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.
Introduction–Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: Walking Into Fire
Introduction
Hochschild introduces his study of the Congo at the turn of the twentieth century with a focus on what he calls “a young man’s flash of moral recognition” (1). The young man in question is “the sober, respectable businessman,” Edmund Dene Morel, who is a “trusted employee of a Liverpool shipping line” (1). This is the man at the center of Hochschild’s story—the man who comes “face to face with evil” when he realizes that the “trade” happening in the Congo is not “trade” at all: the goods arriving in Europe from the Congo have been acquired through slave labor. This realization motivates Morel to begin what Hochschild calls the “first great international human rights movement of the twentieth century” (2).
The Introduction acknowledges Hochschild’s own initial ignorance of Congolese history, while asking how the genocide that occurred there under King Leopold’s rule could have been erased from our collective memory. He recounts a visit to the Congo in 1961, during which he listens to a CIA operative’s smug account of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister of the newly-formed nation of Congo. However, he notes, it is not until several decades later, sparked by a footnote in a book about Mark Twain’s involvement in the “worldwide movement against slave labor in the Congo” (3), that Hochschild confronts his own ignorance. His path to knowledge begins with the realization that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is set in a Congo based on fact and experience.
As he digs deeper into the subject, Hochschild realizes that “the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions” (4). He notes that Morel was not the first person to try to draw attention to what was going on in the Congo. Black Americans George Washington Williams and William Sheppard both shared accounts of what happened there. Hochschild also observes that this was “the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera” (4), making it seem “strikingly close to our time” (4). Hochschild points out that King Leopold’s remoteness from the carnage he caused also seems “very modern” (4).
Hochschild ends his Introduction by noting that while there is much historical evidence of the Congo genocide, in part due to the Victorian interest in letter-writing and travel narratives, including the diaries and published writing of “the men who seized the Congo” (5), as well as institutional documents such as an “explicit instruction book for colonial officials”, there are no accounts of this historical moment from the perspective of the Congolese: “Instead of African voices from this time there is largely silence” (5). Furthermore, while the “worst of the bloodshed in the Congo took place between 1890 and 1910” (5), in order to fully understand the story, we must go back much further in history, to the beginning of European exploration of sub-Saharan Africa, “more than five hundred years” (5) before.
Prologue: “The Traders Are Kidnapping Our People”
The Prologue sets the stage for understanding how the colonization of the Congo began. Before the fifteenth century, Europeans imagined sub-Saharan Africa as “a dreamscape, a site for fantasies of the fearsome and the supernatural” (6). Chief among medieval myths about Africa was that of “Prester John, a Christian king who was said to rule a vast empire in the interior of Africa, where, from a palace of translucent crystal and precious stones, he reigned over forty-two lesser kings, in addition to assorted centaurs and giants” (7). When, in 1482, a Portuguese explorer named Diogo Cão came across the mouth of the Congo River, “an enormous silt-filled river, larger than any European had ever seen” (7), he erected a pillar claiming the land “to be discovered” (8) for the Portuguese king, King João II.
What European explorers eventually discovered was a vast Kingdom called Kongo, which “had been in place for at least a hundred years before the Portuguese arrived” (8). The Portuguese were welcomed by the king of the Kongo—the “ManiKongo”—who ruled with the help of “an elaborate civil service” and a system of taxation. The Kingdom of the Kongo also practiced slavery, a fact which proved to be its downfall, as the European demand for Kongolese slaves quickly grew, particularly once the European exploration of the Americas yielded mines and coffee plantations in Brazil and sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
Affonso I was the ManiKongo at the beginning of the “decimating” (11) slave trade in the Congo, and despite his welcome of “European learning, weapons, and goods” (12), he pleaded with his Portuguese counterpart King João III to stop sending slave traders to the Congo. His pleas fell on deaf ears, however, and after his death, Britain, France, and the Netherlands joined in the slave trade.
