Customer Reviews

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

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3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Researcher Adam Hochschild provides a lurid and surprisingly fascinating account of the brutal exploitation of the Congo under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium and beyond. With the real-life stories of Henry Morton Stanley, William Sheppard, Leon Rom, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement and others as foundation, Hochschild is able to outline the rise of Leopold, and to paint a vivid portrait of his development from an unlikable and oafish young heir of the Belgian throne to a cunning and vicious ruler responsible for the death of approximately 10 million African men, women and children. More than that, this book is also the story of E.D. Morel, an Englishman whose chance discovery of apparent misdeeds in so-called "trade" with the Congo gave rise to the most extensive and politically powerful anti-slavery and anti-colonization movements of the century.

I recommend this title for its readability (few historians ever make their subject matter as accessible to general readers), its underlying - and savvy - political analysis of the brutality of European colonization across Africa, and its detailed account of what it took to launch, extend and sustain a human rights movement.

I recommend pairing this work with Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz," which details Congo's later struggles under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

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.

Hochschild's constant speculation into motives and fits of amateur psychoanalysis made it difficult to separate the matters of record from dramatic characterizations. The substantive research is rather thin and commonly presented in relative terms such as "many", "some", and "few" without context for comparison. At no point did I gain a clear insight into how widespread or coordinated were the atrocities or how damaging the secondary effects may have been (the chapter addressing this is awfully feeble). 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 depravity with nearly no overview of the system in which he operated.

The final chapter is a model of the book's flaws. It considers the Belgian process of forgetting which followed their foray into colonialism, aided by international sympathy during the first world war. Instead of pursuing this interesting and somewhat complicated topic in more detail, however, we are duly regaled with additional vignettes of heroism and villainy. The book then concludes with a sermon aimed squarely at us in the choir. While some readers might find this inspirational, it bored me.

Assuming that research into the history of the Belgian Congo is ongoing, I'll look for a more definitive and less melodramatic account.

King Leopold-this is a story that deserved to be told but wasn't. It was one of the biggest and one of the cruelest colonial regimes in Africa. It is a story of manipulation, drama, brutal murders, corruption, and immorality. In my opinion, King Leopold of Belgium is one of history's most notorious characters. Due to Leopold being the heir to the throne, as a child he was drawn towards wealth and indulgence. Greed drove him. Even into his adulthood, greed and self-indulgence were the traits that surfaced when he realized through gaining colonies he could continue to accumulate his riches. He positioned himself as a concerned leader of the people who wanted to combat the Arab slave trade that pervaded Africa. In the public eye, he was seen as a humanitarian, but the real facts didn't support that popular opinion and contradicted his image. Leopold used unethical methods to acquire his land. He ordered his men to force the natives, the Congolese, into manual labor. His inhumane treatment of them was characterized by killings, whippings, destruction of crops and local villages, and taking, as hostages, the wives and children for those who resisted or didn't produce enough rubber or ivory for the day. According to the author, Adam Hochschild, there was an estimated ten million Congolese deaths during Leopold's colonization process. (That sounds familiar.) Sadly, King Leopold's name isn't mentioned with the Hitlers and the Stalins of world history in the classrooms, as it rightfully should be. As people during that time started to find out the truth, Leopold resorted to cover-ups, lawsuits and bribery. In my opinion, Hochschild has done a fantastic job telling a story that most haven't heard to enable them to understand the outcome and, more importantly, the motives behind it.

Extremely well-researched & well-written. Adam Hochschild exposes what colonialism really accomplished in Africa (specifically the Congo) & it's lasting effects today. It is disturbing to think that so much of Europe & North America was built on the backs of slave labour, exploitation & looting of the resources in Africa...unfortunately, this still goes on today. An excellent read for anyone interested in what really happened in Africa & why today, it is a continent still struggling to break-free from under the thumb of the West.

This is a must read if you are at all interested in Africa and the atrocities commited there. Normally i don't like history books, but after reading the introduction I was hooked. it is very easy to read, and reads like a novel. It is a history of King leopold's Congo, how came to be and how it was brought down by the hard work of a few individuals that created a world wide mouvement to stop him. The book discribes in detail the horrors that occured and how the people of the Congo were mistreated. Hochschild has a way of bringing the charachters to life through revealing their past and showing them as real human beings as opposed to one dimentional characters from history. In the beging of the book he discribes the history of the Congo, and how King Leopold aquired it. In the second half of the book he shows how his rein was pulled down by the first major humanitarian effort of the last century.

