King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a fantastic, crucial look at the European colonization of Africa written by the historian Adam Hochschild and published in 1998. Describing how the tyrant Leopold II murdered roughly 10 million people for the sole sake of providing an outlet for his greed, this book should be required reading for all human beings, as it shows the extreme depths of depravity and monstrosity people can fall into, especially those possessing power.
King Leopold's Ghost begins with Hochschild writing of how he learned of the atrocities in the Congo under Leopold: he came across a footnote in a book detailing that eight-ten million human beings have been wiped out due to the cruelty of others. Indeed, the footnote came from a quote by Mark Twain in which he wrote that he was campaigning against slave labor. Hochschild writes that he was surprised to learn of the atrocities in the Congo, as he expected the events to be discussed in more detail. He writes that the Congo Terror (I will be calling the atrocities this starting from now for the sake of convenience) was a very modern atrocity, as Leopold never personally killed anyone to satisfy his desire for money: “unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh” (4). Hochschild discusses that in the Victorian Era, many people kept letters, including the perpetrators of the Congo Terror: “The men who had seized the Congo often trumpeted their killings, bragging about them in books and newspaper articles. Some kept surprisingly frank diaries that show far more than the writers intended, as does a voluminous and explicit instruction book for colonial officials. Furthermore, several officers of the private army that occupied the Congo came to feel guilty about the blood on their hands. Their testimony, and the documents they smuggled out, helped fuel the protest movement. Even on the part of the most brutally suppressed Africans, the silence is not complete. Some of their actions and voices, though filtered through the records of their conquerors, we can still see and hear” (5). Hochschild details that most of the atrocities in the Congo occurred from 1890-1910, and mass exploitation began the moment white Europeans entered Africa.
Hochschild states that before Europeans went to Africa, they imagined it as a land of bizarre people and phenomena: the Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden wrote in 1350 that Africa had “one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads. A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg, three faces, and the heads of lions. 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” (6). These illusions were later shown to be inaccurate when maritime travel was improved. That is, in the 1440s, engineers from Lisbon invented the caravel, a ship which utilized the wind for movement. The main motivation for the Europeans traveling to Africa was pure, unadulterated greed and intolerance for those of different belief systems, eerily foreshadowing Leopold’s reign of terror: “They were also driven by one of the most enduring of medieval myths, the legend of Prester John, a Christian king who was said to rule a vast empire in the interior of Africa, where, from a palace of translucent crystal and precious stones, he reigned over forty-two lesser kings, in addition to assorted centaurs and giants … Surely Prester John would be eager to share his riches with his fellow Christians and to help them find their way onward, to the fabled wealth of India” (7). Of course, one of the main reasons wealth was desired was to put pressure on Muslims, who had a relationship of intense and mutual animosity with the Europeans due to their religious differences. When the explorer Diago Cao in 1482 came across the Congo, he immediately recognized it as an advanced civilization: it had been in place for a century before his arrival. He was also horrified at certain practices (ex. polygamy - he maintained that the Africans followed this practice because substances found in their spices worsened their judgment). Europeans noted the existence of slavery in the kingdom of the Congo, as well as its prevalence: you could be enslaved for failing to pay a debt. Masters also had the leeway to abuse and even kill their slaves: sometimes slaves were ritualistically murdered (excellently seen in how when a treaty would be made, a slave would be left to die of starvation and exposure: their demise is meant to symbolize what will happen to those who violate the treaty). Despite the potential brutality of slavery within African societies, it was flexible and somewhat escapable: “Over a generation or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and free people and slaves sometimes intermarried. Nonetheless, the fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell” (10). European traders came in swarms to Africa over the years, and they purchased vast quantities of slaves to sell in other areas (ex. Britain and America). Human depravity is seen in the following quote, which demonstrates the corruption of idealism, hypocrisy, and religious fanaticism: “The lust for slave profits engulfed even some of the priests, who abandoned their preaching, took black women as concubines, kept slaves themselves, and sold their students and converts into slavery. The priests who strayed from the fold stuck to their faith in one way, however; after the Reformation they tried to ensure that none of their human goods ended up in Protestant Hands. It was surely not right, said one, ‘for persons baptized in the Catholic church to be sold to people who are enemies of their faith.’” (10). Some of the records of slavery at that time are utterly heartbreaking: one of the accounts of a trader notes that a female child slave was “worthless” due to the fact that she was dying: there would be no profit to anyone who wants to buy her.
A king of the Congo, Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, became the king in 1506 and got the title Affonso I for his forty-year rule. He was very important, as he wasn’t stupid: while he wanted slavery (for the sake of the economy and for personal convenience), he didn't want his kingdom to be turned into a slave colony. Furthermore, Affonso tried to modernize in a European style, going so far as to become a Christian: however, he was unsuccessful, for the greed of the settlers was virtually insatiable. In an attempt to satisfy their avarice, many traders took to kidnapping to get their supply of slaves (whom they viewed as property, not living beings). It was noted by Affonso that in one incident four free blacks were seized and sold into slavery during the evening to ward off potential discovery. When the slaves were sold, they were immediately branded with an extremely hot iron to mark them as slaves. The Portuguese king King Joao III responded to Affonso’s pleas to stop mass kidnappings by telling him that he was overexaggerating: he had heard from his subjects that there are so many Africans that the kidnappings had only a negligible impact on their civilization. Eventually, ten members of Affonso’s family disappeared while going to Portugal to learn religion. Later, Portuguese traders tried to assassinate him when he went to Mass on Sunday: while he survived, he lost some of his allies in the chaos. After his death, the Congo was completely taken over by the Europeans, and the presiding ruler was decapitated. Needless to say, Africans had an extremely low opinion of the Europeans: they viewed them as barbarians who enjoyed eating them. Furthermore, some thought of ships as vessels that could take one to the land of the dead. Their logic went as follows: the ships which brought slaves into the ocean came back without them, so they were probably deposited in the afterlife. In one sickening demonstration of the trauma slaves underwent, “The death tolls on the packed slave ships that sailed west from the Congo coast rose higher still when some slaves refused to eat the food they were given, believing that they would be eating those who had sailed before them” (16). Later on, Africans believed that European ships traveled the way they did due to a compact the captains would have with a sea sprite: in exchange for a few African bodies, the sea sprite would give them various materials and hasten the speed of their travel. Hochschild morbidly remarks that this wasn’t far from the truth, seeing that Europeans were quite enthusiastic about exchanging the lives of Africans for pecuniary gain.
