King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild (PDF)

Description

“An enthralling story . . . A work of history that reads like a novel.” — Christian Science Monitor “As Hochschild’s brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times . . . This book must be read and reread.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area’s population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold’s Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century’s first great human rights movement. A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Specifically, Joseph Conrad’s character, Kurtz, in

⭐that HALF the combat troops in Vietnam carried around the ears of dead Vietnamese as trophies. By far, it was Neil Sheehan, in writing about My Lai, in

⭐who got it right: “Calley appears to have been a sadist… What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as many over a larger area and a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, and rockets, white phosphorus and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct.”Yes, Virginia, there really is “a horror.” There really were the Kurtz/Rom’s who decorated their fence posts with human heads and there really were American soldiers who acquired ears as trophies. But the emphasis should truly be on the “horror” that is a magnitude greater, and lay in the absent “heart” of Leopold himself, as well as that of the enterprising Dow chemist who discovered the additive that would make napalm stick to the skin. With the significant exception of Hochschild’s opinion of Herr, his account of the crimes in the Congo clearly rates 6-stars.

⭐This is a tragic history of the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 19th century as the Scramble for Africa began. Adam Hochschild is an American writer and journalist for the New Yorker, NY Times, NY Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. His work has combined history with human rights advocacy. The events in this book are a shameful chapter in the era of colonialism, of which there were many. It is portrait of Leopold likely to inspire loathing in any who reads it. Beside an account of a colony, it archives the lives of activists who fought to free it.In 1482 Portuguese sailors braved the ocean beyond the Canary Islands and discovered a fresh water flow off the coast of Central Africa. Following a silt trail, fighting a fast current, they found the mouth of a vast river. Nine years later priests and emissaries arrived and began the first European settlement in a black African kingdom. Small scale slavery existed but a booming slave trade developed with the Americas to grow cotton and cane. During the 19th century slavery was abolished in Britain and America yet continued in Afro-Arab commerce.Leopold II (1835-1909) was the King of the Belgians and obsessed with obtaining colonies. He studied records of conquistadores in Seville, sailed to India, Ceylon, Burma and Java noting lucrative concerns. Plantations depended on forced labor to lift profits and civilize the lazy natives. He looked at land in Brazil, Argentina, Phillipines and Taiwan. Frustrated in these attempts he focused his sights on Africa. Humanitarian pretenses of freeing Africa from slavery and bringing enlightenment to the Dark Continent disguised his dreams of ivory and rubber.Henry Morton Stanley led a Dickensonian life. Abandoned to a poorhouse as a child he sailed to America and became a soldier in the Civil War, first for the Confederacy and then for the Union. He became a newspaper correspondent and tracked down explorer David Livingstone during his search for the source of the Nile. Returning to Africa in 1874 to map the waterways of the interior he discovered the source of the Congo River. Upon reaching the Atlantic he was hired by Leopold to establish trading posts and railroads and force tribal leaders to cede land.King Leopold and an American ambassador formed fake philanthropic associations for evangelism and scientific study of the region. In 1884 he lobbied the US to recognize the Congo Free State, in reality a colony owned by himself. Post-Civil War politicians were interested in sending freed slaves back to Africa. The area annexed was as large as the land east of the Mississippi while Belgium was half the size of West Virginia. In diplomatic deals France and Germany fell into line and Britain became invested. The challenge was to carry steamboats over the falls.By 1890 trading stations had been secured. Elephants were hunted by conscripted natives or their ivory simply seized. Vacant land was leased to private companies with shares of the profit retained. Legions of Africans were used as porters through jungles chained by the neck. So many were needed agents began to purchase them from the slave traders they purported to abolish. Security officers of the Free State were Europeans, half from Belgium, with soldiers drawn from the Congo. They chose to join the conquerors, their spears and muskets no match for machine guns.Leopold’s agents set up orphanages run by Catholic missions to train future troops. Captured women were kept in harems by agents or held hostage to coerce their men to harvest rubber. Discipline was enforced with the whip and counted in severed hands of dead rebels. To exact penalties entire villages were often burned down. The human toll over a quarter century is not known for certain but is estimated at 10 million, or half of the population. The causes included murder, starvation and disease (due to inhuman working conditions) and lowered birth rates.Joseph Conrad was briefly a steamboat pilot on the Congo, his novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ a depiction of what he saw. Displays of decapitated heads were not only a metaphorical critique of colonialism. Black Americans G.W. Williams, a polymath, and W.H. Sheppard, a missionary, exposed the conditions in 1890. Few voices of natives were recorded but are included where possible. In 1898 British shipping clerk E. D. Morel and Irish diplomat R. Casement suspected forced labor and began campaigns. Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote exposés on Leopold.As opinion turned Leopold waged propaganda wars. Self-appointed commission reports criticized his regime. The only option was to sell Congo to Belgium; self rule was unthinkable. In 1908 Leopold was given a billion dollar bonus and billions remained in his name. Wild rubber was replaced with farms. Atrocities declined but forced labor persisted. Head taxes kept people in plantations and mines before independence in 1960. PM Lumumba, seen as hostile to business, was shot with Belgian and US assistance and replaced by kleptocrat Mobuto until 1997.

