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At the turn of the last century, Belgium’s King Leopold craved a colony. All were
taken, it seemed, except central Africa. In the eyes of the colonizers, the interior was
literally uncharted territory, and the region’s natives were considered as much a
natural resource as the land and the animals — there for the taking. King Leopold in
particular lost as little time as possible securing and exploiting the land and enslaving
its people.
This story is just devastating. Hochschild doesn’t waste one
single word. I read about the central players and felt as if I’d met them or at least
understood something about them. The immediacy of the writing and the immensity of the
disaster make this a haunting book.
King Leopold was insatiable.
Eventually a human rights campaign protesting the abuses there slowly developed in Europe
and America. Mark Twain, Wilfred Thesiger, Arthur Conan Doyle all appear briefly to help
the protest. But it was journalist E.D. Morel who was the most successful and persistent
of the protesters. Although he had predecessors, it was Morel who drew the world’s
attention to the disaster in the Congo and kept it there.
Not that it
really saved anyone in Africa. The human toll on the region was staggering. Those whom
the Belgians didn’t kill outright were often starved, dislocated or infected with
disease. Although census reports for the region are imprecise at best, according to the
author’s best estimates, at the end of Leopold’s so-called reign “the population of the
territory dropped by approximately ten million people.”
In the end, the
First World War eclipsed it all. Leopold not only got away with pillaging the country
during his lifetime, but for all time too it seems. The Royal Museum of Central Africa in
Brussels Belgium contains “one of the world’s largest collections of Africana.” Yet,
Hochschild notes, “in none of the museum’s twenty large exhibition galleries is there
the slightest hint that millions of Congolese met unnatural deaths.” This he calls the
“politics of forgetting,” a phenomenon common to atrocites around the world. Hochschild
lays the case before us, but the tragedy remains officially ignored: no trials, no
reparations, no apologies, no justice. The sound you hear is that of silence. Read the
book and mourn.