Hochschild discusses John Rowlands, who would later be known as Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley was abandoned by his mother to his abusive family, and he was later sent to an orphanage which had terrible living conditions and treatment (like most of the other orphanages at the time). Due to his treatment in the orphanage, he developed an intense phobia of sexual intimacy. He became a traveler and fought for both sides in the American Civil War. Later, he went to Africa to come up with material for what he would hope to be a best-selling book. He tried to find Dr. Livingstone, an explorer who had seemingly gone missing (the last time he had been seen by a European was five years ago). He succeeded in doing so, though it took him eight months. It’s also worthy to mention that “Because Stanley was the only source of information about the search (his two white companions died during the expedition, and no one ever bothered to interview the surviving porters), the legend remained heroic. There were the months of arduous marching, the terrible swamps, the evil ‘Arab’ slavetraders, the mysterious deadly diseases, the perilous attacks by crocodiles, and finally Stanley’s triumphant discovery of the gentle Dr. Livingstone” (30). Of course, the last part of his adventure is extremely famous. Stanley alleged that when he met Dr. Livingstone, they quickly bonded before a tearful farewell: there is no telling whether this is true or not, as Dr. Livingstone died in Africa before he was asked to verify the information. Stanley was also very brutal and sadistic towards his slaves: he furiously whipped them to keep them moving, and praised himself for the number of lashes he gave them. While traveling in Africa, he noted that it should be populated by whites and dominated by Christianity, seeing that he viewed it as largely empty (which, of course, was utterly untrue). Leopold II was a fan of Stanley’s travels, and Hochschild describes him: when he was young, he didn't appear to be destined to be a prolific mass murderer. On the contrary, he was physically weak and was noted by his father as attentive to detail and possessing of a cautious personality (to be more specific, he compared his son to a fox before it crosses the stream). Leopold became eighteen in 1853, and he was married to the Archduchess Marie-Henriette: they were a disaster of a couple, seeing that Marie-Henriette loved to ride horses while Leopold frequently fell off them. Leopold felt no love for her, instead focusing on trade and Africa: he felt insecure and weak compared to other European rulers, seeing that Belgium didn't have a very distinct national identity. Furthermore, Belgian was minuscule in size compared to other European countries and didn't have a mighty military. All of this fueled Leopold’s paranoia, causing him to want to expand his influence by gaining more territory.
Hochschild talks more of Leopold’s home life: like the vast majority of other rulers at the time (and indeed people), Leopold was obsessed with having children. To be more specific, he wanted a son to become the next ruler (this idea of “carrying on your legacy” is completely erroneous and foolish: the dinosaurs dominated for more than 100 million years, yet what is their legacy now?). His greed continued to make itself known even in his personal life: “In 1869, the king’s nine-year-old son fell into a pond, caught pneumonia, and died. At the funeral, for the only time in his life, Leopold broke down in public, collapsing to his knees beside the coffin and sobbing uncontrollably. He had the presence of mind, however, to ask Parliament to pass a law requiring the state to pay the expenses of the royal funeral” (39). While he had three daughters, he refused to give them any attention, and tried to pass a law to guarantee they would receive no assets upon his death. Leopold then took his scheming to the next level when he made an entire plan to annex the Congo: he invited many of the most prominent royals of Europe to his palace. He then informed them that he wanted to help the Congo as a philanthropist and humanitarian; he fooled basically all of them due to the details he gave. As stated before, he wanted to appear as a philanthropist, and he tried to convince the royals to give him the Congo (the whole topic of “giving” European rulers areas of Africa without the consent of the Africans themselves is best embodied in the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which all of Africa was divided among European aristocrats and despots), as he alleged that he had no interest in exploiting them and was satisfied with ruling Belgium. Over the days, the details were drawn for the “Congo Free State” (the area of the land, including the Congo, that is owned and managed by Leopold - he’s basically a dictator, seeing that his word is law). In the end, Leopold got exactly what he wanted: “Before the guests dispersed to their respective countries, they voted to establish the International African Association … Leopold was elected by acclamation as the international committee’s first chairman … He presented each guest with a gilt-framed portrait of himself in dress uniform, and the awed dignitaries and explorers headed home” (45-6). Hochschild tellingly compares Leopold to a theatrical producer: he had fooled the audience into believing something, and was going to capitalize on his trickery.
When Stanley returned from his journey in Africa (it is noted that those who saw him were appalled by the way he treated colored people), Leopold decided to use him as a pawn to secure a large portion of Africa. However, Belgium didn't have a very large military presence, making it imperative and crucial that he continues his ruse of being a humanitarian: he must continue his trickery in order to get land. He used Stanley as a scout to map the area, and masked his intentions of colonization and complete domination behind the magnificent guise of Stanley’s journeys of supposed daring, courage, and curiosity. Beforehand, Leopold played to Stanley’s insecurities: he loved flattery, like many. Hochschild then notes that when it came to profiting from slavery, rich people like Leopold made the most while people like Stanley who were once poor desired social mobility: “The commanders of the ground troops in the great African land grab, the whites who led soldiers into the bush, directed the rifle and machine-gun fire and wielded the surveyors’ instruments, who braved malaria, dysentery, and typhoid, were often, like Stanley, from the lower or lower middle class in their home countries. For them, Africa was a chance to gain upward mobility toward wealth and glory. But like those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with” (63). When Stanley went into Africa, he established a base to serve as a checkpoint for European traders and the like. Insultingly, the town was named “Leopoldville,” and Leopold later ordered Stanley to conquer as much as he can and to crush all resistance. Stanley, with some advice from Leopold and other Europeans, tricked the African chiefs into giving away their land: the African chiefs didn't understand the basic principles of treaties and documents. That is, when they received gifts, they thought that the Europeans were trying to make friends with them, not to mention that they were completely alien to the act of signing away land. Hochschild describes, “The idea of a treaty of friendship between two clans or villages was familiar; the idea of signing over one’s land to someone on the other side of the ocean was inconceivable. Did the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela, for example, have any idea of what they agreed to on April 1, 1884? In return for ‘one piece of cloth per month to each of the undersigned chiefs, besides present of cloth in hand,’ they promised to ‘freely … give up to the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governments rights to all their territories … and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories…. All roads and waterways running through this country, the right of collecting tolls on the same, and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of said Association.’” (72). It’s worthy to point out that the clause included the declaration that the Africans are to help the Europeans “by labour,” which was a euphemism for the word which should’ve been used: “slavery.” When the Africans realized what they had done, it was far too late: most likely, they would be enslaved at that point. At the very least, the documents with their signatures would be all but gone.
