King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

Dennis Abbot led our discussion of this fascinating book. Review by  MICHIKO KAKUTANI, A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa,  New York Times, 1 Sep 1998. "Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is frequently read as an allegorical or Freudian parable, while its murderous hero, Kurtz -- the renegade white trader, who lives deep in the Congo jungle behind a fence adorned with shrunken heads -- is regarded as a Nietzschean madman or avatar of colonial ambition run dangerously amok.

As Adam Hochschild's disturbing new book on the Belgian Congo makes clear, however, Kurtz was based on several historical figures, and the horror Conrad described was all too real. In fact, Hochschild suggests, "Heart of Darkness" stands as a remarkably "precise and detailed" portrait of King Leopold's Congo in 1890, just as one of history's most heinous acts of mass killing was getting underway.

Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (he ran the Congo Free State as his personal fiefdom from 1885 to 1908), the population was reduced by half. As many as 8 million Africans (perhaps even 10 million, in Hochschild's opinion) lost their lives.

Some were beaten or whipped to death for failing to meet the rigid production quotas for ivory and rubber harvests, imposed by Leopold's agents. Some were worked to death, forced to labor in slavelike conditions as porters, rubber gatherers, or miners for little or no pay.

Some died of the diseases introduced to (and spread throughout) the Congo by Europeans. And still others died from the increasingly frequent famines that swept the Congo basin as Leopold's army rampaged through the countryside, appropriating food and crops for its own use while destroying villages and fields.

Although much of the material in "King Leopold's Ghost" is secondhand -- the author has drawn heavily from Jules Marchal's scholarly four-volume history of turn-of-the-century Congo and from "The Scramble for Africa," Thomas Pakenham's wide-ranging 1991 study of the European conquest of the continent -- Hochschild has stitched it together into a vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.

It is a book that situates Leopold's crimes in a wider context of European and African history while at the same time underscoring the peculiarly modern nature of his efforts to exert "spin control" over his actions."