I was reading Lacy Johnson's article "The Fallout" in Guernica about Manhattan Project waste illegally dumped near subsurface landfill fires in St. Louis and she mentioned the drums of uranium ore with "PRODUCT OF BELGIAN CONGO" stamps of origin and it reminded me that I'd been meaning to read this book for over a decade, ever since Michela Wrong mentioned it in "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz", so I finally picked it up.

It's the penultimate chapter that I think stands out as the book's most shocking. After some 274 pages of narrative about a long and heroic international human rights campaign Hochschild flips the script in a handful of paragraphs, pointing out that the depopulation of Africa by half was common to most other colonial rubber operations (whether in Africa or South America, French or Portuguese) and that contemporary episodes of outright genocide (e.g. Germany's destruction of 80% of the Hereros in what is now Namibia or America's contemporaneous colonial conquests) managed to dwarf the depredations of the Congo Free State in microcosm. In some sense the rights campaign for the Congo only took off by virtue of the colonial venture not being sponsored by any major world power but by an otherwise powerless constitutional monarch, perhaps demonstrated best by the fact that the depredations continued long after Brussels took over the colony while the human rights campaign shriveled up.

I'm left with this troubling vision of the shadows of those conscripted Congolese miners flickering on the walls of the Shinkolobwe uranium mines becoming paralyzed as the nuclear shadows of Little Boy's Japanese victims at Hiroshima, and how the shadow cast by the ore they hauled out of that mountain are still poisoning poor black neighborhoods in America.