Hochschild describes that the American President Chester A. Arthur was tricked by Leopold’s ruse. To be specific, Arthur wrote that “Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established … under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.” (78). America as a whole recognized Leopold’s “ownership” of the Congo: the secretary of state himself said so. America, ironically, was the first country to rule in favor of Leopold’s control of the Congo Free State. Leopold, following his initial success in America, succeeded in deceiving every other major European ruler, even Chancellor Bismarck of Germany, by a combination of lies and outright bribery. That is, he persuaded Chancellor Bismarck by having his friend, Gerson Bleichroder, say good words on his behalf. In exchange, Bleirchroder “received some banking business from advisers to Leopold and the chance to invest in the Congo himself. A woman pianist, thought to be a romantic interest of his, was invited to give a recital at the Belgian court, where she was presented with a medal by Leopold” (83). In February 1885, European leaders finalized their recognition of Leopold’s claim over the Congo. When it came to the geography of Belgium and its slave colony, there was a clear disproportion between their spatial dimensions: “Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king’s flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself” (87). Leopold named himself the “proprietor” of the Congo. While this was happening, he was acting like a predator in his domestic life: he slept with multiple women, and was personally named by the British court for the sexual trafficking of young women: “Leopold had paid £800 a month, a former servant of the house testified, for a steady supply of young women, some of whom were ten to fifteen years old and guaranteed to be virgins … what made the case close with unusual speed was that the Prince of Wales was said to be another of the establishment’s customers” (88). Like before, he didn't care for his daughters; later in her life, the oldest struggled with the management of money due to not having discipline over her impulse to consume luxury clothing (ex. dresses). Leopold then tried to work more on the colony by building infrastructure. Hochschild provides the following statistics: by the end of 1889, there were 430 whites and in 1887 surveyors charted 220 miles for a potential railroad. Leopold continued his deceit, as he needed some money to finance his domination of the Congo: to do so, he asked Parliament to give him a loan of twenty-five million francs (roughly $125 million dollars). Because Parliament didn't know of his deception, they agreed to help his “philanthropy.” As an added bonus, they charged him no interest for the loan. Another reason why they agreed to give him the large loan was that he promised to leave the Congo to Belgium after his death, providing the country with a new source of revenue. Hochschild then discusses Leopold’s extreme arrogance, seen excellently in how he claimed to represent the people of Africa, despite the exact opposite being true: an agreement read “We, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, Sovereign of the Etat Independant du Congo, wishing to secure for Our beloved fatherland the fruits of the work which, for many long years, We have been pursuing on the African continent … declare, by these presents, to bequeath and transmit, after Our death, to Belgium, all Our sovereign rights over l’Etat Independant du Congo.” (95).
One of the prominent African American historians of his time, George Washington Williams, focused heavily on nontraditional sources (ex. testimonies), which made him an oddity compared to other historians at the time who generally only wrote histories of events long after they were finished. Williams, an African American, focused on slavery and racism: “Williams had already begun writing and speaking about a bondage closer to home - the position of American blacks, enduring the long post-Civil War backlash of lynchings and Ku Klux Klan violence, and the return of white supremacist rule throughout the South. As a veteran, he was especially angry that so few hopes of the war that ended slavery had been realized” (103). When he went to the Congo Free State to do research, Leopold tried to prevent him from going there with all his flattery and influence. Regardless, he failed to sway the historian, and Williams was horrified to see the depredations and atrocities occurring in the Congo Free State. In his Open Letter he highlighted the biggest issues, including: (1) white Europeans tricked African American chiefs into giving them their land by convincing them they had magical powers (using technology: one of their methods included using electric batteries to trick the Africans into believing the white Europeans had supernatural strength), (2) Stanley’s personal cruelty, (3) mistreatment of African employees (they were expected to feed and provide for themselves), (4) physical abuse coming from high authorities (severe restraint for small offenses: sometimes ox-chains would be attached to the necks of prisoners, making it liable to infection seeing how it exposes the skin - in the hot tropical weather, flies frequently gather around the wound), (5) the complete absence of schools (no philanthropy was happening), (6) sexual trafficking and sex slavery (African women were forced to become prostitutes), (7) wholesale massacre of civilians (white soldiers would frequently slaughter African Americans for entertainment; other times they would do so to steal all the females for themselves - in one incident, two officers in the Belgian Army saw an African in a canoe. They wagered five sterling to see who could kill the African first. Three bullets later, the African died from a bullet piercing his skull), and (8) mass slavery. Williams asked the United States to confront Leopold, as it was partially responsible for allowing Leopold’s regime to arise. He then described the atrocities occurring as “crimes against humanity,” which would find its voice best in the Nuremberg Trials following WWII (the body counts of Holocaust victims and those who were murdered in the Congo Free State were extremely similar: one of the few differences was that those who perished under Leopold’s tyranny were colored people). When Williams published his work, Leopold was infuriated and denounced it as slander. He then started an ad hominem assault in which he libeled Williams and said that he had no right to speak, seeing that he didn't have military experience. George Washington Williams later died of tuberculosis, and Le Mouvement Géographique, a newspaper that trusted Leopold, noted his demise with satisfaction and happiness. When he was buried, it was in an unmarked grave. While Williams was a hero in a sense, he still had personal weaknesses: his second British fiance didn't realize he had left his wife and fifteen-year-old son in America before meeting her. However, he is still commendable, as “this was the flip side of the extraordinary boldness that enabled him to defy a king, his officials, and the entire racial order of the day … Williams’s Open Letter was a cry of outrage that came from the heart. It gained him nothing. It lost him his patron … It guaranteed that he could never work, as he had hoped, to bring American blacks to the Congo. It brought him none of the money he always needed, and in the few months he had left before his life ended in a foreign beach resort, it earned him nothing little but calumny. By the time he went to the Congo in 1890, close to a thousand Europeans and Americans had visited the territory or worked there. Williams was the only one to speak out fully and passionately and repeatedly about what others denied or ignored” (114). Indeed, Williams can be seen as what Orwell would note as a person who can face unpleasant facts. This whole idea of handling knowledge while having a sense of personal responsibility still rings true in its relevance today: how many people talk about the dangers climate change poses not just to human life, but to all life on Earth? Is any action being undertaken? More importantly, when will drastic action be done? Personally, I feel it will be delayed until it’s too late, but you never know: we humans can be surprising at times.
