King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Adam Hochschild
Who learned in school that in 1895 the Congo Free State was named the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium?
Leopold II (1835-1909) was a king with a Shakespearean appetite for ostentatious wealth. He believed that colonies were the source of a nation’s wealth and power at a time that his people and ministers did not. So, under the pretext of protecting African natives from Arab slavers, he sent the Anglo/American explorer and journalist, Henry Stanley Morton, to claim for him his own personal colony, an area 76 times the size of Belgium; then he declared Stanley the Congo Free State’s first governor.
The land belonging to Africans was declared vacant and was divided between commercial concessions, which were basically extensions of the state, to exploit ivory and wild rubber – ‘the wood that weeps.’ Quotas would be met by the forced conscription of tens of thousands of full-time laborers; the other word for this is slavery. Punishment, such as the taking of hostages and burning of villages, for failing to meet quotas, was enforced by Leopold’s own personal army, La Force Publique, or by company militias outfitted by the King. Leopold, who never set foot in his African kingdom, received half the concession companies’ profits, but earned even greater sums from the land he exploited directly, for example through the Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber and Exploration Company.
1890 to 1910 were particularly bad years in the Congo under Leopold, but Hochschild is careful to point out that after the King sold his African country to his own country, life for natives was hardly better under the Belgium government, or on rubber plantations next door, in French Equatorial Africa’s Congo/Brazzaville. Forced labour produced rubber during WWI, was used to build railroads in the 1930s, and later to exploit the copper mines of Katanga province. These decades also claimed countless lives.
Collecting wild rubber is ugly, painful work. “The native does not like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it,” wrote one boss. To meet his quota of kilos of coagulated rubber, the gatherer would spread the syrup-like rubber on his body to dry – a process that became increasingly painful each time.
Hochschild tells a great historical tale. It is as ‘character-driven’ as a Broadway play, and he describes a long list of personalities that played definitive roles in colonial Congo – from TheHeart of Darkness (1902) author Joseph Conrad to the charismatic William Sheppard, the first black American missionary to the Congo, who introduced the first bicycle to central Africa, hunted big-game, and was the first foreigner to reach the Kuba kingdom and collect its impressive art – all dressed in white.
Very interesting is Hochschild’s deduction that Conrad’s most unforgettable ‘fictional’ character, Mr. Kurtz, was actually based on the very real administrator and avid elephant hunter Léon Rom who, like Kurtz, was a landscape artist and amateur entomologist who also displayed his collection of human skulls.
As Hochschild writes, his book is “a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves.”
Leopold, a hypochondriac cousin of Queen Victoria, is himself an awful personage. A monster to his long-suffering Austrian wife, he tried to dominate, and then disinherit, his unhappy daughters. And five days before his death, Leopold married his long-term, wild-spending mistress, a French prostitute with whom he had fathered two sons. Leopold was booed during his burial parade.
Leopold handed out medals and sent lobbyists to the States and Britain to place favourable articles about the Congo in magazines. But he faced a string of unforgettable and determined opponents, including a former shipping clerk, E.D. Morel, who is considered the first organizer of a human rights movement. Despite their weaknesses and failings, Hochschild immortalizes them all.
Eventually, cultivated rubber replaced wild rubber, and today, diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt and uranium are far more important. (80% of the uranium in the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the Congo). Whether the black casualties of colonialism add up to five or 14 million, not to mention the additional four million claimed by the 10-year civil war, the numbers rival the Holocaust. It’s something to think about while sitting in the blind.
Bottom line: A fascinating, colourful, character-rich history in clear English.
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Adam Hochschild - Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Co. 1999 - 367 pp. $15.00