King Leopold's Ghost

In Chapter 8, Hochschild describes the bureaucracy of Leopold’s Congo, noting that “[m]ore than any other colony in Africa, the Congo was administered directly from Europe” (115). “At the lowest level,” however, “the king’s rule over his colony was carried out by white men in charge of districts and river stations throughout the vast territory” (116). The focus for Leopold was on “whatever could be quickly harvested” (117), and Hochschild describes him as being “like the manager of a venture capital syndicate today” (117), as he leased vast tracts of land to private companies in which “the state” (Leopold himself) owned half the shares, in addition to collecting “various taxes and fees” (117). He also used military force to deter any companies in which he was not a shareholder.

Leopold’s focus at this point (the early 1890s), Hochschild tells us, was gathering vast quantities of ivory, “bought” from Africans “if necessary—at gunpoint” (118), and on building the railroad that would surpass the long stretch of treacherous rapids on the Congo that lay between the Atlantic coast and the navigable stretch of the river that heads inland--so that everything need not be carried up to by porters on foot. “Moving dismantled steamboats, [for example,] to the upper section of the river was the most labor-intensive job of all: one steamboat could comprise three thousand porter loads.” (119). Porters were conscripted into service, treated poorly, and often died of starvation, exhaustion, and/or disease—that is, if they weren’t whipped to death by “a central tool of Leopold’s Congo”: the “chicotte—a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks.  Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more—not an uncommon punishment—were often fatal” (120).

Hochschild notes that “few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror” (121). He accounts for their lack of horror and empathy by citing race and the way that Europeans saw “blacks” as less than human. Hochschild also notes that because the violence was “sanctioned by the authorities” (121), it was significantly more difficult to “rebel” because it “meant challenging the system provided your livelihood” (121-122). He further points out that “a slight, symbolic distance” from the violence—achieved, for example, by having an African overseer carry out the whipping—helped Europeans to normalize and come to terms with the violence done to “the bodies of […] Africans” (122). The last explanation Hochschild offers is to assert that “when terror is the unquestioned order of the day, wielding It efficiently is regarded as a manly virtue” (123). Throughout this account, he makes refers to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany to support and illustrate his analysis.

Leopold also built a large African army called the Force Publique, to fight the significant resistance offered by “[m]ore than a dozen different ethnic groups” (124), such as the Yaka, the Chokwe, the Boa, the Budja, and the Sanga. There were also mutinies in the soldier ranks of the Force Publique. Much of the information about these rebellions comes from white witnesses, many of whom were missionaries in the Congo, spared by the rebels who were explicitly fighting “those whites who worked for the hated Congo state” (129).

Like the porters conscripted to work for expeditions circumventing the Congo rapids, and to build the railroad, many of the Force Publique’s soldiers were conscripted—kidnapped by or sold to the Force—rather than being willing volunteers. Hochschild offers an account of “Ilanga’s” experience to shed light on the reality of what it was “like to be captured and enslaved by the Congo’s white conquerors” (131). Whole villages were dragged from their homes, force-marched, starved, and murdered when they refused to go on. Babies were taken from their mothers’ arms and tossed by the side of the road. Children were kidnapped into “children’s colonies” so they could be trained into military service. Like the adults forced to work for the state, many of these children, “often over 50 percent” (135), died of starvation and disease. 

Hochschild also includes an account of Leopold’s “domestic troubles” (135) with his daughters, through whose marriages he meant to form royal alliances. When their marriages did not work out or they married someone whom Leopold felt was not good enough, he refused to speak to them.

Hochschild goes on to highlight how the Congo offered young white men who were not born into royal or even noble blood, “a place to get rich and wield power” (136)—a place to become “a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem” (136-137). In particular, he offers the example of Léon Rom, who went “to the Congo in search of adventure in 1886, at the age of twenty-five” (137), and quickly moved up in the ranks.

In Chapter 9, Hochschild focuses on Joseph Conrad, who first traveled to the Congo in 1890, right around the time when George Washington Williams was leaving it. Conrad was then Konrad Korzeiowski, a young Polish man who had “grown up with an image of Africa based on the hazy allure of the unknown” (140). He was apprenticed to a steamboat captain and spent six months in the Congo, by the end of which time “he canceled his contract and began the long journey back to Europe” (141).  According to Hochschild, three things made Conrad decide to quit the Congo: first, “he hit it off badly with an official of the company he was working for, which meant that he would not gain command of a steamer after all” (141-2); second, he got sick twice—with malaria and dysentery; and third, and perhaps most importantly, “he was so horrified by the greed and brutality among white men he saw in the Congo that his view of human nature was permanently change” (142). 

It took eight years for Conrad to write his famous book, Heart of Darkness, which is set in the Congo and was based on the many notes he took while there. Hochschild illustrates how Marlowe, the book’s narrator, is based on Conrad himself and his own experiences. He also discusses the historical figures upon whom Mr. Kurtz is based—“among them Georges Antoine Klein, a French agent for an ivory-gathering firm at Stanley Falls. […] Major Edmund Barttelot, the man whom Stanley left in charge of the rear column on the Emin Pasha expedition [… and] Arthur Hodister, famed for his harem of African women and for gathering huge amounts of ivory” (144-5). Hochschild asserts, however, that “Conrad’s legion of biographers and critics have almost entirely ignored the man who resembles Kurtz most closely of all […] the swashbuckling Captain Léon Rom of the Force Publique. It is from Rom that Conrad may have taken the signal feature of his villain: the collection of African heads surrounding Kurtz’s house” (145).

