King Leopold's Ghost (Hochschild)

Book Reviews
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


This true story of the Congo is full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor.... A work of history that reads like a novel.... An enthralling story.
Christian Science Monitor


To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, a late addition is required. 'Late' only because King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) should always have been there. As 'owner' of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 he was responsible for what Joseph Conrad once called "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." It is indeed a ghastly story of greed, lies and murder. And Adam Hochschild retells it well. King Leopold's Ghost last week beat several excellent books to win the Lionel Gelber prize...now the world's most important award for non-fiction.... Around the turn of this century in the depths of the Congo the bonds of humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilisation cast aside, releasing something diabolical which exists within us all. Mr. Hochschild conveys this particularly well.
Economist


This book provides a wonderfully vivid account of an episode in the modern history of Africa that was tragic and terrible.... King Leopold's Ghost is an exemplary piece of history-writing: urgent, vivid and compelling.
Robin Blackburn - Literary Review


Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world. 30 illustrations.
Publishers Weekly


Journalist-memoirist Hochschild (Finding the Trapdoor) recounts the crimes against humanity of Belgium's King Leopold II, whose brutal imperialist regime sparked the creation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the first major human-rights protest movement of this century. Hell-bent on building grandiose state monuments and palaces and on swelling royal coffers, Leopold sought to carve out of central Africa a fiefdom 76 times the size of Belgium. Cagily inveighing against local slave traders and inviting Christian missionaries to spread the Gospel, he transformed a philanthropic organization temporarily under his aegis into the Congo, his own personal colony. He plundered the Congo's bounty of rubber, instituted forced labor, and reduced the population by half (an estimated 10 million deaths from 1880 to 1920). To achieve compliance with rubber-gathering quotas, soldiers in the Force Publique, Leopold's colonial army, committed mass murder, cut off hands, severed heads, took hostages, and burnt villages. His misrule remained undetected for more than a decade because he won U.S. recognition of his claim to the Congo, used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to swindle chiefs out of land, and concealed the colony's budget. If Hochschild depicts Leopold not as a Hitleresque madman but as a liberal bogeyman ready to sacrifice all for the bottom line, he profiles the monarch's opponents in all their complicated humanity. These include George Washington William, an African-American journalist prone to exaggerating his own credentials but not Leopold's atrocities; Roger Casement, a British consul knighted for a damning Congo report, then later executed for participating in Ireland's 1916 rebellion, and exposed as a homosexual; and E.D. Morel, a journalist who, though committed to imperialism, led a decade-long campaign that succeeded in forcing Leopold to turn the Congo over to the citizens of Belgium. A searing history of evil and the heroes who exposed it.
Kirkus Reviews