King Leopold's
Ghost (1998) is a best-selling popular
history book by Adam Hochschild
that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State
by King Leopold II
of Belgium between 1885 and 1908.
The aim of the book is to increase public awareness of crimes
committed by European colonial rulers in Africa. After having been
refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an
outline was submitted, the book became an unexpected bestseller and
won the prestigious
Mark
Lynton History Prize for literary style. By 2005, some 400,000
copies were in print in a dozen languages.
The title is adopted from the poem
The Congo, by Illinois
poet
Vachel Lindsay. Condemning
Léopold's actions, Lindsay wrote:
Listen to the yell of
Léopold's ghost, / Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed
host.
The book is the basis of a 2006
documentary film of the same name, directed
by
Pippa Scott and narrated by
Don Cheadle.
The story of Léopold's Congo
Hochschild describes Léopold as a man of greed who, obsessed by the
desire for a colony, hides his real intentions under
"philanthropic" purposes. With a complex scheme of political
intrigue, corruption and propaganda, he wins the assistance of one
of the greatest explorers of the time,
Henry Morton Stanley, as well as that
of public opinion and of powerful states. Through the
Berlin Conference and other diplomatic
efforts, he finally obtains international recognition for his
colony. He then establishes a system of forced labour that keeps
the people of the Congo basin in a condition of slavery.
In Hochschild's impassioned book, King Leopold takes his place with
the great tyrants, having reduced the population of the Congo Free
State—which Hochschild describes as his private fiefdom — from 20
million people to 10 million in 40 years. Louis and Stengers
however state that population figures at the start of Leopold's
period of control in 1885 are only "wild guesses", while E.D.
Morel's attempt and others at coming to a figure for consequent
population losses until the Congo's cession to Belgium in 1908 were
"but figments of the imagination".
The heroes of the book (as much as a book of non-fiction can be
said to have heroes) are Léopold's enemies, those who made the
world aware of the reality of the Congo Free State. These
include:
- George Washington
Williams, an African American
politician and historian, the first ever to report the atrocities
in the Congo.
- William Henry Sheppard,
another African American, a Presbyterian missionary who furnished direct
testimony of the atrocities.
- E. D.
Morel, a British journalist and shipping
agent who understood, checking the commercial documents of the
Congo Free State, that while millions of dollars worth of rubber
and ivory were coming out of the Congo, all that was going back was
rifles and chains. From this evidence, he inferred that the Congo
was a slave state, and devoted the rest of his life to destroying
it. Morel's assertions were often erroneous.
- Sir Roger Casement, British
diplomat and Irish patriot, who put the force of the British
government behind the international protest against Leopold.
Casement's involvement had the ironic effect of drawing attention
away from British colonialism, Hochschild suggests. The Congo Reform Association was formed
by Morel following Casement's instigation.
Hochschild dedicates a chapter to
Joseph
Conrad, the famous Anglo-Polish writer, in the first years of
Belgian colonization only a sea captain assigned to a Congo
steamer. Hochschild observes that Conrad's novel
Heart of Darkness, despite its
abstract and evocative theme, is in fact a quite realistic picture
of the Congo Free State and its main character,
Kurtz, is inspired by real figures
of state functionaries, most notably
Leon
Rom. While
Heart of Darkness is probably the most
reprinted and studied short novel of the 20th century, its
psychological and moral truths are so profound as to overshadow its
literal truth. Hochschild finds four likely models for Kurtz: men
who boasted of cutting off the heads of African rebels and
sometimes displayed them, as Kurtz does in
Heart of
Darkness.
Documentation and bibliography
Adam Hochschild takes inspiration from the research of several
historians, many of whom are Belgian. He especially refers to
Jules Marchal, a Belgian former
colonial civil servant and diplomat who spent twenty years of his
life trying to break Belgian silence on the massacres. The
documentation was not easy to come by; the furnaces in Brussels are
said to have spent more than a week burning incriminating papers
when Léopold turned over his private Congo to the Belgian nation,
and for many years Belgian authorities prevented access to what
remained of the archives, most notably the accounts of Congolese
before the King's Commission. Most of the information about
Léopold's torture-murderers that Hochschild uses was accumulated by
his enemies.
