King Leopold's Ghost

“Except for Affonso’s letters, the written record of these times still shows them entirely through white men’s eyes. How did the Europeans, beginning with Diogo Cão and his three ships with faded red crosses on their sails, appear to the people living at the great river’s mouth?”  

This passage is one of the first to address a much-repeated motif in Hochschild’s book—the lack of African voices in the story of the Congo. Here, and throughout the book, he disrupts the assumption that the white, European, male perspective is the norm.

“He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, as one historian has remarked, ‘the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers.’ His articles, books, and speaking tours brought him greater riches than any other travel writer of his time, and probably of the next century as well. With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.” 

This passage highlights an aspect of Stanley’s character that Hochschild returns to repeatedly—his ability to craft a public persona that made him an international celebrity—in a way that reveals how calculated his self-representation was. The idea that he “planned how to tell the story once he got home” emphasizes how much “spin” Stanley put on the stories he told about himself, and the use of the word “sculpting” implies the artistry of it. This passage also reiterates the motif of modernity, suggesting, perhaps, that Stanley was a precursor to contemporary superstars who also must carefully control access to the details of their personal lives and spin misleading stories in the press to maintain a particular image. 

“If we take a step back and look at Leopold at this moment we can imagine him the political equivalent of an ambitious theatrical producer. He has organizational talent and the public’s good will, as proven by his successful Geographical Conference. He has a special kind of capital: the great public relations power of the throne itself. He has a script: the dream of a colony that had been running through his head since he was a teenager. But he has as yet no stage, no cast. One day in September 1877, however, while the king-producer is planning his next move, a bulletin in the London Daily Telegraph from a small town on the west coast of Africa announces some remarkable news. It is just the opening Leopold has been waiting for. Stage and star have appeared, and the play can begin.”

This is one of the few places Hochschild uses the metaphor of the theater to highlight the carefully orchestrated performance that was Leopold’s long-awaited establishment of a colony. The use of the metaphor emphasizes, again, how much of a fiction Leopold’s professed intentions in Africa were. It also sheds light on the relationship between Leopold and Stanley. Though Stanley appears to be the “star” of this production, the man behind the curtain, whose intentions remain secret, holds the real power.

“To read Stanley today is to see how much his traveling was an act of appropriation. He is forever measuring and tabulating things: temperature, miles traveled, lake depths, latitude, longitude, and altitude […] It is almost as if he were a surveyor, mapping the continent he crossed for its prospective owners”

This passage is, perhaps intentionally, ironic, in that “mapping the continent he crossed for its prospective owners” is exactly what Stanley is doing, even though he doesn’t yet know it. This description of “traveling” as “an act of appropriation” also recalls Hochschild’s assertion, in Chapter 1, that for “nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for ‘discovering’ some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking” (27). Finally, the description of Stanley “forever measuring and tabulating” echoes the description of Leopold’s obsessive architectural plans, which no doubt involved him measuring and tabulating how much grander he could make things.

“His stern, mustachioed face appeared in magazines everywhere beneath a Stanley Cap, his own invention. It had a high crown surrounded by ventilation holes, a brim over the eyes, and a Havelock, a cloth to keep the sun off ears and neck. To our eyes the cap looks like a cross between that of a Foreign Legionnaire and a doorman—which, in a way, summed up Stanley’s personality: one part titan of rugged force and mountain-moving confidence; the other a vulnerable, illegitimate son of the working class, anxiously struggling for the approval of the powerful. In photographs each part seems visible: the explorer’s eyes carry both a fierce determination and a woundedness.”  

This passage is one of several that delve into Stanley’s psychology in a way that tries to account for the choices he made and the violence he committed over the course of his adventurous life. The Stanley Cap becomes a metaphor for Stanley’s own psyche, and the comical description of it—a Foreign Legionnaire crossed with a doorman—is lent a sense of pathos when it is used to describe Stanley’s fierceness and woundedness.

“Leopold’s will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic of European industry. […] To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold’s regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom.”

