Missions Resources - Bibliography
King Leopold's Ghost
Authors: Adam Hochschild
ISBN: 0618001905
Publisher: Mariner Books
Number of pages: 384
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
Reviewed by Paul Grant
King Leopold was the constitutional monarch of Belgium at the end of the 19th century, a romantic dreamer living in a world of technology, industrial superpowers and empires. He was the king of a tiny country with no hope at being a European power, so he threw his life into transforming Belgium into a world empire. His primary achievement, the Belgian Congo, was one of the most audacious land-grabs in the history of colonialism.
Much of this book details the story of Leopold’s creation of an enormous, oppressive and aggressive colonial regime in a place he never lived to see with his own eyes. Leopold was a genius of sorts: a conniving manipulator and shrewd observer of human frailties. Leopold was able to take one good look at a person and understand that person’s deepest fears, along with the price at which he might be bought.
Charles Stanley, for instance, the great explorer, who famously uttered the phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?,” ended his career ingloriously as a pawn of Leopold’s. The king had adjudged that what Stanley – the orphan boy made good – desired most in life was a father figure. That was exactly what Leopold was able to provide.
Leopold made similar short work of the paranoid leaders of Europe, playing them against one another, and finding himself appointed to lead various continent-wide task forces. The most significant of these was the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, which started as a negotiation over European commerce in Africa, and quickly devolved into the smoke-filled room, in which an entire continent was sliced up – the so-called scramble for Africa. It was Leopold’s project all along. He wanted the Congo.
This is significant. European involvement in Africa had lasted for centuries without a significant colonial incursion. Even the transatlantic slave trade proceeded without territorial occupation. But Leopold’s ambition catalyzed the conquest of Africa.
The Belgian Congo that emerged from the scramble was many times larger than Belgium itself. It was inaccessible jungle country. The Congo River – broad and navigable upstream – was cut off from the coast by awful rapids. To develop the colony required a railroad over the coastal ranges, sufficiently big to transport the river steamers that would make administration possible. Congo was an incredibly expensive fantasy. Leopold had to promise the people of Belgium that the colony would be self-supporting, or even a profitable investment.
This agreement ensured the Congo’s fate: development would take a back seat to extraction. Building the railroad required enormous amounts of human labor, which in turn required enormous military expenditure.
The tide began to turn when an eagle-eyed accountant in Europe read the Congo Company’s balance sheet. Exports from the colony: rubber. Imports to the colony: guns and ammunition. In other words, rubber was not being bought and sold; rubber was being collected at gunpoint.
Over the next few years the grim truth came out: the Congo had devolved into a savage colony, with megalomaniac supervisors, unspeakable violence and bloodshed. Joseph Conrad’s epoch-defining novel Heart of Darkness was set in the Congo. Instead of creating an empire, King Leopold had created a monster.
But if Leopold looms larger than life throughout this story, why was the book named for his ghost? The last chapter tells the greatest tragedy of all – the “great forgetting.” After all the spectacular wealth created from the Belgian Congo, after all the benefit to Belgium and all the cost to the Congolese, it just ended. Congo became an independent nation-state in 1971. Belgium dissolved into the European Union. And everyone forgot.
What was for several years running a trendy injustice to oppose, simply evaporated from the public imagination. The Congo was a remote and unsexy cause. Even Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s big-screen version of Heart of Darkness was stripped of its context, and smashed into Vietnam instead.
The Congolese peoples continued to suffer – and “Africa’s World War” of the last ten years in the Great Lakes region of Africa has only exaggerated the sorrows. The region is haunted by King Leopold’s ghost. The past is not past where such loss remains unsettled. There has been no “great forgetting” in central Africa. This book should help the rest of us remember as well, and hopefully bring some healing to the passage of time.
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