King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by Adam Hochschild
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Book Summary Information
Author: Adam HochschildEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-10
ISBN: 0618001905
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Book Review: An epic theme that deserves a better treatment
Summary: 3 Stars
The process by which the Congo was opened and colonised was unique in African history. This book details Leopold II of Belgium's acquisition and ruthless exploitation of the region as a personal fief, an undertaking that was simultaneously epic and squalid. Untold hundreds of thousands of Africans - perhaps even millions, the statistics are uncertain - died under conditions of the most appalling suffering to satisfy this mean-spirited egomaniac's greed. Worse still, the whole callous process, which descended at times into orgiastic sadism, was aided and abetted by a range of administrators, business interests and even missionaries. Leopold dominates the narrative, a malign, hypocritical and wealth-obsessed spider at the centre of a vast business web, busy until his deathbed in creating schemes of breath-taking ambition and of true, unadulterated evil, never visiting the lands he made a hell, never glimpsing the wretches whose lives he ruined. Almost as an aside he also very competently cheated his own Belgian subjects as part of his profit-maximisation and, when international pressure finally made continued running of the Congo as a private estate impossible, dumped it upon them, so creating the seeds of another tragedy from the 1960's onwards. Villains outnumber the heroes in the story by a substantial margin, and the efforts of the magnificent trio of E.D. Morel, Roger Casement and the Liverpool shipping magnate John Holt to expose the scandal and end the abuses were rewarded with only qualified success. This book is readable, and covers the basic facts of the story, often in a somewhat sketchy manner, but one longs repeatedly for more detail and for imposition of a firmer chronological sequence on the events described. The writing lacks a real sense and feel for Africa, its landscapes and its peoples, and indeed Thomas Packenham's treatment of the same topic in his "The Scramble for Africa", though more summary, is considerably more convincing and rewarding. An interesting footnote is that when Irish forces went to the Congo in 1960 as part of the UN response to the secession of Katanga, they did so as "The Casement Brigade" and the airbase near Dublin they flew out from has been known thereafter as the "Casement Airfield". One feels that the old champion of Congolese rights and of Irish independence would have approved fully.
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