King Leopold's Ghost

by Adam Hochschild

Ranulf Higden, a Benedictine monk who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads.

In 1459, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro, declared Africa the home of the roc, a bird so large that it could carry an elephant through the air.

It was not until the fifteenth century, the dawn of the age of ocean navigation, that Europeans systematically began to venture south, the Portuguese in the lead.

In 1482, an experienced naval captain named Diogo Cão set off

King João II of Portugal

The river where he had landed would be known by Europeans for most of the next five hundred years as the Congo.

The Kingdom of the Kongo had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived. Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders.

Like many white evangelists who followed them, they were horrified by polygamy;

The ManiKongo appointed governors for each of some half-dozen provinces, and his rule was carried out by an elaborate civil service

According to myth, the founder of the Kongo state was a blacksmith king, so ironwork was an occupation of the nobility.

African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World.

after the Reformation they tried to ensure that none of their human goods ended up in Protestant hands.

The Catholics were not to be outdone through African enslavement.

Once they were properly baptized, clothed in leftover burlap cargo wrappings, and chained together in ships’ holds, most slaves from this region were sent to Brazil,

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River’s mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years.

King Affonso I provides something rare and valuable: an African voice.

we hear a human being, one who is aghast to see his people taken away in ever greater numbers on slave ships.

Pope Nicholas V had already sanctioned the Portuguese to trade Africans “for a profit”

In 1665, the army of the weakened Kingdom of the Kongo fought a battle with the Portuguese. It was defeated, and the ManiKongo was beheaded.

Africans apparently saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi—ancestral ghosts—since the Kongo people believed that a person’s skin changed to the color of chalk when he passed into the land of the dead.

Congo River,

only the Amazon carries more water.

to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for “discovering” some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back the skins and skeletons of gorillas, and told riveted audiences how the great hairy beasts abducted women to their jungle lairs for purposes too vile to be spoken of.

King Kong origin

only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire.

In the slave markets of Zanzibar, traders sold their human booty to Arab plantation owners on the island itself, and to other buyers in Persia, Madagascar, and the various sultanates and principalities of the Arabian peninsula.

the traders on the African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking Africans from territory that today is Kenya and Tanzania.

In 1866, Livingstone set off on another long expedition, looking for slave-traders, potential Christians, the Nile, or anything else that might need discovering.

“Discovering”? Nope that’s old fashioned invading and colonizing.

Like many whites who would follow him, Stanley saw Africa as essentially empty. “Unpeopled country,”

H.M. Stanley, Commanding Anglo-American Expedition for Exploration of Africa.

Stanley had crossed the entire African continent, from east to west. But unlike Verney Lovett Cameron, the only European to do this before him, he had emerged at the Congo’s mouth.

Stanley’s party carried the latest rifles and an elephant gun with exploding bullets; the unlucky people they fought had spears, bows and arrows, or, at best, ancient muskets bought from slave-traders. “We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages,” he wrote in his journal.

Stanley was able to describe such skirmishes in newspaper stories carried by messengers to Africa’s east coast, where they were relayed to England by sea and telegraph.

Propaganda

Stanley “shoots negroes as if they were monkeys,” commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton.