Late in the 1890s, a young shipping executive named Edmund Dene Morel stands on the shipping docks of Antwerp, Belgium. Amidst the hustle and bustle of ships destined for the Congo, he meticulously records trade statistics for his employer, the shipping firm Elder Dempster. As Morel watches the sailors unload case after case of rubber and ivory from the incoming ships, he suddenly notices that the numbers don't match up. In these brief moments, standing on the dock in Antwerp, Morel finds himself amidst one of the largest slave-operations of this century.
In his new book, King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild '63 tells a haunting story that has been forgotten for nearly 85 years. Hochschild himself knew nothing of the murders that claimed 10 million lives in King Leopold's colony between 1890 and 1913, and only came across the information by chance. In a recent talk given at the Kennedy School in conjunction with the Human Rights Initiative, Hochschild said that he learned about the atrocities in the Congo from a "footnote in a book I was reading...written as part of the worldwide movement protesting atrocities in the Congo that had taken an estimated 5 to 8 million lives. Why hadn't I heard about this? The information was startling, and I became tremendously curious."
Hochschild's curiosity was indeed tremendous--King Leopold's Ghost is an extraordinarily dense work filled with Steamboat schedules, diary entries, calculations of the price of harvesting rubber from 1897 to 1904 in exact francs per kilo, and fantastical newspaper headlines from various countries. Yet Hochschild's carefully controlled pen never allows the data to dominate the story; he integrates the information into a fluid narrative style. This story is far from a series of dry laundry lists. Hochschild begins each chapter with a vivid character portrait that provides an accessible segue into the heart of the story.
And Hochschild is at no loss for characters in this story; one of the earliest we meet is Sir Henry Morton Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame. Stanley is hired by King Leopold II of Belgium--according to one of Leopold's best PR men, Henry Shelton Sanford--in order to create "a chain of posts or hospices, both hospitable and scientific, which should serve as means of information and aid to travelers...and ultimately, by their humanizing influences, to secure the abolition of the traffic in slaves." Stanley was the first to betray this rhetoric in service to Leopold by relentlessly pursuing the wealth of ivory and, later, rubber.
Leopold and Stanley were certainly not the only villains in this story; even the infamous Mr. Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness makes an appearance. Specifically, Hochschild has found no less than three men who could feasibly have served as models for the character of Kurtz. One of these men, Leon Rom, was station chief at Stanley Falls, on which Conrad's "Inner Station" may be based, and kept 21 heads as a decoration around his flower bed. But Hochschild makes an important distinction--he asserts that while Conrad's tale may have many levels of literary significance, it is also a book about a certain time and a certain place.
As the atrocities of the Congo mounted, the first major human rights initiative of this century was launched with Morel at the helm. Morel had a short but impressive list of predecessors in the movement to end the killings in the Congo, starting with George Washington Williams, the first African-American member of the Ohio state legislature (as well as a prominent minister, lawyer and journalist). In a letter written to the U.S. Secretary of State, Williams wrote that Leopold's Congo was "guilty of crimes against humanity," a full half-century before the same phrase was used in the Nuremberg trials.
Morel is the true hero of this story, and he dedicated nearly a decade of his life exclusively to this cause. He estimated that he wrote over 20,000 letters concerning the Congo as of 1908, and it is precisely this sense of passion which Hochschild illustrates so beautifully in his portrayal of Morel. As the story progresses into the second section of the book, "A King at Bay," it becomes as much a story of hope, perseverance and triumph as a story of death and destruction.
The efforts of Morel and others eventually pressured Leopold into giving up what had previously been solely his colony, but not before the King had personally made what would amount to a profit of $1.1 billion in today's currency. Yet, Hochschild does not provide a fairy tale ending of prosperity in the Congo. Instead, he stays true to his historical roots by presenting an accurate, if not uplifting, portrait of life in the Congo post-1913.
One fascinating aspect of Hochschild's story involves the sheer modernity of the crisis. Morel's constant coverage of the Congo in pamphlets, newspapers, mass meetings, novels and even church hymns amounted to a public relations campaign on an immense scale. And although Morel was successful, Leopold was his own best popularizer. He ordered that a copy of his propagandist pamphlet, The Truth about the Congo, be placed next to the Bible in the sleeping compartment of every luxury train in Europe.
The book's conclusion is particularly chilling as Hochschild explores how the mass murder of 10 million people came to be ignored for nearly a century. Historically this small portion of the book is just as fascinating as the unraveling of the killings and the movement itself and is written with just as much eloquence. Hochschild offers a multi-leveled rationale for this forgetting, but concludes that perhaps the chief cause lies in the beginnings of the First World War and the Allies' politically advantageous characterization of "Poor Little Belgium."
Meticulously researched and carefully crafted, Hochschild's book is an extraordinarily powerful account of one of the most horrific events of the 20th century. Without compromising the subject's integrity, he tells an unforget-table story layered with subtlety and unexpected tenderness.
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