Review by Choice Review
The Republic of the Congo (known until recently as Zaire) experienced an appalling era of tyranny, corruption, exploitation, and torture under the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In castigating Mobutu the West seems to forget the extent to which this immense country was conceived in treachery and violence by a Belgian king. Hochschild provides a lucid and passionate history of Leopold's ironically named Congo Free State and the movement that unveiled the atrocities committed behind a pose of humanitarian goodwill. The counterpoint struggle to conceal and reveal is powerful. Leopold's forces pillaged both resources and people; millions died in this avaricious genocide. In outlining Leopold's use of remote control to devastate this area, the author offers a vivid morality play involving two of the 20th-century's principal themes: the expansion of global investment and the human rights movement. Hochschild may not have discovered any new archival sources for his study, but the genius of this book lies in the author's ability to synthesize and dramatize. The result makes for compelling reading. All levels. J. A. Works Jr.; University of Missouri--St. Louis
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
The intersection of the boundless egos of Henry M. Stanley (the writer and explorer famous for having found Dr. David Livingstone) and King Leopold II of Belgium resulted in the colonizing of the Congo region of Africa and a period of slave labor, torture, and mass murders to rival the Holocaust. Hochschild magnificently renders a period in the 1880s little acknowledged in history, and includes the perspective of black Americans and black Africans, a perspective not often included in history books. Under the subterfuge of civilizing Africans and saving them from Arab slave traders (with no mention of the recently halted European slave trade), Leopold enlisted Stanley in colonizing a region 76 times the size of Belgium for his own personal benefit. This is a finely detailed account of the arrogance and hypocrisy of Europeans of the era in carving up Africa, appropriating land and resources in the name of humanitarian and scientific advancements. Hochschild's impressively researched history records the roles of the famous and obscure, missionaries, journalists, opportunists, politicians, and royalty in this long-forgotten drama.--Vanessa Bush
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world. 30 illustrations. Agent: Georges Borchardt. First serial rights to American Scholar. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost, LJ 2/15/94) provides a powerfully written, deeply researched, and acutely analyzed exposé of the European scramble for Africa. He focuses on King Leopold's reign of terror in the Belgian Congo and the unswerving efforts by human rights activists (Sir Roger Casement, E.D. Morel, and others) and the Congo Reform Association to raise awareness of the enslavement, mutilation, and murder of millions of Congolese. Hochschild's strengths lie in the fiery eloquence of his indictment of King Leopold's atrocities and his treatment of the human dimension. His account of the mutilation of Africans makes especially grim reading: "1308 severed hands were turned over to the District Commissioner in a single day." The notes and bibliography are thorough and should be of great help to anyone wanting to engage in further research. This deserves widespread reading by scholars and the general public interested in colonialism in Africa. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Lib., Long Beach (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Journalist-memoirist Hochschild (Finding the Trapdoor, 1997, etc.) recounts the crimes against humanity of Belgium's King Leopold II, whose brutal imperialist regime sparked the creation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the first major human-rights protest movement of this century. Hell-bent on building grandiose state monuments and palaces and on swelling royal coffers, Leopold sought to carve out of central Africa a fiefdom 76 times the size of Belgium. Cagily inveighing against local slave traders and inviting Christian missionaries to spread the Gospel, he transformed a philanthropic organization temporarily under his aegis into the Congo, his own personal colony. He plundered the Congo's bounty of rubber, instituted forced labor, and reduced the population by half (an estimated 10 million deaths from 1880 to 1920). To achieve compliance with rubber-gathering quotas, soldiers in the Force Publique, Leopold's colonial army, committed mass murder, cut off hands, severed heads, took hostages, and burnt villages. His misrule remained undetected for more than a decade because he won US recognition of his claim to the Congo, used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to swindle chiefs out of land, and concealed the colony's budget. If Hochschild depicts Leopold not as a Hitleresque madman but as a liberal bogeyman ready to sacrifice all for the bottom line, he profiles the monarch's opponents in all their complicated humanity. These include George Washington William, an African-American journalist prone to exaggerating his own credentials but not Leopold's atrocities; Roger Casement, a British consul knighted for a damning Congo report, then later executed for participating in Ireland's 1916 rebellion, and exposed as a homosexual; and E.D. Morel, a journalist who, though committed to imperialism, led a decade-long campaign that succeeded in forcing Leopold to turn the Congo over to the citizens of Belgium. A searing history of evil and the heroes who exposed it. (31 b&w illustrations)
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