Please note I am NOT a frequent book reviewer and have not
written a paper on a book in over 5 years. The following is only my opinion!
“King Leopold’s Ghost” is a overwhelming and exhausting look
at Congolese history. This is not
a light quick read, nor does it address current issues. I enjoyed Hochschild’s writing style
immensely. He wove the facts
presented into a fascinating whole without becoming dry. The subject matter is what made for
heavy reading that sometimes required a few days break just to escape the
horror.
Thus far “King Leopold’s Ghost” is best look at the
foundation for the current issues in DRC I have read. While it starts with early accounts of European discovery of
the Congo and hits most of the big points I’ve read about in other books it
does skim over that part of history pretty quickly. This book focuses (surprise, surprise) on Leopold, King of
the Belgians part in Congolese history.
Hochschild does a good job of looking at Leopold’s life and
his fanatical pursuit of a colony. Leopold was a master manipulator and grasping
his part in the scramble for Africa and how Leopold’s maneuvering for Congo
really pushed Europe into carving the continent up.
The book delves into forced labor, porterage and how the
ivory and rubber trades created a slave state. This is where the reading became difficult for me. While the atrocities of Leopold’s
reign in Congo and immediately after are far in the past reading accounts of
torture, death, hopelessness, and cruelty was not easy for me.
The Rubber Terror in particular set the stage for current
African socio-economic conditions. The systematic brutalization of the African
people to collect wild rubber left millions dead, a dismal birth rate and
tribal cultures all but dismantled.
The timeline is integrated so the accounts from the Congo
are in the same chapters as the information about the fight to remove the
country from Leopold’s rule. The details of the human rights movement
associated with this time period are interesting. The story of E. D. Morel in particular is pretty amazing.
Morel was a simple clerk that deduced there was slave labor being used in the
Congo just from the import/exports through the shipping company he was working
for. Morel was a cornerstone of
the movement in Europe for reform in the Congo.
The last sections of the book are the most telling for
me. Hochschild discusses the state
of affairs in other rubber producing areas located in central Africa. While there was a huge human rights
movement associated with the atrocities in the Congo the same terror was being
inflicted by other countries for the same purposes. He also mentions atrocities, genocides and other human
rights violations in other areas of the world.
“King Leopold’s Ghost” definitely put a context to the
history of the Congo for me.
~M
Try reading "Africa's world war".
ReplyDeleteI've got quiet the list going and I'll add that title to it! Thanks for the recommendation.
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