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King Leopold's Ghost summary

Name: King Leopold's Ghost
Rating: 4.6 (60 reviews)
Author: Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

4.6 (60 ratings)

35 mins

What is King Leopold's Ghost about?

King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) is the devastating story of how one man – Leopold, King of the Belgians – developed a territory comprising one-thirteenth of the African continent into his personal fiefdom. While publicizing his supposedly benevolent intentions, Leopold enslaved vast numbers of people, forcing them to harvest ivory and rubber in appalling conditions. In all, an estimated ten million Africans died while he was the King-Sovereign of the Congo.

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King Leopold's Ghost
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What’s in it for me? A shattering account of one of the most horrifying sagas of the colonial era.

King Leopold wasn’t the first European colonialist to exploit the resources, and people, of another country.

But with the Congo, Leopold took the greed, exploitation, and violence of the era to a far more extreme and ghastly level than ever before. Over nearly thirty years of rule, he used slave labor to amass a personal fortune of over $1 billion in today’s dollars. Leopold forced African laborers to harvest vast quantities of ivory and rubber on land he expropriated from them. In the process, an estimated ten million Africans died. To put it bluntly, Leopold turned African bodies into money.

What's worse, Leopold wasn't the last to interfere in Congolese affairs for personal gain. In fact, his violent regime set the stage for countless subsequent horrors in the Congo, from the CIA’s assassination of democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 to the appalling conditions in Congolese mines that to this day keep diamonds on fingers, uranium in nuclear weapons, and coltan in iPhones.

A short warning: in their exposition of enslavement and colonization in the Congo, these blinks contain graphic descriptions of extreme violence and brutality.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Leopold used humanitarianism to mask his true motivations for colonizing the Congo;
why some African chiefs were open to bartering with human lives when European slavers showed up; and
how one Irish father’s weekend chores led to the deaths of millions of Africans.

From first contact, Europeans valued central Africa mainly for its profit-making potential.

In 1482, Portuguese naval captain Diogo Cão was watching the North Star disappear over the horizon. His ship was passing the equator, and was much farther south than any European had ever been before.

Suddenly, he saw the ocean had turned brownish-yellow. It was freshwater. Cão had stumbled upon the mouth of a massive, silty river, larger than anything he’d ever seen. He went ashore and erected a limestone pillar and cross, marking it as discovered for Portugal.

But Cão hadn’t ventured on this dangerous journey just for the sake of discovery. He was in search of treasure.

The key message here is: From first contact, Europeans valued central Africa mainly for its profit-making potential.

The great river, later known as the Congo, lay at the northern end of a wealthy African kingdom, a federation of two to three million people spread over three hundred square miles.

Nine years later, Portuguese monks located its capital and set up an embassy. It was the first interaction between Europeans and a black African nation. The ManiKongo, or king, was enthusiastic about the Portuguese’s fire-spouting weapons – guns, as we'd call them – and the effect they might have on a potential provincial rebellion.

For their part, the Portuguese were largely dismissive of Kongo culture – and they were scandalized by the nudity they saw. They admitted, though, that the kingdom was sophisticated, the most advanced on the west coast of central Africa. Arts and agriculture flourished, and there was an intricate political system that also involved enslavement. This was crucial: the preexistence of a form of slavery there meant that when Europeans showed up and offered to buy human beings, the kingdom’s chiefs were open to selling.

European development of the Americas had created a nearly insatiable market for African slave labor. Slaving fever gripped the Portuguese in the Congo, who generated vast profits by shuffling convoys of chained Africans onto ships. Enslaved peoples were marched to the coast, deprived of sufficient food and clean water on their miserable journey. The trails linking the ocean to the interior were soon littered with bleaching bones.

Europeans were also seized by the urge to explore. But the treacherous terrain meant that several centuries’ worth of visitors never made it up the great Congo River. Many expeditions set out and never returned.

The source of the river remained a mystery. The only thing that Europeans could be sure of was that Africa supplied valuable raw materials: elephant tusks and human bodies.

Stanley was brutal, ambitious, and narcissistic, traits that made him well-suited to Europe's colonization of Africa.

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.

Leopold wanted a colony, and he saw Stanley as the man who could help get him one.

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.

Leopold began squeezing the Congo for profit by any means possible.

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.

Leopold established a brutal slave colony while continually insisting his motives were altruistic.

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.

The horrors of the Congo inspired two canonical works, one of investigative journalism and the other of literature.

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.

As Leopold’s focus shifted from ivory to rubber, a grisly new chapter began in his Congo slave colony.

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.

As reports of ghastly crimes began to trickle out of the Congo, Leopold carefully maintained his public image.

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.

Morel’s outrage launched the first international human rights movement of the twentieth century.

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.

Roger Casement’s firsthand experience in the Congo catalyzed the Congo Reform 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.

As the Congo reform movement gained momentum, the tide began to turn against Leopold.

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's reign of terror finally came to an end, but the true extent of his crimes remains unknown.

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.

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About the Author

Adam Hochschild is an American writer and journalist whose work is focused mainly on issues of social justice and civil rights. He has won a number of awards for his numerous books, and King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Who should read King Leopold's Ghost?

Anyone too horrified by colonialism to look away
Those interested in little-known histories
Scholars of African history

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