King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by Adam Hochschild
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Book Summary Information
Author: Adam HochschildEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10
ISBN: 0618001905
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780618001903
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Book Review: The Horror of Civilized Barbarity
Summary: 5 Stars
How convenient it is for Europeans and their descendants to think ourselves as bringing the light of civilization to the benighted hordes of native people throughout the world. How inconvenient to have a book like this shine a light on the dark, greedy side of the European soul.
"King Leopold's Ghost" brings forward the utter horror that was the Belgian Congo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. King Leopold II, ambitious to rule a colony of his own, found the last spot on earth that was still available -- the ivory and rubber rich lands around the Congo River in central Africa. By stealth, deceit and unspeakable violence, he wrested control of the area from the local tribesmen. Posing to fellow Europeans as a financially-disinterested humanitarian, Leopold forced millions of Congolese to bring in the riches of their land. The violence was appalling. Severed hands, hostages, the fearsome "chicotte" (a sharp-edged whip), burned villages and the halving of the Congo's population were the result. A few missionaries and other men of conscience (including the incomparable Mark Twain) worked hard to stir up outrage in Europe and the US. The book details the stories of Henry Morton Stanley, the murderous explorer; George Washington Williams, a black American lawyer who wrote about his first-hand experiences in the Congo; Joseph Conrad, whose "Heart of Darkness" barely fictionalized the atrocities he witnessed; E. D. Morel, who uncovered the lie behind "trade" with the Congolese; Roger Casement, whose passion for Congolese freedom merged with his Irish patriotism; and William Shepherd, black American missionary who loved Africans as people, not as subjects. If there was any shortcoming to the book it was the lack of indigenous African voices. But I assume this was a matter of a dearth of research.
Author Adam Hochschild does a brilliant job of capturing the period in this marvelous book. He also take on some of the more complex and less-comforting aspects of the story. While the US and England were expressing their outrage over the cruelty of the Belgians, they were presiding over their own brutal colonial periods." In the final chapter Hochschild follows the Congolese past the colonial period, into the post=WWII period, into independence in 1960, the CIA-backed murder of Patrice Lumumba and the decades long kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko.
"King Leopold's Ghost" is a must-read for those interested in the roots of Africa's slow rise from its painful colonial past.
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Summary of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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 as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.King Leopold of Belgium, writes historian Adam Hochschild in this grim history, did not much care for his native land or his subjects, all of which he dismissed as "small country, small people." Even so, he searched the globe to find a colony for Belgium, frantic that the scramble of other European powers for overseas dominions in Africa and Asia would leave nothing for himself or his people. When he eventually found a suitable location in what would become the Belgian Congo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo, Leopold set about establishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." Those who survived went to work mining ore or harvesting rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who salted away billions of dollars in hidden bank accounts throughout the world. Hochschild's fine book of historical inquiry, which draws heavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery, brings this little-studied episode in European and African history into new light. --Gregory McNamee
Democratic Republic of Congo Books
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