A king's crimes in the Congo

KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST by Adam Hochschild (Macmillan, GBP 22.50) EXTERMINATE all the brutes!" exclaims the European trader, Mr Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Conrad set his story in the ivory-rich Congo Free State, created in 1885 by Belgium's rapacious King Leopold II.

African land was stolen and villages cleared; his majesty's traders began to herd refugees into swamps, starve women hostages and flog their children. Ninety years on, Congo tribes still talk fearfully of "the overwhelming". The rape of the Congolese has been suppressed and forgotten too long. So argues Adam Hochschild in this superbly researched history of Belgium's plunder, King Leopold's Ghost. From his palace in Brussels, Leopold II pillaged an area of Central Africa 76 times the size of Belgium. For two decades, until 1908, the killings continued. They generated international outcry; British newspapers ran pictures of torched villages and mutilated bodies. A century before the Serbs set fire to the Kosovar Albanian archives, Leopold burned the Congo state records in an attempt to cover his bloody tracks. Today the death-toll in the former Belgian Congo is impossible to establish accurately: Hochschild's sources accept an unimaginable figure of 10 million dead. This passionate book unflinchingly catalogues the Belgian monarch's depredations in a continent he never even visited: the breathtaking scale of his material acquisitiveness, his palace- sanctioned brutality. Routinely, the king's Force Publique cut the hands off murdered "rebel" Congolese and bagged them as hunting trophies. (A sliced-off penis was proof that a man had been killed.) This murder and theft of land was all for elephant tusks and, later, rubber. Craftily, the Belgian king hid his mercantile greed behind a mask of philanthropy. Supposedly his brave African Utopia was to be modelled on Liberia where freed American slaves had been settled in the time of Abraham Lincoln. With the monarch's showcase capital established as Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), it seemed a bright new Belgium Freetown was in the making. However, this was not the first "Liberia" scam. Twenty years earlier, in 1862, a New Orleans adventurer had persuaded the US government to house 5,000 emancipated blacks on a desolate island off Haiti, Ilea-Vache. The philanthropist's promised schools and hospitals never materialised. Instead the freedmen found themselves clamped in leg irons again. Leopold II was just such a human flesh-monger; black slavery made him a millionaire. For five long years, Belgium's main scout in the Congo was Henry Stanley, then the most lionised British explorer of his time. Stanley had pressed in vain for a British Congo. More than any Victorian, it was Stanley who ignited the great African land grab for Europeans. Hochschild provides a fascinating portrait of this pathfinder whose blinkered refusal to recognise his Belgian patron as a money- grabbing despot was a tragic delusion. Belatedly the Congo Reform Society was set up in 1904 to monitor Belgian crimes against humanity. Among its patrons were Roger Casement (first British consul to Brussel's nightmare colony) and Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur's blistering indictment of Leopold II, The Crime of the Congo, sold an astonishing 25,000 copies on publication, such was the righteous indignation in post-slavery Britain. Adam Hochschild has a novelist's flare for narrative, and King Leopold's Ghost is a horrifically readable history. Unfortunately, the author crassly compares the Congo outrage to the Nazi Holocaust. The annihilation of European Jewry was a unique instance of human infamy. Belgium's abuse of human life in Africa was scarcely the industrialised extermination of a race. Nevertheless, this book is a vitally important addition to the ever-growing literature of atrocity, and deserves to be read widely.

Copyright 1999
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