King Leopold's Ghost

Make a lie , make it big , make it loud , keep repeating it and everyone will believe it

An extract from the chapter called The Reckoning
“So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt, so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of René de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890s. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he or- dered a child killed in the nearest village.

Two Force Publique officers, Clément Brasseur and Léon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.

Michael Herr, the most brilliant reporter of the Vietnam War, captures the same frenzy in the voice of one American soldier he met: “We'd rip out the hedges and burn the hooches and blow all the wells and kill every chicken, pig and cow in the whole fucking ville. I mean, if we can't shoot these people, what the fuck are we doing here?” When another American, Francis Ford Coppola, tried to put the blood lust of that war on film, where did he turn for the plot of his Apocalypse Now? To Joseph Conrad, who had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.”

At times, this has been a brutal read that highlights man's inhumanity to his fellow human being. It has also highlighted others courage in the pursuit of justice.

I had been aware of the treatment of the peoples of the Congo via Mathew White's atrocity website. His site stated the following.

• Roger Casement's original 1904 report estimated that as many as 3 million Congolese had died of disease, torture or shooting since 1888 (cited in Gilbert's History of the Twentieth Century; also in Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (1972)).
• E.D. Morel estimated that the Congo's population began with an original 20 or 30 million, and bottomed out at a mere 8 million. Morel, The Black Man's Burden, 1920, Chapter 9 (“[W]hen the country had been explored in every direction by travellers of divers nationalities, estimates varied between twenty and thirty millions. No estimate fell below twenty millions. In 1911 an official census was taken. It was not published in Belgium, but was reported in one of the British Consular dispatches. It revealed that only eight and a half million people were left.”). This estimate also appears in
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Congo Free State,” v.3, p.535
- Bertrand Russell, Freedom and organization 1814-1914 (first published, George Allen & 1934) p.453 in the 2001 Routledge ed., citing Sir H. H. Johnston, The Colonization of Africa (Cambridge Historical Series) p. 352
- Fredric Wertham A Sign For Cain : A Exploration of Human Violence (1966): the population of the Congo dropped dropped from 30M to 8.5M, a loss of 21.5 million
• Peter Forbath, The River Congo (1977) p.375: “at least 5 million people were killed in the Congo.”
• John Gunther (Inside Africa (1953)): 5-8 million deaths.
• Adam Hochschild (Leopold's Ghost, (1998)): 10 million, or half the original population.
• Rummel:
- 2,150,000 democides, 19th Century (based on 10% of Wertham)
- 25,000 democides, 1900-1910.
• AVERAGE:
- Median: ca. 8M
- Mean: ca. 8.5M
• NOTE: Because this event began in 1886, it tend to get relegated to the 19th Century; however, 40% of it occured in the 20th Century, so we need to keep this in mind when splitting the death toll into century-based subtotals. Also, it took awhile for the atrocities to get up to speed, so the dying probably intensified as more time passed.


As the reader can see this book by Hochschild is at the high end of deaths. Hochschild does cover the slaughter in the same chapter I have quoted above, called A Reckoning. He states he did not think that the authorities were of a genocidal nature to the Congolese peoples, they just worked them as slave labour and to death, profit was everything in the pursuit of ivory and rubber with rebellion ruthlessly put down. So that meant that murder through to starvation played a part in the plummeting drop in population numbers. There was also a huge fall of the birth-rate as men left their villages with women under hostage so as to force them to not abscond and join rebellions.

There have been some historical characters in this book that were unknown to me prior. Roger Casement and E D Morel, campaigners from Ireland and England, both deserve further reads, they lead fascinating lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Morel

As does George Washington Williams from the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Williams

All three contributed heavily to the public campaign to expose the inhumanity that was the Congo Free State.

Known to me, but more as someone taught to the English schoolboy with stories of derring-do was Henry Morton Stanley. He does not come out of this book with any honour.

There are 2 sets of illuminating black and white plates and an excellent bibliography. I have David van Reybrouck's Congo to read and will do so sometime into the future.

This was a fascinating if sad history and highly recommended.

“We are tired of living under this tyranny. We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away and dealt with by the white savages. We shall make war. . . . We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.”

I would not have finished this book if not for the stories of William Henry Sheppard, George Washington Williams, Roger Cassment and E.D. Morel. I trudged through the endless pages of the numbered dead. the unnumbered dead. the severed hands, mutilated bodies. burned villages and tortured African natives if only to find some relief. As if seeing King Leopold die a second death through the book would satisfy me in the end. It didn't.