⭐My mentor had discussed some of the topics of the Congo to me many times years ago and I eventually came upon this book.This is the sort of information about Africa during the colonial era that you’d rarely learn or hear about as all of it is true and ruthless.This is easily the sort of information that you’d almost never really learn about unless you’re taught the obscure faces and rarely mentioned details.This book is definitely worth the money to have and is a must own for anyone who wants a good read or knows about colonial Africa.

⭐”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.” (p. 266)There has been a a great forgetting of the tragic deaths of millions of Africans just a mere 125 years ago. This well – researched book thoroughly documents the Belgian atrocities in the Congo from 1890 until approximately 1910.

⭐The first thing to state – and something that I was unaware of – was that the original book was published thirty years ago. This means that the closing chapter acts as an update of sorts and is almost worth reading first. It brings the story up to date and shows how some things haven’t changed.One of the darkest chapters in human history, ‘King Leopold’s Ghost recounts the egregious land-grab by King Leopold of Belgium towards the riches of the Congo. Having felt left out by the colonial profits of surrounding countries, Leopold formulated a plan to access one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa. Leopold’s brand of colonialism was especially vicious though and some of the crimes are hard to read.Importantly, I say ‘human’ instead of ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Colonial’ as one thing we learn is that no one race had patent rights on slavery, despite w might be taught today. The book highlights how the indigenous tribes had quite a fruitful line in slavery before explorers arrived; nowhere near as rapacious or structured, but just as nasty. One tribe mentioned used severed heads as a kind of currency – if you ran out of funds, simply lop a slave’s head off.Of course this fact shouldn’t distract us to the fact that the main crimes were by Leopold and his forces. What is fascinating – and it almost seems to stick in Hochschild’s craw – is that the many voices attacking the terror were from Christian missionaries. Modern revisionism would have that they were eagerly taking part in the activities, but until brave men like Morel and George Washington Williams came along, they were lone, unheard voices.The epilogue is a reminder that two things do not change. Western involvement (interference) in Africa and, ultimately, the power of greed. One thing is touched on is that continuing to solely blame colonialism for current problems in countries like Congo is ridiculous but fashionable. The truth is, as stated by Solomon in Ecclesiastes (and not about one race or another) ‘Man has dominated man to his harm.’All in all, a sobering book that draws parallels between King Leopold’s reign and the Holocaust in its viciousness.

⭐I own both the book and kindle version and for some reason there are none of the photographs on the Kindle that are found in the paperback, which is a shame.I do not know if this is common practice with a Kindle version as i have only just got it!!Actual content of book is very good though and well worth a read!

⭐This book is a salutary read, what a brute Leopold was. It’s a terrible indictment upon the human race that men can stoop to such inhuman and brutal behaviour in pursuit of nothing but personal power and bare-faced greed. I hadn’t appreciated Henry Morton Stanley was equally inhuman, this list of characters involved in the Congo in the late 1800s makes for astonishing discovery: Jospeh Conrad, Sir Roger Casement, Morel and other familiar names one would not have associated with the excesses of a brutal dictatorship, posing as benign colonisation and the appalling methods employed to furnish the west with ivory and rubber. Although Casement, Morel and Conrad bitterly opposed it, It makes for horrifying reading nonetheless. Well done the author on his research, it must have been pretty gruesome to wade through the detail of the day, it makes one reflect upon Belgium’s role in all of this and that now it occupies the centre of the EU. Mmm. You can’t blame a people for the excesses of their rulers but one wonders how on earth they managed to keep so quiet about it. They must rank as the most brutal colonisers on the planet.

⭐The history of the Congo, Africa and even colonialism isn’t something I was ever taught in school and it’s never really been brought to my attention what’s gone on. I found the book really informative and easy to read as someone who was completely clueless about it all. Really interesting and utterly devastating what we have done to each other. Really well written and researched and I feel like it’s a book we should all read and a topic westerners should have some understanding of.

⭐An insightful and well-researched account of one of the forgotten genocides in Africa. The author narrates with great warmth the tenacity of individuals such as ED Morel, who fought so hard to stop the slavery and abuse in the Congo. I had never heard of ED Morel before reading this book. Hochschild also expresses regret that he could not record the efforts of more African people who fought against the awful circumstances they found themselves in, but does draw on the rare remaining scraps of historical evidence so that their voices can be heard as far as is possible. His insights into the less savoury characters involved in the scramble for rubber in the Congo – Stanley and King Leopold – are also well-researched. He avoids demonising them, despite his abhorrence of their behaviour and values, which few people in Europe would have challenged at the time. A masterful analysis of a much forgotten genocide.

Keywords

Free Download King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa in PDF format
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa PDF Free Download
Download King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa 1999 PDF Free
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa 1999 PDF Free Download
Download King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa PDF
Free Download Ebook King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa