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

I first stumbled upon Belgium's dark cloud over the Congo on a chance story about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. That led to a read of The Assassination of Lumumba by Ludo De Witte; which I recommend.

Reading about Lumumba and the country's exploited history, I went in search of more history about the Congo and found Hochschild's fine history on the country: King Leopold's Ghost (KLG).

For being a comprehensive history of Belgium's atrocities, KLG was a page turner. I found myself constantly writing things like "WTF?!?!?" and "Fuck this guy" and "They knew they were wrong" in the margins. Page after page, Hochschild lays the evidence naked for us to consume. It's like an encyclopedia of horrors with Belgian agents and rubber and ivory traders/thieves committing murders, torturing Congolese and doing everything but bringing civilization to people whom they considered savage.

I guess it's probably a story folks are familiar with in the sense that we have South Africa, the slave trade, colonialism, the US, etc. But where this differs I think is that I'd never heard of these atrocities prior to happenstance leading me to Lumumba. It wasn't taught in my public high school and while I'm sure it was in some classroom at my college, I didn't find it. That we have an extended event that led to the deaths of some ~10 million humans and a concerted, decades long effort to cover it up and not have more made of it speaks to a lot. It speaks to a continued disregard of black and African voices; a devaluation of their lives and experiences. (Hochschild repeatedly points out the lack of Congolese voices in this history.) It speaks to the weak spines of government leaders in Europe and the US where it's convenient for ugly history to be forgotten -- though that's probably the case with most governments.

Whatever, this was a necessary, but frustrating book to read -- frustrating in the lack of justice and fairness and for the atrocities that occurred over decades in the names of greed, power, materialism.

Once King Leopold II was finally forced to give up the Congo (which he sold to his own country for what would translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in modern currency), as he ordered all state documents to be burned, he said, "I will give them *my* Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there." This audacity and sense of entitlement is at the heart of his brutality. However smart, however savvy, however shrewd, King Leopold II was a murderous, monstrous human whose hideous character has been captured perfectly in this book by Adam Hochschild.