The death toll was absurdly high for porters compared to every other occupation: the loads they carried over long distances, along with severe malnourishment, led to a quick death. Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, saw some porters he saw in 1896. He tellingly described, “Unceasingly we meet these porters … black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load - box, bale, ivory tusk … barrel; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food - a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round from preoccupation with keeping their balance and from the daze of exhaustion. They come and go like this by the thousands” (120). In one incident, three hundred porters conscripted in 1891 by District Commissioner Paul Lemarinel all died on a single forced march that stretched for more than six hundred miles. Hochschild writes of the chicotte - a devastating whip which would be used to brutalize people for little to no reason. To illustrate, in one single incident thirty children (seven-eight years old) were heinously whipped by soldiers - their only crime was that they laughed in front of a white man. The white man, feeling insulted, ordered for the African boys in the town to be whipped fifty times. Furthermore, the chicotte was “a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually, the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more - not an uncommon punishment - were often fatal” (120). When a European, Lefranc, wrote of these horrid beatings, few people paid attention, seeing how racism (which still exists today - I’m writing summary during the George Floyd protests - 6/10/10) was institutionalized in society. Some pictures follow the description of the chicotte. I want to point out only a few: an image of Joseph Conrad (author, as you mostly likely know, of Heart of Darkness), Leon Rom (inspiration for Mr. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: he enjoyed beheading Africans, wrote a book on their traditions, painted, and collected butterflies), a dead elephant killed by Rom and other Europeans for sport (this kind of behavior is easy to understand: if we can’t even treat each other well, how can we give due consideration to other species?), a portrait of Guillaume Van Kerckhoven (a soldier who paid his subordinates for the amount of decapitated heads they collected), an image of a man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, a chicotte beating, and a cartoon which shows Leopold and Abdul Hamid II (perpetrator of the Hamidian massacres) comparing notes on how to best slaughter large groups of people without being punished (in the comic, Abdul Hamid II tells Leopold that those who complain won’t do anything, seeing how they didn't punish him at all for killing roughly 200,000 civilians). Hochschild describes that the vast majority of white Europeans didn't care about the massive torture perpetrated on the blacks, as they didn't suffer their fate themselves. When Lefranc complained, he was viewed negatively by the other whites in the community: the governor general wrote that Lefranc was ignorant and mediocre. This whole theme of humans not caring about the suffering of others is still thriving today in the meat and dairy industry (although I’m an omnivore at the time of the writing, I will become a vegan once I go to college): people don’t care that tens of billions of animals are brought into the world only to be mutilated, tortured, raped, slaughtered, dismembered, and consumed.
Hochschild details Primo Levi’s famed quote which goes as follows: “‘Monsters exist,’” “‘But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are … the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.’” (121). Hochschild writes that racism allowed the white Europeans to easily excuse their heinous actions: they blamed the victims for causing their own suffering (despite largely knowing better). Furthermore, another reason how it was simple for people to excuse the suffering was adaptation: people can get used to anything. Furthermore, most travelers were fine with the regime, so long as they weren’t forced to commit the murders, tortures, and rapes themselves (which is awfully similar to the meat industry today - people may not like eating animals, but so long as they don’t have to slaughter it themselves they don’t care about the situation). In Hochschild’s own words, “Everyone around you was participating. By going along with the system, you were paid, promoted, awarded medals. So men who would have been appalled to see someone using a chicotte on the streets of Brussels or Paris or Stockholm accepted the act, in this different setting, as normal. We can hear the echo of this thinking, in another context, half a century later: ‘To tell the truth,’ said Franz Stangl of the mass killings that took place when he was commandant of the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, ‘one did become used to it.’ In such a regime, one thing that often helps functionaries ‘become used to it’ is a slight, symbolic distance … between an official in charge and the physical act of terror itself” (122). To be more specific, many of the Europeans had some Africans who were more privileged than the others administer the punishment, which was similar to how the Nazis had kapos while the Soviets kept predurki. An official named George Bricusse writes plainly of an execution of a man arrested in 1895 for stealing a gun: he said that he was perfectly fine watching his suffering, and that he couldn’t believe he felt scared the first time he saw the chicotte being used on an African. A survivor of the Congo Free State recounted how she was kidnapped by the Europeans: she watched her husband get stabbed to death and babies be left to die in the wilderness (her sister’s infant suffered that fate). Leopold, not content with mere slaughter, decided to brainwash the children by stealing them from their families and forcing them on the pain of death to practice Catholicism. These children, as imagined, were frequently whipped with the chicotte, and countless infants died while being forced on a forced march there. This sickening attitude of moral superiority on the side of Leopold and the Catholic authorities is made extremely evident in the following quote: “Of one column of 108 boys on a forced march to the state colony at Boma in 1892-1893, only sixty-two made it to their destination; eight of them died within the following few weeks. The mother superiority of one Catholic colony for girls wrote to a high Congo state official in 1895, ‘Several of the little girls were so sickly on their arrival that … our good sisters couldn’t save them, but all had the happiness of receiving Holy Baptism; they are now little angels in Heaven who are praying for our great king.’” (135). I remember that after I read the prior part, I was seized with a feeling of intense and overwhelming nausea: if exploiting and killing the Africans wasn’t bad enough, they had to add insult to injury by thinking of themselves as “liberators” and whatnot.
Hochschild then discusses Joseph Conrad, who allegedly was relatively ignorant when it came to the workings of the world until his stay in Africa, seeing that he detailed that “he had had ‘not a thought in his head.’” (142). After six months in Africa, however, he was shocked and horrified by human nature, and published Heart of Darkness, which is the world’s most reprinted short novel. Hochschild interestingly notes that even though Conrad loathed Leopold’s barbarism, he himself was an imperialist, clearly showing that humans are quite nuanced in their behavior and beliefs. Hochschild tellingly details that Heart of Darkness is a seething indictment of imperialism (and therefore nationalism and racism), seeing how it “remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa. When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, ‘she talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.’ Conrad’s white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives, bringing civilization, serving ‘the noble cause.’ All these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, ‘an emissary of … science and progress.’ He is a painter, the creator of ‘a small sketch in oils’ of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other works, a seventeenth-page report - ‘vibrating with eloquence … a beautiful piece of writing’ - to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. At the end of this report, filled with lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’” (147). Personally, I find Kurtz to be quite telling of humanity’s problem: we have great technological capability but very little sense of responsibility and empathy. Even though Kurtz, as shown above, was highly intelligent and capable, he was still a sadist and serial killer: more than power and information is needed to create a decent human being. Furthermore, Rom was frequently complained about for the sickening violence which he perpetrated and his disregard for life in general: a governor general personally mentioned Rom as having slaughtered large numbers of people for little reason, not to mention that Rom kept a flower bed adorned with a large number of human heads. Rom also erected a gallows in front of the military station to intimidate people. In the end, “the moral landscape of Heart of Darkness and the shadowy figure at its center are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy” (149).
