59 pages • 1 hour read
Adam HochschildKing Leopold's Ghost
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18–19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: Victory?
The beginning of Chapter 18 is devoted to an account of all the ways that Leopold hid his money and assets from the his daughters and the Belgian people, culminating in the question of exactly how much money Leopold made from his exploitation of the Congo. Hochschild cites the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, who estimates that 220 million francs ($1.1 billion today) would be a “conservative” (277) figure. Hochschild ends this first section by noting that, while the Belgian government did eventually get most of Leopold’s money, there was no one “to argue that the money should have been returned to the Congolese” (277).
Hochschild then turns to the question of whether Morel’s Congo Reform Association “did […] any lasting good” (277). “For many years,” he says, “the conventional answer was yes” (277), but he goes on to assert that “the truth is more somber” (278). Leopold’s system of forced labor, which relied on violence and terror, was replaced by “a new method of forcing people to work that saw much less protest from missionaries and humanitarians: taxes” (278). The use of the chicotte remained legal, chiefs were still pressured and bribed to provide workers in chains, and workers’ families were still threatened to ensure that they did not try to leave. And these conditions, Hochschild notes, continued throughout the period of the Second World War.
Hochschild then addresses another question: “Why the Congo?” (279). Why was the Congo the subject of such intense scrutiny when other European powers were doing similar, if not worse, things in other parts of the African continent? One reason Hochschild suggests is that Leopold had the biggest share of the rubber-producing part of the continent, so his state’s abuses loomed the largest. But another possibility is that “it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences of taking on a major power like France or Germany” (282).
In the next section, Hochschild returns to William Sheppard, who “was forced to resign his post as a missionary because he had been caught having extramarital affairs with African women” (283). His return to the U.S. meant going back to a place “where he was still a second-class citizen” (283), no matter his experiences and considerable accomplishments. When he died in 1927, over a thousand people attended his funeral.
Hochschild also reviews the fates of some of the other players in the story of Congo—Henry Kowalsky died in 1914, Leon Rom and Joseph Conrad in 1924, and Alice Harris in 1970, at the age of one hundred—before he returns to Roger Casement’s story. Casement retired from the British consular service in 1913 and threw “himself into the cause [… of] freedom for his homeland” (284). After pursuing an unsuccessful plan to convince Germany, then at war with Britain, to guarantee Ireland’s independence should they win the war, in exchange for Irish troops and support, Casement returned to Ireland, was captured, charged with treason, and hanged on August 3, 1916.
The final section of Chapter 18 focuses on Edmund Morel’s last stint of activism, this time protesting Britain’s involvement in World War I. Hochschild tells us that “Morel was among the handful of people on either side in Europe who said openly that the war was madness” (287). He formed the Union of Democratic Control, “which quickly became the main voice of antiwar dissent in England” (287), and endured much public hatred as his former admirers abandoned him. In his analysis of this period of Morel’s life, Hochschild observes that “[t]oday we see so clearly that the 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded of World War I were a needless, avoidable tragedy that we forget how few people had the courage to call it that at the time” (288), and notes that because of Morel’s pariah status in British society, he was unable to even visit his friend Casement during the last months of his life.
Morel was subsequently the object of intense surveillance by the British government, who wanted him silenced and out of the way. “In 1917, they found an appropriate technicality, and arrested him for violating an obscure law against sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. He was denied bail and promptly sentenced to six months at hard labor” (289). His hard labor at Pentonville Prison, where his friend Casement had been hanged only a year previously, reminded him of the labor of the porters in the Congo, and he emerged from prison after his term was up “painfully thin” (291)and prone to heart attacks. After the war, he was vindicated, as the claims he had made about the Allies “secret treaties” (291) turned out to be true. He was elected to the House of Commons on the Labor ticket, defeating Winston Churchill and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1924. On November 12 of that year, at fifty-one years old, Morel went for a walk in the woods, sat down against a tree, and died there.
Chapter 19 Summary: The Great Forgetting
Hochschild’s final chapter focuses on how thoroughly the Congo atrocities have been erased from public memory. He opens with a comparison between the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow during the Soviet regime—a visitor there would have found “no clue that some twenty million Soviet citizens had died in execution cellars, in manmade famines, and in the gulag” (292)—and the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels—which holds not “the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths” (293), though it does list “the names of several dozen Force Publique officers who ‘rest in African earth’” (293), as well as “the names of hundreds more white pioneers who died in the Congo” (293). He tells us that the Congo administration destroyed of most of the state records shortly before the colony was sold to Belgium, and explains that Germany’s attack on Belgium in 1914 conveniently placed it in the role of victim and drew attention away from role in the atrocities perpetrated in the Congo.
