Product Description

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2481 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.com Review
King Leopold of Belgium, writes historian Adam Hochschild in this grim history, did not much care for his native land or his subjects, all of which he dismissed as "small country, small people." Even so, he searched the globe to find a colony for Belgium, frantic that the scramble of other European powers for overseas dominions in Africa and Asia would leave nothing for himself or his people. When he eventually found a suitable location in what would become the Belgian Congo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo, Leopold set about establishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." Those who survived went to work mining ore or harvesting rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who salted away billions of dollars in hidden bank accounts throughout the world. Hochschild's fine book of historical inquiry, which draws heavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery, brings this little-studied episode in European and African history into new light. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly
Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world. 30 illustrations. Agent: Georges Borchardt. First serial rights to American Scholar. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Having had two books named to LJ's Best Books list in the past?Half the Way Home in 1986 and The Unquiet Ghost in 1994?Hochschild wins the Triple Crown with this powerfully moving account of enslavement, mutilation, and murder in 19th-century Africa. Though it is not well known today, five to eight million African lives were lost when the Belgians colonized the Congo under King Leopold?a slaughter that, as Hochschild points out, proves Conrad's Mr. Kurtz to be no exaggeration. Hochschild is quietly devastating: he's got the facts, gleaned from prodigious research, and they speak?damningly?for themselves. (LJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The facts of Western Civilization
There are few stories that shock you with horror and this is one of the stories that make you wonder about greed and inhumanity of men. The ground for granted a king one of Africa's largest region continue to this day(we all remember democracy for Iraq)was to end the Islamization of the Congo but the reality was to for Leopold to exploit as he want through summary executions, looting, deforestation, hanging, amputations of African women, men and children.

Leopold's personal rubber planations caused the lives of millions of Africans with granted immunity from western democracies and the Congolese paid with their land, lives and culture. The Congo has always been a place the west value due to its raw materials and the Author has written a book with an array of characters that are humanly flawed, yet honest about the basic universal laws toward others.

i was amazed that the coined term "crime against humanity" was first used/written by an African American, who is a generation removed from Amerian slavery. The silence of Christianity, the model of Kutz and task achieved by the author truly bring written history to life.

The author has written a book that illustrate to the world that silence is always ground for future horrors. In fact, the horrors' victims have mostly been people from the southern hemisphere but we must understand in an interdependent society that every soldier of terrorist regime or colony eventually will return home and to some extent practice their craft in their original community.

The Friendly Belgians
To the extent that the Belgians impinge on the American sense of history at all, they exist in a kind of permanent heroic relief, bravely standing strong against the juggernaut of Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I. Their brave defense of Liege, and the courageous stand of King Albert I when he fought the German onslaught remain as poster-child images of an honorable European nation.

Adam Hochschild paints a horrific tale that makes adherents of divine retribution see a just punishment in both world wars for the atrocities committed against Africans in the Belgian Congo. Other readers have faulted the book for its sketchy treatment of the Congo, its myriad tribes, languages, customs, and varied landscape, but as an introduction to the most despotic depradations since the Spanish Conquest, the book is enlightening, riveting, and wrenching.

I could not read the chapters consecutively, so terrible is the litany of atrocities perpetrated by the Belgians. This book will take your breath away with its awfulness. It chronicles the pogroms that were enforced on tribes who could not collect their quotas of rubber, and it repeats in awful detail the torture and sadism of colonial rulers who cut off the hands of living children in order to run up false tallies of the dead. Each chapter devolves into a series of calamities more gruesome than the one before, and the only way I got through the book was by taking hourlong breaks in between chapters.

This book is an invaluable primer on colonial Belgium in the Congo. It is a continuation of the slave trade practiced hundreds of years before, and reflects the true nature of European attitudes towards Africa during a time when the slave trade had been extinct for more than a century. This is compelling and moving history at its very best.

Be careful who you sit down to tea with
This is a brutal history of the colonization of the Belgian Congo beginning in the 1890's. Long after slavery was unilaterally condemned on the planet earth, we find that King Leopold and the tiny country of Belgium has managed to take ownership of a chunk of the African continent, claim it for its own and ransack its people and resources for his own benefit.

Belgium felt they were being left out of the colonial expansion of Europe into Africa and wanted their piece of the action. They found the Congo River area an ideal source of rubber and cheap labor; a perfect location to set up shop which they did with the help of vicious mercenaries and Belgian company men. The book goes into horrible detail about the methods the white colonialists and their hired African mercenaries used to extract these resources and the labor that made it so valuable.

How could this happen? Where was the rest of the world? Well, believe it or not the United States inadvertently helped Leopold. A senator Sanford from the state of Florida, on the floor of the house, recognized the Congo as a Belgian territory. This simple recognition of a countries imperialistic expansion left the door wide open for Leopold to continue his atrocities under the guise of a legitimate Belgian state. It took decades for the truth about this brutal state to be known.

The implications of this episode in history bear some resemblance to today's debate about the benefit of the US negotiating with known terrorist states like Iran and N Korea. If a super power comes to the table of negotiation with a rogue state, the rogue country wins recognition even when nothing is accomplished. Unless pre-conditions and terms are negotiated, which make the meeting of mutual benefit to both parties, these terrorist states need to be marginalized and shunned by society at large.