King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial… (1998)

While I was somewhat aware of the atrocities committed in the name of colonialism in the Belgian Congo thanks to a number of African history classes in college, Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" A story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa" really brings it home how horrible and pervasive the horrors were.

An estimated 10 million Congolese were murdered as as Belgian King Leopold's men marched into villages to compel Congolese to gather rubber and ultimately line the King's coffers with more riches. The soldiers needed to prove they used their previous bullets on people rather than going out hunting and so began a program of lopping off hands -- from the living and dead-- as their form of proof The images presented in the book are stunning and memorable and not for the feint of heart. ( )

Engrossing and horrifying in equal measure, King Leopold's Ghost tells the story of the atrocities committed by Europeans in the Congo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the period when this vast area of central Africa was the personal fiefdom of Leopold II of Belgium. In secondary school, I learned about the sympathy and outrage created in Europe at the beginning of WWI, when 'poor little Belgium' was invaded by Germany—yet Belgium's government had for many years presided over a regime in the Congo which was propped up through an institutionalised use of murder, torture, rape and mutilation on a vast scale, and all motivated by greed and racism. The incidents which Hochschild recounts were sometimes almost unbearable to hear about, particularly when they involved children, even at the remove of several decades and confined to text.

Hochschild does a good job of reconstructing what happened as best he can—though, as he acknowledges, it is largely a story which must be told through the eyes of (mostly white) Westerners because almost no accounts survive from any Congolese witnesses, and understandably traumatised survivors didn't pass their experiences down through oral history. In addition, Leopold ordered the whole scale destruction of almost all the colonial administration's records so it was hard to get a sense of just how the system worked in the Congo, and how much Leopold specifically and unambiguously knew about what was going on. There's no equivalent here to the Wannsee papers—though I do wonder if there might be untapped sources in the Vatican archives, given how complicit several members of the Catholic clergy were in what happened.

This is a must-read—if not for the sake of the text in and of itself, for the sake of knowing about a history which the world outside the Congo has largely forgotten. ( )

A great book with a fascinating story not to be missed especially in its understanding of world-wide slavery and Africa. ( )

I was warned that my high writing standards would make this book a difficult read for me, because the poor sentence structure would distract from the compelling events being described. I would want to have a red pen in my hand. I actually didn't find that to be the case, though, and I got the full impact of the atrocities that went down as Leopold subjugated a huge portion of a continent. I wouldn't have minded a little distraction, as some of those images are not easy to get out of my head. Three and a half stars. ( )

It's gratifying to get the chance to read a book as powerful and influential as this. King Leopold's Ghost is the book that re-exposed the atrocities Leopold committed against the Congo between 1880 and 1910 - atrocities that sank out of sight after they were finally stopped. An estimated ten million Congolese died during that time.

It's even more gratifying to find that Hochschild's book is well-written, too; it's fast, gripping and clearly laid out. Rarely, I read a book that's so important and so well-done that I feel privileged to hold it. This is one of those. Sorry to gush.

It's not perfect. Tim Jeal has argued convincingly in his [b:biography of Henry Morton Stanley|1724560|Stanley The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer|Tim Jeal|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187421530s/1724560.jpg|1251068] that Stanley exaggerated his own bloodthirstiness, using evidence Hochschild overlooks. The author occasionally lets his own political views show a bit more than is necessary. And more importantly, it suffers from a paucity of stories from the Congolese themselves, a fact Hochschild is quite unhappily aware of. It's not that he didn't try; it's that there are none. No extended, first-person accounts of any Congolese survive from this period. What bits exist are reproduced here, but it's not enough.

It's a tragic reminder of how easy it is to squelch the testimony of an entire people, particularly a pre-literate one. How many stories we have never, and can never hear. A reminder of how delicate history is - like a hollow eggshell - how easily crushed. ( )