King Leopold's Ghost

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Summary: Chilling Tale of Colonial Africa
Review: Carefully pieced together from documents, articles and witnesses, Leopold's atrocities are revealed to it's true genocidal proportions. Fascinating, frightening, readable, enlightening. This will be the book I recommend to anyone who searches for a deeper understanding of colonial Africa.

Rating:
Summary: To Flood His Deeds With Day
Review: "I knew almost nothing abour the history of the Congo until a few years ago, when I noticed a footnote in a book I happened to be reading..." So the author recounts the beginnings of his book.
This experience in one form another is frequent in this area, it seems.
The abstractions of discourse over imperiaism are often counterproductive. There is nothing like getting down to cases. This work on King Leopold in the Congo is truly outstanding as history and the uncovering of the distortion of history, the 'great forgetting' as the author calls it, that occurred at the end of Leopold's 'holocaust' of millions when the archives were systematically destroyed. The book opens appropriately with the arrival of the slavers in the sixteenth century in the ancient Kongo whose very intellignet king Affonso attempted to forestall the beginnings of what was to be the coming centuries of European barbarism. Henry Stanley also fares poorly and the lead up and biographical portraits of the explorer and of Leopold set the stage for the entry into the account of Moret, the shipping clerk who noticed the anomalies in the company records, slavery was the only conclusion.
Even now, this saga of modern history too seldom receives mention in the accounts of Bolshevism, Nazism, and subsequent genocides. And yet the shadow of the 'revenge drama' stalks all accounts, for this period and its dreadful horrors saw the onset of the counterreaction in the double tragedy. One can almost feel Lenin's blood coming to a boil, reading this excellent account of the generation that made that revolutionary's revenge come true.
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.

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Summary: The Black Holocaust (10 mil+) no one heard about( must read)
Review: Since I read this book over a year ago I have spoken about it to several people as well as bought copies to give to others. Trying to explain it does not do it any justice, you have to read it to capture the full sense of the horror and puts present day Africa and what is still happening there in full focus.
It was a light bulb turning on.

Many of the ways people are being killed, tortured, mutilated and raped are the same as when colonialization by Europe and others was occuring. Blacks were used to inflict suffering on others or become inflected themselves. It is almost like generations after generations used these same tactics and now it is sadly in bred as the way to dominate. be ruthless and brutal beyond belief.

During WWII, the Jews lost 6 million, Russia lost over 20 million
and we hear about them, but who really knew what happened to Blacks in Africa after the Slave trade to America and other countries was over. Or that the adventures of Stanley and Livingston was more than some adventure walk through Africa. All my life I was fooled and looked upon them like virtually everyone else, wow that must have been exciting. How I know...wow they were brutal murderers.

White people around the world as well as black people should read this. I say whites because they really need to be made aware of our history. Black are brought up and taught white history but they can often go through life fully clueless of
what has happened in our history. Or before being quick to turn a blind eye to Africa as just some place where blacks can't seem to get along, remember one thing what you see or hear about now has a direct line back to many countries around the world that took want it wanted by any means. If blacks anywhere in history inflicted 1/1,000,000 of these horrors on the white race, it would be in every history book as one of worst example of evil ever known. In this case no one seems to know or talk about it.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: This book reads like a novel even though it is a well researched history. Before I read it, I had only a vague idea of the atrocities that went on in the Congo. I have read Heart of Darkness for several classes, but we mostly used the book to study the writing style and the literature rather than researching the specific situation that was the basis for the book. I was also interested in finding out more about the Congo after I researched the modern instability that Barbara Kingsolver writes about in the Poisonwood Bible.

As I read the book, I couldn't believe what a horrible man Leopold could be. It scares me when I study people who have such little regard for humanity. While I was astounded by Leopold's ... selfish nature, the focus of the book for me became those that stood up to him. E.D. Morel and Roger Casement in particular were able to at least put a dent in the situation in the Congo at much sacrifice to their own personal lives. The people who worked to bring down Leopold's regime were not perfect--Hochschild reveals many of their flaws. But they made a difference; they helped to end the horror that Joseph Conrad witnessed and wrote about.

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Summary: The True History of Africa's Congo
Review: How did nearly ten million deaths in one African colony escape the ears of history? In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild opens our eyes to what really went on during the late 1800's and the early 1900's in the Congo. In this gruesome tale of greed, terror, and death, Hochschild shows us the lines from which the Congo was derived and means by which it was raped of it's rich history and natural resources. Very well written and easy to understand King Leopold's Ghost exposes the near extinction of a race of people by a tyrant who never once set foot in the land of his plunders. An excellent read in every way.

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Summary: Is it "true"?
Review: After reading Stanley's "Into the Dark Continent," and liking it a great deal, I was instructed by other readers to read "King Leopold's Ghost" if I wanted to know "the truth." I have read it, and the primary effect of having done so is to make me wonder about the transitory and ambiguous nature of the concept of "truth."

Hochschild's book tells the tale of King Leopold II of Belgium and his decisive land grab of the Congo in the late 19th century, and also of Leopold's use of Henry Morton Stanley as a public relation's tool and a kind of "My man in Africa."

In short, I have found the work terribly biased and slanted to the author's views. It is not a bad book, or badly researched in general. It is certainly worth reading as part of the literature of the time and place, but the author has come to the work with a point of view, which is obvious. Particularly his picture of the African explore, H.M. Stanley. His portrait of Stanley is lifted almost entirely from Bierman's "Dark Safari: The Life behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley" which has been for years a shamefully hateful and incomplete picture of Stanley, but the source that is currently considered the "true" portrait of the great explorer (Stanley's own autobiography is still the only source for his early life, but the author roundly dismisses it, of course, for its presumed embellishments).

