Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost: Exploring Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa"

Carolyn Wilhelm: Oh, my, what people in the Congo have endured - here is the information - terrible - terrible - mutilation, millions of deaths, as well as heroes who worked to bring the information to life. We should all be aware of this part of history and the ramifications going on today.

United States on Nov 13, 2023

Kindle Customer: Very well written and exceedingly readable. Clearly tremendously well researched. Fascinating, eye-opening and should be read by everyone interested in Africa - and the absolutely vile nature of Man. The last few pages, briefly mentioning what was going on in the rest of the world are probably (for me at least) more shocking than the whole Congo aspect.

Prompted by this book I have now bought Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Raoul Peck’s ‘Lumumba’…! And I know I will be contemplating this book for a LONG time to come!

United Kingdom on Nov 03, 2023

Ian Witham: European nations grabbed vast chunks of Africa to protect the poor natives from slavers. Had they forgotten that millions of Africans had been taken to the New World as slaves by Europeans?
King Leopold of Belgium was the worst offender. Other countries had abolished slavery. He told the great European conferences that he had abolished slavery but there was slavery of a particularly vicious kind. You will find little in the records of America, Britain, France, Portugal, or Spain that is as bad as this.
I was pleased to read of the Swedish missionaries who wrote to reassure the folks back home that the revolting Africans did not harm them because the missionaries did not harm them. A French missionary was captured by African freedom fighters and released unharmed with compensation for the things they had taken from him.
The author even found accounts of war crimes from Africans. They talked of the floggings, the parents who were forced to leave their children behind to did of hunger and thirst, and the pleasure that Europeans took in torturing and killing the people their hypocritical monarch claimed to be helping.
This is the best history of Sub-Saharan Africa that I...

United Kingdom on Oct 23, 2023

RobNraz: Mycket bra och hemsk bok. Helt klart läsvärd om du intresserar dig för historia

Sweden on Oct 09, 2023

Diana Messerschmidt: Hugely engaging book, so well written, with sharp characterization (all the characters are so well described they come to life) and great observations and insight. I could not put this down, and so well-written that it was like reading good literary fiction rather than a non-fiction. Move over Joseph Conrad!

United Kingdom on Aug 02, 2023

John Nambu: Actually I read this book because I have become interested in hippopotami and wanted to know more about the lands where they live. This was a truly depressing book. When I was growing up, we were taught that colonialism was a good thing, where more advanced nations governed peoples who were unable to do so themselves; though they may have extracted profits from the natural resources and labor of the people, again the native peoples would have been incapable of extracting these resources, and the colonizers after granting independence, left behind a legacy of education, institutions, and infrastructure.
It is striking to me that Leopold not only exploited, tortured and literally half exterminated the native population of the Congo, he also concealed the financial structure of his enterprise from his own nation, reaping all of the profit, while passing the expenses of his ventures onto the Belgian people. Kaiser Wilhelm II may have had his faults, but his opinion of Leopold quoted by the author is a marvel of concision and accuracy--Satan and Mammon in one man.
Perhaps even more scary is that Leopold never set foot in the Congo, and that the physical oppression was committed...

United States on Jul 04, 2023

dmiguer: This is a tragic history of the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 19th century as the Scramble for Africa began. Adam Hochschild is an American writer and journalist for the New Yorker, NY Times, NY Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. His work has combined history with human rights advocacy. The events in this book are a shameful chapter in the era of colonialism, of which there were many. It is portrait of Leopold likely to inspire loathing in any who reads it. Beside an account of a colony, it archives the lives of activists who fought to free it.

In 1482 Portuguese sailors braved the ocean beyond the Canary Islands and discovered a fresh water flow off the coast of Central Africa. Following a silt trail, fighting a fast current, they found the mouth of a vast river. Nine years later priests and emissaries arrived and began the first European settlement in a black African kingdom. Small scale slavery existed but a booming slave trade developed with the Americas to grow cotton and cane. During the 19th century slavery was abolished in Britain and America yet continued in Afro-Arab commerce.

Leopold II (1835-1909) was the King of the Belgians and obsessed...

United States on Feb 11, 2021

Vasily Pugh: The first thing to state - and something that I was unaware of - was that the original book was published thirty years ago. This means that the closing chapter acts as an update of sorts and is almost worth reading first. It brings the story up to date and shows how some things haven't changed.

One of the darkest chapters in human history, 'King Leopold's Ghost recounts the egregious land-grab by King Leopold of Belgium towards the riches of the Congo. Having felt left out by the colonial profits of surrounding countries, Leopold formulated a plan to access one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa. Leopold's brand of colonialism was especially vicious though and some of the crimes are hard to read.
Importantly, I say 'human' instead of 'White', 'Black', 'Colonial' as one thing we learn is that no one race had patent rights on slavery, despite w might be taught today. The book highlights how the indigenous tribes had quite a fruitful line in slavery before explorers arrived; nowhere near as rapacious or structured, but just as nasty. One tribe mentioned used severed heads as a kind of currency - if you ran out of funds, simply lop a slave's head off.

Of course...

United Kingdom on Oct 16, 2020

D. Cloyce Smith: Many of us who have read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" think of it as an allegory tinged with racism--a tale of a European, Kurtz, who has abandoned the restraints of civilization and has surrendered himself to the barbaric despotism and primitive rituals innate to Africa. Yet Hochschild spends a full chapter of his excellent history reminding us of the novel's historical context: the figure of Kurtz is based on at least one real-life colonial administrator, and the barbarity is not one that is indigenous to Africa but imported from Europe. Conrad's contemporary readers understood that his novel was a condemnation more of colonial tyranny rather than of African primitivism.

And the ringleader of these gang of hoodlums who invaded the Congo and massacred its inhabitants was King Leopold II of Belgium. In a tour de force of characterization, Hochschild portrays Leopold as a petulant and greedy monster who decided at a young age that the way to wealth was ownership of an African colony and the subjugation of its inhabitants. Leopold initially made his profits through the exportation of ivory, but his bureaucrats struck gold with the expansion of the international rubber...

United States on Aug 28, 2005