## Metadata - Author: [[Adam Hochschild]] - Full Title: King Leopold's Ghost - Category: #books ## Highlights - “Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are . . . the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ([Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2112)) - the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status. Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem. ([Location 2387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2387)) - ” Heart of Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In fact, they don’t speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a “drone of weird incantations” and “a wild and passionate uproar”; they spout “strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language . . . like the responses of some satanic litany.” The true message of the book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued, is: “Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.” ([Location 2632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2632)) - Ever since Stanley shot his way down the Congo River and then promptly wrote a two-volume best-seller, ivory collectors, soldiers, and explorers had tried to imitate him—in books, and in thousands of articles for the geographical society journals and magazines about colonial exploration that were as popular in the late nineteenth century as the National Geographic is in the United States today. It was as if the act of putting Africa on paper were the ultimate proof of the superiority of European civilization. ([Location 2649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2649)) - the adventurers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion—the search for raw materials, labor, and markets—are all valid, but there was psychological fuel as well. ([Location 2712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2712)) - For Leopold, the rubber boom was a godsend. He had gone dangerously into debt with his Congo investments, but he now saw that the return would be more lucrative than he had ever imagined. The world did not lose its desire for ivory, but by the late 1890s wild rubber had far surpassed it as the main source of revenue from the Congo. ([Location 2852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2852)) - The competition Leopold worried about was from cultivated rubber, which comes not from a vine but a tree. Rubber trees, however, require much care and some years before they grow large enough to be tapped. The king voraciously demanded ever greater quantities of wild rubber from the Congo, because he knew that the price would drop once plantations of rubber trees in Latin America and Asia reached maturity. ([Location 2860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=2860)) - In 1897, he started to invest Congo state profits in a railway in China, eventually making big money on the deal. He saw that country as he had seen the “magnificent African cake,” a feast to be consumed, and he was as ready as ever to invite himself to the table. Of the route he hoped to get for his railway line he said, “This is the spine of China; if they give it to me I’ll also take some cutlets.” ([Location 3037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=3037)) - Officials erected a monument on the old caravan route that the rail line had replaced: three life-size metal figures of porters—one carrying a large box on his head, two collapsed in exhaustion beside him. The inscription read: THE RAILWAY FREED THEM FROM PORTERAGE. It said nothing about who made them become porters in the first place. ([Location 3073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=3073)) - A dog-lover himself, Casement later learned, to his horror, that Stanley had cut off his own dog’s tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat. ([Location 3431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=3431)) - At the time they met and shared their passion about the Congo in December 1903, Morel and Casement did not know that more than a dozen years later they would have something else in common. Each would be taken, in custody, through the gates of London’s Pentonville Prison. One would never emerge. ([Location 3645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=3645)) - In the Congo, as in Russia, mass murder had a momentum of its own. Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone’s life. Once under way, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. ([Location 4102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4102)) - On May 10, 1904, Stanley heard Big Ben strike in the night, and murmured, “How strange! So that is time! Strange!” Those were his last words. ([Location 4128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4128)) - Just as he had done in England, Morel smoothly shaped his message for different American constituencies. Most of his allies were progressive intellectuals like Mark Twain, but he was willing to sup with the devil to help his cause. He made shrewd use of Senator John Tyler Morgan, the former Confederate general who had helped to engineer U.S. recognition of Leopold’s Congo twenty years earlier. Morgan, still thundering away about sending blacks back to Africa so as to make an all-white South, wanted the abuses in the Congo cleaned up with no delay. Otherwise, how could black Americans be persuaded to move there? He hoped to see ten million of them “planted” in the Congo, he told Morel. With prodding from Morel, Morgan kept the issue of Congo atrocities alive in the Senate. ([Location 4246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4246)) - Here at last was something the rest of the world had seldom heard from the Congo: the voices of the Congolese themselves. On few other occasions in the entire European Scramble for Africa did anyone gather such a searing collection of firsthand African testimony. The effect on anyone who read these stories could be only that of overwhelming horror. However, no one read them. Despite the report’s critical conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission’s report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, nor was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not until the 1980s were people at last permitted to read and copy them freely. ([Location 4460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4460)) - The South African diamond king Cecil Rhodes, the one other white man whose boundless reach in Africa matched Leopold’s, once joked that he had declined an invitation to a meal at the palace because “each dinner accepted cost a province.” ([Location 4490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4490)) - As he was preparing to leave Belgium, someone criticized him for traveling all the way to Africa to defend a couple of “foreigners.” Unspoken, perhaps, was the fact that one of those foreigners was black. Vandervelde replied, “No man is a stranger in a court of justice.” ([Location 4617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4617)) - I do not agree with you that England and America are the two great humanitarian powers. . . . [They are] materialistic first and humanitarian only a century after.” ([Location 4721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4721)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - When the vaunted Matadi-Leopoldville railroad was rebuilt with a wider gauge and partly new route by forced labor between 1921 and 1931, more workmen on the project perished than had died when the line was laid in the 1890s. To the Africans throughout the Congo conscripted to work on these and other new enterprises, the Great Depression, paradoxically, brought lifesaving relief. ([Location 4895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4895)) - More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe. ([Location 4898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4898)) - When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo? The politics of empathy are fickle. Certainly one reason Britons and Americans focused on the Congo was that it was a safe target. Outrage over the Congo did not involve British or American misdeeds, nor did it entail the diplomatic, trade, or military consequences of taking on a major power like France or Germany. ([Location 4956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=4956)) - “Self-government is our right,” he declared. “A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself—than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours . . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel . . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.” Like far too few nationalists, Casement’s passion for freedom applied to all peoples, not just his own. For his time he was rare, perhaps unique, in proclaiming something in common between the struggle for freedom of Europeans like the Irish and of Africans like the Egyptians and the Congolese. His speech quickly entered the annals of anticolonialism, where it made a deep impression on a young man who would later help lead his own country to independence, Jawaharlal Nehru. ([Location 5020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=5020)) - And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history. ([Location 5165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=5165)) - In all of Africa, the colonizers wrote the school textbooks; together with widespread book-banning and press censorship, this accomplished the act of forgetting for the written record. In the Congo, throughout the halfcentury of Belgian rule that followed Leopold’s death, textbooks for Africans praised Leopold and his works as lavishly as Soviet schoolbooks praised Lenin. For example, a 1959 text for young Congolese soldiers studying to become NCOs in the Force Publique explained that history “reveals how the Belgians, by acts of heroism, managed to create this immense territory.” Fighting the “Arab” slavers, “in three years of sacrifice, perseverance and steadfast endurance, they brilliantly completed the most humanitarian campaign of the century, liberating the decimated and exploited peoples of this part of Africa.” As for critics, who go unnamed: “The criticisms emitted in the course of defamatory campaigns undertaken by jealous foreigners . . . were shown to amount to nothing.” ([Location 5258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=5258)) - The Congo reform movement at its best not only helped to shape and strengthen this set of beliefs; it went beyond them. Human rights groups today usually deal with results—a man in jail, a woman in servitude, a child without medicine. E. D. Morel talked, as well, about causes: above all, the theft of African land and labor that made possible Leopold’s whole system of exploitation. It was this radicalism, in the best and deepest sense of the word, that underlay the passion of the leading Congo reformers and that led Morel and Casement, after their battle for justice in the Congo, to Pentonville Prison. ([Location 5378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004KZOWEG&location=5378))