Tom's Reviews > King Leopold's Ghost

"The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting. Leopold and the Belgian colonial officials who followed him went to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical record. One day in August 1908, shortly before the colony was officially turned over to Belgium, the king's young military aide Gustave Stinglhamber walked from the Royal Palace to see a friend in the Congo state offices next door. The midsummer day seemed particularly warm, and the two men went to an open window to talk. Stinglhamber sat down on a radiator, then jumped to his feet: it was burning hot. When the men summoned the janitor for an explanation, he replied, "Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.""
-- Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

A devastating examination of the evils of colonialism and the vagaries of historical memory that, more than two decades after its publication, remains relevant in light of recent attempts to frame colonialism as a historical good regardless of its human cost. As related by Adam Hochschild, that cost was high and unspeakably brutal in the so-called Congo Free State, over which King Leopold II of Belgium ruled. The result of Hochschild's research is one of the most powerful works of non-fiction I've read: a painful, enraging portrait of wanton greed and horror that still resonates.