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Summary: Read this book
Review: Every so often, a book comes along that opens your eyes. This is such a book. Before reading King Leopold's Ghost, I was ignorant of the genocide of colonial Congo, but after reading a few hundred pages, not only did I learn of the key players involved, the crimes committed and actions taken to combat the situation, but I also wanted to know more about imperialism in general. Writing a book on a little researched topic such as this, Hochschild rises to the occassion and writes an easily read yet amazingly complete rendition of the situation. He introduces us to numerous charcters: Stanley,the egocentric mentally unbalanced explorer; Williams,the American missionary who brings back tales of the horror; Conrad, the author whose voyage to "The Heart of Darkness" prompted his novel, Morel and Casement, the men who made righting the wrongs of the Congo their crusade; and King Leopold, who..... well, you'll see. Tracing the story of the Congo from exploration through the selling of the Congo by King Leopold to Belgium and then on to an investigation of the world-wide forgetting of the entire episode, Hochschild has created an amazingly complete history. This story of the struggles between good and evil is so packed with incredible characters, adventure and murder that you'll never want to turn on the television again!
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Summary: Horrifying and Moving
Review: King Leopold's Ghost illuminates a nearly forgotten tragedy in human history: the exploitation of the Congo on behalf of one man during the late 1800s and early 1900s. King Leopold II of the Belgians enjoyed a reputation for humaneness due to his sponsorship of efforts to end the slave trade. As Adam Hochschild makes clear, the King's efforts were calculated so as to obscure from the world what was really going on in the Congo. Starting in 1885, Leopold's minions worked literally millions of people to death in the pursuit of profits in ivory and rubber. Brutality was commonplace and expected. There are horrific descriptions of attacks on villages, coldblooded mutilations, and other horrors. Hochschild draws parallels between the Congo atrocities and the activities of concentration camp officials in World War II and in the Soviet Union. This book is also an excellent reminder of what can be accomplished when decent people see injustice and vow to stop it. Starting with a few righteous souls outraged over what they saw happening, the movement to expose and end the Congo atrocities eventually spread to many countries and ultimately embarrassed the Belgian government into taking control over the colony away from the King. The book is well written, and despite the horrors it details never descends into sensationalism. It deserves a place in the library of any one who wants to shine a spotlight on evil.
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Summary: The Unknown???
Review: King Leopold-this is a story that deserved to be told but wasn't. It was one of the biggest and one of the cruelest colonial regimes in Africa. It is a story of manipulation, drama, brutal murders, corruption, and immorality. In my opinion, King Leopold of Belgium is one of history's most notorious characters. Due to Leopold being the heir to the throne, as a child he was drawn towards wealth and indulgence. Greed drove him. Even into his adulthood, greed and self-indulgence were the traits that surfaced when he realized through gaining colonies he could continue to accumulate his riches. He positioned himself as a concerned leader of the people who wanted to combat the Arab slave trade that pervaded Africa. In the public eye, he was seen as a humanitarian, but the real facts didn't support that popular opinion and contradicted his image. Leopold used unethical methods to acquire his land. He ordered his men to force the natives, the Congolese, into manual labor. His inhumane treatment of them was characterized by killings, whippings, destruction of crops and local villages, and taking, as hostages, the wives and children for those who resisted or didn't produce enough rubber or ivory for the day. According to the author, Adam Hochschild, there was an estimated ten million Congolese deaths during Leopold's colonization process. (That sounds familiar.) Sadly, King Leopold's name isn't mentioned with the Hitlers and the Stalins of world history in the classrooms, as it rightfully should be. As people during that time started to find out the truth, Leopold resorted to cover-ups, lawsuits and bribery. In my opinion, Hochschild has done a fantastic job telling a story that most haven't heard to enable them to understand the outcome and, more importantly, the motives behind it.
