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

by Adam Hochschild

Leopold had paid £800 a month, a former servant of the house testified, for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins.

Even children were not spared the rigors of Leopold’s regime.

For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not “wasted” in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. “Sometimes,” said one officer to a missionary, soldiers “shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man.”

An American described seeing Congo state soldiers cut off someone’s hand “while the poor heart beat strongly enough to shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet.”

Less than two months after being named the Congo’s first democratically chosen prime minister, a U.S. National Security Council subcommittee on covert operations, which included CIA director Allen Dulles, authorized his assassination.

“Those who are conquered,” wrote the philosopher Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, “always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics — in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and customs.”