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A review by mburnamfink
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
5.0
I let this book sit on my shelves because I thought that it'd be too depressing to read. When I started, I couldn't put it down. The story of the Belgian Congo and the broader colonization of Africa is one of the most fascinating and horrible in history, and Hochschild makes King Leopold's Ghost come alive.
Late into the 19th century, Africa was still the 'dark continent', unmapped and uncontrolled by European powers. The great Congo river was blocked by falls a few hundred miles inland, and the slave traders camped out in disease ridden coastal towns were content to let slaves come to them. A few men of immense will and ambition broke that system. Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh orphan, a man who invented his own past, and became a famous explorer. His expeditions could best be described as search and destroy operations, as he lead columns of enslaved porters into the African wilderness, blasting away at anything, animal or human, that crossed his path. His expedition to the headwaters of the Congo found thousands of miles of navigable river above the Congo rapids. King Leopold of Belgium was ruler of a small country with grand ambitions. In a clever series of diplomatic manuevers in the 1880s, he organized millions of square miles of internal Africa as a personal colony, responsible only to him.
And then he set out exploiting that. The system is simple. Get a few people from Europe ready for a grand adventure. Give them rifles, bullets, and a platoon of enslaved Africans separated from their home. Tell them to gather ivory by any means necessary, including hostage taking, repeated application of the chicotte (a kind of whip made out of hippo hide), and summary executions. When ivory began to fail, a rubber boom provide an even greater impetus to murder for the sake of profit. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his Mr. Kurtz only scratch the surface of the mass murder and disfigurement of the Congo. At one point, soldiers were required to show a severed hand for every bullet expended, leading to a brisk trade in hands.
Leopold's Congo was brought down by public opprobrium, lead by the English abolistionist E.D. Morel, and substantially aided by a pair of African American missionaries, George Washing Williams and William Sheppard. These men revealed to the world what was happening in the Congo, and the immensity of the crime. Leopold was forced to relinquish the Congo a year before his death, but not before extracting one last concession from the Belgian people.
Since its publication, Hochschild's book has provoke a reexamination of King Leopold, and European colonialism more broadly. This is right. This is one of the best books I've read all year. Absolutely recommended.
Late into the 19th century, Africa was still the 'dark continent', unmapped and uncontrolled by European powers. The great Congo river was blocked by falls a few hundred miles inland, and the slave traders camped out in disease ridden coastal towns were content to let slaves come to them. A few men of immense will and ambition broke that system. Henry Morton Stanley was a Welsh orphan, a man who invented his own past, and became a famous explorer. His expeditions could best be described as search and destroy operations, as he lead columns of enslaved porters into the African wilderness, blasting away at anything, animal or human, that crossed his path. His expedition to the headwaters of the Congo found thousands of miles of navigable river above the Congo rapids. King Leopold of Belgium was ruler of a small country with grand ambitions. In a clever series of diplomatic manuevers in the 1880s, he organized millions of square miles of internal Africa as a personal colony, responsible only to him.
And then he set out exploiting that. The system is simple. Get a few people from Europe ready for a grand adventure. Give them rifles, bullets, and a platoon of enslaved Africans separated from their home. Tell them to gather ivory by any means necessary, including hostage taking, repeated application of the chicotte (a kind of whip made out of hippo hide), and summary executions. When ivory began to fail, a rubber boom provide an even greater impetus to murder for the sake of profit. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his Mr. Kurtz only scratch the surface of the mass murder and disfigurement of the Congo. At one point, soldiers were required to show a severed hand for every bullet expended, leading to a brisk trade in hands.
Leopold's Congo was brought down by public opprobrium, lead by the English abolistionist E.D. Morel, and substantially aided by a pair of African American missionaries, George Washing Williams and William Sheppard. These men revealed to the world what was happening in the Congo, and the immensity of the crime. Leopold was forced to relinquish the Congo a year before his death, but not before extracting one last concession from the Belgian people.
Since its publication, Hochschild's book has provoke a reexamination of King Leopold, and European colonialism more broadly. This is right. This is one of the best books I've read all year. Absolutely recommended.