Hochschild then fast-forwards again, focusing on Jules Marchal, a retired Belgian diplomat whose chance reading of a Liberian newspaper article that mentioned the “ten million deaths in King Leopold’s Congo” (297) prompted his lifelong research into his country’s past. This research culminated in his “definitive scholarly study” (298) of an episode in Belgian history that he knew absolutely nothing about at the start, even though “he had worked in the Congo for nearly twenty years, in its last years as a Belgian colony and its first as an independent country” (299).
There are several methods by which this “great forgetting” was accomplished. First, Hochschild notes, “the colonizers wrote the school textbooks” (299) and practiced “widespread book-banning and press censorship,” which “accomplished the act of forgetting for the written record” (299). But what about the memories of those who were there? In some of the villages, “there remains some lore about the rubber terror. But even that collective memory today is more scanty than one would expect” (300). Hochschild accounts for this aspect of the great forgetting by once again referring to those in power: “oral tradition is usually a matter of remembering kings, dynasties, victories in battle. And those dynasties which have survived almost always did so by collaborating with the colonial rulers” (300). This is not a legacy those rulers wanted to hand down. The result is that “[t]raditional cultures have been much weakened, and disappearing with them is the very memory of the forces that first shattered them” (300).
The next section of Chapter 19 focuses on more recent history in the Congo, which gained its independence from Belgium and elected its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba in 1960 .Lumumba openly and stridently advocated for Congo’s economic independence and his assassination was engineered by the U.S. and carried out under the direction of Joseph Desire Mobutu, “the chief of staff of the army and a former NCO in the old colonial Force Publique” (302). American and European powers saw in Mobutu “someone who would look out for their interests” (302), and they provided him billions in aid over the course of his decades-long dictatorship. Hochschild’s analysis of Mobutu highlights his striking similarities to Leopold—from his one-man rule and appropriation of state funds, to his tendency to spend much of his time on his yacht and buy properties on the French Riviera.
The final section of this chapter considers the legacy of Morel’s Congo reform movement, and Hochschild describes “two achievements that lasted far beyond its own time” (304). The first is that “it put a remarkable amount of information on the historical record” (304). “That record of truth matters” (305), Hochschild asserts, “especially for a continent whose history is otherwise so filled with silences” (305). The second achievement, Hochschild observes, is the way the movement “kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth” (305). This is its most important legacy, because it presumes “the idea of full human rights” for all people, an idea that is still “a profound threat to the established order” today.
Chapter 18 – 19 Analysis
Chapter 18 provides the conclusion to the intertwining stories of those people involved in the larger story of Leopold’s Congo and ends, fittingly, with Morel’s death. This chapter also answers some important questions—about whether Morel’s Congo Reform Association achieved any lasting good and why its focus was on the Congo, to the exclusion of other parts of Africa colonized by European countries. The short answers to these questions are: no, the C.R.A.’s reforms were not sufficient to achieve lasting good, as a system of forced labor remained in place throughout the period of World War II; and because Belgium was, in the end, the puny little country Leopold believed it to be, and it was safe to pick on. Though these answers seem to undermine what has heretofore been a hero’s story and mitigate our enjoyment of Morel’s David-like triumph over the Goliath that was Leopold, they are a necessary transition into “the great forgetting” described in Hochschild’s final chapter.
In this final chapter, Hochschild addresses the recent history of the Congo, mostly by highlighting the similarities between the Congolese dictator Mobutu, whose tenure ended as recently as 1997, and Leopold—perhaps to illustrate how a forgotten history will inevitably repeat itself. Hochschild also uses this chapter to illustrate, once again, that “history is written by the victors”. Finally, though, this last chapter gets at the real achievements of Morel’s Congo reform movement, achievements that make it easier to come to terms with the limitations spelled out in Chapter 18. Not surprisingly, these achievements dovetail with Hochschild’s own purpose in writing his book—to put into the historical record the truth about “a continent whose history is otherwise so filled with silences” (305), and to participate in the “tradition” of empathy and a way of seeing the world that acknowledges human suffering with a moral response.
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