Using accounts from twentieth-century oral histories, Hochschild describes how the people of the Congo saw the European explorers and, later, slave traders—as “vumbi—ancestral ghosts” (15) coming from the land of the dead. Many believed that the Europeans practiced cannibalism on the African people they took aboard the slave ships, and that when the captain of slave ship went into the ship’s hold to bring out cloth for trading, “sea sprites hand[ed] him up [the] cloth” (16) they made “in an ‘oceanic factory’”, for which, the captain gave them the bodies of people he acquired from African slave traders. Hochschild comments that this was not far from the truth, since “what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth?” (16).
The Prologue concludes with Hochschild’s account of the failed attempts of European explorers and missionaries to find the source of the Congo River—the geography of the river and the land surrounding it made the trip upstream far too treacherous to survive. Thus, well into the nineteenth century, “Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials—human bodies and elephant tusks. But otherwise, [Europeans] saw the continent as faceless, blank, empty, a place on the map waiting to be explored, one ever more frequently described by the phrase that says more about the seer than what is seen: the Dark Continent” (18).
Chapter 1 Summary: “I Shall Not Give Up the Chase”
Much of this chapter is devoted to recounting the early history of Henry Morton Stanley, the Victorian-era journalist who found the famous explorer, David Livingstone. Stanley was known as an American journalist, but he was actually the illegitimate child of a Welsh woman, Betsy Parry, who abandoned him after birth, leaving him in the abusive care of his maternal grandfather and uncles. His given name was John Rowlands, and by age six, he had been given to the St. Asaph Union Workhouse, where he was beaten and probably sexually abused. He did well in the workhouse school, however, and by fifteen he was living with relatives. At seventeen, while working as a butcher’s delivery boy, he made a meat delivery to an American ship. The captain invited him to sail with his crew, and he ended up in New Orleans in February of 1859, where he jumped ship and found work with a cotton broker, Henry Stanley.
Over the course of a few years, he remade himself, going from John Rowlands, to “John Rollings,” to “John Rollins,” before finally ending up as “Henry Morton Stanley.” He didn’t just change his name, however; he also changed his entire biography, making up stories about his past that reflected who he wanted to be and disguised his shame about who he actually was. During the American Civil War, he enlisted in the Confederate Army, was captured, and then enlisted in the Union Army, from which he was discharged after falling ill with dysentery. He then became a sailor, and in 1864, enlisted with the Union Navy, only to desert in 1865. He later traveled west as a freelance journalist, first to San Francisco, then to Turkey, then back to the American West to cover the “Indian Wars.” His accounts of these events got him hired, at age twenty-seven, by the New York Herald as the “permanent roving foreign correspondent” (26).
At this point, Hochschild shifts his focus back to Africa, noting that when Stanley becomes the Herald’s foreign correspondent, the “first rumblings of what would before long become known as the Scramble for Africa” (26) were just beginning, and “a new type of hero, the African explorer” (27), was being born. Hochschild cites Richard Burton, John Speke, and Paul Belloni Du Chaillu as some of the more famous “African explorers” from Europe, describing them as “the first international celebrity figures, their fame crossing national boundaries like that of today’s champion athletes and movie stars” (27), and noting 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). Europe looked to Africa as the potential “source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe’s earlier dealings with Africa” (27).
Also bound up in Europe’s excitement about African exploration is “antislavery fervor” (28). Hochschild notes the irony of British and French antislavery activists’ focus on “Arab slave traders” operating in Africa, while turning a blind eye to the ongoing slavery in Brazil, Spain and Portuguese colonies: “Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target” (28). Furthermore, while African slaves “often ended up in the Arab world, the traders on the African mainland were largely Swahili-speaking Africans from territory that today is Kenya and Tanzania”—in other words, not Arab at all.
Having introduced the figure of the “African explorer” and the larger context of European interest in Africa, Hochschild turns his attention to David Livingstone, who, he asserts, “embodied” the antislavery zeal, the search for raw materials, the Christian evangelism, and the sheer “curiosity” that made up the “European impulses toward Africa” (28). Livingstone “explored” Africa for decades, starting in the early 1840s, and did not return from his 1866 trip.
