-Caveat Lector-
'King Leopold's Ghost': Genocide
With Spin Control
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
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 under way.
Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (who
ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908), the
population of the Congo 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.
As depicted by Hochschild, the people in "Ghost" emerge
as larger-than-life figures, the sort of characters who
might easily populate a Victorian melodrama were it not
for the tragic and very real consequences of their actions.
Leopold himself comes across as a cartoon-strip
megalomaniac -- a mad, greedy king obsessed since
adolescence with the idea of running a colony of his own
and intent throughout his career on covering his lust for
money and real estate in honeyed talk of philanthropy and
human rights.
As for Henry Morton Stanley, the world-famous explorer whom Leopold
retained as his agent, he is depicted as a Dickensian bully and chronic
liar who allowed his own monumental celebrity to be used by Leopold for
the worst possible ends. He eventually persuaded hundreds of Congo
basin chiefs to sign over their land and their rights to the king of the
Belgians.
With the sheaf of treaties Stanley had acquired firmly in hand, King
Leopold embarked on a worldwide lobbying campaign to win diplomatic
recognition of his new colony.
He succeeded in winning this recognition, Hochschild argues, by playing
one great European power against another and by portraying his control
of the Congo as a kind of benevolent protectorship that would bring a
civilizing influence to the continent while thwarting the malign designs of
Arab slave-traders eager to exploit the same region.
In actuality, Leopold saw the Congo as his personal domain (his power
as sovereign of the colony was not shared with the Belgian government)
and as a rich source of rubber, ivory and other natural resources that
could fatten his coffers at home.
Marchal, the Belgian scholar, estimates that Leopold drew some 220
million francs (or $1.1 billion in today's dollars) in profits from the Congo
during his lifetime. Much of that money, Hochschild suggests, went to
buying Leopold's teen-age mistress, a former call girl named Caroline,
expensive dresses and villas, and building ever grander monuments,
museums and triumphal arches in honor of the king.
Those profits came at the price of terrible suffering by the Congolese
people. Not only was their land summarily annexed -- most of the chiefs
who signed Stanley's "treaties" had no idea what they were signing -- but
they were also coerced into the arduous job of gathering rubber for
Leopold's men as well.
Those who refused or failed to meet their quotas were brutally whipped,
tortured or shot, Hochschild reports; others saw their wives and children
taken hostage by Leopold's soldiers.
According to Hochschild, hostage-taking and the grisly severing of hands
(from corpses or from living human beings) were part of the
government's deliberate policy -- a means of terrorizing others into
submission.
As the "rubber terror" spread through the Congolese rain forest,
Hochschild adds, entire villages were wiped out: Hundreds of dead
bodies were dumped in rivers and lakes, while baskets of severed hands
were routinely presented to white officers as evidence of how many
people had been killed.
Hochschild writes about these horrifying events with tightly controlled
anger, and he brings equal passion to his account of the small band of
protesters who orchestrated resistance to Leopold's rule.
Those protesters include Edmund Dene Morel, a British
shipping-company employee, who brought the king's crimes to world
attention; George Washington Williams, a black American journalist who
chronicled the grisly conditions in the Congo in an open letter to King
Leopold; and Roger Casement, an Irish member of the British consular
service, who sent home a torrent of dispatches condemning specific
atrocities and the entire way the colony was run.
The efforts of these men and others helped bring international pressure
to bear on Leopold, and in 1908 he turned over the Congo -- in effect,
sold it -- to the Belgian government.
Leopold, in the meantime, tried to ensure that his crimes would never
make it into the history books. Shortly after the turnover of the colony,
Hochschild writes, the furnaces near Leopold's palace burned for eight
days, "turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke." "I will
give them my Congo," the king is reported saying, "but they have no right
to know what I did there."
With this book, Hochschild, like other historians before him, ensures that
King Leopold has not gotten away with his efforts to erase the memory
of his brutal acts.
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