To me, colonialism in Africa mostly meant the “scramble for Africa.” Yes, Italians and Germans were snooping around before Second World War, but these latecomers were mostly an afterthought. It was really a table-for-two: the British and the French.
I’d assumed that the African story was largely reflective of India’s. The parallels were hard to ignore — the Boer Wars in South Africa, the Algerian Resistance against the French, the Raj vs. Indian Congress — colonial trajectory seemed similar enough.
Boy, was I ignorant! For I was totally unaware of the harrowing story of a small and insignificant country of Europe ruling a vast and significant region of Africa: the Belgian in the Congo! This isn’t simply a callous oversight by my high school history teacher. I cannot think of any of my highly educated friends, from Asia to America, who knows much about this dark chapter of colonial history either. It is as if, by some unspoken agreement, we the global educated citizens have taken an oath of collective amensia.
That ignorance would be hard to pardon after the brilliant publication of the book King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild.
King Leopold’s genocidal plunder — his regime handily killed ten million — was ever more impressive not simply for the depths of his atrocities, but because of the parallel and successful cultivation of his own reputation as “a great humanitarian”. The ultimate PR machine! Countless op-eds from America to London, praised the King’s kindness and selfless service while his henchmen cut-off limbs of Africans who failed to meet the weekly “rubber quota”. (Side note: as a colonial officer, the more chopped up lazy slave hands you brought in for accounting, the more you got paid.)
Adam Hochschild has written a very special book. Not for the history lesson it imparts (which is exquisite nonetheless); but for telling a riveting story of an odd motely of characters like an expert novelist.
You get to know about the rubber plant and its sap, the ubiquitous ivory and its many commonplaces uses like doorstops and combs, the Congo River basin and its mosquitos, the local tribes and their fashion, attempts at love of egomaniacal explorers, racist missionaries, and unwavering human rights activists. And dysentery.
The subject matter is hardly light — it speaks of unimaginable cruelty — but reading the book doesn’t put you into depression. Neither does it fetishize your morbid curiosity. There is a strange grace to his prose, a conviction for a better future, and a rhythm of hope. All lies are eventually exposed. And so was King Leopold’s. That gripping exposure, it turns out, was also the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century. Even Mark Twain weighed in!
If you are like me, and get the occasional urge to extricate ignorance about something you were only vaguely aware of, put this book on your reading list. It is, in every sense of the word, enlightening.
As an added bonus, you’d be surprised to realize the spooky relevance the story holds for our own times.
Get it here. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004KZOWEG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
