King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa [Paperback]

Years ago, Adam Hochschild came across a reference to the "five to eight million lives" destroyed in the colonial exploitation of the Congo. Startled, he realised that this had been "one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century's horrors?" His corrective history makes sobering and gripping reading. In King Leopold of Belgium, who decided to buy himself an empire to compensate for his country's smallness, he portrays a villain of Shakespearian dimensions. Aided by Stanley (of "Mr Livingstone I Presume" fame) the king appropriated a section of central Africa the size of Western Europe as his personal territory. The appalling brutality that ensued, as Europeans plundered the country for rubber and ivory, is vividly captured by Hochschild. He manages to leaven the horror with touches of grotesque humour--for instance, when tricking tribal chiefs into signing away their land for bales of cloth, Stanley would, to impress his dupes, secrete a battery in his pocket with the wires in his palm, so that on shaking hands the chief "was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong that he nearly knocked him off his feet". Hochschild has something of Simon Schama's gift for populist history; and among other things he provides astonishing background to Joseph Conrad's Congo-set masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. --Adam Roberts --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"As Adam Hochschild tells in his fascinating book about the Congo's terrible encounter with Europe. . . . the creation of Zaire under the dictator Mobutu, the break-up of that country and its renaming Congo, and the civil war that rages there now--all of these can be traced back to Leopold's bloody enterprise." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"Hochschild, in his thoroughly researched and engagingly written book, tells the story of one of the greatest human rights crimes in the past hundred years. . . . King Leopold's Ghost has all the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel. At the same time it is . . . carefully researched and historically accurate." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST has a riveting cast of characters: heroes, villains and bit-players, all extraordinary, all compelling tangles of neuroses and ambitions, all wonderfully drawn." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, a late addition is required.'Late' only because King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) should always have been there. As 'owner' of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 he was responsible for what Joseph Conrad once called 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.' It is indeed a ghastly story of greed, lies and murder. And Adam Hochschild retells it well. 'King Leopold's Ghost' last week beat several excellent books to win the Lionel Gelber prize. . . . now the world's most important award for non-fiction. . . . Around the turn of this century in the depths of the Congo the bonds of humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilisation cast aside,releasing something diabolical which exists within us all. Mr. Hochschild conveys this particularly well." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Brilliant.. this book must be read and re-read' Neal Ascherson'. 'A hundred years ago, enlightened people in the western world were outraged by a holocaust in Africa which left millions dead. Denunciations thundered from speaker's platforms around the US and Europe. One open letter to The Times was signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops and 75 MPs. Viscount Grey, Britain's foreign secretary, declared that no overseas issue had so intensely aroused the British public for 30 years. Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet on the Congo atrocities which sold 25,000 copies in the first week alone. Yet today not one person in a thousand could say what the fuss was all about, unless, of course, they have read this amazing book.' Tariq Ali, Financial Times 'Fascinating... brilliant and gripping' Mail on Sunday 'An exemplary piece of history writing: urgent, vivid and compelling' Literary Review

"KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST is an exemplary piece of history-writing: urgent,vivid and compelling." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"For 23 years the King . . . brought a new dark age to the Dark Continent. In that time some ten million people--half the population--died. . . . The story of this appalling episode, and the remarkable campaign led by an ordinary English shipping clerk, Edmund Dene morel, to bring it to the attention of the world, is told in this brilliant and gripping book." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"Adam Hochschild has a novelist's flare for narrative, and KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST is a horrifically readable history." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"As Hochschild's brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times. It was the first Orwellian big lie, which sold a gigantic mechanism of greed and terror to the world as a crusade for humanitarian values. . . . that is why this book must be read and reread. In its breathtaking mendacity, in its shameless industry of lies, in its elevation of sadism and greed into a civilised routine, the Congo Free State was a testing-ground for the 20thcentury." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A riveting and highly readable account of the Congo massacre, peopled by callous monarchs, corrupt adventurers and a handful of genuine heroes.

