posted on 16 Dec 2016

King Leopold’s Ghost By Adam Hochschild

From 1895, for twenty-three years, King Leopold II – the King of the Belgians, as he was styled – ran the seized territories of the Congo as a personal fiefdom for profit. His Congo Free State anticipated the slave labour systems of both the Third Reich and Stalin’s gulags, routinely working Africans to death in the harvesting and transport first of ivory and latterly of rubber, murdering those who opposed the ‘rubber regime’ or who could not or would not work, holding women and children hostage when rubber quotas were not met, and systematising a programme of mutilations and whippings to enforce the rule of terror of his Force Publique militia.

King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild is the story of those years – and how Belgium’s ‘rubber terror’ halved the population of the Congo, inspired Conrad to write one of the greatest – and shortest – fables of colonial horror, and turned Edmund Morel, an insignificant shipping clerk, into a compulsively driven investigative journalist, agitator and campaigner determined to expose the full extent of Leopold’s crimes against humanity.

I thought I was pretty well informed about the high colonial period of imperialism. I even knew something of the Belgian colonial venture. But what I knew barely scratched the service. Hochschild’s account is an astonishingly detailed and vivid exposé of imperial brutality which – somehow – is also achieved with grace, a lightness of touch, and huge narrative drive.

And it isn’t just history. It’s also a ‘how it was done’ – how to build a colony, how to finance it, how to extract profit and maximise that profit (slave labour was a virtual inevitably for someone as rapacious as Leopold), how to hide the inner operation of your colony from prying eyes and do-gooders, how to ‘spin’ it into a philanthropic endeavour… If you have ever wondered, “But how could such a thing happen?” this book will tell you.

But the truly masterly aspect of this book is that it is all done without a hint of shrill righteous indignation or empty, scandalised rhetoric. The tone is calmly analytical, its anger is controlled and focused, the book surges forward, ever more revealingly. It is expertly structured, popular narrative history, but beneath its surface is pure reinforced steel – an armature of fierce, urgent engagement and commitment that never for one moment lets the book sag or lose direction.

It isn’t true to say that Leopold’s crimes had been entirely forgotten or swept under the carpet, but their study certainly was almost entirely the reserve of specialist historians. Hochschild’s book has changed that forever. If you want to know more about the period of Belgium’s ‘rubber terror’ I think it can be said with certainty that there will never be a better popular history. It seems inconceivable that anyone else would feel the need to attempt such a thing – or achieve it with as much style and humanity as Hochschild.

Hochschild never makes Leopold’s colonial venture sound easy. It clearly required the energy and the resources of a true monster. But in revealing its methods and mechanisms he makes us see not just how it was possible but how it might be repeatable; and in this sense his book is admonitory history, a message about the colonial heart of darkness waiting to be rediscovered in the 21st century.

When international outrage finally brought an end to Leopold’s personal colony it is said that the furnaces at his palace roared for eight days and eight nights as incriminating papers were fed into the flames. “I will give them my Congo,” he is reported as saying, “but they have no right to know what I did there.”

Hochschild has given everyone that right.

 

Alun Severn

December 2016