Book Notes

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. By Adam Hochschild. New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. Pp. 384, $26, cloth.

The tale of King Leopold’s Ghost is fascinating because of what the Belgian Congo was, and because of what the Belgian Congo was not. During its short life between 1885 and 1908, the Belgian Congo was the site of European and American savagery and indifference toward Africans that was massive in scale and monstrous in manner. The Belgian Congo was also the focus of the world’s first successful international human rights crusade. The Belgian Congo was not, however, long remembered.

Hochschild’s extraordinary and scholarly work in King Leopold’s Ghost remedies this gap in our collective memory. Despite the intrinsic horror of his subject matter, he presents an engagingly readable exposé. His characters are painted in vivid colors, but sensitively with a fine brush: the legendary and wise African King Affonso, the greedy Belgian King Leopold, the sadistic explorer Stanley, and the many sweet old ladies in London and Duluth

who contributed their hard-earned coins first to help Leopold obtain the Congo, and then, to kick him out. King Leopold’s Ghost is a page-turner with a soul.

Although almost a century old, the story of the Belgian Congo is jarringly modern. Leopold exploited foreign labor to reap the profits of mass production through international trade. He raised the capital for his initial venture and kept public will on his side through canny manipulations of the mass media. Furthermore, Leopold didn’t conquer the Congo, he bought it through donations obtained by exploiting Western prejudices against the Arab world. In Belgium, a king’s role had customary duties as well as privileges, but in the Congo Leopold ruled absolutely as the sole proprietor of a private organization whose purported purpose was saving the souls of Africans from Islam.

To profit from the natural resources that abounded in his new proprietorship, Leopold kidnapped and enslaved the Africans who lived there and forced them to harvest rubber in traveling concentration camps. Western consumers appreciated the inexpensive rubber and chose not to probe too deeply into Leopold’s fictions about bringing God to Africa. In one of the many anecdotes that enlivens this richly detailed chronicle, Hochschild recounts how members of the American public were able to see for themselves a savage whose soul Leopold was saving. In September of 1906 a man from the Congo, Ota Benga, shared display space with an orangutan in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo. Eventually rescued from his cage by a delegation of black American ministers, Mr. Benga subsequently committed suicide.

Hochschild includes some of the more hopeful elements of an otherwise shocking and tragic tale. Eventually reporters visited the Congo and noticed the skulls of Africans lining the walkways of the colonial administrators’ homes. Using the newly invented cameras, they created images that appalled the world. A young Pole, Joseph Conrad, wrote a renowned book about it. Thus sprang an international groundswell that ended the Belgian Congo. After facilitating Leopold’s pet empire for years, a suddenly outraged world community successfully mounted the first ever international human rights crusade, thereby inventing the field and coining the phrase “crime against humanity.”

Leopold left the Congo a rich man. For their part, the people of the Congo suffered an estimated ten million deaths during his twenty-three-year occupation and were left emotionally scarred, economically plundered, and socially fractured. In one of the many cruel absurdities of the region’s history, one of their subsequent leaders, Mobutu Sese Seko, modeled his leadership style on Leopold’s to the preposterous extreme of purchasing a palace on the French Riviera just down the road from Leopold’s. The ironies that Hochschild’s book reveals, and the questions it leaves unresolved, concern stomach-churning issues: the nature of capitalism, the exploitation of developing nations’ people and natural resources, collective guilt, collective

memory, illusion, spectacle, human rights, human nature, good, evil, and even the mundane pettiness that permeates life even at its best. Through its riveting tale, King Leopold’s Ghost reminds us that our stomachs ought to be churning.

—Colette Hickert

Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 12, Spring 1999