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

King Leopold II of Belgium managed to convince the world (for a while) that he was a humanitarian and philanthropist. Meanwhile, he was extracting the riches of the Congo for personal gain and ruthlessly exploiting the Congolese, with the death toll eventually estimated at ten million people. This book provides a history of the Congo from pre-colonial times through Mobutu’s regime. Through the efforts George Washington Williams, Rev. William Sheppard, E.D. Morel, and Roger Casement, the abuses became widely known and Leopold was forced to relinquish control to Belgium. These main paid a high price for their activism in the area of human rights.

“The Congo reform movement had two achievements that lasted far beyond its own time. First…it put a remarkable amount of information on the historical record. And there it remains, despite the strenuous efforts of Leopold and his admirers, then and now, to burn it, to ignore it, to distort it with mythologizing. That record of truth matters, especially for a continent whose history is otherwise so filled with silences. [Second]… among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.”

This book is an engagingly written, logically organized history that provides a revealing analysis of the colonization of the Congo, and the oppression of its inhabitants. Hochschild relates Leopold’s activities in the Congo to the larger picture of other countries’ exploitation of Africa. He also gives the reader a good idea of why this part of history had previously been largely forgotten (or covered up).

This is the type of history book that reads as a story of man’s inhumanity to man. It is meticulously footnoted, and the author has attempted to use primary sources as much as possible. His only regret is that there is such limited source material from the Congolese tribes. The photos are heart-breaking. Highly recommended.