Hochschild's picture of Stanley is the currently popular one: a massively insecure man given to self-promotion; a driven individual with a compulsive need to prove himself, stemming largely from his orphaned and neglected childhood. Thus the book is riddled with amateur psychology and wild leaps of faith and assumption regarding Stanley's motives and thoughts. For example:

"With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home."

". . . he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity."

"Livingston was haloed in Stanley's prose, for he was the noble father figure the younger man had long been looking for . . ."

None of these things the author has any way of knowing, and are all armchair assumptions. They reveal the author's own views, and the book is full of such opinions put down as fact.

One of the book's praised heroes is George Washington Williams, a black American and sometime journalist who wrote of the miserable conditions of blacks in Africa. Looking at the details of this man's life, a reader with a cynical eye might concluded this man was simply a bunko artist looking for the most profitable hustle. Throughout his many and various "careers" he lied about going to Harvard, he lied about having a doctoral degree, and he abandoned his wife and fifteen year old son to escape mounting debt that resulted from his various failed schemes - only to become engaged during a shipboard romance just before his death. One might expect a writer of Hochschild's obviously distaste for self-promoters would cast a cynical gaze to anything Williams might write about Africa. Surely, as he so keenly observed with Stanley, the author might assume that Williams had traveled to Africa to make a public relations splash for himself after his sensational writings of Africa. But, no, this is not the case. For Hochschild, Williams's writings of Africa "were a cry of outrage that came from the heart." Once again, the slippery nature of truth is a matter of interpretation.

So, what is true? At the time of publication, Stanley's "Into the Dark Continent," was considered true. Most Europeans believed that Africa was full of poor, unenlightened blacks living in squalor, subject to the whims of brutal rulers and slave traders; beings who desperately needed our help and the Christian faith. Today, Hochschild boosts the popular belief that Africa at the turn of the century was full of a contented people living in a workable, peaceful society, which was destroyed by the avarice and greed of white Europeans. What will be the truth in a hundred years?

So, finally, what is true? Well, that depends. What do you want to believe?

Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: This was a really enjoyable book to read. It is well written and easy to follow, particularly for someone who is not a rigorous academic historian. By means of comparison, I found it considerably easier to follow and more enjoyable to read than Pakenham's cumbersome "A Scramble for Africa." The historical period he describes is both fascinating and disturbing, as the atrocities committed by the Belgians and their cohort in the Congo were beyond belief at times. The book focuses only on affairs in the Congo and, as a result, will not give the reader a broader overview of the colonization and exploitation of Africa, in general. Nevertheless, it depicts an important historical event and does so in a clear, concise, enjoyable manner.

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Summary: Couldn't be more recommended!
Review: Well written, powerful...Hochschild successfully weaves a story of historic proportions, sacrificing nothing to communicate the true destruction of the Congolese people under King Leopold and Belgium.

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Summary: Essential reading for the student of colonialism
Review: The rarely told, indeed deliberately forgotten, tale of the greed of King Leopold II, who through hypocrisy, false promises, obfuscations and outright lies, took possession of the Congo. Under his rule, which he tried to depict as beneficial to the natives (bringing the savages the ennobling light of civilization, the typical Victoriam delusions), a sadistic form of slavery was the order of the day. Leopold's reign, offically endorsing mutilation, whipping, massacre and kidnapping, oversaw the killing of fully half the Congo's population, a figure Hochschild and others estimate at ten million deaths. This is a chilling book, written as an indictment without a single false step. The pacing is deliberate, the charges made plain, the research thorough. It's a harrowing tale, and Hochschild peoples it with villains and heroes (the great pioneers of the human rights movements that challenged Leopold's self-serving catalogue of lies). Hochschild never manages to secure absolute evidence that Leopold knew of the atrocities, but given the detail-obsessed, controlling personality that emerges from the book, it seems that the king had to know at least most of what went on. An indispensable work of history.

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Summary: The Heart of Darkness
Review: Most readers encountered Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness" in English Lit 101. I was taught that "Heart of Darkness" was a metaphorical journey into the darkest heart of man rather than a realistic novel. Reading "King Leopold's Ghost" I realized that "Heart of Darkness" has a basis in cold, hard fact -- the brutal regime of King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo from about 1890 to 1910.

It is often said nowadays that Africa was better off when it was ruled by the European colonial powers. Hochschild's book will make you question that statement as he piles on example after example of Belgian brutality in the Congo. Certainly, Africans were killing other Africans and an Arab-operated slave trade existed before the arrival of the Europeans -- but the "civilizing mission" of the Europeans is revealed as mostly a scramble for the almighty franc. Hochschild speculates that ten million people -- half the population -- of the Congo might have died of violence, disease, and mistreatment during King Leopold's rule. The apt subtitle of the book is "A story of greed, terror, and heroism is colonial Africa."

The author finds several possible prototypes for Conrad's fictional character, Kurtz, the colonial official who ornamented the fenceposts around his house with severed human heads. As Conrad said "Heart of Darkness is experience...pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the facts of the case." The heroes of "King Leopold's Ghost" are the human rights advocates and Protestant missionaries -- mostly British and American -- who brought the brutalities of the Belgian rule to light.

The last chapter, "The Great Forgetting" is one of the most interesting. The author details the efforts of the Belgians and other Europeans to forget, deny, and cover up the records of their abuses in Africa. "King Leopold's Ghost" is a hard-hitting book that tells a story too little known about the seamier side of imperialism.