This is a key passage for understanding how racism supports imperialism, because in order to see Africa as being “without Africans,” the “explorers, journalists, and empire-builders” must be able to view actual African people as nothing more than scenery—part of the exotic fauna of an alien and far-off place. This passage offers more support for Hochschild’s preoccupation with having African voices heard, so it’s not surprising that it comes at the beginning of the chapter devoted to George Washington Williams, the “first great dissenter” (102) in Leopold’s Congo. Williams was someone who could see Africa for what it was—“a continent of coherent societies”—and so was the first person to sound the alarm when he saw, with empathy, what was being done to those societies.

“Williams was a pioneer among American historians in the use of nontraditional sources. He sensed what most academics only began to acknowledge nearly a hundred years later: that in writing the history of powerless people, drawing on conventional, published sources is far from enough.”  

The juxtaposition of nontraditional sources and “the history of powerless people” in this passage points to the fact that official or traditional history is often written by, or for, the powerful. It describes in a general way, what it meant to find the voices of the oppressed in the margins of society and history. It also recalls what we know of the “conventional, published sources” already mentioned in the book, such as Stanley’s books on Africa and Leopold’s manipulation of the press: conventional sources lie, particularly about those who have no voice or power with which to refute or even respond.

“High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable of all times and places, not as a book about one time and place. Two of the three times the story was filmed, most notably in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, it was not even set in Africa. But Conrad himself wrote, ‘Heart of Darkness is experience . . . pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.’ Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is of ‘the actual facts of the case’: King Leopold’s Congo in 1890, just as the exploitation of the territory was getting under way in earnest.” 

This passage, and the chapter it is taken from, seems to respond directly to Hochschild’s own previous relation to Heart of Darkness, which he discusses in the Introduction, noting that he “had mentally filed away the book under fiction, not fact” (3). This is Hochschild’s chance to set the record straight, to compensate for his earlier ignorance. It also seems as though Hochschild wants to honor Conrad’s experience and intention, by drawing our attention to the historical veracity of the novel.

“Whether this inference is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion—the search for raw materials, labor, and markets—are all valid, but there was psychological fuel as well.”

Here, in the wake of speculation as to whether Stanley consummated his marriage to Dorothy Tennant, Hochschild again considers the psychological motivations of imperial explorers. He suggests that men who go adventuring, particularly in the brutal fashion that Stanley practiced, are really running away from some painful past or secret, and their adventures help to distract them from that pain. The passage also recalls the way that Stanley, and presumably other explorers, created a public persona that was “bold, bluff, [and] hardy” in order to mask the “restless, unhappy, driven” man he was underneath.

“The Congo in Leopold’s mind was not the one of starving porters, raped hostages, emaciated rubber slaves, and severed hands. It was the empire of his dreams, with gigantic trees, exotic animals, and inhabitants grateful for his wise rule. Instead of going there, Leopold brought the Congo—that Congo, the theatrical production of his imagination—to himself. Red mahogany from it paneled the bedroom of his private railway car, animals from it appeared in Belgian zoos, and to the array of huge greenhouses at Laeken the king added a Congo Greenhouse (still full of palm trees today), topped with four glass cupolas and an octagonal dome bearing the star emblem of his private state.”  

This passage, describing Leopold’s imaginary Congo, recalls an earlier passage from Chapter 7 about how the Congo was seen as “an expanse of empty space” (101): both passages deal with the distance between reality and the white Europeans imagination. This passage also leads into an account of Leopold’s exhibition of Congolese people at a world’s fair in Brussels in 1897, further illustrating how African people were seen as sub-human, like animals in a zoo.  Furthermore, this passage makes reference to “the theatrical production of his imagination,” recalling the passage from Chapter 2 that imagines Leopold as a producer and Stanley as his star.  

“In certain ways, Morel is harder to fathom than some of the other figures of the Congo story. For example, it is easy to see how Stanley’s painful poorhouse childhood may have fostered his cruel streak and the drive to place his mark on the world. The origin of the fiery passion for justice that fueled Morel is less evident. […] In every way, he seemed an unlikely person to become the leader of a great moral crusade. His prodigious capacity for indignation seems to be something he was born with, as some people are born with great musical talent. […] It was this smoldering sense of outrage that led Morel to become, in short order, the greatest British investigative journalist of his time.” 

