King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.

A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an “oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain . . . goes to this hole and rings a bell.” The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain “then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men.” The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth?

Everyone was struck by the nose. “It is such a nose,” Disraeli wrote, “as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy.”

Ouch.

As the poet Hilaire Belloc wrote: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

“Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.

It is strange that people who claim to be civilized think they can treat their fellow man—even though he is of a different color—any which way. . . .

For Europeans of the day, colonies all over the world offered a convenient escape. Kipling wrote: Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst. In the Congo the Ten Commandments were practiced even less than in most colonies.

“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.” ‭‭(Proverbs‬ ‭15:3‬)

High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place.

As news of the white man’s soldiers and their baskets of severed hands spread through the Congo, a myth gained credence with Africans that was a curious reversal of the white obsession with black cannibalism. The cans of corned beef seen in white men’s houses, it was said, did not contain meat from the animals shown on the label; they contained chopped-up hands.

“wretched set of incompetent noodles.”

Posh Burn!

With his modern sense of public relations, the king understood brilliantly that what matters, often, is less the substance of a political event than how the public perceives it. If you control the perception, you control the event.

Clever bastard.

I do not agree with you that England and America are the two great humanitarian powers. . . . [They are] materialistic first and humanitarian only a century after.”

He might have been on to something.

An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a “hue and cry.” But we live in a world of corpses, and only about some of them is there a hue and cry.

The politics of empathy are fickle. Certainly one reason Britons and Americans focused on the Congo was that it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences of taking on a major power like France or Germany.

Somethings never change.

Conrad said it best: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

“Self-government is our right,” he declared. “A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself—than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours . . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel . . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.”

Roger Casement

And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.

At the time of the Congo controversy a hundred years ago, the idea of full human rights, political, social, and economic, was a profound threat to the established order of most countries on earth. It still is today.