WINNER OF THE 1999 DUFF COOPER PRIZE. 'Brilliant .. this book must be read and re-read' Neal Ascherson'. 'A hundred years ago, enlightened people in the western world were outraged by a holocaust in Africa which left millions dead. Denunciations thundered from speaker's platforms around the US and Europe. One open letter to The Times was signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops and 75 MPs. Viscount Grey, Britain's foreign secretary, declared that no overseas issue had so intensely aroused the British public for 30 years. Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet on the Congo atrocities which sold 25,000 copies in the first week alone. Yet today not one person in a thousand could say what the fuss was all about, unless, of course, they have read this amazing book.' Tariq Ali, Financial Times 'Fascinating ... brilliant and gripping' Mail on Sunday 'An exemplary piece of history writing: urgent, vivid and compelling' Literary Review

"Hochschild's outstanding study, unmatched by any other work on the Congo, reveals how all Europe--and the USA--contributed to the making of King Leopold's holocaust of the Congolese people." --Nadine Gordimer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Adam Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco with his wife. His most recent book, Bury the Chains, was published to great acclaim by Macmillan in 2005 and will be available in Pan paperback in early 2006.

As with any traumatic piece of history, the roots of this story lie farback in time, and its reverberations still sound today. But for me a central vantage point, an incandescent pivotal moment that illuminates long decades beforeand after, is a young man's flash of moral recognition.

The year is 1897 or1898. Try to imagine, briskly stepping off a cross-Channel steamer, a forceful,burly man in his mid-20s, with a handlebar mustache. He is confident and well-spoken, but his British speech is without the polish of an Eton or an Oxford. He is well-dressed, but the clothes are not from Bond Street. With an ailing motherand a wife and growing family to support he is not the sort of person likely toget caught up in any idealistic cause. His ideas are thoroughly conventional. He looks--and is--every inch the sober, respectable businessman.

Edmund Dene Morel is a trusted employee of a Liverpool-based shipping line. A subsidiary of the company has the monopoly on all transport of cargo to and from the Congo Free State, as it is then called, the huge territory in central Africa that is the world's only colony claimed by one man. That man is King Leopold II of Belgium, a ruler much admired throughout Europe as a "philanthropic" monarch. He has welcomed Christian missionaries to his new colony; his troops, it is said, have fought and defeated local slave-traders who preyed on the population; and for more than a decade European newspapers have praised him for selflessly investing his personal fortune in public works to benefit the Africans.

Because Morel speaks fluent French, his company sends him over to Belgium every few weeks to supervise the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo run. Although the officials he is working with have been handling this shipping traffic for years without a second thought, Morel begins to notice things that unsettle him. At the docks of the big Belgian port of Antwerp he sees his company's ships arriving filled to the hatch-covers with immensely valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships' rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes with horror that there can be only one possible explanation for the ir source: slave labor on a vast scale.

Brought face to face with evil, More l did not turn away. Instead, what he saw determined the course of his life, and the course of an extraordinary movement, the first great international human rights movement of the 20th century. Seldom, if ever, has one human being-impassioned, eloquent, blessed with brilliant organizing skills and nearly superhuman energy--managed almost single-handedly to put something on the world's front page s for more than a decade. Only a few years after standing on the docks of Antwerp, Edmund Morel would be inside the White House insisting to President Theodore Roosevelt that the United States had a special responsibility to do something ab out the Congo. He would organize delegations to the British Foreign Office. He would mobilize everyone from Booker T. Washington to Anatole France to the Archbishop of Canterbury to join his cause. More than 200 mass meetings to protest slave labor in the Congo would be held across the United States. A far larger number of gatherings in England--nearly 300 a year at the crusade's peak--would draw as many as 5,000 people at a time. In London, one letter of protest to the Times on the Congo would be signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops, 76 Members of Parliament, the presidents of 7 Chambers of Commerce, 13 editors of major newspapers, and e very Lord Mayor in the country. Angry speeches on the horrors of King Leopold's Congo would be given as far away as Australia. In Italy, two men would fight a duel over the issue. British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, a man not given to overstatement, would declare that "no external question for at least thirty ye ars has moved the country so strongly and so vehemently."

This is the story of that movement, of the great crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it, and the way the world has managed to forget one of the great mass killings of recent history. . . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.