Underlying this comparison between Morel and Stanley seems to be the suggestion that while monsters are made, angels are born, since nothing in Morel’s biography suggests he would become the activist hero that he did, spending a decade of his life in a tireless effort to help people in a place he had never even visited, during a time when the dominant ideologies purported those people to be less than human. The comparison suggests that perhaps evil is not as difficult to understand as we might think, and that human goodness is inherent.

“Living long after the movement against slavery and well before the appearance of organizations like Amnesty International, Casement in his diary wrote in the tones of the Abolitionist: ‘Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.’ But the official report he composed subsequently is in the language that Amnesty and similar groups would later make their own: formal and sober, assessing the reliability of various witnesses, filled with references to laws and statistics, and accompanied by appendices and depositions.” 

This passage offers another consideration of the relationship between the nineteenth and the twenty-first century, this time in terms of the language of human rights. Hochschild provides an analysis of Casement’s writing that marks the transition from the language and style of the nineteenth century to what will be the language and style of the twentieth. The private-public dichotomy revealed here—with the nineteenth-century diction used in Casement’s private diary and the twentieth-century diction in his published report—is also interesting: his emotional response to the Congo is kept private but no doubt fueled Casement’s pursuit of the facts that would make his report so influential.

“They were white men trying to stop other white men from brutalizing Africans. Most of the Africans who fought this battle in the Congo perished, their very names unrecorded. In a sense, we honor Morel and Casement in their stead.” 

Here, again, Hochschild returns to the voicelessness of those who were most oppressed by Leopold’s reign. In this context, Morel and Casement become more than just historical figures; they become symbols of the struggle itself. Though each man is worthy of honor in his own right, Hochschild feels morally compelled to explicitly recognize that theirs was not the only struggle worth telling.

“One of his political limitations was, in fact, a source of his immense success as an organizer. If he had believed, as we might conclude today, that Leopold’s rape of the Congo was in part a logical consequence of the very idea of colonialism, of the belief that there was nothing wrong with a country being ruled other than by its own inhabitants, Morel would have been written off as being on the fringe. No one in England would have paid much attention to him. But he did not believe this; he believed with all his heart that Leopold’s system of rule constituted a unique form of evil. People in England’s ruling circles, therefore, could support his crusade without feeling their own interests threatened.” 

This passage gets at what it means to work “within the system” to achieve reform. For Morel, challenging the legitimacy of Leopold’s reign in the Congo did not necessitate questioning the validity of European imperialism. Thus, while Morel was a hero for achieving some reform in the Congo, his reforms were not enough to ensure lasting and real change, since he was not able to question the foundations upon which Leopold’s Congo and all other European imperialistic ventures rested. In other words, Morel was able to rock the boat and knock off a few bad apples, but he could not capsize it. This truth becomes evident later in the book, when Hochschild describes the public response to Morel’s antiwar activism. In this context, his beliefs are too far from the norm—they are “on the fringe”—and though he is eventually vindicated, it is not before he learns what it means to try to capsize the boat. 

“If you control the perception, you control the event.” 

This sentence refers to Leopold and his talent for manipulating the public perception of his misdeeds and is a truism of the modern era. It also suggests that Leopold’s talent for controlling perception is the result of his psychological need for control rather than a skill he honed in the service of his greed. If we consider other expressions of his need for control, such as his constant manipulation of his environment through renovation and monument-building, his rejection of his daughters when they made marriages he did not approve of, and, most obviously and significantly his insatiable desire to own his own country rather than simply being king of one, it seems clear that “control” is Leopold’s key motivator.

“What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’”

In its reference to the Heart of Darkness motif, this passage sums up one of Hochschild’s critiques of the Congo reform movement—that its narrow focus on Leopold’s Congo was, if not disingenuous, then a bit myopic. Leopold wasn’t the only European power exploiting the people and natural resources in Africa, but he was the only one to be subjected to such intense scrutiny and criticism. To look closely at the other “Europeans then at work or war elsewhere in Africa” would mean reexamining the whole enterprise of imperialism. This passage’s “sad truth” also gets at how thoroughly the violence involved in the “scramble for Africa” was normalized, and how “ordinary” it was for the men who went to oversee European interests there to participate, either implicitly or explicitly, in “mass murder on a vast scale.”

