King Leopold's Ghost - Book Review

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Victorian Era, most Europeans and Americans only knew of the Africa depicted by Henry Morton Stanley (of "Livingston, I presume" fame). Stanley was an influencer. The term might not have existed then but the concept most certainly did and Stanley was an effective practitioner. The tools he used were different than the multiple tools available today; he only had dispatches of his adventures sent to newspapers by wire rather than artfully-composed photos on Instagram and 140-character tweet-storms, but the concept is the same. Stanley created Africa for those who had never been there. His expert voice defined the place and its people. Much of what he created has more to do with fictional embellishment than truth, of course, but worse than his elaborations and embroideries is Stanley's attitude towards the native peoples; he was the hunter and they were the hunted. They were game. Pack animals. His dismissal of their humanity was such an ingrained part of his Victorian psyche that he approached descriptions of the people he encountered without seeming awareness that they were of the same taxonomic species as he was. That was the story he told Europeans. A story they believed. Because it was the only one being told.

"For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials--human bodies and elephant tusks."

Joseph Conrad's portrait of Africa, Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, is based on Conrad's experience on the crew of the Roi des Belges, a Congo river steamer, in the early 1890s. It details the horrors visited upon the native peoples of the Congo. But Conrad still approached the horrors through a similar lens to Stanley. Granted, the lens was beginning to fog up and crack, but there's still enough of European supremacy in Conrad's telling that the novel has become controversial. It has been dissected and analyzed and lauded and excoriated. Is it a critique of colonialism? Or simply an example of it?

And those are the two stories we've historically had of European colonization in Africa.

Most people have never heard of Edmund Morel, Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, and William H. Sheppard. These are the voices that Hochschild's book amplifies. Hochschild also amplifies the few African voices that can be found from the era; many of those voices had never been heard or published (including an interesting bit of trivia from the Commission of Inquiry that Leopold set up in 1890 to "investigate" the reports of abuse; he had stacked the commission so that the report would be favorable but the overwhelming atrocity of the stories his three commissioners heard caused them to issue a scathing rebuke of human rights violations in the Congo. But the report did not quote any of the African voices from the thousands of witnesses detailing the parade of horror; it expressed the abuse and murder in generalities, effectively taking much of the bite out of the rebuke. The witness testimony was sealed and hidden away in a closed section of the state archive in Belgium, not to be released again until the 1980s).

The atrocities were horrendous. The European colonizers were violently abusive to the African natives. However the native tribes of the Congo weren't innocent naifs. As Hochschild writes, "Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and ritual cannibalism and were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part of Africa, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere."

The inherent violent nature of all humanity was used at the time as an excuse for the terrors of colonization.

"Leopold's will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic of European industry. To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom."

But this same thought progress is still used today in the philosophy of neocolonialism, as well as in the current wrestling match of what we do about the complex, non-heroic parts of Euro-centric history. An underlying theme, then and today, is 'if the Europeans hadn't abused the native peoples, the native peoples would have abused one other; with European colonization, they got railroads at least. Right?'

The politics of forgetting are powerful. And, as Hochschild points out, "the politics of empathy are fickle."

That's why books like this one are so important. Culture changes slowly. Soooo slowly. This book was written in 1998. Reading it in 2021, during BLM movements in the US, I see how far we've come but mourn how far we yet have left to go.

"In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the population of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in--its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence--is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful event we try to forget."

"An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a 'hue and cry.' But we live in a world of corpses and only about some of them is there a hue and cry."

"What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.'"

View all my reviews