Although few, if any, Africa scholars outside of Belgium question
the high estimates of the death toll in King Leopold’s Congo, the
subject remains a touchy one in Belgium itself.
The country’s Royal Museum for
Central Africa
, founded by Léopold II, mounted a special
exhibition in 2005 about the colonial Congo; in an article in the
New York Review of Books,
Hochschild accused the museum of distortion and evasion.Adam
Hochschild In the Heart of Darkness, New York Review of Books, 26 October 2005. "The exhibit
deals with this question in a wall panel misleadingly headed
'Genocide in the Congo?' This is a red herring, for no reputable
historian of the Congo has made charges of genocide; a forced labor
system, although it may be equally deadly, is
different."
Also in 2005, the American and British publishers of
King
Leopold’s Ghost reissued the book with a new
“Afterword”by Hochschild in which he talks
about the reactions to the book, the death toll, and events in the
Congo since its publication.
Reviews and critics
Hochschild has been praised by critics for his ability in telling
the story. While acknowledging that most of the facts illustrated
in the book were already known (although appearing in books and
documents not easy to find), most historians and Africa specialists
appreciated his capacity to narrate the history accurately.
Hochschild's book was praised by scholars of
Africa such as Prof. Robert Harms of
Yale
University
and by the
South African Nobel
laureate Nadine
Gordimer.
Hochschild has said that his intention was to tell the story in "a
way that brings characters alive, that brings out the moral
dimension, that lays bare a great crime and a great crusade." His
choice was the basis of his success, but some Belgian critics
deplored his comparison between Léopold and such famous
mass-murderers as
Hitler and
Stalin.
The Belgian historian
Jean Stengers,
whose works are cited in the sources of
King Leopold's
Ghost, claimed in a newspaper article that Hochschild's moral
judgements are "not justified in respect at the time and place" and
that his conclusions about the scale of the mass murder are based
on incomplete statistics. He advanced the suspicion that in
Hochschild's book historical objectivity was affected by the desire
to attract the attention of the public—especially the African
American public.
Hochschild was also criticized by
Barbara Emerson, author of a biography of
Léopold, who described Hochschild's book as "a very shoddy piece of
work" and declared that "Leopold did not start genocide. He was
greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got
out of control." Hochschild, however, has never called what
happened in the Congo a genocide; instead, he describes how these
mass deaths happened as a result of a forced labor system.
Hochschild replied to Stengers, accusing him of not accepting the
implications of his own research, arguing that while Stengers was
"a meticulous and talented scholar", he was conditioned by his
colonialist views. Hochschild claims that the estimates about the
reduction of the population of the Congo reported in his book are
taken, in part, directly from Stengers' own writing.
Jules Marchal, on the other hand, showed his admiration for
Hochschild's book. He defined it as "a masterpiece, without even
one error about the historical deeds related." He reminded people
that Hochschild's conclusions were confirmed by his own work on
original sources. Several other Belgian experts on the period, such
as anthropologist
Jan Vansina, also
backed Hochschild. And
Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, a
Congolese scholar whose
Histoire générale du Congo was
published the same year as
King Leopold's Ghost, estimated
the death toll in the Léopold era and its immediate aftermath at
roughly 13 million, a higher figure than the various scholarly
estimates Hochschild cites.
The
Guardian reported in July 2002 that, after initial outrage
by Belgian historians over King Leopold's Ghost, the
state-funded Royal Museum for Central Africa would finance an investigation into Hochschild's
allegations. The investigatory panel, likely to be headed by
Professor
Jean-Luc Vellut, was
scheduled to report its findings in 2004. The main result appears
to be the museum exhibit mentioned above.
References
- King Leopold's Ghost (Documentary film, 2006),
IMDB.
- Wm. Roger Louis and Jean Stengers: E.D. Morel's History of
the Congo Reform Movement p.252-7
- The hidden holocaust, The Guardian,
13 May 1999
- Andrew Osborn Belgium exhumes its colonial demons
The
Guardian July
13, 2002
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