“In one of the last letters he wrote from his cell, less than a week before he was hanged, Casement looked back over his life: ‘I made awful mistakes, and did heaps of things wrong and failed at much—but . . . the best thing was the Congo.’”

This passage captures the pathos of many of the stories included in King Leopold’s Ghost and highlights just how important the Congo reform work was to those who were engaged in it; so much so that Casement, looking back over his life, over a decade after he wrote his famous report on the Congo, could point to it as his “best thing.”

“Brussels is not unique. In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is but one of these silences of history.”

This passage addresses the erasure of the history of Europe’s heinous misdeeds in Africa. Hochschild also explicitly connects the European erasure of its dark role in African history to the U.S.’s history of slavery that was initially made possible by European slave traders. More than a catalogue of the places where black history has been silenced by white oppressors, however, the passage offers a subtle warning about the costs of forgetting this history. Hochschild’s use of the term “inexplicable” to describe the “outbursts of violence” we experience in our world of “divisions and conflicts” and the “widening gap between rich and poor” suggests that these outbursts would be much more understandable (and perhaps, therefore, preventable) if we made the “silences of history” speak. The importance of knowing our history is of a piece with Hochschild’s interest in the psychology of people like Stanley and Leopold—perhaps if we understand what in their personal histories led to their “inexplicable outbursts of violence,” we can avoid reproducing such men in the future.

“The same kind of deliberate forgetting took place in the minds of the men who staffed the regime. Forgetting one’s participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed. […] It is not a moment of erasure, but of turning things upside down, the strange reversal of the victimizer mentally converting himself to victim.”

This passage once again investigates the psychology of imperialism, and what it means—on an individual level—to participate in the kind of mass murder that happened in Congo and other parts of Africa. From this angle, we can see how “forgetting one’s participation mass murder” is actually an act of appropriation—the white oppressor’s appropriation of victimhood, which denies the oppressed even the right to feel their own misery.  

“In all of Africa, the colonizers wrote the school textbooks; together with widespread book-banning and press censorship, this accomplished the act of forgetting for the written record.”

This passage opens the discussion of how the “great forgetting” of the chapter’s title was accomplished, not only in Europe but in Africa as well.  

“History lies heavy on Africa: the long decades of colonialism, several hundred years of the Atlantic and Arab world slave trade, and—all too often ignored—countless centuries of indigenous slavery before that. From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder. On the whole continent, perhaps no nation has had a harder time than the Congo in emerging from the shadow of its past.”

This passage provides a sweeping view of African history—and the “big picture” it provides gives us a clear sense of why some African countries might still be struggling to emerge from the weight of such a history. It also serves as the transition into Hochschild’s account of Congo’s more recent and troubled history, which, again like Leopold’s Congo, was managed from afar. Though Congo’s first attempt at independence, with the election of Patrice Lumumba as prime minister, was democratic, it was not an approach more powerful countries, like the U.S., encouraged, since democracy is difficult to control. It was not difficult, then, to push Congo back into “authoritarian rule and plunder” by supporting the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu.

“It is an oversimplification to blame Africa’s troubles today entirely on European imperialism; history is far more complicated. And yet, consider Mobutu again. Aside from the color of his skin, there were few ways in which he did not resemble the monarch who governed the same territory a hundred years earlier. His one-man rule. His great wealth taken from the land. His naming a lake after himself. His yacht.  His appropriation of state possessions as his own. His huge shareholdings in private corporations doing business in his territory.”

Here Hochschild provides an elegant example of “history repeating itself,” right down to the small detail that both Leopold and Mobutu preferred to live on a yacht. And though he acknowledges that it is an “oversimplification” to blame Europe for the socio-political unrest in sub-Saharan Africa, Hochschild does illustrate how European imperialism enabled the rise of oppressive regimes.

“Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but, as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth.” 

In this articulation of human rights endeavors—moving from the diction of the nineteenth century to that of today, Hochschild achieves multiple things. One is to place Casement in an explicitly transitional position. Much like his discussion of the difference between Casement’s diary and his official report (the style of nineteenth-century abolitionism vs. the style of twentieth-century human rights groups), Hochschild places Casement at the forefront of a forward movement. In short, Casement was ahead of his time in his understanding of human rights and race.