King Leopold's ghost is just as real as he was. The chief mass murderer himself knows he won't rest in peace for crimes he committed on this earth so he roams around haunting Congolese people to this day. As if genocide wasn't enough!!! If you don't believe me just go to the end of the book where Hochschild details how, as the country finally began taking its first steps of independence, the CIA (under Eisenhower) shot the first democratically elected prime minister of Congo, cut up his body and dissolved it in acid to prevent Patrice Lumumba from becoming a symbol.

How much of the 20th century was built on the corpses of tens of millions of Africans? Congo went from a population of roughly 20 million people before the arrival of Leopold to roughly 10 million at his death ten years later. I just get so frustrated and tired and discouraged reading about the imperialist history on the continent that it takes everything in me to keep reading and searching to learn more. For once I just wanted to find a glimpse of the stories of the people who fought against.

Maybe that's why this book is different. Thoroughly researched and handled with tremendous care, Adam Hochschild was committed to showing the efforts of the people who did bring the problem of Congo to the international stage. If crimes go on and on, the only solace is the people who still go to great lengths to fight it.
I'd recommend this book to anyone

One of the most groundbreaking anti-colonial history books of the entire genre.
An absolute requirement for all who want to know about the intentionally obfuscated history of colonial capitalism and their brutal murderous regimes.

