''King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa'' (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the

Congo Free State The Congo Free State, also known as the Independent State of the Congo (), was a large Sovereign state, state and absolute monarchy in Central Africa from 1885 to 1908. It was privately owned by Leopold II of Belgium, King Leopold II, the const ...

by King Leopold II of the Belgians between 1885 and 1908, as well as the large-scale atrocities committed during that period. The book, also a general biography of the private life of King Leopold, succeeded in increasing public awareness of these crimes in recent decades.: "The story is familiar thanks to Adam Hochschild's 1998 book, ''King Leopold's Ghost''." The book was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013 more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages. The book is the basis of a 2006 documentary film of the same name, directed by Pippa Scott and narrated by

Don Cheadle Donald Frank Cheadle Jr. (, ; born November 29, 1964) is an American actor. Known for his roles in film and television, he has received List of awards and nominations received by Don Cheadle, multiple accolades including two Golden Globe Award ...

Title

The title is adopted from the 1914 poem "The Congo", by Illinois poet

Vachel Lindsay Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (; November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931) was an American poet. He is considered a founder of modern ''singing poetry,'' as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. Early years Lindsay was born ...

. Condemning Leopold's actions, Lindsay wrote: :Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost, :Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. :Hear how the demons chuckle and yell, :Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

Content

Leopold II,

King of the Belgians The monarchy of Belgium is the Constitutional monarchy, constitutional and Inheritance, hereditary institution of the monarchical head of state of the Kingdom of Belgium. As a popular monarchy, the Belgian monarch uses the title king/quee ...

, privately controlled and owned the

from 1885 to 1908. In 1908, the vast territory was annexed by

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

as a colony known as the Belgian Congo. King Leopold II used his personal control to strip the Congo Free State of vast amounts of wealth, largely in the form of ivory and rubber. These labor-intensive industries were serviced by slave labor, and the local peoples were forced to work through various means, including torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror. Christian missionaries and a handful of human rights organizers internationally publicized these atrocities. Slowly, various countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States of America, began to object to Leopold's tyranny with the result that the country's administration was transferred to Belgium. Little changed inside the country, however, until the ivory and rubber were exhausted. European interest in the African continent can be traced back to the late 1400s, when the European explorer Diogo Cão sailed the west coast and saw the

Congo River The Congo River, formerly also known as the Zaire River, is the second-longest river in Africa, shorter only than the Nile, as well as the third-largest river in the world list of rivers by discharge, by discharge volume, following the Amazon Ri ...

. By the 1860s, most African coastal regions were claimed as colonies of European powers, but the vast interior of the continent remained unknown to Europeans. Henry Morton Stanley, a complicated man and renowned explorer, ventured through much of that unknown during a descent of the Congo River. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and focused upon claiming the interior of Africa—the only unclaimed sizable geographic area. Moving within the European political paradigm existing in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State. His rule of the vast region was based on tyranny and terror. Under his direction, Stanley again visited the area and extracted favorable treaties from numerous local leaders. A road and, eventually, a rail line were developed from the coast to Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa). A series of militarized outposts were established along the length of the Congo River, and imported paddle wheelers commenced regular river service. Native peoples were forced to gather ivory and transport it for export. Beginning c. 1890, rubber—originally manufactured from coagulated sap—became economically significant in international trade. The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory supplies to the burgeoning rubber market. Slavery, exploitation and the reign of terror continued and even increased. Meanwhile, early missionaries and human rights advocates such as Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, George Washington Williams, and William Henry Sheppard began to circulate news of the widespread atrocities committed in the Congo under the official blessing of Leopold's administration. Women and children were imprisoned as hostages to force husbands and fathers to work. Flogging, starvation and torture were routine. Murder was common—tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet issued. Rape and sexual slavery were rampant. Workers failing to secure assigned quotas of rubber were routinely mutilated or tortured. Administration officials so completely dehumanized local peoples that at least one decorated his flower garden with a border of severed human heads. News of these atrocities brought slow, but powerful, international condemnation of Leopold's administration leading, eventually, to his assignment of the country to Belgian administration. In November 1908, Belgium officially annexed the Congo Free State as a colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo, and proclaimed a general sea-change in administrative policy. Actual change, however, was nearly imperceptible. The era of

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

shifted attention from atrocities in Africa to European trench warfare. In the post-war era, the global demand for reform was largely forgotten. However, commercial rubber tree farming had become firmly established and the collection of wild rubber became commercially insignificant, just as ivory supplies had been exhausted years earlier. Because of this, the slave labor industries of the Belgian Congo diminished in importance and atrocities became far less frequent. Finally, in 1960, the Congo gained independence.

