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

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books, I’ve read it many times and so when I saw this a few years ago I knew that I would one day read it.

This is a book that I will put in the category of William L. Shirer’s 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Iris Chang’s 1997 history The Rape of Nanking. While what went on in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was not officially a war, what went on “behind the lines” was similar with what went on in Eastern Europe and in China – a people were victimized by a stronger military force and crimes against humanity were covered up.

Author Adam Hochschild blamed much of this violence and cover up on racism and provides a 500 year history of the region as it experienced first exploration and then exploitation by European powers. Hochschild makes comparisons to Marxism, Stalinism and the plight of Native Americans in his denunciation of the system of oppression that resulted in decades of civil rights abuses, murder and theft.

Two villains stand out: King Leopold II of Belgium and the explorer and writer Henry Morton Stanley.

Stanley is of course the speaker of the famous quote: “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” as the intrepid explorer and finder of the lost humanitarian David Livingston. But did he really say this? Hochschild studies the history of Stanley and we find a character who is impeached with his own obfuscations and misdirection as well as first-hand accounts of witnesses to his barbarism. Far from the image of strident explorer, the portrait Hochschild paints of Stanley is one of a habitual fabricator of stories, a tyrannical supervisor and a murderer.

I wondered whether Stanley was the inspiration for Conrad’s Kurtz but it appears not, though the resulting atrocities cited by the author had no doubt an overabundance of models from which to draw.

King Leopold II of Belgium was an oppressor in the sense that he created a system by which the Congolese people would be greatly harmed and then did nothing to correct the situation when it was plain that things had gotten out of control. His was the villainy of persecution and in many ways even worse, of betrayal. Leopold had presented himself to the world stage as a humanitarian and a benefactor to the African people, when all the while he only wanted to rule over a vast colony, being unsatisfied with ruling over a small European country. By forming a system wherein profits from mineral and ivory wealth was the sole purpose for agents in the interior of the country, without legal restraint, he was complicit in the atrocities against the native people. Leopold cited the Arab slave trade as the reason why his rule was necessary, but then created a system that may as well have been outright slavery of the people he had stated that he sought to save. The system of oppression that Leopold created would last far beyond his own governance.

Hochschild also examines the role of trustee as accomplice to crime as locals were recruited by the Belgians to carry out many of the atrocities and he also explores the psychological effects of a native populace who carry out unconstitutional orders. Just as the Nuremberg trials exposed a class of middle managers who were "just following orders" so too do we find in the Congo a system where a privileged caste learns to follow orders or to look the other way. Like a Nazi concentration camp administrator stated decades later, some officers "just got used to it."

As a historian, Hochschild stands in the pulpit too frequently. To be fair, there is likely very little good to be said of the Belgian occupation and the African history provided as background was excellent.

This book succeeds as a cautionary tale and a call to arms against civil rights abuses by shining a bright light on a great crime. Like Chang did for Chinese victims in Rape of Nanking; the plight of the Congolese people, as dehumanized victims of military colonization, are examined for all to see and so the sufferers are memorialized and the criminals are exposed. This also examines the role of the press as accomplices to governmental crime, as much of the propaganda used to support Leopold and to substantiate his claims was published in the name of good intentions.