Hochschild moves back to discuss Stanley: he finally married, but was absolutely terrified of sexual activity. In fact, when he was told to satisfy his wife, he broke down weeping and admitted that he was incapable of doing it. Moving back to Leopold, Hochschild writes that he exploited the Congo by not only ravaging its people, but by consuming its resources: a rubber boom shook the world’s economy, seeing how it could be used to form tires, hoses, gaskets, tubings, and insulation for technology (ex. telephones, telegraphs, wiring). Fortunately for Leopold, rubber came from certain trees: the Congo had a huge amount of trees that could provide the material. Leopold, seeing the large prices rubber could be sold at, ordered the officials in the Congo to extract as much rubber as possible. The collection of rubber was tiresome and time-consuming: to find rubber, people had to search for the trees which provided the sap before scaling them. That is, “Rubber is coagulated sap; the French word for it, caoutchouc, comes from a South American Indian word meaning ‘the wood that weeps.’ The wood that wept in the Congo was a long spongy vine of the Landolphia genus. Up to a foot thick at the base, a vine would twine upward around a tree to a hundred feet or more off the ground, where it could reach sunlight. There, branching, it might wind its way hundreds of feet through the upper limbs of another half-dozen trees. To gather the rubber, you had to slash the vine with a knife and hang a bucket or earthenware pot to collect the slow drip of thick, milky sap. You could make a small incision to tap the vine, or-officially forbidden but widely practiced-cut through it entirely, which produced more rubber but killed the vine … As the lengths of vine within reach of the ground were tapped dry, workers climbed high into the trees to reach sap” (160-1). This proved annoying to the Europeans, as they wanted as much rubber as soon as possible. Another concern was that those who searched for rubber had to go deep into the jungle, which made it possible they would attempt escape: to dissuade them, the Europeans would frequently kidnap their family (especially the women) and threaten to torture and kill them if a certain amount of rubber is not provided by a set date. In some instances, even when the Africans paid the Europeans the set amount, they were met with heartbreak: in quite a few instances their families would be butchered regardless of their behavior (though this would be kept from them to keep them motivated as long as possible). As expected, the Europeans also frequently raped the women: officer Georges Bricusse wrote in his diary on November 22, 1895 that the soldiers all want concubines, so that “‘The sentries who are supposed to watch them unchain the prettiest ones and rape them.’” (162). The instruction manual for officials in the Congo, the Manuel du Voyageur et du Résident au Congo, gave detailed instructions on the “correct” way to kidnap and coerce people, telling officials to preferably send old women to make negotiations with village chiefs. Furthermore, those who refused to cooperate would be immediately slaughtered, which led to terrible behavior on the part of the Europeans: to make sure that every bullet (to save money for Leopold) was being used effectively, the authorities demanded proof that it was used to slay someone. The widely established currency to guarantee the efficacy of the bullets was human hands: the hands of corpses and still-living people would be amputated and presented to those in power. That is, “If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message … each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone … standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. ‘Sometimes,’ said one officer to a missionary, soldiers ‘shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man.’ In some military units there was even a ‘keeper of the hands,’” whose main job was preserving the hands long enough to show his superior proof of the subjection of the workers (165).
An officer, Leon Fievez, enjoyed brutalizing people. In one incident, he had ten people thrown into the river in a large net filled with stones: any village which disobeys him could expect to be wiped off the face of the earth. Fievez justified his atrocities by saying that he was only killing people to serve as an example for others: “‘One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people … but that allowed five hundred others to live.’” (166). All in all, the Congo Terror is a clear demonstration of humanity’s capability of sadism, cruelty, arrogance, tribalism, and pure, unadulterated selfishness. All in all, more than eleven million pounds of rubber was annually produced in the Congo. Leopold succeeded in deceiving most people, and he felt no responsibility for what was happening: he refused to think about it. Also, in the ultimate demonstration of arrogance and stupidity, Leopold hosted a fair in 1897 in Brussels which cast him as a humanitarian and the Africans as savages who should be “grateful”: “More than a million visitors came to see this celebration of the Congo. Items on display ranged from that great instrument of civilization so praised by Stanley (who twice visited the fair), the Maxim gun, to a large set of linen tapestries portraying Barbarism and Civilization, Fetishism and Christianity, Polygamy and Family Life, Slavery and Freedom. The most extraordinary tableau, however, was a living one: 267 black men, women, and children imported from the Congo” (176). Perversely, some European men came to the fair in hopes of seeing the women without shirts: they heard that they didn't wear them. That is, “European men hoping to see the fabled bare breasts of Africa went away disappointed, however, for the women were made to wear cotton dressing gowns while at the fair. Clothing, a local magazine observed, was, after all, ‘the first sign of civilization.’” (176). In the same event, Leopold put a placard in front of the Africans which read “THE BLACKS ARE FED BY THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE” (176). Indeed, this circumstance is so bizarre that one may hope that this is only a joke, but it isn’t: as Denis Diderot, author of the first dictionary, would say, “From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step” (176).
Fortunately, there were some people who partially redeemed the human species. One of them was Edmund Dene Morel, who went to the Congo and witnessed the Congo Terror for himself, seeing how he was an official. Impassioned, he launched a massive crusade (Hochschild described him as Leopold’s most formidable opponent when it came to the media) against Leopold and the Congo Free State. Morel’s physical appearance did suit his personality, for “his thick handlebar mustache and tall, barrel-chested frame exuded forcefulness; his dark eyes blazed with indignation. The millions of words that would flow from his pen over the remainder of his life came in a handwriting that raced across the page in bold, forward-slanting lines, flattened by speed, as if they had no time to spare in reaching their destination” (186-7). Hochschild also notes that Morel’s moral indignation was very impressive and was hard to explain, seeing how he spent the majority of his young life as a businessman, not to mention that he wasn’t politically active. He also didn't champion any social movement before: his protest of the Congo Free State was his first. Hochschild also makes it clear that he did his criticism out of altruism, not personal gain: his mother was sick, so his losing his potentially high-paying job as an official in the Congo Free State would give him no advantage. Overall, Morel was deemed by Hochschild to be the most important and powerful British investigative journalist of his era, clearly demonstrating his sheer influence. This could be easily explained once his writing style is noted: he wrote with impassioned fury and a demand for justice while making his writing terse and extremely detailed: “Over the years both admirers and enemies have searched his work for factual errors, with scant success. Even today, in almost any account of the rubber system in Leopold’s Congo, if you trace statistics and quotations to their sources, many of them prove to have been first printed by Morel” (188). While Morel took the lead, others followed, including the Anti-Slavery Society. Morel was denounced by Leopold’s cronies as a liar, and he responded by becoming even more detail-oriented when it came to his writing: he published documents that belonged to officials which proved that large numbers of people were sexually assaulted and murdered on a whim. Morel was eventually approached by a representative of Leopold who offered him a bribe in exchange for his stopping. Remaining steadfast in his decision to defend those who were being oppressed, Morel staunchly refused to stop and told Leopold’s messenger to forget about trying to convince him. Morel’s intense yet consistent efforts caused Leopold’s reputation to crumble in many areas, and news of the horrors of the Congo became apparent to the European public, including Britain. Leopold, upon learning that Britain had learned of his crimes, was terrified: Britain might use humanitarianism as an excuse to take the Congo from him, seeing how it owned much of Africa and yet wanted more.
