King Leopold's Ghost (the history of a little known Holocaust)

Personal Background

For most of my life I haven't thought much about Belgium, either positively or negatively. Their beer is pretty tasty and there was a certain sympathy about the country being used as an invasion route by the Germans in two World Wars. The European Union is based there. But I didn’t know much more than that.

As Adam Hochschild describes in “King Leopold’s Ghost”, however, there were hints of something unsavory that wasn’t widely discussed. I remember being at the house of a friend in the early 1980s playing Trivial Pursuit with his family and the distasteful way he responded to a question with a name previously unknown to me: the Belgian Congo. There was a hint in his answer of some deeply unsavory history but the nasty legacies of imperialism that still haunt our lives are in the news daily and I never really looked any more deeply into it.

But those were the days before the Internet and now it's easy to start looking for information about a book or movie and have it lead into some serious reading about historical context - information that would have required weeks of research is now available in a few minutes. In my case, a search for information about Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" lead to 1) a surprising comment very critical of it as racist and 2) a reference to Adam Hochschild's book, "King Leopold's Ghost."

To put it bluntly, "King Leopold's Ghost" is one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. I also feel that it is one of the most important books I have read recently, for reasons which I will delve into presently. Never forget? But people have...

King Leopold's Ghost

"The title of "King Leopold's Ghost" comes from this stanza in Vachel Lindsay's poem, "The Congo":

Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

The focus of the hate in that stanza, King Leopold II, was the second king of the Belgians. A monarch with contempt for his own country, which he characterized as "small country, small people", Leopold was obsessed with joining the colonial "gold rush" to claim bits of Africa. After considering various harebrained schemes such as draining lakes in the Nile delta and claiming the new land as a colony, Leopold found success by cynically exploiting the concerns of Europeans and Americans aflutter about the exploitation of Africa by Arab slave traders. At a conference in 1876, Leopold manipulated representatives from these countries into establishing the International African Association, with himself as "temporary" chairman.

Never pulling punches, the book notes the hypocrisy in that concern coming from countries which had until recently taken slaves from anybody who would provide them...

Through the work of the ruthlessly violent Henry Morton Stanley, Leopold hoodwinked rulers of some 450 Congo basin chiefs into signing trade agreements, title to their land...and an agreement to provide labor to the organization/country that was to become known as the Congo Free State. In essence, Stanley obtained their ill-informed consent to be robbed blind and have their people used as slave labor.

The Congo Free State lasted from 1877 to 1908. Supposedly intended to fight slavery and enhance the lives of Congo natives with free trade, it instead became a slavery-based organization which drained the riches of ivory and later rubber trees and fed them back, primarily, for the enrichment of King Leopold. And it was a particularly brutal form of slavery, with a heavy accent on murder, rape, hostage taking and mutilation. Its symbols became the stump of a slave with a hand or foot cut off and the chicotte, a sharp-edged whip made of dried hippopotamus hide. Punishment with the chicotte was often lethal.

International Response

Eventually word filtered back about what Leopold's "anti-slavery" organization was doing in Africa, international pressure began building to curtail these abuses. Brave voices spoke out based on the horrors they had seen: Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, William Shepard and Hezekiah Andrew Shanu. E.D. Morel never left Belgium but deduced that the system involved slavery by seeing weapons and soldiers but no trade goods be sent to the Congo and valuable ivory and rubber return. Some of these early ancestors of Amnesty International paid with their lives, either in fighting to end slavery in the Congo, opposing World War I (Morel) or for Irish Independence (Casement). Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle opposed the Congo Free State. Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", considered racist by some is clearly against Leopold's organization and supportive of the Congo's natives.

In the end, Belgium was shamed into taking over the Congo Free State through the distasteful expedient of buying it from the avaricious Leopold. Abuses lessened, though it never became a beacon of civilization. When the region became free in 1960, the departing Belgians patronizingly challenged the Congolese to "justify our confidence". Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba's justifiably bitter counter-speech, while no doubt satisfying, probably sealed his fate when he was later arrested and murdered by rival elements within his government, with the complicit support of the United States AND the United Nations.

An African Holocaust - 8 to 10 Million Dead

Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust are wont to use the expression "Never again!", with one of the evils they must face being the occasional reappearance of those denying the Holocaust. And surely part of our duty as humans is to be aware of some of the worst atrocities the human race has been capable of, in order that we can avoid similar horrible directions in the future.

Yet there is widespread unawareness that the rape of the Congo by Leopold and Belgium cost a toll of lives comparable to Hitler's Holocaust and how Belgium's contemptible rationalization and quibbling about the details of that death toll continues to this very day. Belgium is home to the Royal Museum for Central Africa, which has been conducting a petty feud with Hochschild since this book was published, focusing legalistically on whether genocide was the intent of Belgium's atrocities.

The human race can do better that this but not until we look unflinchingly at the truth. And the opportunity to do so provided by this book's window on a grotesque and horrible injustice makes it a tool to aid in finding truth.