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.
Themes
Morality
King Leopold’s Ghost is, at its center, about morality. Its opening lines focus on the young Edmund Morel’s “flash of moral recognition” (1), and throughout the rest of the book we see other characters have similar insights, like lights flickering on in the darkness. It is a book about what one can and should do in the aftermath of such moral awakenings. Certainly many chose to look away, but this history highlights those who didn’t, and paid painful, sometimes fatal prices for it.
Hochschild’s repeated references to other mass murders in the twentieth century also contribute to the exploration of this theme, by offering examples of immorality on a large scale and comparing them to what happened in the Congo.
Human rights in the context of race and imperialism
Exploring the theme of human rights in the Congo necessitates an analysis of how the concept of race supports—and is, in fact, central to—European imperialism. Racial prejudice allows white Europeans to view non-white people as less than human, which in turn allows for the systematic violation of their human rights. If, for example, the people of the Congo had been considered fully human, what was done to them—the violent appropriation of their land, labor, and lives—could not have gone on for as long as it did. This idea reinforces the theme of morality, because in the absence of a belief in another person’s full humanity, one might not consider it immoral to treat them poorly.
The psychology of imperialism
Closely related to the theme of morality is the exploration of the psychology of imperialism, or what, psychologically speaking, makes people act in immoral ways specific to the context of imperialism. What creates a Leopold or a Stanley, or any of the other sadistic men stationed in the Congo and mentioned in Hochschild’s account? What psychological mechanisms allow mass murder to become “like a sport” for its participants? What mechanisms create a populace so willing to look away?
The importance of history
Though Hochschild’s account of Leopold’s Congo is as engaging as, for example, Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, it never loses sight of itself as a piece of silenced history. From its preoccupation with providing African and black American perspectives, to its concluding comparison of Leopold and Mobutu, this history reminds us of those voices missing from our official histories and how that lack will doom us to repetition of silenced and painful pasts.
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