Hochschild writes of Roger Casement, an official who witnessed brutality (officer Van Kerckhoven happily explained to him how he would pay his soldiers for each person killed). Casement was a great orator, which helped him attract more attention to the Congo Terror. Leopold, being the snake he is, invited Casement to see him. When he arrived, he ranted for 90 minutes on how he was doing the right thing, and that those who had done atrocities could be excused: “the king also claimed that ‘it was impossible to have always the best men in Africa; and indeed the African climate seemed frequently to cause deterioration in the character.’” (198). Casement, however, was somewhat demoralized when Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the most decorated British soldiers of the era, committed suicide once he was exposed as a homosexual: he ended his life in a hotel room in Paris. Casement later went to the Congo once again, and his diary shows the atrocities he witnessed: he witnessed people being kidnapped and executed. He also saw the standard practices of hand mutilation and rape; the British government was hesitant to publish the information due to notions that Belgians belonged to a supposedly “civilized” race: “Despite the restrained tone and careful documentation, the report’s accounts of sliced-off hands and penises were far more graphic and forceful than the British government had expected. The Foreign Office, already uneasy, began getting urgent requests to delay publication from Sir Constantine Phipps, the fervently pro-Leopold British minister to Brussels. Philipps, a conceited man of limited intelligence, couldn’t believe ‘that Belgians, members of a cultivated people amongst whom I had lived, could, under even a tropical sky, have perpetrated acts of refined cruelty.’ The only reason the companies used ‘sentries,’ he explained to the foreign secretary, was to protect the rubber harvesters during their work. ‘Please manage to prevent issue of report by Casement until after 10th instant, date on which I must unavoidably encounter King of the Belgians,’ Phipps telegraphed. ‘The publication will inevitably put me in an awkward position at court.’” (203-4). Others like Phipps supported Leopold, and one of them went so far as to try to get a copy of the report to Leopold before its publication. When the report finally came out in 1904, the names of the victims were censored, causing some to believe he was lying. For instance, La Tribune Congolaise said that those who had lost their hands had only undergone surgery due to cancer which was present on them (this, like most of the information in the book, shows the deception and stupidity to which people can descend to when there is incentive). By 1908, Morel wrote some 20,000 letters about the Congo Free State, and he published a large number of pictures (many of which displayed people who had lost their hands). Once they were released, some newspapers began to make fun of Leopold, showing him as a despotic tyrant who couldn’t care less about his slaves (which was factually accurate). Despite the great success of the people who tried to expose the Congo Terror, there were still casualties. For instance, Hezekiah Andrew Shanu was a British subject who went against the Congo Free State. In response to his efforts, the officials at the Congo didn't want to risk insulting Britain by utilizing sheer force. Instead, they made his life a living hell through manipulation, making him commit suicide: “they harassed him unremittingly, even rescinding the medal he had been awarded for his work for the state. They then ordered all state employees not to patronize his business … In July 1905 Hezekiah Andrew Shanu committed suicide” (221).
Leopold at home caused his eventual downfall by allowing his perverted sexual tastes to become public: he didn't even try to hide his countless affairs. That is, when his wife died, his affair with a sixteen-year-old girl named Caroline made headlines (Leopold was sixty-five). Leopold spent a huge amount of money on presents for Caroline, including a mansion. Hochschild hilariously states that Leopold, for all his evil and cruelty, proved himself capable of love as shown in his intense affair with his teenage prostitute: “The two of them seemed to trumpet, rather than disguise, their difference in age: she called him Tres Vieux and he called her Tres Belle. To the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love of his life” (223). Aside from his affair, another factor which crippled his reputation was the realization of the public that they weren’t profiting from the murder and exploitations of millions in the Congo: “the bulk of the profits were going straight into Caroline’s dresses and villas and, on a far larger scale, into the king’s constructive projects … For years the king had pled poverty, but as his triumphal arches, museums, and monuments sprouted around the country, he could keep up the pretense no longer” (223-4). Ironically, when Caroline gave him his second son, the child had a deformed hand. In response (and justly), the media sensationalized this hilarious phenomenon: “A cartoon in Punch showed Leopold holding the newborn child, surrounded by Congolese corpses with their hands cut off. The caption read: VENGEANCE FROM ON HIGH. How did Leopold feel about being the target of such wrath? … the tone he sounded was always of annoyance or self-pity, never of shame or guilt” (224). Hochschild eventually comes to discuss the death toll of the Congo: while the massive killings were indeed intense, the number can’t be exactly calculated, seeing that no one was keeping records. He also writes that while the Congo Terror was completely genocidal in its scale, it wasn’t technically a genocide, seeing that the Europeans weren’t actively trying to get rid of the Africans (though they would be more than glad to do so after they squeeze every last cent of profit from them). The vast majority of the deaths of the Congo occurred due to: (1) murder (was extremely common, in one incident, the state officer Simon Roi bragged to the missionary Ellsworth Faris that in six months they cut off 6,000 hands - soldiers frequently murdered infants and younglings by using the butts of their guns), (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure (countless people worked themselves to death or died from falling off trees - others, especially porters and hard laborers, were given next-to-nothing when it came to food despite being worked to the point of death), (3) disease (smallpox, sleeping sickness which was spread largely because of the Europeans - “One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot bao constrictor was dining on smallpox victims’ flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly. Sleeping sickness also spread lethally up the rivers. Half a million Congolese were estimated to have died of it in 1901 alone. The disease is caused by a parasite first spread by the bite of the pink-striped tsetse fly, about the size of a horsefly, with a distinctive high-pitched buzz. Once contracted by humans, sleeping sickness becomes highly contagious. It can cause fever, swelling of the lymph glands, a strange craving for meat, and a sensitivity to cold. At last comes the immense lethargy that gives the illness its name”), and (4) an extreme decrease in the birth rate (parents used their reason to realize that the world they would bring their children into was cruel and harsh; they didn't want them to suffer the way they did) (231). All in all, the Congo’s human population was decreased by 50%, according to Jan Vansina, the professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and the most credible ethnographer of the Congolese. The officials at the Congo Free State did see the sharp decrease in the population, but they cared little. When they did care, it was only because they were concerned that they would have no slaves left to do their jobs for them: they wanted profit, nothing more.
