King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, which came out in 1998 is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the profound trauma of colonialism as seen through one of its most egregious instances in Central Africa as one European man plundered a region for his personal profit while claiming to the world that he was “saving” its “savage” inhabitants. As usual, he was assisted in this by the abysses of human nature, as sadists, rapists, and other power-hungry enablers lined up to participate, while hapless others were roped in or had no choices.
In one sense, it is only an extreme version of the basic template for the Imperialism visited upon vast swathes of the planet by western European powers: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, German, British … and in this case Belgium. The king of a constitutional monarchy decided to go out and grab the enormous power and wealth he craved but was denied in his own small nation. It was only a few brave souls who dared to object; they persisted, at great cost to themselves, but it took years before anything was actually done. Meanwhile, something like six to ten million Africans died (possibly thirteen million by some estimates.) There is agreement that perhaps 50% of the population perished through disease, starvation, and outright killing. The cruelty and brutality are mind-boggling. One wants to look away. And yet, it is essential to one’s own humanity and to the future of humankind, to look unblinkingly at this and understand it in context. I hope this summary of mine is useful for those who do not have the luxury and leisure to read entire books, however important their subject.
“The politics of empathy are fickle” Hochschild writes. When it did gradually come, public outrage over the atrocities in the Congo -- that massive central river system of the African continent, with its over 200 ethnic groups and 400 languages – the outrage was deliberately focused on the Arab slave traders, and deflected from Europe, Britain and others, notably the United States, who had profited massively from the use of enslaved African labor for centuries. We witness empathy-fickleness at work today as desperate “Third World” refugees are portrayed by powerful interests in the “First World” not as the moral challenge they present but rather an invading army (USA), a temporary and very expendable labor source (Gulf States) or a “threat to our way of life” (EU).
Beginning in the late 1870s and extending to the 1910s the resource gutting began with massive extraction of ivory, a valuable commodity in Europe. [The near extinction of elephants in the course of this, like the near extinction of whales for another commodity even more basic to European lifestyles, is a whole other topic that deserves its own discussions.] As industrial development proceeded in Europe, rubber became the indispensable raw material that could, for the benefit of Europe, be ripped out of southeast Asia, South America, and conveniently nearby Africa. I learned a great deal from this book, including the difference between cultivated and wild rubber plants, and how forced labor was the “ideal” way to extract the maximum of the wild variety from the jungles of the Congo Basin. Someone wrote at the time that if Leopold’s rule had lasted another ten years there would not have been “a single rubber vine or perhaps a single native” left. The same practices were adopted and extended by all the colonial powers; in the 1920s construction of a new railway cost the lives of an estimated 20,000 forced laborers under the French.
Hochschild writes, “What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than “many at work elsewhere.” Around that time, he notes, “the Germans were slaughtering the Herero people, the world was ignoring America’s brutal counter-guerrilla war in the Philippines … Britain came in for no international criticism for its killing of aborigines in Australia … And nowhere was there ever protest about the near extermination of the American Indians.” The holocaust in central Africa is barely remembered today, though it powerfully persists in collective imagination in the form of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, and its reworking nearly 100 years later in Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now. The consequences extend right into our own times. As Hochschild points out, the brutality of forced labor extended into the First World War, and with the start of the Second World War the legal maximum for forced labor was increased! The rubber the Allies needed came from Congolese labor and more than 80 percent of the uranium in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the mines of the Congo.
A savvy exploiter of his era’s media, Leopold reminds one in some ways of someone like Donald Trump: utterly lacking in empathy, loudly proclaiming himself the victim when even mildly called out for his misdeeds! The book has numerous riveting photos. The stories of those who vigorously opposed this are an important aspect of the narrative: those very few people – some European, some Black -- who looked at Africa with empathy, who saw a continent of “diverse societies with their own cultures and histories” and viewed “Leopold’s regime not as progress and civilization but as a theft of land and freedom.”
It seems important not to relegate such events to the remote past; we must acknowledge that this is an evolving and ongoing process right now in the 21st century, with multinational companies extracting resources using African labor, while almost all the profits go straight out of Africa. Adam Hochschild’s writing is engaging and vivid. It is important to know history if we hope to avoid repeating it. It strikes me as one of those grim ironies of history that today’s European Union conceived in the wake of centuries ferocious wars and often claiming the high moral ground in international affairs, is beset with grumblings about Brussels, headquarters of the EU and epicenter of Leopold’s rape of the Congo.