Jacob Overmark's Reviews > King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

This is not a book for the faint-hearted.

It reveals the massive abuse of the Congo from the very day the Belgian King Leopold II laid his eyes on it and till the end of colonial days.

You may ask why we cannot let bygone be bygones, why we cannot get out of our mind the pictures of severed hands and heads, flogging, rape and murder.
You may ask why treating other human beings like animals or at best like second-class citizens in the past should not just be buried as something we have dealt with already, a mass-trauma which over the years have been successfully suppressed.

The answer to this is the same as to when asked if Holocaust was real.
“The Manic Street Preachers” put it into song with the proverbial lines: “… And if you tolerate this then your children will be next”.

This is exactly what this is about.
Congo – and Africa was not new to violence and slavery when the colonialization fever broke out.
However, with the industrial era beginning in Europe it took a new turn.
Whereas most nations agreed about abolition of slavery, though for many different reasons, “forced labor” was something entirely different.
While it is hard to defend the practice seen through 2019 eyes, the conditions of chimney sweeper boys and children working in coal mines were extremely harsh as well.
In Victorian times “them and us” were much more the order of the day than at present and the “them group” of society did not fare well.

As in other aspects it is very convenient being able to present an even lower status group, the poor uneducated and pagan natives of the Congo.
By putting up several smokescreens King Leopold under cover of humanitarian work and development goes into Congo to empty it for any profit possible.

For a long number of years, the Congo is the personal possession of King Leopold and public eyes have no access to the bookkeeping. Concessions are given, bonds issued, and people killed on regular basis, if not directly then as consequence of agricultural land confiscated and forced labor. Killings, famine, sickness, all took its toll and between 10-13 million lives are by a conservative estimate lost during Belgian rule.
Today we know a great deal about what happened during these years and as most Europeans had a part to play in either participating directly or being unwilling to investigate, we all must plead guilty.

The least we can do is to learn the lessons from this era and not stand by idle when history is repeating.