Scholarship

Hochschild cites the research of several historians, many of them Belgian. He refers especially to Jules Marchal, formerly a Belgian colonial civil servant and diplomat who (as Hochschild describes) spent twenty years trying to break Belgian silence about the massacres. The documentation was not easy to come by; the furnaces of the palace in Brussels are said to have spent more than a week burning incriminating papers before Leopold turned over his private Congo to the Belgian nation. For many years Belgian authorities prevented access to what remained of the archives, notably the accounts given by Congolese to the King's Commission. Although few African scholars seriously question that large numbers died in Leopold's Congo, the subject remains a touchy one in Belgium itself. The country's

Royal Museum for Central Africa The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) (; ; ), communicating under the name AfricaMuseum since 2018, is an ethnography and natural history museum situated in Tervuren in Flemish Brabant, Belgium, just outside Brussels. It was originally b ...

, founded by Leopold II, mounted a special exhibition in 2005 about the colonial Congo; in an article in the '' New York Review of Books'', Hochschild accused the museum of distortion and evasion. Recently, however, the museum reopened after an extensive five-year renovation. Hochschild gave the results a partly favorable review. Also in 2005, the American and British publishers of ''King Leopold's Ghost'' reissued the book with a new afterword by Hochschild in which he talks about the reactions to the book, the death toll, and events in the Congo since its publication.

Reception

Hochschild has been praised by scholars and critics for his narrative. Jeremy Harding, writing in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', called it "a model account" that showed how the human rights abuses and human rights activism that resulted became a "template for modernity". Richard F. Hamilton, writing in ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'', called it an excellent book to counteract "the great forgetting" of the Congo atrocities. Hochschild's estimate of 10 million deaths is generally considered on the high range of possibilities, but a plausible one. Isidore Ndaywel è 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 Free State era and its aftermath at roughly 13 million (which Ndaywel è Nziem has subsequently revised downward to 10 million, the same number as Hochschild's conclusion). According to Jean Stengers, and Etienne van de Walle, Aline Désesquelles and Jacques Houdaille, the 10 million number cited by Hochschild is extrapolated from a 1924 estimation of the population and from the opinion of a 1919 Belgian government official commission that the population had been halved since 1880. While Hochschild has said that his intention was to tell the story in "a way that brings characters alive, that brings out the moral dimension, that lays bare a great crime and a great crusade", he was criticised for his overly moralistic dimension, and former Belgian officials deplored his comparison of Leopold with

Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

and Stalin. Belgian historian Jean Stengers commented, "Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died." Other historians have painted a picture similar to Hochschild's of the high death toll in Leopold's Congo, among them Jan Vansina, who appeared in the documentary based on the book, and the demographer . Hochschild was also criticized by Barbara Emerson, the author of a biography of Leopold, who described his book as "a very shoddy piece of work" and declared that "Leopold did not start a genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control." Hochschild does not use the word genocide, but describes how the mass deaths happened as a result of the forced labor system instituted at Leopold's direction. ''King Leopold's Ghost'' was specifically singled out for praise by the American Historical Association when it gave Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008. In an article published by '' The American Conservative'', political scientist Bruce Gilley was highly critical of the accuracy of the book and defended colonialism.

References

{{reflist , refs = {{cite web , title = In the Heart of Darkness — A Glimpse of the World , date = 2005-10-26 , work = HowardwFrench.com , publisher = New York Review of Books , url = http://www.howardwfrench.com/2005/10/in_the_heart_of/ , access-date = 2011-06-02 , quote = The exhibit deals with this question in a wall panel misleadingly headed 'Genocide in the Congo?' This is a red herring, for no reputable historian of the Congo has made charges of genocide; a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is different. {{Dead link, date=June 2025 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes {{cite news , title = The hidden holocaust , date = 1999-05-13 , newspaper =

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

, publisher = GMG , location =

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, issn = 0261-3077 , oclc = 60623878 , url = https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/may/13/features11.g22 , access-date = 2011-06-02 ;Cited works {{Refbegin *{{Cite book , last = Hochschild , first = Adam , author-link = Adam Hochschild , year = 1998 , title = King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa , publisher = Pan Macmillan , isbn = 0-330-49233-0 *{{Cite book , editor1-last = Louis , editor1-first = Wm. Roger , editor2-last = Stengers , editor2-first = Jean , editor2-link = Jean Stengers , year = 1968 , title = E. D. Morel's History of the Congo Reform Movement , location = Oxford , publisher = Clarendon Press , isbn = 0-19-821644-0 *{{Cite book , last = Neier , first = Aryeh , author-link = Aryeh Neier , year = 2012 , title = The International Human Rights Movement: A History , location = Princeton, NJ , publisher =

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial ...

, isbn = 978-0-691-13515-1 {{Refend

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