Slaughter rule

Belgium's King Leopold ran the Congo like a prison camp -- until international pressure forced him out.

by Harvey Blume

KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: THE PLUNDER OF THE CONGO AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY'S FIRST GREAT HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT, by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages, $26.

Before becoming king of Belgium in 1865, Leopold II was skinny -- "pencil-thin," according to Adam Hochschild -- and ravenous for colonies. King Leopold, by contrast, grew farcically fat in the decades after he took a giant bite out of Africa in 1884. He called this chunk of continent the Congo Free State -- the precursor to Zaire -- and lived lavishly off its proceeds. The colony's abundant ivory and wild rubber translated into yachts for Leopold, art collections, mistresses, palatial hideaways, and a Falstaffian girth based on unrestricted gourmet intake. The Congo made him the largest landowner on earth -- and, when word leaked out about the methods he used to obtain his wealth, the most notorious. As one horrified American visitor charged in 1890, Leopold was guilty of nothing less than "crimes against humanity."

Leopold's regime shocked witnesses into the kind of language 20th-century observers apply to the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. And in King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild -- the author of The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994) and The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey (1990) -- highlights the links between Leopold's misrule and such subsequent regimes. He depicts Leopold not only as a rogue colonialist but as the 20th century's first mass murderer -- and the first to be confronted by an international protest movement.

Leopold's regime differed from those of fellow colonialists, such as Queen Victoria and the Kaiser, in that the Congo belonged to him personally rather than to his people. It wasn't only that the Belgian populace had little interest in joining in, and getting mangled by, the colonial feeding frenzy over Africa. It was also that Leopold had positioned himself to rule the Congo by sponsoring explorations (such as that undertaken by H.M. Stanley in 1879) to that largely unmapped area of the globe, and by underwriting lobbyists in the relevant capitals to promote his claims. When England, France, and Germany, among others, convened in Berlin in 1885 to settle questions pertaining to the colonization of Africa, none of the great powers was prepared to award the Congo to any of the others. Granting the Congo to Leopold, the ruler of a small, unthreatening nation, seemed the logical solution -- for everyone, that is, except the Congolese.

Put simply, Leopold's crime consisted of impressing as many Congolese as possible into forced labor and requiring them to turn in quotas of rubber and ivory, with hideous consequences, including mutilation, if they failed. Photographs (some of them reproduced in King Leopold's Ghost) of men, women, and children whose hands had been lopped off were among the most damning pieces of evidence adduced against Leopold, and the most difficult for even this masterful spin doctor to explain away. According to Hochschild, Leopold's rule resulted in a decrease of the Congo's population by 10 million people, a number difficult to assimilate unless we remember that the king ran the colony like nothing less than a gulag.

The Congo reform movement began in the 1890s with reports from missionaries, many of them American, whose access to the territory was guaranteed by the Berlin Conference. It culminated in a report by Roger Casement to the British Parliament in 1903 damning Leopold, and was held together throughout by the journalist Edmund Morel, who brought the likes of Booker T. Washington, Arthur Conan Doyle (who contributed The Crime of the Congo), and Mark Twain (who wrote King Leopold's Soliloquy) into the movement. In 1908, international pressure, galvanized by the Congo reform movement, compelled Leopold to cede control of the Congo to the Belgian parliament. In Hochschild's view, the work of the Congo reform movement prefigured that of Amnesty International by articulating a language of human rights, scrupulously documenting abuses, and functioning, thereby, as a sort of global conscience.

The weaknesses of King Leopold's Ghost have to do with occasional lapses of narrative energy and at least one far too literal interpretation. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, set in the Congo Free State, is a text with which all writers on the subject must come to terms, but it is unlikely that Conrad meant Kurtz's resonant "The horror! The horror!" to be taken literally as a statement about Leopold II, as Hochschild asserts.

But this is a minor caveat. King Leopold's Ghost ably reconstructs the human rights situation with which the century began and puts it in the context of colonialism. Hochschild asks whether, by depicting Leopold's regime as an anomaly, the colonial powers prevented his misrule from reflecting on their own dubious colonial practices. Beyond that, Hochschild encourages us to ask whether, in the decades since Leopold and the Congo reform movement, our ability to prevent atrocities has kept pace with our ability to perpetrate them. By raising such questions, this book will serve as a more legitimate end-of-millennium marker than many of the volumes soon to be competing for that status.

Harvey Blume is the coauthor of Oto Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (St. Martin's, 1992).