King Leopold's Ghost Quotes

“to speak, as Leopold’s officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or “liberated men,” was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on bullets—bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“each of the two great archrivals, Booker T. Washington and WE.B. Du Bois, invited”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“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

“During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“a 1959 text for young Congolese soldiers studying to become NCOs in the Force Publique explained that history “reveals how the Belgians, by acts of heroism, managed to create this immense territory.” Fighting the “Arab” slavers, “in three years of sacrifice, perseverance and steadfast endurance, they brilliantly completed the most humanitarian campaign of the century, liberating”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Colonialism was also justified by an elaborate ideology, embodied in everything from Kipling’s poetry and Stanley’s lectures to sermons and books about the shapes of skulls, lazy natives, and the genius of European civilization. And”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“to speak, as Leopold’s officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or “liberated men,” was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Chekhov, knowing the weight of his own country’s history of serfdom, spoke of how Russians must squeeze the slave out of themselves, drop by drop. Russia’s continuing troubles show how long and hard a task this is.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“His frustrations are concealed, his raw lust for colonies moderated by the knowledge that he must depend on subterfuge and flattery.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“To Leopold, the international explosion of bad publicity triggered by the Kowalsky disaster was a turning point: instead of grandly bequeathing the Congo to Belgium at his death as he had planned, he understood that he would have to make the change before then. With his extraordinary knack for making the best of an apparently difficult situation, he began to maneuver. If these do-gooders were forcing him to give up his beloved colony, he decided, he was not going to give it away. He would sell it. And Belgium, the buyer, would have to pay dearly.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“In return for receiving the Congo, the Belgian government first of all agreed to assume its 110 million francs’ worth of debts, much of them in the form of bonds Leopold had freely dispensed over the years to favorites like Caroline. Some of the debt the outmaneuvered Belgian government assumed was in effect to itself—the nearly 32 million francs worth of loans Leopold had never paid back. As part of the deal, Belgium also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs toward completing certain of the king’s pet building projects. Fully a third of the amount was targeted for the extensive renovations under way at Laeken, already one of Europe’s most luxurious royal homes, where, at the height of reconstruction, 700 stone masons, 150 horses, and seven steam cranes had been at work following a grand Leopoldian blueprint to build a center for world conferences. Finally, on top of all this, Leopold was to receive, in installments, another fifty million francs “as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo.” Those funds were not expected to come from the Belgian taxpayer. They were to be extracted from the Congo itself.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Self-government is our right,” he declared. “A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself—than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours . . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel . . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststrucuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of killing Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“His Majesty displays the pretensions and naïve selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing. The whites were thought to turn their captives’ flesh into salt meat, their brains into cheese, and their blood into the red wine Europeans drank. African bones were burned, and the gray ash became gunpowder. The huge, smoking copper cooking kettles that could be seen on sailing vessels were, it was believed, where all these deadly transformations began. The death tolls on the packed slave ships that sailed west from the Congo coast rose higher still when some slaves refused to eat the food they were given, believing that they would be eating those who had sailed before them.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Dissident state or company employees in the Congo could not easily write to Morel directly, for a cabinet noir, or censorship office, in Boma monitored their correspondence.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. ���But they”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“The new gun, Stanley said, would be “of valuable service in helping civilisation to overcome barbarism.” When”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Affonso tried to do something as difficult in his time as in ours: to be a selective modernizer. He”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“In any system of terror, the functionaries must first of all see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Savages are dangerous neighbours and unprofitable customers, and if they remain as degraded denizens of our colonies, they become a burden upon the State.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“he believed with all his heart that Leopold’s system of rule constituted a unique form of evil. People in England’s ruling circles, therefore, could support his crusade without feeling their own interests threatened.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost