How To Build and Destroy an Empire

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 122
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Belgium’s King Leopold II aspired to become one of Europe’s great powers, although Belgium, a loose regional federation, didn’t exist before 1830. Becoming a colonial empire, on par with Britain and France, allowed Leopold a quick, cost-effective way to achieve greatness. It certainly helped that he didn’t care who he hurt, and saw native peoples on colonized land as a treatable nuisance. So he set eyes on the Congo.

Journalist Adam Hochschild previously covered South Africa’s waning apartheid government, a beat that put him in contact with CIA and MI6 officials and their off-the-record stories. One such story involved the CIA’s multiple slapstick efforts to overthrow Patrice Lumumba, the only democratically elected leader of the post-colonial Congo. Further investigation led Hochschild to a colonial history that, in the 1990s, was largely forgotten in Europe and America.

Using primary source documents, including eyewitness testimony and elaborate government and business records, Hochschild reconstructs Leopold’s process. Europeans in the 19^th Century desperately wanted to see themselves as heroes. They bankrolled adventurers l ke Henry Morton Stanley, whose wanderings in Africa’s interior were polished to conceal his actual violent tendencies. Europeans also moralistically raged against Arab slave trading, despite having barely ended the Triangle Trade themselves.

Leopold managed his age’s three great influences—moralism, adventurism, and industrialism—to build support for Belgian intervention in Africa. Except not in Belgium, which cared more about building a reliable domestic state. So Leopold sold bonds overseas, got lucrative British and Prussian loans, and mortgaged royal properties to subsidize his plans. They paid off, too, as Stanley inked treaties with Congolese nations that gave Leopold massive territorial control.

Territory that, incidentally, he never visited.

But, burdened with debt obligations and international prestige, Leopold quickly needed to show profits. He hired agents who cared little for rules, armed them with newfangled carbine rifles, and set quotas. This turned out to be an excellent formula for lucrative export markets, provided nobody cared about the human cost to native peoples. Several state agents made a mint, while Leopold became fabulously rich. Natives fled the bloodshed.

Adam Hochschild

Then as now, money and property became their own justifications. Agents of the state corporation didn’t care whom they hurt, provided they got paid. Those forced to do the actual work never saw the rewards, and indeed were punished severely for even minor noncompliance; casual maiming was common, and company soldiers destroyed entire villages when quotas weren’t met. Africans lived as slaves in their ancestral homeland.

Not everything in Hochschild’s telling is bleak, though. As Leopold’s hybrid of military, government, and capitalism grew to unprecedented power and violence, others began resisting. While many state agents reveled in violence, others were sickened, and carried their stories back to Europe. One such disillusioned state agent was Joseph Conrad, whose novella Heart of Darkness continues telling the resistant story long after Leopold’s colony ended.

Two other resisters were E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. A journalist and a state bureaucrat respectively, they carried news of Leopold’s brutal government to the very countries that owned Congolese bonds and debt instruments. Leopold attempted a PR campaign in Europe and America to assure Whites everywhere of Belgium’s moral valor. But Morel and Casement shone lights on how Leopold’s administration governed, and who got rich of African labor. World sentiment finally turned.

Hochschild writes history without moral sentiment. Those who resisted Leopold’s imperial experiment often had their own racist lenses, and sometimes preserved power as much as they resisted it. While Leopold’s Congo may have been exceptionally violent, Morel and Casement overlooked British and French abuses in adjacent colonies. And Conrad, though conscious of the damage empire caused, never had courage enough to abandon his privileges.

Of all problems in writing this history, though, Hochschild acknowledges the greatest himself: Africans left few primary sources. Even oral history wasn’t coordinated until the survivors of Leopold’s terror were aged and vanishing. Congo historiography winds up being a heavily European narrative; Africans become somebody Europeans speak with, or speak for, not autonomous individuals who speak for themselves. History is as much a matter of what’s missing as what’s known.

Despite these yawning gaps, Hochschild’s history is thorough and enlightening. It’s also timely. When it appeared in 1998, it was revolutionary and even dangerous, but Hochschild’s broad themes have become intrinsic to the modern narrative of resistance. Because, although company agents aren’t massacring villages or cutting off hands, the underlying parallels are way too visible. History is never about the dead; it’s about we who live in the aftermath.