in my hands. He exposes the 40 years of greed and terror foisted on the civilized people of Congo. Europeans and Leopold's Belgians were oblivious to their king's sadistic manipulations. Ame...more

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Jan 04, 2012 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars

A really interesting and well-written history of colonization in the current DRC. Trying to tell the untold story is always difficult, never mind when the majority of available records paint a very biased view of the situation. In this case, I suppose both sides had published records, but one had much better PR savvy and that's skewed the historiography quite a bit.

It's interesting...I know a few people who have worked in the DRC, and from their stories about what a shit show it is there, it mak...more

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About Adam Hochschild

Hochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would later write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after severa...more

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“Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.

It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.

The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered. ” — 4 people liked it

“When Leopold wrote that the precise frontiers of the new state or states would be defined later, [German Chancellor] Bismarck said to an aide, "His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.” — 1 person liked it

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