The first thing I’ll write about King Leopold’s Ghost is that if you’ve not read it, you must. The second thing is that it will depress you. Unconditionally and completely. Deal with it. Read the book.
What will depress you further is that King Leopold’s Ghost is not fiction. It’s an exposé of the rule of one of history’s darkest villains, Leopold II of Belgium, in his personal colony, the Congo Free State.
The book is what we call popular history. Popular in the sense that the writing, which is stylistically excellent, appeals to a general audience rather than academic specialists. (The endorsements on the inside cover are from newspapers rather than academic figures in African history.) Academic specialists might modify the story slightly. Colonialism in Africa isn’t my specialty, so I won’t critique King Leopold’s Ghost on technical grounds.
The cover is brilliant. The overlay is the face of Leopold. He looks very 19th century with his bushy beard. The underlay is an image of missionaries in the Congo Free State standing with Congolese people. The Congolese are each missing one hand.
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Leopold II, arch-villian of King Leopold’s Ghost
Content of King Leopold’s Ghost
As I wrote above, the content is grim, relentlessly and unyieldingly grim. It starts with how Leopold got his own colony. That’s right, one man owned the whole Congo Free State starting in 1886. Not Belgium, just Leopold in his megalomania. Leopold was cunning. He charmed and flattered other Europeans, made use of the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame), and connived his way to recognition as owner of the Congo Free State. Leopold claimed he would rule in the name of philanthropy and paternalism. This is, possibly, the most deadly lie in history prior to the 20th century.
Leopold’s rapacity, tragically, was abetted by a colossal stroke of good (for Leopold) luck. Just as he was looking for ways to cash in on his colony, the rubber boom began. The Congo abounded in rubber. So, when Leopold claimed personal possession of all “unused” land in the Congo, he claimed ownership of vast forests of rubber trees.
Atrocities Left and Right
Soon, the Congolese were slaves required to fulfill rubber quotas while feeding stations of Belgian troops simultaneously. Belgians held hostages to ensure the Congolese met their quotas. Or, if that proved insufficient, they began severing hands and killing people to send a message to the rest. In time, as wild rubber trees diminished, a casualty of the Belgian frenzy to gather it, the Belgians planted more. But clearing fields took labor, so they simply burned down Congolese villages to save the work of cutting trees.
The Congolese responded by dying. Either the Belgians killed them outright or they fled into the bush where hunger and disease did the same. The most careful estimates of the death toll indicate roughly half the people in the Congo perished during Leopold’s 20+ year tenure as ruler of the Congo. Half the people means about 10 million people.
At the end of this post I’ll offer a small gallery of photos of the carnage carried out by Leopold’s agents. Perhaps you are familiar with Colonel Kurtz, the mysterious character from the novella Heart of Darkness. King Leopold’s Ghost offers five different Belgians with enough known atrocities to their name to qualify as Joseph Conrad’s model for Kurtz.
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Congolese extracting rubber as described in King Leopold’s Ghost
Does King Leopold’s Ghost Have Any Good Guys?
It does, even if they were nowhere near enough to stem the carnage. E.D. Morel heads the list. He became aware of the destruction in the Congo Free State because he worked for a company that shipped the rubber out of the Congo. Morel complied meticulous statistics (so precise that researchers still use them). He lectured widely and wrote hosts of pamphlets. Morel even got the British Parliament to protest Leopold’s actions.
Then there was Roger Casement, the British consul whose damning investigative report reached the public in 1904. He and Morel are famous, relatively speaking. Less famous are two African Americans who also aided the cause. George Washington Williams was the first to write about the travesty in the Congo, doing so in 1890. William Shepherd was another. He was an African American missionary who lectured widely in the US about what he’d witnessed in the Kasai River region.
Evaluation
Well, I already told you to read the book no matter what in paragraph one. So, obviously, this book gets 10 points out of 10. The thing that floored me most was just how awful Leopold was in every way. The amount of pain and suffering this man caused ranks up there with previous figures like Tamerlane or any of Russia’s worst dictators. It is on the order of 20th century murderers like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, and Pol Pot. All the death had only one purpose—to fill his pockets with more money. Even still, Leopold spent twenty years denying that anything improper had happened in the Congo.
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Cartoon criticizing Leopold’s rule
I’ll give the last word to one of Leopold’s contemporaries. It’s no wonder that Mark Twain wrote,
In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives with the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there—which will be soon, let us hope and trust.
A Congolese man looking at the hand and foot of his daughter
Mutilated children from the Congo Free State
Congo village burned to make room for a rubber plantation.
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