Hochschild writes of the nature of mass murder: it is hard for a country or group of individuals to stop once they get started, for power is intoxicating, especially the power to decide life and death. He writes of the Soviet Union: in the beginning, sending people to labor camps and torturing and executing political dissidents did help the Communist Party rise to power. However, even after they won the victory over the White Army (Czarists), they continued to do so, killing so many people (including their own - roughly one-third of the Communist Party were liquidated in the Great Purge, a single wave of mass arrests, though the most infamous) that the country’s efficiency as a whole was greatly threatened. In Hochschild’s own words, “Once underway, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of Rene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passerby for target practice. If he found a leaf in his courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village. Two Force Publique officers, Clément Brasseur and Léon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a file was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer” (234). In another part of the globe, Stanley’s health worsened when he was in his early sixties, and he continued to defend Leopold until his demise. Morel eventually went to the US; when he arrived, he informed Americans that they had a moral duty to end Leopold’s brutal reign, as America was the first nation to legitimize Leopold’s claim that he owned the Congo. In 1904 he went into the US and was received by Theodore Roosevelt himself. After speaking at a variety of places, he met Mark Twain. Leopold bribed some powerful officials, including Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, who was “a multimillionaire, a card-playing partner of J. Pierpont Morgan, the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was the ultimate power broker” by promising them large shares of wealth from the Congo (243). Although Leopold was successful in converting important individuals in his cause (including Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Thomas Ryan), he messed up when he tried to make the lawyer Colonel Henry I. Kowalsky of San Francisco another one of his cronies. That is, when he offered him a large amount of money for his assistance in denying the existence of the Congo Terror, Kowalsky instead exposed Leopold’s efforts at bribing American officials in his article titled “KING LEOPOLD’S AMAZING ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE OUR CONGRESS EXPOSED … FULL TEXT OF THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN KING LEOPOLD OF BELGIUM AND HIS PAID AGENTS IN WASHINGTON” (248). An organization was created to receive testimonies from victims of the Congo Terror: however, because the victims were black, their testimonies weren’t quoted in their original form, and weren’t allowed to be read freely by the public until the 1980s.
Leopold recognized the dangerous situation he was in after the Kowalsky Scandal and the protests against him. He decided to sell the Congo Free State for some money, seeing that he was most definitely not going to keep it for much longer. He planned to extract much of the payment for the colony from Belgium itself: “In return for receiving the Congo, the Belgian government first of all agreed to assume its 110 million francs’ worth of debts, much of them in the form of bonds Leopold had freely dispensed over the years to favorites like Caroline. Some of the debt the outmaneuvered Belgian government assumed was in effect to itself-the nearly 32 million francs worth of loans Leopold had never paid back. As part of the deal, Belgium also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs toward completing certain of the king’s pet building projects. Fully a third of the amount was targeted for the extensive renovations under way at Laeken, already one of Europe’s most luxurious royal homes, where, at the height of reconstruction, 700 stone masons, 150 horses, and seven steam cranes had been at work following a grand Leopoldian blueprint to build a center for world conferences. Finally, on top of all this, Leopold was to receive, in installments, another fifty million francs ‘as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo.’ Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer. They were to be extracted from the Congo itself” (259). In December 1909, Leopold became sick with what may have been cancer (“intestinal blockage”) and quickly died. Upon hearing of his death, many celebrated, including the American poet Vachel Lindsay who fantastically and tellingly wrote, “Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost / Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. / Hear how the demons chuckle and yell / Cutting his hands off, down in Hell” (267). After Leopold’s death, the Congo Free State continued to exist, for it was very profitable to the officials involved. Hochschild writes once again of Morel, saying that he was only thirty-nine when he finished his published criticism of the Congo Free State: at the end of the last meeting of the Congo Reform Association, it was clear that it “marked the end of the first major international human rights movement of the twentieth century. ‘We have struck a blow for human justice,’ Morel took the assembled dignitaries, ‘that cannot and will not pass away.’ It would take another generation to judge whether this was true” (275).
It turns out that before Leopold died, he stayed true to his despicable nature: he “transferred some twenty-five million francs’ worth of paintings, silverware, crystal, jewelry, furniture and the like, plus another twenty million francs in securities” to an establishment which he wanted to finance” (275). In total, Leopold made a total of $1.1 billion from instigating the Congo Terror. Hochschild elucidates, “the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, the leading historian of this period, makes a ‘conservative’ estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in today’s dollars” (277). Leopold’s daughters tried to get a share of the money (seeing how he tried to refrain from giving them anything) but largely failed, seeing how the Belgian government got much of Leopold’s money. Hochschild remarks that “There was no lawyer to argue that the money should have been returned to the Congolese” (277). The last meeting of the Congo Reform Association was in 1913. Despite the massive good the organization did, Africans continued to be brutally exploited by the Belgians and other nations: at the gold mines of Moto, 26,579 lashes were given in the first half of 1920 alone, which in turn translated to 8 lashes per worker. Furthermore, the whole attitude of imperialism and colonialism remained: the Hereros of Africa were largely butchered by Europeans (some of them were beaten to death with rifle stocks to save bullets) by the Germans. Hochschild writes himself that “Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America’s brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease. Britain came in for no international criticism for its killings of aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders … in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the American Indians” (282). Overall, the reason for the inconsistencies of the public’s reactions when it came to sentiments in response to various terrible events was the fact that empathy was largely determined by false delusions of “mercy” and selfishness (ex. when Morel criticized France for following Leopold’s example, the British public didn't complain, for they wanted France as an ally in WWI against Germany). Casement the reformer was later executed when he fought for the Irish against the British (he was also homosexual, which made him more receptive to oppressed individuals, seeing how he felt persecuted much of the time in fear that his homosexuality would be exposed to the public’s indignation).
