Book Review: King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild

King Leopold’s Ghost

King Leopold’s Ghost is the story of the establishment of Belgium’s Congo colony. More importantly, it is the story of how a landlocked nation of meager size, seized African land and exploited its denizens in one of the cruelest systems ever created during Europe’s imperialist craze in Africa. (Not to say that there aren’t many close seconds throughout the continent.)

Hochschild focuses on what he calls the first great international humanitarian movement that emerged against Leopold. Under the leadership of E.D. Morel, America and Britain were seized by a humanitarian fervor that eventually pressured King Leopold to relinquish his colony to the marginally more benign Belgian parliament.

There are a few interesting themes that emerge in Hochschild’s narrative. The first can be seen with King Leopold himself.

King Leopold was an incredible character. An amalgamation of a greedy capitalist, a self-indulgent monarch, and a diplomatic whiz, he was able to create an enormous colony in Central Africa. Most astoundingly the colony was all for himself. That’s right. The Belgian government didn’t even have a stake in it—he even got them to fund his venture without ceding land or control. What’s incredible about Leopold is that he was able to create this terribly exploitative colony while casting himself as a humanitarian. A benevolent, bearded monarch protecting the lazy, slow-witted Africans from brutal Arab slavers. He was able to establish this façade of philanthropy all over the Western world and fit it accordingly to the different humanitarian goals of his myriad supporters (promising a free trade colony to venture capitalists and a religious colony to missionaries). What an incredibly shrewd asshole. And what’s more, while draining the Congo of people and rubber, he managed to never even visit the continent.

For me this played as a warning of the power and danger of humanitarianism. King Leopold was able to establish this cruel colony through a humanitarian façade. And, as Hochschild points out, there’s a sort of irony to the humanitarian movement that would eventually expose his evils and fight against him. The British and American patriots that whipped themselves into a self-righteous fervor against Leopold still blindly believed that their own colonial seizures of land and people were appropriate for non-Whites. Paternalism was the order of the day.

In the midst of all this blind self-righteousness, few could imagine that Africans were perhaps equals of whites and deserving of self-rule. But change is incremental, and to point this out may be to harp on an obvious point.

Hochschild is not an academic. He is a journalist, and accordingly, the book is an enthralling narrative, not a careful, slow account of historical events. It reads like fiction. It draws you into the juicy stories of intrigue and the broad strokes of good and bad, yet it still manages to be a thoroughly researched and careful historical book.

His voice and opinions creep into the pages, which at first sort of bothered me since it seems unacademic for a history book. But Hochschild’s voice is fine. He highlights and strengthens certain broad points and is all in all a smart guy. A very good read to learn about early humanitarianism and one of the incredibly interesting stories of Europe in Africa. Perhaps more importantly, Hochschild tells this story in a way that is inundated with historical intrigue and rich characters.