Less than 50 years after agents of King Leopold had murdered, raped, tortured, mutilated, and brutalized half of the population of the Congo, Congolese schoolchildren were taught from Belgium drafted textbooks that Leopold was the benevolent father figure of their country. That is the definition of revisionist history, yet books like this one are more likely to be attacked as being revisionist. Hochschild has written a history that reads with the ease of a newspaper about a subject that has been buried in the annals of mis-history. 10 million Africans were killed for the enrichment of one man and his partners and yet most people have never heard of this story! That this genocide is virtually unknown to most people is a sad reminder of how much injustice has been perpetuated upon Africans over the centuries that has been "forgotten." Among the more fascinating aspects of this book are the profiles of the leaders of the human rights movement, white and black, who at the turn of the century showed super-human courage and integrity in fighting against political and journalistic malfeasance, bribery, and significant risks to their own lives in order to expose to the world the magnitude of the Belgium atrocities committed in the Congo. Dinesh D'Souza, to whom my title refers, is among those who seek to deny or downplay the crimes committed by or for colonialists. Hopefully this book will cast too bright a light for such distortions of the truth to prevail. An enlightening book that I highly recommend.

King Leopold's Ghost is an engrossing, riveting account of one of the saddest chapters in the sad history of colonial exploration and exploitation of the African continent.This book chronicles the lust of King Leopold of the tiny European country of Belgium for an African colony of his own, for no other reason than greed , personal ambition a fanatic and ill-conceived desire to compete with Britain and France, the "big boys" of African colonization. What the inept, greedy Leopold and his henchmen did to the Congo was truly unforgivable and is richly detailed in this superb book. The writing is vivid and truly gripping.There can be no better indictment of the colonial system than this excellent book.

Carefully pieced together from documents, articles and witnesses, Leopold's atrocities are revealed to it's true genocidal proportions. Fascinating, frightening, readable, enlightening. This will be the book I recommend to anyone who searches for a deeper understanding of colonial Africa.

"I knew almost nothing abour the history of the Congo until a few years ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I happened to be reading..." So the author recounts the beginnings of his book.
This experience in one form another is frequent in this area, it seems.
The abstractions of discourse over imperiaism are often counterproductive. There is nothing like getting down to cases. This work on King Leopold in the Congo is truly outstanding as history and the uncovering of the distortion of history, the 'great forgetting' as the author calls it, that occurred at the end of Leopold's 'holocaust' of millions when the archives were systematically destroyed. The book opens appropriately with the arrival of the slavers in the sixteenth century in the ancient Kongo whose very intellignet king Affonso attempted to forestall the beginnings of what was to be the coming centuries of European barbarism. Henry Stanley also fares poorly and the lead up and biographical portraits of the explorer and of Leopold set the stage for the entry into the account of Moret, the shipping clerk who noticed the anomalies in the company records, slavery was the only conclusion.
Even now, this saga of modern history too seldom receives mention in the accounts of Bolshevism, Nazism, and subsequent genocides. And yet the shadow of the 'revenge drama' stalks all accounts, for this period and its dreadful horrors saw the onset of the counterreaction in the double tragedy. One can almost feel Lenin's blood coming to a boil, reading this excellent account of the generation that made that revolutionary's revenge come true.
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

This is a very informative and moving history on a mostly forgotten low point (among many low points) of European colonialism. Tiny Belgium and its unhinged, ineffective monarch King Leopold yearned for an overseas colony. Leopold got his own fiefdom in the Congo Territory, and drained the area of its wealth and people, lining his own pockets in the process. Of course the Congo itself got none of the proceeds, and even the nation of Belgium itself got very little as Leopold hoarded the money for himself and lavished it on mistresses and cronies. During this period the Congo became one of the most gruesome places on earth, as a command economy of ivory and rubber harvesting led to the deaths of millions of native Africans and the torture and hardship of many more. Hochschild ably documents this gruesome history and brings much-needed praise to the worldwide movement to bring attention to the Congo tragedy, a humanitarian effort that was quite unique for its time.

In the process Hochschild also brings necessary attention to the mostly forgotten heroes of the movement, like the grass-roots British whistleblowers E.D. Morel and Roger Casement, and the remarkable black American activists William Sheppard and George Washington Williams. However, in several places the author's historical research becomes bogged down in attempted character sketches of all the figures mentioned above, while the tail end of the book unloads a lot of guilt-tripping about how the world should remember the victims of this and other holocausts. This is already plainly evident to the reader, so such appeals just become tiresome. Another issue is Hochschild's frequent over-analysis of the book "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, which was a fictionalized eyewitness account of these atrocities. But despite those weaknesses, this is still a moving account of the worst crimes of colonialism and their continuing effects on world history.