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| King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa | 
| Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $2.75
You Save: $12.25 (82%)
New (61) Collectible (3) from $5.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  184 reviews
Sales Rank: 1608
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0618001905
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.51022
UPC: 046442001908
EAN: 9780618001903
ASIN: 0618001905
Publication Date: October 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: contains highlinning & marks, name written on side
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Amazon.com
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
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 179 more reviews...
 Amazingly eyeopening July 22, 2008
Although I teach High school history I've never been intersted in African history. I've taught slavery, Pre-european contact, and Egypt yet I've never studied or taught about imperialism in Africa. In preparation for teaching this period in a Modern World history class I've been reading about Africa. Wow - this book blew my mind. It presents all sides of the imperialism issue and doesn't make the Africans as innocent victims. Don't be confused this book pulls no punches everyone from the American government to the British, Belgium and the African leaders are shown to be complicit in the death of over 10 million Africans. Don't miss this one it will help you understand the problems Africa faces today.
Rich and informative. June 17, 2008
This book was among the best I have read this year. I had no idea as to the atrocities committed in the Congo around the turn of the century until I picked up this book. While Hochschild goes into great lengths to expose King Leopold II and his horrible deeds, he still maintains great objectivity and examines WHY Leopold may have acted in the manner that he did. I would love for Hochschild to look more into Leopolds mistress Caroline. That is a book I would definetly pick up.
Good Book May 31, 2008
A very interesting book about a very evil person and a bad time in the world. Much like now in Africa.
The Contest Against Leopold, Archetypal Colonial Despot May 9, 2008
Hochschild's treatment of Belgian King Leopold's African Empire is a well-written and authoritative lay history. The author provides a context for and then delves deeply into the period lasting decades (from the 1880s into the 1920s) during which the envious crowned head of a tiny European nation built himself a totalitarian state for his personal financial gain in the heart of a continent suffering wholesale rape at the gunpoints of the world powers of the time.
Hochschild is careful to note that although the scale of the killings of Congolese Africans was "of genocidal proportions," maybe ten million, it wasn't genocide. It was business. He also notes that King Leopold wasn't the only villain during this time; French, British and U.S. imperialists were oppressing and taking advantage of people throughout Africa, Asia and the Pacific. He does, however, show that the study of Leopold's exercise is an excellent, egregious example of the spirit of the times. And the contest against Leopold's Congolese nation by some of the great humanitarians of the early twentieth century gave voice to the first internationalist ways of thinking about human rights, and local African sovereignty. There were many great, flawed, powerful, conflicted personalities involved in the struggle to make the world aware of what Leopold was doing in the African interior such as British businessman E.D. Morel, U.S. adventurer/attorney George Washington Williams, Irish idealist Roger Casement, and American clergyman William Sheppard. Finally, Hochschild observes that the current condition of many African countries can't be laid fully to rest on the grave of the despotic Leopold, or on imperialism itself. But it is important to recognize and truthfully account for the parts that Western selfishness and superiority played in the history of "the Dark Continent."
I read this book upon the recommendation of my girlfriend and subsequent to a whirlwind college course in which the European colonial period of the African continent was given a mere week in a history class I was taking.
A Century of Horror May 5, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
Anyone who wants to understand the Congo should read two books, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild and and In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. Together, they explain why the last 100 years of bloody tyranny has laid the groundwork for possibly 100 more.
I would also heartily recommend both books to anyone studying Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is too seldom seen as an historic account as well as a literary novel.
Hochschild gives us the first half of the century in a grim story told within the larger picture of a world of developed nations gone mad for colonies. The top of the food chain, England, Germany, and France, are scrambling to lock down markets for their goods and resource-rich lands to supply their bustling industrial economies. King Leopold of Belgium, a man whose inferiority complex knows no bottom and whose greed no limits, jumps into the feeding frenzy and comes up gripping the very heart of Africa, the vast area around the Congo River and it's tributaries that would later become the Belgian Congo, then Zaire, and today is the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the setting for my novel, Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo.
It's easy to focus on the horrors of Leopold's Congo, but there is much more to the story than endless accounts of sadistic whippings and dismemberments, as bestial as they might be. Hochschild tells us, too, how Leopold was able to pull off this massive decades-long crime through manipulation of the media, well-placed bribes and partnerships, and first subversion and then repression of his critics. The holocaust he visited on Congo--as many as 8 million indigenous people were killed--could have been the template for Adolph Hitler's.
This book also gives us a detailed look at the little clerk who eventually brought Leopold's rule of terror to an end. He was Edmund Morel, a Liverpool shipping agent was stumbled on evidence of Leopold's crimes and devoted the rest of his life to exposing them. He became one of the world's first investigative journalists and eventually built a propaganda machine of his own to rub the world's face in Leopold's stink. Hochschild also gives us a look at black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first indictment of Leopold in 1890. Valerie Grey, the protagonist of Heart of Diamonds: A Novel of Scandal, Love and Death in the Congo, is a TV journalist whose dedication to getting out the truth about what she found in the DRC matches that of these men.
There are other striking themes in King Leopold's Ghost. One is how the terror didn't end when the world forced Leopold to turn Congo over to the state of Belgium. It had been his personal possession, not a colony originally--and actually, he sold it to his own subjects in a final act of wringing the last nickel out of his prize. The new "owners" continued many of the gruesome practices Leopold's minioins had perfected, continuing to suck the lifeblood out of the colony.
Another powerful theme is how quickly the world turned its back. Less than a century later, thousands of visitors to the extravagent monuments Leopold built see no sign that they are drenched in the blood of millions of Africans. When the colonial era ended, Belgium walked away from the Congo, leaving it with no Congolese engineers, army officers, doctors, or even bureaucrats--of 5,000 civil service positions, only three were filled by Africans.
Michela Wrong picks up the contemporary story of the Congo with In The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. Her portrayl of Mobutu Sese Seko and how he lost the country to Laurent Kabila brings the story almost up to the present.
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