Hochschild is the author of a book on the imperialist rape of Congo, King Leopold's Ghost (1998), which I haven't read but now shall. I was ashamed to see from his references that over many years a number of people have done excellent studies of the period I was only vaguely aware of, from archives that the Belgians from time to time make accessible but then close up.

The occasion for this article is his critique of the revamping of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and he is very critical when he gets there, but the main interest of the article is certainly his summary retelling of the horrors of Western imperialism in Central Africa.

The article is, unfortunately, not one of the ones that is available online unless you pay $3 for a week's access. I assume that some people will have the print edition, and others will know more of this history than I did. For everyone else, I quote a short passage below.

(If you want to read the entire article online, go to nybooks.com; scroll down to this edition's table of contents; click on it and scroll down to the link to Hochschild; then follow the instructions for gaining a week's access. Sorry I can't link, but I think that gives you too much access to moi.)

Here is just a taste of the article:

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The battle is over Belgium's past as a colonial power. For half a century it controlled the Congo, one thirteenth the land mass of the African continent. Before that the Congo was also linked to Belgium, as the private, personally owned property of the shrewd and ambitious King Leopold II. Belgians had been initially slow to colonize, but Leopold, who took his country's throne in 1865, thought differently. Openly exasperated with being king of such a small country, he hired the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to stake out for him the boundaries of a huge African territory. From 1885 to 1908, when it became the Belgian Congo, the colony was known as l'État Indépendant du Congo, or the Congo Free State. Leopold exercised absolute control, referring to himself as the state's "proprietor."

Fearful of tropical diseases, the King never visited his prized possession. Instead, while living in Brussels, on his yacht, or in several luxurious villas on the French Riviera, he made a huge fortune off the Congo, conservatively estimated as at least $1.1 billion in today's dollars. In the early years, most of the money came from ivory. Joseph Conrad unforgettably depicted the ivory trade in Heart of Darkness in the severed heads of murdered African rebels Kurtz kept as trophies.

From the early 1890s on, the major source of Leopold's Congo wealth was rubber. The Congo's equatorial rain forest was rich in wild rubber vines, and the inventions of the inflatable bicycle tire and the automobile set off a worldwide rubber boom. Troops from the King's private army came into village after village and held the women hostage in order to make the men go deep into the forest to gather their monthly quota of rubber. As demand for rubber soared, quotas rose. Men were forced to search for several weeks out of each month, sometimes having to walk for days to reach vines that were not tapped dry.

Many men were worked to death, while the women hostages were starved. Not surprisingly, the birth rate plummeted. Few able-bodied adults were left in the villages to harvest food, hunt, or fish. Famine spread. During two decades of widespread but unsuccessful rebellions more people died. Others fled the forced labor regime, but they had nowhere to go except to more remote parts of the forest, where there was little food or shelter. Years later, travelers would come upon their bones.

The greatest toll came as soldiers, as well as caravans of porters and large numbers of desperate refugees, moved throughout the country, bringing new diseases to people with no resistance to them. Many illnesses, particularly sleeping sickness, became far more lethal for people weakened by trauma and hunger. All these caused the death of millions. Once it became clear how much money the King was making, Leopold's hostage system was copied in the other rubber-rich territories nearby: French Equatorial Africa across the Congo River, the Cameroons, then owned by Germany, and northern Angola under the Portuguese. The results were equally catastrophic.

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... Leopold II, the king of the Belgians, enthusiastically followed press accounts of Stanley's travels. Leopold was frustrated that tiny Belgium possessed no colonies. As a constitutional monarch, he held little power at home. But he yearned to rule a rich colonial empire.

Leopold invited Stanley to Belgium and persuaded the now famous explorer to return to the Congo acting as the king's personal agent. Leopold instructed Stanley, under the guise of doing scientific explorations and combating slavery, to secretly establish monopoly control over the rich Congo ivory trade. To do this, Stanley had to get local clan chiefs to sign treaties turning over their lands and the labor of their people to Leopold ...

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King Leopold's "Heart of Darkness"

All the while I was reading it I was mentally re-writing it as a screenplay; it would make such an amazing motion picture.

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Originally posted by skdadl:

I've been haunted this weekend by an article in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: "In the Heart of Darkness," by Adam Hochschild (NYR 52, no. 15 [6 Oct. 2005]).

Hochschild is the author of a book on the imperialist rape of Congo, King Leopold's Ghost (1998), which I haven't read but now shall.

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If you think you are haunted now skdadl, you may find it a tough book to get through.

Added: On the other hand, it will very much help explain events in the Congo to this day.

[ 26 September 2005: Message edited by: Transplant ]

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Later in the article, Hochschild reviews various estimates of how many died by the 1920s. No one is sure, but the most authoritative estimates cluster around about half the population of Congo then, about ten million people.

And they didn't die easily, either. Forced labour, torture, murder ... I had never grasped the scale before, nor how deep the destruction of the country itself and its communities.

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Hochschild is the author of a book on the imperialist rape of Congo, King Leopold's Ghost (1998), which I haven't read but now shall.

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It took 40 years for the government of Belgium to apologize for the murder of the only elected Prime Minister of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. But a shorter time for the Belgian police officer. Gerard soete said, 'My wife knew nothing about it. I didn't speak to anyone about it for 18 years'

Malcolm X was deeply touched by the murder of Lumumba, which he named, the greatest African that ever lived. The popular African martyr confirmed Malcolm's claim in January, 1961; a week before his murder, he wrote his wife these words that are now gold plated and immortalized in the very palace of history. "No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. ...

The genie was clearly out of the bottle. A 1975 America Congressional inquiry concluded that CIA Director Allen Dulles ordered the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

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