King Leopold's Ghost summary

Eventually, the source of the Congo River was discovered by a Welshman whose birth was recorded as that of “John Rowlands, Bastard.” He would spend the rest of his life trying to live down the shame he carried as a result. 

After a traumatic childhood in a workhouse, where he was subjected to sexual abuse, he signed on with a merchant ship. Landing in New Orleans, he changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley. He fought in the American Civil War – one of the few people to see combat on both sides. Then he became a journalist, and after getting the scoop on a British expedition against the Emperor of Abyssinia – modern-day Ethiopia – he took a permanent foreign correspondent job with the New York Herald. He was twenty-seven years old. 

The Herald tasked Stanley with searching for Dr. David Livingstone, a famous explorer obsessed with locating the source of the Nile. One man followed Stanley’s hunt with great interest: Leopold II, the 37-year-old King of the Belgians. Leopold spoke French, German, and English, but never bothered to learn Flemish, the unfashionable language spoken by more than half his subjects.

As a boy, Leopold had been an unmotivated scholar, with the exception of one subject: profit. He became fixated on the idea of having a colony of his very own, and endlessly badgered his ministers about it. His goal was singular: to get rich. He once complained to an advisor, “Belgium doesn’t exploit the world. It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.” He would soon make that happen.

For five years, Stanley was Leopold’s man in the Congo. He carved a rough track around the big rapids of the Congo River and moved more than 50 tons of supplies up the trail. Draft animals couldn’t survive the climate, so African porters were forced to do the heavy lifting. In many cases, people were worked literally to death. 

Leopold needed to create a European-style monopoly that would be legally defensible to the other colonial powers. His team of lawyers and bureaucrats came up with an arrangement that would grant his private company the right to act as a sovereign country when dealing with local chiefs. Now all he needed was for the chiefs to sign an agreement to that effect.

On May 29, 1885, the Congo Free State was formally proclaimed a corporate state, of which Leopold was the absolute monarch. That same day, Leopold issued a series of decrees. One stated that any land state officials deemed to be “vacant” was now his property, as were all products of the land, whether elephant tusks or villagers’ vegetables. 

To shore up his monopoly in the region, he shut out any other potential traders, deploying a private army to drive out any profit schemes of which he did not have a piece. All the while, he maintained publicly that he was working to improve the lives of people in the Congo.

George Washington Williams was a Black American pastor, lawyer, and historian. He went to the Congo in 1890 to assess it as a place where Black Americans could potentially settle, away from the racism and discrimination of the Jim Crow South. He made his way slowly upriver by steamboat, with plenty of time to process what he was seeing. 

What he found was not the benevolently ruled colony described by Stanley and Leopold, but a human rights atrocity. Instead of an antislavery crusader, Leopold was himself a slaver.

While Williams and Conrad were steaming down the Congo, John Dunlop was doing chores one morning in Belfast, Ireland. Tinkering with his son’s tricycle, he invented a device that would lead to new industries – and suffering – beyond anything he could have imagined. This device was the inflatable rubber tire. 

The industrial world quickly caught on, demanding vast quantities of rubber for tires, tubing, hoses, and telephone insulation. The price of rubber rose steadily through the 1890s. Nowhere did the boom have a more drastic impact on people’s lives than in the Congo.

In 1899, American missionary William Sheppard was sent into uncharted jungle to investigate the source of bitter interethnic fighting. What he found was beyond his wildest nightmares. He came upon a camp where, with the objective of preserving them, human hands were being smoked over a fire. There were 81 hands in total, all amputated from right arms. 

The hands were from the Kuba people, whose enemies had been incentivized by Congo Free State agents to collect the hands as proof of death. This was deliberate Congo Free State policy. For each cartridge issued to their mercenaries, officers demanded proof that the bullet hadn’t been wasted in hunting. They required right hands from bodies – whether the person was dead or alive.

On the Antwerp docks, as he oversaw the loading and unloading of ships on the Congo-Belgium line, Edmund Morel noticed two unsettling facts. First, in Antwerp, the ships were unloading vast quantities of rubber and ivory. Second, Belgium wasn’t sending anything to the Congo to pay for these items – except weapons and soldiers. Morel realized the only explanation was slave labor. 

Morel’s first step was to tell his boss. The company didn’t know what to make of this junior functionary telling them he’d discovered something terrible about their best customer. Morel’s superiors tried to silence him, offering him a raise and a promotion. In response, Morel quit. He started his own publication, with the goal of exposing the atrocities that were going on unchecked in the Congo. He was only 28 years old, but he was on the cusp of launching a major humanitarian movement. 

As soon as the British resolution was passed by the House of Commons, the British Foreign Office sent its consul to the Congo’s interior to investigate the allegations of Leopold’s brutality. The consul was Roger Casement, an Irishman with 20 years’ experience in Africa, who had been criticized by previous employers as being “too kind to the locals.”

Casement’s expedition into the interior took three and a half months. To avoid being dependent on Congo state authorities for transportation, he rented a steamboat. Traveling far upriver, he spent time at rubber camps and mission stations and sloshed through flooded forests to reach remote villages. His letters condemned the atrocities he witnessed in specific, angry terms. Among other horrors, he described hands and genitals being cut off corpses.

With the Congo reform movement well underway in England, Morel set his sights on the United States. 

In September 1904, he met with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He also won the support of powerful cultural figures Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, and several university presidents. He tailored his message to appeal to a wide range of audiences – from white supremacists who wanted Black Americans to leave the US for Africa, to an old woman born into slavery who wanted to donate her life savings to the cause. 

Leopold would accept only one alternative to personal control over the Congo: passing it on to Belgium. But he wasn’t just going to give away his colony. He would sell it. And he would make the buyers pay dearly, even if they were his own people. 

With its international reputation at stake, the Belgian government was forced to play ball with Leopold. But the king didn’t return the favor. He wouldn’t even show government representatives the balance sheet of the business he was forcing them to buy.