A century before the campaign to support Darfur and the anti-Apartheid struggle of the 1980s there was the Congo, an international humanitarian movement propelled by celebrity endorsements (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain) and stoked by graphic images of the atrocities that happened there, which horrified and outraged and inspired action. Adam Hochschild tells this largely forgotten story with skill, passion and authority.
Three characters dominate the storyline: Belgian King Leopold II and his two bête noires, the former shipping clerk E.M. Morel and the British consular agent Roger Casement. (The intrepid and widely celebrated but deeply flawed and quirky explorer Henry Morton Stanley makes a strong showing, too.) Leopold, Morel and Casement make for a fascinating trio. So fascinating, in fact, that often couldn’t help wondering if the sketches Hochschild provides are more caricature than authentic biographical profile.
Leopold, in the author’s telling of the story, is a psychopath. There is no other word for it. He ascribes to the Belgian king a diabolical conspiracy of epic proportions. He claims that Leopold carefully and deliberately duped the world community into recognizing his personal suzerainty over an enormous swath of Central Africa encompassing the basin of the great Congo River not as a conquering imperialist, but as a benevolent patron dedicated to uplifting and protecting the natives, promoting Christianity, ending the Arab slave trade, and dedicated to economic growth via international free trade. It was all a sham, Hochschild says. The kind was “an illusionist.” Far from the selfless humanitarian he professed to be, he was in fact a shrewd, calculating, rapacious monster, a megalomaniac bent on extracting from the helpless natives as much wealth as could be driven out of them by fear, intimidation, torture and the dreaded hippo hide chicotte whip. At first it was ivory (the object of Mr. Kurtz’s obsession in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” a story that Hochschild stresses is a true-to-life depiction of life in the Congo in the 1890s and not a parable as many literary critics have claimed). But then, with Dunlap’s invention of the inflatable tire, it was rubber, which could be harvested immediately but with great difficulty from the natural rubber vines that were found all over the Congo rainforest, that allowed Leopold an enormously lucrative opportunity to exploit before the new rubber tree plantations around the world could mature and glut the market with a cheaper product.
What troubled me with this aspect of the story is that Hochschild attributes to Leopold such horrible motives and often cites such damning evidence (e.g. “I will give them my Congo, but they have no rights to know what I did there”) but nothing is footnoted and there is no incontrovertible evidence that he knowingly and deliberately ran a terror regime. Indeed, Leopold never even visited the Congo (and neither did his chief antagonist, E.M. Morel). I have no doubt that the atrocities Hochschild describes with such cringing clarity are true; I’m just not convinced that Leopold could be convicted in a modern court with the material the author presents. Yes, the king was a bad man in many ways: a lecher who kept a teenage prostitute as his mistress when he was in his 70s, who disinherited his daughters, who extracted vast riches from the Congo but who refused to repay the generous loans he took from his Belgian government. But did he personally direct and promote a regime that tortured, took women and children hostages to ensure quotas were met, that lopped off the hands of anyone who resisted them, all in an effort to boost the rubber harvest? Probably, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.
So what was the upshot of Leopold’s 23-year-rule in the Congo (1885-1908)? Hochschild claims it led to a 50% reduction in the native population – or roughly 10 million deaths – and resulted in over $1 billion of profits in modern dollars directly into Leopold’s pockets.
If Leopold was evil incarnate, the two heroes of the narrative, Morel and Casement, were giants among men. Not infallible by any means: Morel could be domineering and egocentric; Casement could be self righteous and unstable. But they were both skilled public relations and fund raising experts who were perceptive, indefatigable, and deeply committed opponents of Leopold’s regime in the Congo. A reign, it must be noted, that was even by Hochschild’s own admission, no more bloody or exploitative than the French and German occupied territories adjacent to the Belgian Congo. The campaign that Morel led almost single-handedly since its founding in 1898, the Congo Reform Association, and which was buoyed by the authoritative and explosive investigative consular reports supplied by Casement, was one of the greatest and most successful humanitarian campaigns of the twentieth century. As Hochshild writes, “Almost never has one man, possessed of no wealth, title, or official post, caused so much trouble for the governments of several major countries.”
The post-Congo phases of their careers are especially notable. Morel emerged as the leading voice in the anti-war movement in England during WWI, earning a six-month hard labor sentence and losing many of his friends and former benefactors because of it, but who emerged as a hero to the Left and the new Labour Party, culminating in his election to Parliament in 1922 over a former Cabinet minister named Winston Churchill. Casement, on the other hand, turned strident Irish nationalist, collaborated with the Germans during WWI, was captured after a foolhardy landing from a German submarine on an Irish beach and was subsequently hung for his traitorous acts, the first Knight to be so executed in centuries. His homosexuality was also revealed after he was captured and investigated, which further damaged his reputation.
In sum, “King Leopold’s Ghost” is an excellent and lively narrative on a long forgotten story that absolutely deserves to be re-told.
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