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Summary: Deepest Darkest Africa, and Europe
Review: This is a very informative and moving history on a mostly forgotten low point (among many low points) of European colonialism. Tiny Belgium and its unhinged, ineffective monarch King Leopold yearned for an overseas colony. Leopold got his own fiefdom in the Congo Territory, and drained the area of its wealth and people, lining his own pockets in the process. Of course the Congo itself got none of the proceeds, and even the nation of Belgium itself got very little as Leopold hoarded the money for himself and lavished it on mistresses and cronies. During this period the Congo became one of the most gruesome places on earth, as a command economy of ivory and rubber harvesting led to the deaths of millions of native Africans and the torture and hardship of many more. Hochschild ably documents this gruesome history and brings much-needed praise to the worldwide movement to bring attention to the Congo tragedy, a humanitarian effort that was quite unique for its time. In the process Hochschild also brings necessary attention to the mostly forgotten heroes of the movement, like the grass-roots British whistleblowers E.D. Morel and Roger Casement, and the remarkable black American activists William Sheppard and George Washington Williams. However, in several places the author's historical research becomes bogged down in attempted character sketches of all the figures mentioned above, while the tail end of the book unloads a lot of guilt-tripping about how the world should remember the victims of this and other holocausts. This is already plainly evident to the reader, so such appeals just become tiresome. Another issue is Hochschild's frequent over-analysis of the book "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, which was a fictionalized eyewitness account of these atrocities. But despite those weaknesses, this is still a moving account of the worst crimes of colonialism and their continuing effects on world history.
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Summary: The Evil that Men Do
Review: If the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in world history--and oh yes, it was--then it sure got off to a flying start with this little escapade: the colonization of the Congo by Belgium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More accurately, it was the colonization of the Congo by Belgium's king, Leopold, who started the process, oversaw its progress, and indeed owned it outright until his death, when he bequeathed it to Belgium. It is a pretty sickening story. Of course, Europeans had been exploiting Africa for centuries, taking its people by the hundreds of thousands and using them as slaves in North and South America. The book does a pretty good job of discussing this and is very educational. Leopold's innovation was to exploit the region's natural resources by using as slaves the people already there. Bad as it was at the beginning, the abuse of the Africans was initially on a smaller scale, as the primary resource of the area was only elephant ivory and not much else. African natives were needed as "porters", or carriers, of this resource. They were needed because the terrain of the area--mountainous and jungly--made it impossible for boats or trains, and extremely difficult for animals, to get through. Initially, efforts were made to pay these porters, but when they began to refuse to do the work, other methods were used, ultimately culminating in forcing them to do so at gunpoint. And as bad as this was, it got a whole lot worse when Europe and the U. S. developed an appetite for rubber, due to the desire to make rubber tires for bicycles, and also for the burgeoning automobile industry. The Congo was rich in rubber resources. Again there was the search for labor, and again the labor was procured by the most odious means. Wives were kidnapped and not released until their husbands worked. Severe punishments were meted out to those who refused to work, or did not work hard enough. Those tribes who refused or fought back were attacked and gunned down mercilessly. Hands and feet of children were chopped off to keep the natives in check. It was a living hell, and it is where Joseph Conrad got his inspiration for his great novel. The author estimates that as many as five to ten million Africans died as the result of this "colonization," primarily due to disease, starvation, overwork and outright murder. These numbers seem high and can't be determined with certainty--as the author points out--but even if he is off by half, we are still looking at one of the greatest human catastrophes of all time. Eventually, the events occurring in Africa began to come to the public consciousness in Europe and the U. S., due to the work of courageous men whose stories are recounted in this book as well. There then followed the usual hand-wringing, editorializing and righteous condemnations typical of the Western elites, but of course nothing was done. This is a well-researched, compelling, informative book about the kind of events that are all too common in the history of mankind. It deserves to be read and studied by all well-meaning people, as a reminder of the heart of darkness that lurks within us all.
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Summary: A great read
Review: This is a must read if you are at all interested in Africa and the atrocities commited there. Normally i don't like history books, but after reading the introduction I was hooked. it is very easy to read, and reads like a novel. It is a history of King leopold's Congo, how came to be and how it was brought down by the hard work of a few individuals that created a world wide mouvement to stop him. The book discribes in detail the horrors that occured and how the people of the Congo were mistreated. Hochschild has a way of bringing the charachters to life through revealing their past and showing them as real human beings as opposed to one dimentional characters from history. In the beging of the book he discribes the history of the Congo, and how King Leopold aquired it. In the second half of the book he shows how his rein was pulled down by the first major humanitarian effort of the last century.