During WWI, Morel criticized the massive slaughter which was occurring for no good reason. In response to his calls for peace, he came under assault from most sources which were patriotic and saw WWI as a moral good. For instance, the Evening Standard libeled him by saying that he was a German agent for wanting peace. Hochschild put it best when he wrote that while we may see WWI as a terrible tragedy today (more than 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded), back then it was viewed in high-esteem (in another instance, Bertrand Russell was thrown into jail for being a pacifist and was socially excluded by other aristocrats and rich people for protesting the bloodshed and slaughter associated with it). Russell himself wrote, “‘The War of 1914-1918 changed everything for me,’” “‘I lost old friends and made new ones. I came to know some few people whom I could deeply admire, first among whom I should place E.D. Morel … With untiring energy and immense ability in the face of all the obstacles of propaganda and censorship, he did what he could to enlighten the British nation as to the true purposes for which the Government was driving the young men to the shambles. More than any other opponent of the War he was attacked by politicians and the press … In spite of all this his courage never failed,’” “‘No other man known to me has had the same heroic simplicity in pursuing and proclaiming political truth.’” (289). Morel, like Russell, was thrown into jail. When he was incarcerated, he was put in the same cell as a pedophile who had just violated a child. After six months of severe confinement, he was released. Bertrand Russell noted that when he saw him, he was shocked that his hair, which was mostly normal before, had become completely white. Furthermore, Morel could barely function from the malnutrition which he was subjected to during his stay in prison. Morel, who was severely stressed over prison, the indifference and stupidity of the public during WWI, and his fervor to prosecute Leopold for the Congo Terror, became physically strained. When he was 51, he died suddenly on November 12, 1924 when he walked with his sister-in-law in the woods. When it came to the Congo Terror itself, many of the documents which detailed the atrocities were destroyed. Raoul de Premorel, an official in the Congo in the Kasai region from 1896 to 1901, wrote of abusing an African, going so far as to cast himself as the victim: “Sometimes, I think it is I who have suffered most in the years that have passed since that night” (295). Hochschild ironically remarks that throughout history, those guilty of horrendous crimes often tried to excuse their behavior by adopting a victim mentality. For instance, when Belgium was invaded by Germany during WWI and experienced the deaths of more than 5,000 civilians, the public was whipped into a frenzy, conveniently forgetting Leopold’s crimes. All in all, the Congo Terror was quickly forgotten by the European public. Furthermore, Leopold was actually glorified: censorship was common and books which were “controversial” were utterly banned.
Leopold’s ghost has indeed hung over the Congo: due to the massive population loss and the exploitation the people were subjected to, the economy was all but crippled. When Joseph Désiré Mobutu became the leader of the Congo, he was ousted thirty-two years later for corruption and mismanagement of money (which led to hundreds of people were slaughtered by soldiers who were angry that the money of the Congo was virtually useless). Despite being largely exiled, Mobutu was one of the world’s richest people (despite his great wealth, he’s still a scoundrel nonetheless): “his personal wealth at its peak was esteemed at $4 billion. He spent much of his time on his yacht, on the river at Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville … He made no distinction between state assets and his own; in a single year, he dispatched a state-owned jet airliner thirty-two times to Venezuela to ferry five thousand long-haired sheep to his ranch at Gbadolite” (304). Hochschild acknowledges that while it is unfair to blame Africa’s troubles solely on Europeans, it is a fact that Europe was one of the main reasons (if not the reason) for Africa’s poverty. Hochschild interestingly notes that conquered peoples frequently try to imitate the conqueror: Mobutu’s behavior was eerily akin to Leopold’s in their shared greed, the inequality which they perpetrated, and the scandals they were involved in (though Mobutu obviously wasn’t responsible for anything approaching the scale of the Congo Terror). Hochschild ends his book by detailing the book’s reception and publication history. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to publish the book (nine out of ten New York publishers refused to publish it): some of them said that “there was no market for books on African history or simply felt Americans would not care about these events so long ago, in a place few could find on a map” (309). Hochschild remarks that this erroneous attitude could be explained in race: the victims of totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Stalin are more relatable to many due to the fact that they’re of light skin color. On the other hand, people of a different skin color (in this case, black) get less sympathy than they deserve. Hochschild clearly states that colonialism is a form of totalitarianism (alongside fascism and communism), as the conquerors have almost complete power over the native populations and can subject the native peoples to whatever they wish due to the fact that they have military force (seen best in bayonets and guns). Like other totalitarian ideologies, colonialism had excuses to justify its excesses, including racism and nationalism: Leopold’s officials spoke of forced laborers as “libérés,” or “liberated men.” While the reception to Hochschild’s book when it was finally published was mostly positive, there was still criticism (as expected, from white Europeans who praised Leopold as a hero). Regardless, I think it can be decided that those people should be ignored, for they probably don’t care about evidence: as Thomas Paine once quipped, trying to convince an unreasonable person (who plans to stay true to their prejudices) of your position with ample evidence is like trying to administer medicine to the dead. Hochschild ends his book by writing of colonialism’s massive impacts. Although it is very depressing from a certain standpoint, it can serve as some form of encouragement from another, seeing how conquered peoples have proved themselves (in many cases) to be able to lead themselves and to build successful societies. Hochschild details that a major factor retarding Africa’s perspective is the fact that women don’t have many rights, and he writes that he hopes that it will change soon. He ends his book with the following section: “Even without the problems of being colonized, the birth of a viable, truly democratic civil society is usually a slow and difficult business. For western Europe to move from the Holy Roman Empire and the panoply of duchies and principalities and mini-kingdoms to its current patchwork of nations took centuries of bloodshed, including the deadly Thirty Years’ War … Africa cannot afford those centuries. Its path will not be an easy one, and nowhere will it be harder than in the Congo” (318).
Personal thoughts:
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild is a fantastic, unnerving book that should be read by everyone. It discusses history from a specific and large scale, and draws on plenty of firsthand accounts to paint a realistic view of the Congo Terror and the Congo Free State. A truly chilling book, it shows what can happen when greed is allowed to have the final say, and it clearly proves the stupidity of racism and nationalism, as seen in the disastrous effects they can easily have on a wide multitude of lives when implemented on a large scale. As stated before, I wrote this summary during the George Floyd protests (6/10/20), and I saw an interesting article which detailed that amidst the demonstrations, Belgium has taken down a statue of Leopold in Antwerp: though racism still exists, we have improved tremendously when compared to the society of a century ago. I highly recommend King Leopold’s Ghost to anyone interested in Africa, European colonialism, heroism, human nature, and discrimination.
Get the book: