King Leopold's Ghost - Adam Hochschild

If you come to read King Leopold’s Ghost, knowing little of the history of the Congo and the atrocities committed there some 120 years ago, rest assured you are not alone. The only association many will have with this period is Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. The title is apt since the entire history of the region has always been shrouded in darkness. Hochschild himself recounts in his introduction that he “knew almost nothing about the history of the Congo" until he stumbled upon “a footnote in a book [he] happened to be reading”. The footnote was to a quotation by Mark Twain, referring to Twain’s membership of a worldwide movement against slave labour in the Congo which had claimed 8 to 10 million lives. (It is interesting to note, then, that the claim of up to 10 million deaths in the Congo had been circulated before King Leopold’s Ghost was published and was not, as so many critics have implied, a figure first promulgated by Hochschild.) Hochschild was not only startled by the enormity of the figure, but by the fact that only now, so late in his academic career, had he come across it and this realisation set in motion the years of research which culminated in King Leopold’s Ghost. When he embarked on his research for the book, he leaned heavily on an exhaustive 4 volume work by the Belgian historian Jules Marchel and the moment which had triggered Marchal’s interest in the Congo was remarkably similar to Hochschild’s. Marchal had noticed a story in a Liberian newspaper which referred, in passing, to 10 million deaths in the Congo Free State during the time of Leopold II’s rule. He too had never previously heard such a claim and at first dismissed it as an outrageous slander on his country, until a few questions to the Belgian foreign ministry went unanswered and his suspicions were aroused. 26 years later, Marchal’s work would corroborate this claim.

If the Belgian political establishment have been careful to mask the magnitude of the crimes committed in the Congo between 1885 and 1908, it is perhaps only a continuation of the way in which the system of forced labour, kidnapping and abuse was concealed at the time. The man who first detected that something was terribly amiss in the late 1890s, shipping clerk E.D. Morel, began to notice that while plentiful supplies of rubber and ivory were arriving daily from the Congo, nothing was being sent back in return, save guns and soldiers. His discovery was as sudden and as unexpected as it was for those historians who would later document his campaign and it would take years of tireless lobbying to force the world to confront the scale of Leopold's crimes. Of course, there is nothing novel or surprising about a regime seeking to hide its murderous behaviour, but perhaps no other regime in history hid its actions with such brazen duplicity as Leopold's. The Nazis may have concealed the existence of the gas chambers, but Hitler never made any secret of his hatred for the Jews. King Leopold's murderous administration of the Congo, on the other hand, was presented as a great humanitarian exercise, as a way to protect the African from the dreaded Arab slave-dealer, "under one flag", as one contemporary American supporter gushed "which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade".

Hochschild's book is undeniably a depressing read and the writer makes a sensible and necessary decision to focus not only on the depravity of the crimes of the regime but the heroism and bravery of those who sought to bring about its downfall. Yet perhaps the most tragic and deflating aspect of the story comes late in the book, when the writer reminds us that the conduct of Le Force Publique soldiers and Belgian governors in the Congo was not uniquely savage but broadly representative of the practices of European colonialism throughout the continent. Other European empires competed with the Belgians in terms of brutality; 50 years before the Holocaust, Germany was pursuing an openly genocidal policy against the Hereros of present-day Namibia, the French imposed a similar system of slave labour and mass murder on the other side of the Congo river and the British were decimating the Aboriginal population of Australia. Hochschild is explicit in this, and it is this part of his work which seems to have been overlooked by the horrified Belgian critics who savaged it. In fact Hochschild goes as far as to identify why it was the Belgian Congo that became the object of worldwide protest and not, say, areas of French or Portuguese Africa where the rubber terror slashed the populations of some areas by up to a half. His conclusions are unpalatable but logical; as the private empire of a ridiculed and increasingly marginalised monarch, the Congo Free State was an easy target and governments could be rallied to confront it without incurring dangerous political consequences. After all, the Congo Free State was an anomaly; not the property of a nation but of one man. This was not proper colonialism but its perverted and unworkable cousin. For this reason it had to be dismantled. It is interesting to note that not even the most radical opponents of the regime at the time ever called for the region to be handed back to the native population and in the end the administration of the Congo Free State passed into the hands of the Belgian government - at a price, of course. King Leopold, tenacious to the last, sold it back to his countrymen for around 50 million francs.

In his afterword to the 2006 edition, Hochschild expounds an idea, previously expressed in his interviews and other writings, that has still to gain acceptance in contemporary European thinking; that European colonialism has shaped the world we live in today as profoundly and drastically as Communism and Fascism and was equal to both of them in terms of brutality, tyranny and cost to human life. It is an idea which sits uncomfortably with many people, perhaps for good reason. The equating of political regimes with the Nazis or Bolsheviks has long been the shrill war-cry of misguided sociopaths (as demonstrated by the hysterical nature of anti-Israel sentiment which frequently compares the conduct of Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories with the worst excesses of the Nazis). Yet it is a sentiment which seems to be self-evident. Hochschild draws stark parallels. Like the two ideologies of the 20th century, the colonialism of Europeans was rooted in quasi-religious ideology with notions of manifest destiny (and, like Nazism, held a violent claim to racial superiority). It was similarly totalitarian, with a suppression of all political opposition by terror and a belief in the subordination of the individual to the greater goals of the state. Lastly, its death toll was comparably obscene.

It is this last point that raises the greatest questions and provokes the strongest ire. Hochschild's opponents have ridiculed his figure of between 8 to 10 million deaths. It is worth noting that Hochschild's figure was not his own but based on other scholarly estimates and that it falls short of more radical estimates; Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem, a Congolese scholar whose Histoire Générale du Congo was published the same year as King Leopold's Ghost, estimated the death toll in the Léopold era and its immediate aftermath at roughly 13 million. I am in no position to dispute or verify Hochschild's claim, yet there are aspects of it which are questionable. The author explains that contemporary data is hard to find and that most estimates are based on a reading of the Congolese population before the Leopold era and in the imediate aftermath. A number of his sources revealed that the population of the Congo was reduced by a half during the Leopold period and that its population at around 1920, some years after Leopold's relinquishing of control, stood at around 10 million. Therefore it is concluded that the Congo lost up to 10 million people during these times and Hochschild gives four main reasons for this; murder, starvation, disease and, consequently, a plummeting birth rate. It is this last factor which is problematic. A falling birth rate does not automaticaly equate to mass extermination and if a population is reduced by 10 million, that is not to say that 10 million lives were taken. To put it crudely, not being born is not the same as being killed. And yet it is dangerous and distracting to be absorbed by arguments over the exact figure for Congolese deaths. Belgian nationalists seized on the idea that Hochschild's figures may have been overstated and concluded that all criticism of its colonial history had been similarly misguided. Clearly, Hochschild and his self-righteous brand of history could not be trusted, they said, but they were of course missing a fundamental point. The debate over the exact number of deaths was in essence an admission that mass murder did take place. If we cannot even peg the figure to its nearest million, we are admitting that millions were killed. As Hochschild himself remarks, "sifting such figures today" may not reveal "precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder". An obsession with discovering exactly how many Africans were killed in the Congo (a near impossible task) should not blind us to the crimes and injustices of this period or the abhorrence of the ideas that underlined it.

There is another facet to the arguments of those who defend the crimes of colonialism, one that I have heard countless times. It is the one which dismisses all criticism of colonialism as liberal nonsense that lays the blame for all the world's ills at the feet of the white man and conveniently overlooks the massacres and wars perpetrated by Africans over the centuries. Perhaps one of the most over-used lines brandished in defence of colonialism is the argument that the slave trade existed in Africa long before the arrival of the white man. Of course it did, but the argument ignores the fact that this was an entirely different form of slavery; a system where, in the aftermath of tribal battles and skirmishes, the surviving members of vanquished armies would be taken into captivity and used as forced labour or as bargaining tools in future negotiations. It was a system practised in all reaches of the world, by all races and tribes, from biblical times and beyond. What the European did in Africa and the Americas was to transform slavery into a mass industry. And while Africans continued to be involved in its implementation, often serving as middlemen, it was a system overseen and orchestrated by Europeans, whose economy demanded it.

Certainly noone can deny the extraordinary crimes visited upon Africans by Africans in post-colonial times, yet it is fair to say that corruption, ethnic and tribal hatred, conflict and war are better served in lands which have been granted political independence but denied economic autonomy, as has been the fate of almost all sub-Saharan Africa. Neither of course has this political independence been free from Western interference. Congo, for one, has been in a state of almost constant warfare since the deposition and murder of its first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, 1n 1961, in which Belgium, and the CIA, played a pivotal role. As war has ravaged the country, refugees have poured into Europe and today in the UK, the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture has more referrals from the Democratic Republic of Congo than any other country except Iran. Almost a hundred years on, King Leopold's ghost continues to haunt a beleaguered nation.