In 1871, the Herald sent Stanley to find Livingstone, and it took him eight months to do so. As Hochschild notes, “[t]he long search was shaped into legend by his stream of dispatches,” which recounted stories of “the months of arduous marching, the terrible swamps, the evil ‘Arab’ slave-traders, the mysterious deadly diseases, the perilous attacks by crocodiles, and finally Stanley’s triumphant discovery of the gentle Dr. Livingstone” (30), a discovery which made famous Stanley’s turn of phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” (30). Hochschild also points out that Livingstone declined to leave Africa with Stanley after they “explored” together for several months, and died there shortly afterwards; thus we have no way of knowing how truthful Stanley’s accounts of their time together were. What is clear from Stanley’s writing, however, is how “harsh and brutal [a] taskmaster” he was (30-31), and how, “[l]ike many whites who would follow him, Stanley saw Africa as essentially empty” (31).
The chapter ends with Hochschild’s account of British rumors about Stanley’s actual place of birth, which caused him great anxiety because of his sense of shame about his illegitimate birth and abusive childhood. Though he claimed to be American “born and bred,” his “American accent tended to change to a Welsh one whenever he got excited” (31), some noticed. He also confessed his secret to the woman he believed he would marry, Katie Gough-Roberts, and when she married someone else, he was unable to get back the letter he wrote to her that revealed the truth about who he was and where he came from.
Chapter 2 Summary: The Fox Crosses the Stream
Chapter 2 focuses on Leopold II, the “fox” of the chapter’s title, and the events that led to his acquisition of the Congo as a Belgian colony. He is described as the unloved product of a loveless marriage, barely older than the nation he would come to rule. He was not a good student, with the exception of his interest in geography, or how best to amass money and power. He was both an avid traveler who, “[e]verywhere he went, […] looked for imperial opportunities, particularly in the European colonies” (37), and someone who could spend months combing through the “eighty-six million handwritten pages” (37) in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, in order to learn exactly how much Spain had profited from its colonies. As Hochschild wryly notes, “The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors” (37).
Like his parents, Leopold II made a politically expedient but loveless marriage. He and his bride, “an eligible young Hapsburg, Archduchess Marie-Henriette” (35) actually “loathed each other at first sight, feelings that apparently never changed” (35). Though they went on to have four children, their only son died at age nine, and Leopold had no interest in his daughters because they were not male.
Hochschild also notes Leopold’s insatiable need for more—more money, more power, more space over which to rule—expressed in his persistent inquiries into whether other European nations would be willing to sell him colonial holdings, to his decades-long renovation of the royal palace at Laeken, which allowed a person to walk for more than a kilometer through “[greenhouses,] château, and connecting passageways, without going outdoors” (41). In Hochschild’s view, Leopold revealed himself, through his actions and the letters he left behind, as “a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute” (38). “The urge for more,” he writes, “can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more” (38).
Hochschild also addresses Leopold’s sister, Charlotte, whose ill-fated stint as Empress Carlota of Mexico alongside her husband Emperor Maximilian, whose execution leaves her both widowed and mad, might have served as a cautionary tale for Leopold and his thirst for colonial power and riches. Instead, Leopold set his sights on Africa. He knew, however, that he must frame his interest in terms agreeable to his Belgian subjects. To this end, he hosted a geographical convention in September of 1876, inviting all of the famous European explorers, and giving his interest in Africa the necessary “humanitarian veneer” (42) it required. Though Henry Morton Stanley did not attend, being on an expedition in the heart of Africa at the time, this conference sets the stage for Leopold’s entry into Africa. In fact, “Leopold’s welcoming speech was a masterpiece. It clothed the whole enterprise in noble rhetoric, staked out his own role in what was to come, and guaranteed his plans a stamp of approval by the group he was hosting” (44).
