King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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 c...show more
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I reread the American-born writer Adam Hochschild’s 1999’s edition of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Hochschild’s monograph was responsible for putting the humanitarian crisis of the Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State and the first “great human rights movement” of the 20th Century (back cover of the monograph) back in the public imagination. Hochschild’s monograph is both a study of the cri...read more
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