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Summary: A Colonial Morality Play
Review: The story in "King Leopold's Ghost" is a powerful one -- colonization taken to its extreme -- but the book is rendered mediocre by the author's trite moralizing, lack of historical rigor, and tiresome reliance on depicting every actor with either a halo or horns. Hochschild's constant speculation into motives and fits of amateur psychoanalysis made it difficult to separate the matters of record from dramatic characterizations. The substantive research is rather thin and commonly presented in relative terms such as "many", "some", and "few" without context for comparison. At no point did I gain a clear insight into how widespread or coordinated were the atrocities or how damaging the secondary effects may have been (the chapter addressing this is awfully feeble). Leopold, here an antagonist of extraordinary guile, is only weakly connected to the governmental and business interests with which he worked; the reader is given pages of anecdote concerning the king's depravity with nearly no overview of the system in which he operated. The final chapter is a model of the book's flaws. It considers the Belgian process of forgetting which followed their foray into colonialism, aided by international sympathy during the first world war. Instead of pursuing this interesting and somewhat complicated topic in more detail, however, we are duly regaled with additional vignettes of heroism and villainy. The book then concludes with a sermon aimed squarely at us in the choir. While some readers might find this inspirational, it bored me. Assuming that research into the history of the Belgian Congo is ongoing, I'll look for a more definitive and less melodramatic account.
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Summary: Scandalous book
Review: This book is not really historical. Many reknown historians (not only Belgian, but Britsh and Congolese as well) have concluded that what the book tells is very partial. Yes, they were many victims. Everybody agrees with that. Yes, that was atrocious. But that was the same in any colony (what did the US with the native Indians ?). But you can't call what happened in Congo a genocide. Because this was not programmed. Also, it is practically impossible to precisely know how many people died directly from barbary (and not from disease, wars, etc.). Another example is that the role of Morel is vastly over-estimated in the book. They were others (including Belgians) who reported the atrocities in Congo. Comparing King Leopold to Staline or Hitler is just hilarious, and I would consider that as a selling argument, not a historical truth. How can the author proclaim himself historian ? I would not recommend this book to anyone who doesn't know better the full story of Congo. It may only lead to wrong conclusions.
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Summary: 10 Million Cheers for Colonialism?
Review: Less than 50 years after agents of King Leopold had murdered, raped, tortured, mutilated, and brutalized half of the population of the Congo, Congolese schoolchildren were taught from Belgium drafted textbooks that Leopold was the benevolent father figure of their country. That is the definition of revisionist history, yet books like this one are more likely to be attacked as being revisionist. Hochschild has written a history that reads with the ease of a newspaper about a subject that has been buried in the annals of mis-history. 10 million Africans were killed for the enrichment of one man and his partners and yet most people have never heard of this story! That this genocide is virtually unknown to most people is a sad reminder of how much injustice has been perpetuated upon Africans over the centuries that has been "forgotten." Among the more fascinating aspects of this book are the profiles of the leaders of the human rights movement, white and black, who at the turn of the century showed super-human courage and integrity in fighting against political and journalistic malfeasance, bribery, and significant risks to their own lives in order to expose to the world the magnitude of the Belgium atrocities committed in the Congo. Dinesh D'Souza, to whom my title refers, is among those who seek to deny or downplay the crimes committed by or for colonialists. Hopefully this book will cast too bright a light for such distortions of the truth to prevail. An enlightening book that I highly recommend.
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Summary: A sad, tragic story
Review: King Leopold's Ghost is an engrossing, riveting account of one of the saddest chapters in the sad history of colonial exploration and exploitation of the African continent.This book chronicles the lust of King Leopold of the tiny European country of Belgium for an African colony of his own, for no other reason than greed , personal ambition a fanatic and ill-conceived desire to compete with Britain and France, the "big boys" of African colonization. What the inept, greedy Leopold and his henchmen did to the Congo was truly unforgivable and is richly detailed in this superb book. The writing is vivid and truly gripping.There can be no better indictment of the colonial system than this excellent book.
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