366
pages, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN-13: 978-0618001903
Before the massacre of the
Armenians, before the collectivization famine in Ukraine, before the Shoah…there
was Congo, a human catastrophe that lasted longer than all three of those put
together but which remains largely forgotten today by most of the world, a turn
of events that Adam Hochschild seeks to remedy in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa, as harrowing a tale of inhumanity and exploitation as one could
imagine. Hochschild drops right in, without any background about how Congo got
to be the way it was when Leopold II, King of the Belgians (and his beard),
first cast his eye upon its investment possibilities…but it is worth pausing to
note that Congo was, for its era, a stable, orderly, centralized polity until
the Portuguese arrived and began wreaking hell in the 15th Century.
The African ruling elite adopted Catholicism and Portuguese names and, like
European Christian kings, set about ruining the peasantry for the greater glory
of their lines.
Leopold and most of his family were
head cases, but the motivation for his Congolese business appears to have been
mere house envy. As king of a rich (but oh-so-small) country, his income would
not support the splendid palaces of the other kings. Ah, but there was Congo
with all of that precious ivory and (later) rubber, that would become the main
attraction after the bicycle and the automobile were invented. Leopold, a
modern man, set up a corporation to exploit the resources, and over the next
quarter-century a series of interlocking corporations would gain control over
an area that dwarfed tiny Belgium and that would attain a byzantine complexity
that researchers have never been able to completely untangle – but the key
point is that they were private businesses controlled by Leopold; the
government of Belgium had no interest in or control over what went on, and the
area did not become the Belgian Congo until 1908, when a dying Leopold (and his
beard), under pressure from international public opinion, sold his businesses
to the government.
In most times and places,
capitalist enterprises are tempered somewhat by competing interests of
government, religion, custom, other ventures or the humanity of the
capitalists. None of these factors operated in Leopold’s Congo. Maximizing
profit for the King was the only goal. There was no civil service or government
department involved; Leopold’s managers recruited whom they pleased, including
Joseph Conrad, who left as soon as his contract allowed (later, he reported
what he saw in Heart of Darkness;
that’s right: Kurtz was based on a real person or, probably, persons). However,
complete vertical integration (and thus secrecy) eluded Leopold; in those days,
Britain controlled half the world’s merchant marine and Leopold’s managers had
to use British shippers. Into that chink stepped E.D. Morel, an English shipping
clerk who handled the Belgian business because he knew French. Morel noticed
that the ships going out contained lots of rifles and ammunition but nothing –
no cloth, pots and pans or canned herring – that could have been used to pay
for the ivory and rubber that came back. The king was stealing the produce of
the country.
The methods his agents used had
already been observed by the silent Conrad and also by a few reporters, missionaries
and other visitors…but they had not been heard, in part because Leopold hired
big PR names like Henry Stanley to tell lies about his businesses (just about
everyone knows that Henry Stanley, “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” and whatnot, but
how many were aware that he said it in the course of an expedition which had as
its covert purpose paving the way for the grabbing of the Congo for King
Leopold, or that Stanley himself was a mass murderer who thought nothing of
liquidating entire villages of unthreatening natives?). Morel, with nothing but
an inexhaustible energy in writing letters, set out to expose Leopold. It took
years but it worked. He was helped because, as Hochschild says, “It was the
first major atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera”
(Hochschild, not a specialist in history, is in error: the Bulgarian Massacres
were the first. From time to time Hochschild reveals he is not in complete
command of his material, as when he says, “Bismarck wanted colonies in Africa”
which is incorrect). The story is astonishing and deserves to be famous for
that alone, notwithstanding its implications for understanding just where the
organized violence of the modern era got its start.
Nevertheless, despite all these revelations,
the book fails to establish its central thesis: the charge of “genocide” is
never made to stick. Reading the book, one is left with no doubt that tens,
perhaps hundreds of thousands of Congolese were killed in one way or another by
the men of the heartless King Leopold, but the demographic evidence underlying
the claim that millions died is sketchy in the extreme. The estimates of 10
million Congolese before Leopold and 5 million after that are unexplained, and
seem to be nothing more than dead reckoning. Further, no attempt is made to
distinguish between deaths through killing and overwork on one hand, and
disease on the other. In the end we are left with the portrait of a man
amazingly indifferent to the sufferings and deaths he caused among Africans,
while at the same time exceptionally sensitive to his reputation among
Europeans. It is a brutal indictment of the insensitivity and hypocrisy of
colonialism, but offers little more than guesswork in support of its claims of
an African Holocaust.
