In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million—all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo—too long forgotten—onto the conscience of the West.
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for Nonfiction in 1999.
From the Publisher
"An enthralling story, full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, deceitful manipulations, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor . . .A work of history that reads like a novel." Christian Science Monitor
"As Hochschild's brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times . . . This book must be read and reread."—Neal Ascherson The Los Angeles Times
"A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions." The New York Times
"King Leopold’s Ghost is a remarkable achievement, hugely satisfying on many levels. It overwhelmed me in the way Heart of Darkness did when I first read it—and for precisely the same reasons: as a revelation of the horror that had been hidden in the Congo."—Paul Theroux
"Carefully researched and vigorously told, King Leopold’s Ghost does what good history always does—expands the memory of the human race." The Houston Chronicle
Michiko Kakutani
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
— The New York Times
Jeremy Harding
A superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.
— The New York Times Book Review
Robin Blackburn
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.
— Literary Review Magazine
Christian Science Monitor
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
The Economist
To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hi-tler, 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 his-tory 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 particular-ly well.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
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.
Library Journal
The author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russia Remembers Stalin, one of Library Journal's best books of 1994, takes on another megalomaniac.
Library Journal
The author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russia Remembers Stalin, one of Library Journal's best books of 1994, takes on another megalomaniac.
Rebecca A. Clay
...[D]raws on memoris, missionary accounts, government rcords, and the testimony of Africans themselves to unearth the long-forgotten facts behind Conrad's fiction....the kind remains a shadowy villain...[but] Hochschild vividly brings to life the activists whose battle agains Leopold dominates the book's second half.
— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly
Jeremy Harding
A superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.
— The New York Times Book Review
Michiko Kakutani
A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
— The New York Times
Robert Taylor
Adam Hochschild's spellbinding account of imperial machinations and how these led to the first major human-rights movement of this century present a dynamic story.
— The Boston Globe
Zachary Karabell
In King Leopold's Ghost, journalist Adam Hochschild chronicles the depredations of Belgian rule of the Congo (today's Zaire) between the 1880s and 1909, when Leopold, the king of Belgium, died. During this period, 5 million to 10 million people were killed, or died of starvation, disease and being worked to death. All of this for rubber, harvested from the thick vines that contained that precious gelatinous sap. Hochschild understandably wanted to know why so few of us have ever heard about the atrocities of Leopold's rule.
Even today, travel in the Congo basin is excruciatingly difficult -- 100 years ago, it was usually fatal for those who attempted the journey. In 1874, Henry Stanley became the first Westerner to get to the interior of the Congo basin and survive to tell the tale. At the time, the competition for colonies was intense; in the late 19th century, such colonies were to a European state's power what market share is for corporations today. Sitting in his immense palaces in tiny Belgium, King Leopold finagled his way into gaining control of the Congo basin. Within a decade of Stanley's journey, Leopold ruled a territory bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined.
By all accounts, Leopold was a narcissistic, sleazy, greedy man. He was also a master manipulator who used the vainglorious Stanley to convince the rest of Europe that his motives for wanting the Congo stemmed solely from a desire to put an end to "Arab slavery." Having rescued the Congolese from that non-existent threat, Leopold proceeded to enslave them himself.
In time, a few European and American visitors to the Congo began to publicize the whippings, murders, rapes and other humiliations visited upon the Congolese by Leopold's administrators. Some of these visitors were American blacks, whose reports were discounted. Not until a group of Englishmen made exposing the injustices of Leopold's rule their own private crusade did the general public become aware of what was happening.
Hochschild, co-founder of Mother Jones magazine, presents the story as a parable of human rights abuses stemmed by activism. While it would be reassuring to believe that Leopold's violence stopped as a result of intrepid crusaders, Hochschild doesn't make a convincing case. Yes, the reformers spoke at hundreds of meetings, letters were written, commissions heard testimony and governments disapproved. But the violence started to ebb only when the population declined to the point that labor got expensive and killing people by intent or neglect meant less profit.
Hochschild prefers to see the Congo as a sorry tale that is in the end redemptive. Unfortunately, redemption in this case can only be found by distorting history. Viewed through a less idealistic lens, the Congo's history tells us that evil isn't only banal; it can also be profitable, and it often goes unpunished. Not an uplifting moral, but the harsh light of history often exposes aspects of humanity that most of us prefer not to see. Hochschild has written about a terrible period that we have tried to forget. It's a shame that he tries to shield himself and the reader from recognizing the full dimension of the horror. Hitler committed suicide; the Japanese were routed after Nanking; but Leopold died in his bed, vastly enriched by the suffering of millions.
— SalonSept. 9, 1998
Kirkus Reviews
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.
