King Leopold's Ghost Quotes

“of white men they are branded with a red-hot”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that slavery’s demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops. In their opinion, slavery had come to an end throughout most of the world for one reason only: British virtue. When London’s Albert Memorial was built in 1872, one of its statues showed a young black African, naked except for some leaves over his loins. The memorial’s inaugural handbook explained that he was a “representative of the uncivilised races” listening to a European woman’s teaching, and that the “broken chains at his feet refer to the part taken by Great Britain in the emancipation of slaves.” Significantly, most British and French antislavery fervor in the 1860s was directed not at Spain and Portugal, which allowed slavery in their colonies, or at Brazil, with its millions of slaves. Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target: the so-called Arab slave-traders raiding Africa from the east.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

“I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“When the Atlantic slave trade began decimating the Kongo, that nation was under the reign of a ManiKongo named Nzinga Mbemba Affonso, who had gained the throne in 1506 and ruled as Affonso I for nearly forty years. Affonso’s life spanned a crucial period. When he was born, no one in the kingdom knew that Europeans existed.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, “there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time,” as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for “discovering” some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“slavery’s demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Nonetheless, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books and speeches and sermons denounced the vicious “Arab” slavers—and with them, by implication, the idea that any part of Africa might be colonized by someone other than Europeans.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Only half a dozen years earlier Stanley had deserted from the U.S. Navy, but now he noted with satisfaction how “the incorrigible deserters . . . were well flogged and chained.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Even in the north, business people and professionals tended to speak French and to look down on the impoverished Flemish-speaking farmworkers and factory laborers.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“But there was something foxlike about the manner in which this constitutional monarch of a small, increasingly democratic country became the totalitarian ruler of a vast empire on another continent. Stealth and dissembling would be his trusted devices, just as the fox relies on these qualities to survive in a world of hunters and larger beasts.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“And finally Money noted that the huge Dutch profits from Java depended on forced labor.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“For him, colonies existed for one purpose: to make him and his country rich. “Belgium doesn’t exploit the world,” he complained to one of his advisers. “It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would make “an excellent president of a republic.” Scornfully, he turned to his faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, “What would you say, Doctor, if someone greeted you as ‘a great veterinarian’?” The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“We know from a later scrap of oral tradition that Europeans were often believed to have hoofs; not having seen shoes before, some Africans along the river thought them part of white anatomy.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“As Sanford saw his inherited fortune draining away, his connections at the Belgian court loomed larger for him.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“do not understand Englishmen at all,” Stanley wrote. “Either they suspect me of some self-interest, or they do not believe me. . . . For the relief of Livingstone I was called an impostor; for the crossing of Africa I was called a pirate.” Nor was there enthusiasm in the United States for Congo colonization. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in New York, now wanted to send Stanley off in search of the North Pole.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“But those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“ivory in the nineteenth century was a more rare and expensive version of what plastic is today,”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Traders kept careful records of their booty. One surviving inventory from this region lists “68 head” of slaves by name, physical defects, and cash value, starting with the men, who were worth the most money, and ending with: “Child, name unknown as she is dying and cannot speak, male without value, and a small girl Callenbo, no value because she is dying; one small girl Cantunbe, no value because she is dying.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“But the marriage remained miserable. Marie-Henriette fled the royal château of Laeken to go horseback riding for most of each day.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Otherwise, about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers. It was ripe for conquest—or, as Leopold was now learning to say, for protection.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“These figures told their own story. . . . Forced labour of a terrible and continuous kind could alone explain such unheard-of profits . . . forced labour in which the Congo Government was the immediate beneficiary; forced labour directed by the closest associates of the King himself. . . . I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder. I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a King for a croniman.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Lined up . . . are 40 emaciated sons of an African village, each carrying his little basket of rubber. The toll of rubber is weighed and accepted, but . . . four baskets are short of the demand. The order is brutally short and sharp—Quickly the first defaulter is seized by four lusty “executioners,” thrown on the bare ground, pinioned hands and feet, whilst a fifth steps forward carrying a long whip of twisted hippo hide. Swiftly and without cessation the whip falls, and the sharp corrugated edges cut deep into the flesh—on back, shoulders and buttocks blood spurts from a dozen places. In vain the victim twists in the grip of the executioners, and then the whip cuts other parts of the quivering body—and in the case of one of the four, upon the most sensitive part of the human frame. The “hundred lashes each” left four inert bodies bloody and quivering on the shimmering sand of the rubber collecting post.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. “Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“But memory remains, experience is a great teacher, and, after all, one has lived to play both parts.
~ E.D. Morel”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“for the Kuba had one of central Africa’s most sophisticated political systems.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost