King Leopold's Ghost - Books Babb.no

No cover — Adam Hochschild: King Leopold's Ghost (Mariner Books)

384 pages

English language

Published by Mariner Books.

ISBN:: 978-0-618-71167-3
OCLC Number:: 173165800

(1 review)

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 …

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.

9 editions

Eivind (like the Terrible) reviewed King Leopold's ghost by Adam Hochschild

Review of "King Leopold's ghost" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

"“Those who are conquered,” wrote the philosopher Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteenth century, “always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics — in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and customs.”"

King Leopold II raped and plundered Congo for 25 years. An estimated 10 million Africans were killed in his quest for riches (half of Congo's population). Among all the brutality in Congo, the rubber harvest is singled out as especially horrendous. (This period of terror is stamped into the Mongo language where "to send someone to harvest rubber" is an idiom meaning "to tyrannize.")

Belgium bought the colony from Leopold in 1908, but they made few structural changes.

After "independence" Lumumba offered a brief flicker of hope, but there was no way Western capitalists would tolerate his talk about economic independence as a requirement for true independence. He was assassinated in 1961 to …

"“Those who are conquered,” wrote the philosopher Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteenth century, “always want to imitate the conqueror in his main characteristics — in his clothing, his crafts, and in all his distinctive traits and customs.”"

King Leopold II raped and plundered Congo for 25 years. An estimated 10 million Africans were killed in his quest for riches (half of Congo's population). Among all the brutality in Congo, the rubber harvest is singled out as especially horrendous. (This period of terror is stamped into the Mongo language where "to send someone to harvest rubber" is an idiom meaning "to tyrannize.")

Belgium bought the colony from Leopold in 1908, but they made few structural changes.

After "independence" Lumumba offered a brief flicker of hope, but there was no way Western capitalists would tolerate his talk about economic independence as a requirement for true independence. He was assassinated in 1961 to allow the continued exploitation of the country and extraction of its vast natural resources by Western corporations.

In 1965, Lieutenant General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized control of the country, and, as the author of this book points out, "Aside from the color of his skin, there were few ways in which he did not resemble the monarch who governed the same territory a hundred years earlier. His one-man rule. His great wealth taken from the land. His naming a lake after himself. His yacht. His appropriation of state possessions as his own. His huge shareholdings in private corporations doing business in his territory. Just as Leopold, using his privately controlled state, shared most of his rubber profits with no one, so Mobutu acquired his personal group of gold mines — and a rubber plantation. Mobutu’s habit of printing more money when he needed it resembled nothing so much as Leopold’s printing of Congo bonds."

King Leopold's ghost still looms large over Congo, as the shadow of European imperialism still looms large over large parts of Africa south of Sahara. But in Europe most people believe our exploitation of Africa is a thing of the past.