Here's what I learned:
__The Scramble for AfricaThe scramble for Africa began in the late 1800's. Why was this scramble happening? Why the unquenchable thirst of capitalism, of course! “Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a 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.”Britain, in particular claimed they wanted to bring “civilization” to the peoples of Africa. This is a lie. They wanted to drain the wealth of the nation to feed their economies. They claimed they were “combatting the slave trade” when in reality...“Britain, of course, had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot all this, just as they forgot that slavery's demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty suppressed by British troops.” If we look at history through the leans of dialectical materialism, slavery abolition became a strong cultural phenomenon both in the US and Europe not because of the “virtues” of the Yankees or Brits, but because of the industrial revolution. Slavery was becoming less economically viable with the rise of machinery. British imperial interests strove to end chattel slavery everywhere to replace it with wage slavery and colonialism (with British elites at the top, of course). “During the nineteenth-century European drive for possessions in Africa and Asia, people justified colonialism in various ways, claiming that it Christianized the heathen or civilized the savage races or brought everyone the miraculous benefits of free trade.”Leopold has entered the chatBut let's get to our book's namesake. Leopold, king of the country of Belgium (about the size of the state of Maryland) NEEDED a piece of the pie: “Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary. The urge for more 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.”King Leopold didn't pretend he wanted to “civilize the savages”. He wanted to extract as much wealth as he possibly could as quickly as he possibly could: “‘Belgium doesn't exploit the world,' he complained to one of his advisers. ‘It's a taste we have got to make her learn.'”The coastal nations were all taken by other European colonies, so Leopold sent his colonizers deeper into the mainland, trying to find where the Congo River came from. They pretended their new colony was to create a “confederation of free negro republics.” This was an obvious smokescreen. “As one of Leopold's subordinates bluntly wrote to Stanley: ‘There is no question of granting the slightest political power to negroes. That would be absurd. The white men, heads of the stations, retain all the powers.'”The colonizers did what all colonizers (like our forefathers) did to garner more wealth and power: lie, cheat, and steal. They wrote up treaties and lied to the people who could not read said treaties what they specifically entailed: “The texts varied, but many of the treaties gave the king a complete trading monopoly, even as he placated European and American questioners by insisting that he was opening up Africa to free trade. More important, chiefs signed over their land to Leopold, and they did so for almost nothing. At Isangila, near the big rapids, Stanley recorded, he was able to buy land for a station by paying some chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of divers marketable wares ... not omitting a couple of bottles of gin.'”“The very word treaty is a euphemism, for many chiefs had no idea what they were signing. Few had seen the written word before, and they were being asked to mark their X's to documents in a foreign language and in legalese.” This isn't ‘negotiations between two independent parties,' this is criminally scamming entire tribes, villages, and territories. They used phony treaties to justify incalculable theft and horrible atrocities. Truly ghoulish. Florida Man?But here's a crazy twist in the story: Henry Shelton Sanford, some failson who managed to only invest in enterprises that end up going under, was good homies with the King. To my fellow Floridians, that last name might sound familiar to you because it's the same Sanford of which the town north of Orlando got its name. This guy became head propagandist in the US to try and legitimize the king's exploits through US recognition of Belgium's claim over the region. The USA loved the idea of Europeans colonizing another country (obviously). And Sanford didn't have to go far in Washington to find some friends: “Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a former Confederate brigadier general, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like most white Southern politicians of the era, he was frightened by the specter of millions of freed slaves and their descendants harboring threatening dreams of equality. [...] Morgan fretted for years over the ‘problem' of this growing black population. His solution, endorsed by many, was simple: send them back to Africa!” Since they couldn't own black people anymore, the only logical solution was to send them back to the continent their ancestors came from hundreds of years ago. (Fun fact: The whole “send em back to Africa” idea came into popularity in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. This is not a coincidence.) The USA was the first country to internationally legitimize the King's crimes, because of course it was. Never miss a chance to be an embarrassment, USA. In a redemptive arc, the first person to effectively blow the whistle on the atrocities happening there came from an American by the name of George Washington Williams, who went there to see the viability about getting black Americans to emigrate there. What he saw shook him to his core. He penned “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, by Colonel the Honorable Geo. W. Williams, of the United States of America.” It's a great read and a damming exposé of the horrors. Much shorter than the book. Strong recommend. Unspeakable BrutalityYou might be asking: how did the native people of the Congo fair under subjugation by Belgium? Well...not great. The Danish were nothing less than brutal savages. And yet they had the audacity to call the victims of their reign of terror “savages.” Their rule came alongside the invention of the machine gun, which was used liberally to murder as many civilians as possible as quickly as possible when they deemed it necessary. They worked people to death. They raped, pillaged, burned, mutilated, killed, kidnapped, terrorized, forced conscription, enslaved, stole land, created child soldiers, tortured, and committed every other possible atrocity one person could do to another at the time. Why? To suck the wealth out of the country, as quickly and effectively as possible, of course. They established children's colonies with the help of Catholic priests to create armies of child soldiers, many of their parents having been killed by the occupying military or simply worked to death. These were the only “schools” Belgium constructed. “Among the traumatized and malnourished children packed into both the state and Catholic colonies, disease was rife and the death rate high, often over 50 percent. Thousands more children perished during the long journeys to get there.”The Europeans who went to Africa to serve as colonial rulers were not particularly evil (prior to doing all the atrocities). They were young white men looking for adventure and to make a little more money. “For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist.“ It didn't matter as long as the wealth kept flowing. Why get stuck in some factory or clerk job in Europe when you could run your own little fiefdom in Africa? And the more brutal you were, the more money you made! A guy wrote a fictional book about these atrocities called “Heart of Darkness.” Pretty much everything he wrote in there was just what he really saw happening. This book was the basis for the movie “Apocalypse Now,” which takes place during the US-Vietnam war. I'll let you put two and two together there. RUBBER!For a while, Belgium was only extracting ivory. Then some asshole named “Goodyear” supposedly spilled some sulfur onto rubber on his stove, inadvertently inventing vulcanization, and in the 1890's, rubber became all the rage. The atrocities kicked into high gear when the King realized that he was sitting on a proverbial gold mine of wild rubber trees. He knew that eventually these trees would be grown in plantations, which would take a few years to get going. So he had a head start and limited window to extract and export as much rubber as he possibly could. “'An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River],' the British vice consul reported in 1899. ‘This officer['s]...method ... was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected.'”When I say they were “draining the wealth” of the Congo, I mean this as literally as I possibly can. Not only does the harvesting of rubber literally entail cutting it from the bottom of the dangling vines and draining it, but...“We now know that the value of the rubber, ivory, and other riches coming to Europe each year [...] was roughly five times that of goods being shipped to the Congo that were destined for Africans. In return for the rubber and ivory, Morel knew, it was not possible that the Congo's Africans were being paid in money—which he knew they were not allowed to use—or in goods that came from elsewhere, for Elder Dempster had the cargo monopoly. Clearly, they were not being paid at all.”The world was slowly coming round to recognize how particularly brutal Leopold's regime was. So did he work toward creating more humane working conditions for the Congolese? Of course not! Like all capitalists, he used propaganda to downplay the atrocities he oversaw, buying good press and slandering those spreading bad press. And who was spearheading opposition in Belgium's parliament? Unsurprisingly, the Socialists. Europe continually pointed the finger at Belgium while ignoring the atrocities being committed in each other their own countries (sounds familiar). They weren't anti-colonialist, they were just anti-being really super mega evil. We have that now with the “ethical capitalists” who think a system designed to be exploitative can somehow be reigned in despite that never working. Leopold often pointed to the double-standard he was facing, with Britain's countless crimes against humanity all across the globe. The cold, hard numbersSo where does this land on the scoreboard of historical atrocities? Well, the King had most of the records burned up to prevent that ever coming to light. but what we do know is astounding. “King Leopold II's personal État Indépendant du Congo officially existed for twenty-three years, beginning in 1885, but many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of that period, and important elements of the king's system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end. The rubber boom, cause of the worst bloodletting in the Congo, began under Leopold's rule in the mid-1890s, but it continued several years after the end of his one-man regime.”All in all, with the genocides and plummeting birth rate, a conservative estimate is that 10,000,000 human beings died under this brutal regime. “An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half.'” Half of what, exactly? “In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.” Half the population killed. Ten million people.And how much wealth did Leopold successfully drain? The true number may not ever be known, but scholars “estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in [1999] dollars,” which is about $2 billion dollars in 2022. But why isn't this horrible event covered in schools? Because the colonizers want you to forget their atrocities, and the colonizers write the history books. The colonizers locked up the files, too. A Commission of Inquiry created by the King (a kangaroo court if there ever was one) still managed to collect a vast trove of testimony about the atrocities committed from the victims themselves. “However, no one read them. Despite the report's critical conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely.” Whitewashing of history. Par for the course. The King's Reign Ends, but the Terror merely evolvesUltimately, the brutal regime didn't stop their crimes against humanity because of the international outcry or because the King died, but because of evolving material conditions. Plantations and taxation replaced brutality and murder in Belgium-ruled Congo. And they found even more resources to suck up! “More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and warplanes.“ Forced labor practices continued for decades into the 20th century. __
Not an anomaly

