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A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Mariner Books
October 1999
On Sale: October 1, 1999
384 pages
ISBN: 0618001905
EAN: 9780618001903
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa,
King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and
mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River.
Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted
its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed
its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly
cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic
efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first
great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in
which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of
Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the
haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions,
a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great
Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving
portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of
missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to
Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found
themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings
this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a
Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often
provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist
could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young
British shipping agent who went on to lead the international
crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the
Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London
gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington
Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence
of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into
the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat
officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the
duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power
and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy
of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the
West.
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