Introduction – Chapter 2 Analysis
The introduction, prologue, and first two chapters of the book lay the foundation, in terms of themes and major characters, for the story that is to come. Hochschild uses his introduction to highlight his book’s hero—Edmund Dene Morel—who doesn’t appear again until Chapter 11, at the end of Part I. Coincidentally, Morel, whose surname so closely approximates the word “moral,” is the moral center of the book, and it is with what Hochschild terms the young Morel’s “flash of moral recognition” that he opens the book. Morality, or our moral recognition of human suffering, along with the responsibilities we accrue as a result of that recognition, is the central issue the book takes up. Although the Congo is the focus of Hochschild’s research, it will be clear by the end of the book that the moral issues raised by the story of Leopold’s Congo are not limited to that location or that time in history.
Hochschild also briefly introduces the other major players in the book, including “King Leopold II, a man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and charm, as any of the more complex villains of Shakespeare” (4). This description of Leopold highlights an offshoot of Hochschild’s exploration of morality—the question of good and evil and what motivates people to act in evil ways. The Introduction is also where Hochschild first makes reference to the motif of modernity in the story of the Congo, describing what happened under Leopold’s rule as “the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera” (4) and noting that its “mixture of bloodshed on an industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying and media campaigns raging in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic” (4) made it seem “strikingly close to our time” (4). Hochschild adds to this sense of spectacle another feature that seems uniquely modern—the fact that Leopold, responsible for so much death and destruction, never once got his own hands dirty; he was “like the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or see shattered homes or torn flesh” (4).
Another theme Hochschild introduces in the introduction and the prologue is the relevance of history to the present moment. The introduction ends with the assertion that the “origins” of Leopold’s Congo “lie much earlier, when Europeans and Africans first encountered each other there” (5), and the prologue offers an account of that initial contact, when European explorers first stumbled upon “a thriving African kingdom, an imperial federation of two to three million people” (8). Hochschild spends a fair amount of time describing this kingdom and its workings, in part because doing so coincides with his concern for giving Africans a voice, since so much of the written record of African history was produced by white, European men. To this end, he highlights the voice of King Affonso I, as “one of the very few central African voices that we can hear at all before the twentieth century” (12). Thus, in addition to offering a much-needed context for understanding what made the Congo region (and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa) so vulnerable to European exploitation at the turn of the twentieth century, the prologue emphasizes Hochschild’s frustration with the lack of agency granted to African people in European representations of them, while giving further evidence for the claim that understanding our past is essential to understanding our present.
Another motif emerges at the end of the Prologue that relates to the theme of representation and race, which is Africa’s designation as “the Dark Continent” (18). In Chapter 1, this motif emerges in relation to Hochschild’s introduction of Henry Morton Stanley, who, as one of the famed “African explorers” of the time, saw Africa as “essentially empty” (31). The story of Stanley’s childhood also provides Hochschild with the first of several opportunities to consider what might foster a psychology that tends toward violence, a theme he returns to in detailing Leopold’s childhood as well. In fact, in his accounts of these two men’s lives leading up to their joint venture in the Congo, one of the main differences between them seems to be class; both men are prone to anger and petulance, greed and selfishness, self-aggrandizement and fear of intimacy.
In exploring the early lives of Stanley and Leopold, Chapters 1 and 2 also invite us to see the similarities between the two men’s approaches to self-representation. In short, they are both very good liars, skilled at making themselves look as good as possible to the outside world, regardless of what the truth might be. Their skills are most evident in Stanley’s writing and Leopold’s use of the press to manipulate public opinion.
Though there are many similarities between Stanley and Leopold in terms of psychology and the skills each man’s insecure sense of self engenders in him, Chapter 2 develops our preliminary understanding of a trait unique to Leopold—his insatiable desire for more—more money and power, which was also expressed in his curious tendency to build monuments and renovate his homes. This need to constantly remake the world around him is a motif that will come up again and again in the chapters that follow.
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