Hochschild calls Heart of Darkness “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature” (146), even though Conrad “thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned” (146) and notes that even though it is “laden […] with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa” (146-7). He points out that the “illusions” that “white men go about their rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives, bringing civilization, serving ‘the noble cause’ [are] embodied in the character of Kurtz” (147), through whose “intellectual pretensions, Conrad caught one telling feature of the white penetration of the Congo, where conquest by pen and ink so often confirmed the conquest by rifle and machine gun” (147). “It was as if,” he tells us, “the act of putting Africa on paper were the ultimate proof of the superiority of European civilization” (148).

Chapter 10 focuses on Leopold’s shift from ivory to rubber as his primary object of desire. It opens, however, with a return to Henry Morton Stanley, on his wedding day. On July 12, 1890, he married Dorothy Tennant, “the eccentric, high-society portrait painter who had previously rejected him” (150). Stanley’s biographer believes that this marriage was never consummated, given Stanley’s intense fear of intimacy and Tennant’s own “powerful neuroses” (151). Stanley’s exploring days were done, but he had “reached the upper class at last” (151); he was elected to Parliament and received a knighthood, and he still traveled—giving speeches about “sloth, socialism, ‘general mediocrity,’ labor unions, Irish nationalism, the eight-hour working day, women journalists, and American hotel servants” (152).

The chapter then shifts focus to William Sheppard, a black American missionary born in Virginia in 1865, who arrived in the Congo in May, 1890, at the same time as Joseph Conrad, who “began walking up the trail to Stanley Pool eleven days after the Americans” (153). Sheppard was “the first black American missionary in the Congo” (154), and he thrived there, perhaps because, as “his writings show” (156), he had “an empathetic, respectful curiosity about African customs radically different from the harsh, quick judgments of someone like Stanley” (156). He was “particularly impressed with the Kuba” (156) and was “the first foreigner to reach the town of Ifuca, seat of the court of the Kuba king, Kot aMbweeky II” (156). Sheppard’s book, Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo, is, Hochschild notes, “a valuable, firsthand look at one of the last great African kingdoms unchanged by European influence” (157); by the turn of the century, the Force Publique had “finally reached and looted the Kuba capital” (158). 

“The raid on the [Kuba] capital,” Hochschild observes, “was triggered by a discovery far away”: John Dunlop’s discovery of “a practical way of making […] an inflatable rubber tire” (158). Dunlop’s discovery set off a “worldwide rubber boom” (159), which was a “godsend” (159) for Leopold, given that half of the Congo territory was filled with wild rubber vines. Rubber is the coagulated sap of the rubber vines, and to get it, “you had to slash the vine with a knife and […] collect the slow drip of thick, milky sap. You could make a small incision to tap the vine, or—officially forbidden but widely practiced—cut through it entirely, which produced more rubber but killed the vine. Once the vines near a village were drained dry, workers had to go ever deeper into the forest until, before long, most harvesters were traveling at least one or two days to find fresh vines” (160-1). Leopold’s demand for rubber was insatiable, and the “workers” referred to in this passage were coerced into finding rubber: their loved ones were kidnapped by the Force Publique and only sold back to them after the minimum amount of rubber was submitted. Hochschild compares the hostage-taking methods of the Congo to those of “other forced-labor regimes” (162), like the Soviet gulags, which also “operated by quotas” (162).

Hochschild then returns to William Sheppard, who, in 1899, traveled “into the bush […] to investigate the source of the fighting” (164) and the stream of refugees to his mission caused by the rubber trade and indigenous resistance to it. During this trip, Sheppard “stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold’s rubber system […] the severing of hands” (165). As Hochschild explains, each cartridge of ammunition issued to the soldiers of the Force Publique had to be accounted for; European officers “demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not ‘wasted’ in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse” (165). 

The chapter ends with a description of the “sadists,” like Léon Fiévez, known to the Africans in his area as “the Devil of the Equator” (166), who “had a field day” (166) with “‘humanitarian’ ground rules that included cutting off hands and heads” (166).

Chapter 11 opens with an account of Leopold’s continued dreams for colonial expansion, which include his offer to send Congolese troops to any troubled spot on the globe, such as Armenia or Crete or China, where he had invested some of his profits in a railroad and land. The chapter then shifts focus to the building of the railroad in Congo, which was “a modest engineering success and a major human disaster” (171), given the exorbitantly high death toll among its workers—both African and European. Leopold had more trouble, however, handling the foreign missionaries in the Congo—such as William Sheppard and E.V. Sjöblom—who often criticized his regime and protested the atrocities and injustices they witnessed. When a white man was killed by a Congo state officer in 1895, Leopold appointed six missionaries to the Commission for the Protection of the Natives, none of whom were stationed in areas where rubber was being harvested, to prove that he “‘squarely faced the facts of the situation’” (174). This ineffectual commission was enough to squelch criticism until the late 1890s.At that point, Edmund Morel, “began to uncover an elaborate skein of fraud” (179) while working for Elder Dempster, a Liverpool-based shipping company. As Hochschild explains, there were three keys to Morel’s discovery. One was that arms cargo was being shipped to the Congo on a regular basis; another was that the amount of rubber and ivory coming into port did not match the numbers provided by the Congolese government; and the third was that very little of what was being shipped back to the Congo could be used for trade. Since the Congolese people were not allowed to use money, Morel concluded that they were not being paid for the ivory and rubber they were being forced to produce. From this, Morel deduced the fact of slave labor. This chapter, and Part I, ends with Hochschild’s assertion that, “With this brilliant flash of recognition by an obscure shipping-company official, King Leopold II acquired his most formidable enemy” (181).