The Congo was a concentrated area of colonial brutality. Other colonial powers were just as brutal, but they weren't as concentrated. “If you draw boundaries differently—to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forest land rich in wild rubber—then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else.” France, Portugal, and Germany used the Leopold model for their own brutal colonial exploits. Same forced labor. Same unfathomable wealth extracted.

“The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50 percent. [...] between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company ‘sentries'—nearly four hundred in a busy month.”

This is what Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital”. The brutal, murderous colonial regimes gobbling up as much wealth as possible. This is why Europe is rich and Africa is poor. This terror campaign never stopped, it merely evolved.

A major reason why Belgium's been left of the hook is because they were major victims of the Nazis in WW2. But remember: Fascism is when Imperialism comes home. The Nazis didn't invent anything they did to Europe. It was all the same stuff Europeans were doing to Africa for centuries.

Anyway, this book is really sad but really good and you should read it if you're into this sort of stuff.

Man, this book is horrifying. I can't believe this isn't talked about more.

The scope and goal of this book and just the sheer amount I learned would ordinarily make it a 5 star read. While I'm very glad I read it though, the lack of available material really makes itself known.

The middle of this book is a hardcore snooze, and I feel like the middle third could have been summarized in like 10 pages. It was basically an entire biography of a random person who went to the Congo, did or saw horrible things, and then left, over and over. I understand giving some historical context to the people who make up this story (I do think it's necessary), but 10 pages of backstory for every person whose contribution to the narrative usually amounts to “and then they saw bad things, and they were horrified, and then they left and thought about the bad things they saw” is just not an interesting or economical usage of pages.

But the first and last third are really good and very informative. This atrocity needs to be more well known, and I hope we continue to discover more information about it and talk about it in a public light.

This was a heavy, gripping, depressing read. I honestly didn't know any of this had happened. Never had to read Heart of Darkness for school, don't recall reading anything about the Congo in world history class. Let's be honest, it would have been a footnote at best. To learn the kind of atrocities that were committed there was frankly shocking. This was very well researched as well.

I knew a little about the Congo, but this book was an eye-opener.

Ugh... I knew a little bit about the Belgian Congo from a chapter in The Vertigo Years by Philipp Blom, but didn't know the extent of it. This is a really interesting, if sometimes hard to read, book about Leopold and the Belgian Congo, and despite the subject matter I'm glad I read it.

The history of the Belgian Congo (known as Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the systematic slavery and plunder and brutalization of its inhabitants.
This book is very detailed, highly researched and really covers everything from start to finish.
It is not a hard read, but in the edition I have the print is very small, and it took me a bit longer to get through than I expected.

Devastating. Should be required reading. Some of the incidents described made me feel sick. And the chapter on the “great forgetting” - and the fact that, indeed, I had almost no idea about the extent of colonial cruelty in the Congo; that, indeed, I was another American high school student who read Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” as if it was ahistorical... Really horrible stuff. Indeed, the post-colonial stuff - the murder of Patrice Lumumba by CIA-funded agents, the subsequent Leopold-esque reign of Mobutu - it's just miserable. I guess I knew this stuff in a very peripheral, superficial way; I had never thought about it or investigated it. Now that I have... damn. As I said, should be required reading.

Edited to add: On a somewhat lighter note, this book is begging to be made into a film. Michael Sheen was BORN to play Stanley, in all his insecure exuberance and cruelty. They're both even Welsh! Perhaps Clive Owen as E.D. Morel? Stephen Fry as Sir Roger Casement? Denzel Washington as William Henry Sheppard? Ian McKellan as Leopold? I'm only half-joking - cinema is one of the most powerful ways to tell history, and the fact that this book is, yes, a bestseller, but not part of high school history curricula is something that HAS to change.