I finished King Leopold’s Ghost last night. I hadn’t intended to finish it so fast, but without internet access I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. It’s a fascinating story of how one man, Kind Leopold II of Belgium, managed to single-handedly take over a huge chunk of central Africa and squeeze every last drop of profit from its resources using horrifying brutality and forced labor. It’s also the story of the international movement to end the abusive regime in the Congo, the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century and the only major one between the abolitionism of the early nineteenth century and the anti-apartheid movement of the late twentieth. The story as Hochschild tells it is full of fascinating characters who do larger-than-life things, both good and bad, in a way that seems strikingly modern, right down to both sides’ shrewd utilization of public relations and communications networks.
Hochschild’s focus is primarily on the anti-Leopold movement, once it arises around the turn of the century, and he clearly intends for his readers to sympathize primarily with the brave crusaders against the colonial regime. And they are indeed easy for a modern reader of the sort inclined to read books like this to sympathize with. The major voice and organizer of the Congo Reform movement was a young Englishman named E. D. Morel, who first realized that the profits of the Congo were the result of slave labor when, as an employee of the Liverpool-based shipping company that had the monopoly on shipping to and from the colony, he noticed that nothing was going in to pay for the massive quantities of ivory and (especially) rubber that were coming out. He was joined by a British diplomat named Roger Casement who happened to be British consul to the Congo right when protests in Britain against Leopold’s regime began to gather steam and was commissioned to conduct an investigation and write a report, which ended up being extremely damning of the Congo regime and quite useful to the protest movement. There are other figures who play important roles in the movement, including missionaries who witness atrocities firsthand and come back to Britain and America to report on them.
The thing about this hugely sympathetic movement on which Hochschild focuses, however, (as he, to his great credit, admits freely) is that it was not ultimately successful. Reports of the most blatant abuses slowed to a trickle around the time that Leopold sold his colony to the Belgian state and then died, and Morel’s Congo Reform Association declared victory and disbanded soon after, but this was more a result of the declining price of rubber than of anything Morel or his supporters did, and forced labor and other harsh practices continued for decades in the extraction of other lucrative resources in the Congo and surrounding areas under the colonial regimes of Belgium and other countries. Hochschild concludes that the movement was useful nevertheless for its role in preserving the spirit of abolitionism and passing it on to subsequent human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. There’s something to this, I suppose, but it’s not really obvious that that spirit wouldn’t have continued anyway without being channeled into Congo agitation. I suspect that Hochschild’s emphasis on these protesters is more the result of their undeniable attractiveness to a modern audience and the need to have some good guys in the story.
I, however, think the real value of the story lies elsewhere. Despite Hochschild’s attention to the protesters, the real main character of this book is Leopold. I actually found it disturbingly easy to sympathize with the king, despite his rampant greed and near-total venality. I see the story of how he was able to realize his dream of a massively lucrative colony, and how his enormously cruel and sadistic local subordinates could enrich themselves and express their bloodlust totally unchecked, as a cautionary tale of how easy it is for ordinary people to commit the most evil deeds given the right circumstances. The stories of how Congo station chiefs, prototypes for Conrad’s Kurtz, murdered local villagers for amusement while at the same time amassing insect collections and writing books about the area are chilling. Kurtz isn’t just an archetype of cruelty against whom people like us write petitions and organize lecture series; he’s also a symbol of the darkest possibilities lurking within each of us.
