Book
Review
In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King
Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored
territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering
of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately
slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating
his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these
crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of
the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop
of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account
of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming,
and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the
deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful
of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa
for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses
to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive
with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that
history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist
could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping
agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold.
Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended
his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George
Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence
of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle
of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph
Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King
Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost
will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the
conscience of the West.
