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Title: King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild ISBN: 0-618-00190-5 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (118 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An absorbing and horrifying book!
Comment: One of the best indictments of colonialism that I have ever read, King leopold's Ghost is obsensively a book about power and greed.
Leopold, a King of a small country with very limited powers, decides that he desperately needs to find a colony where he can reign supreme. He finally discovers Central Africa, a place that hasn't been gobbled up by the other colonizing powers, and claims it for his own. What ensues is one of the most brutal subjegations in recorded history. King Leopold's reign in the Congo was so vicious that even the other colonial powers of the day had to condemn him. This book is the story of a man that was so greedy- even the pretext of humanitarian aims were summarily ignored during his rule.
One of the things I liked most about this book is that it deflates the hero status of people like Henry Morton Stanley- an insecure man who shot Africans for sport. In his place, Hochschild has given us people like E.D. Morel, William Sheppard, Roger Casement and Hezekiah Shanu to look up to. People who tried to make a difference when it wasn't popular to do so.
This book is a very sad story of how the ego of one puny despot lead to the deaths of millions.
Informative, honest and well written- I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Deepest Darkest Africa, and Europe
Comment: This is a very informative and moving history on a mostly forgotten low point (among many low points) of European colonialism. Tiny Belgium and its unhinged, ineffective monarch King Leopold yearned for an overseas colony. Leopold got his own fiefdom in the Congo Territory, and drained the area of its wealth and people, lining his own pockets in the process. Of course the Congo itself got none of the proceeds, and even the nation of Belgium itself got very little as Leopold hoarded the money for himself and lavished it on mistresses and cronies. During this period the Congo became one of the most gruesome places on earth, as a command economy of ivory and rubber harvesting led to the deaths of millions of native Africans and the torture and hardship of many more. Hochschild ably documents this gruesome history and brings much-needed praise to the worldwide movement to bring attention to the Congo tragedy, a humanitarian effort that was quite unique for its time.
In the process Hochschild also brings necessary attention to the mostly forgotten heroes of the movement, like the grass-roots British whistleblowers E.D. Morel and Roger Casement, and the remarkable black American activists William Sheppard and George Washington Williams. However, in several places the author's historical research becomes bogged down in attempted character sketches of all the figures mentioned above, while the tail end of the book unloads a lot of guilt-tripping about how the world should remember the victims of this and other holocausts. This is already plainly evident to the reader, so such appeals just become tiresome. Another issue is Hochschild's frequent over-analysis of the book "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, which was a fictionalized eyewitness account of these atrocities. But despite those weaknesses, this is still a moving account of the worst crimes of colonialism and their continuing effects on world history.
Rating: 5
Summary: 10 Million Cheers for Colonialism?
Comment: Less than 50 years after agents of King Leopold had murdered, raped, tortured, mutilated, and brutalized half of the population of the Congo, Congolese schoolchildren were taught from Belgium drafted textbooks that Leopold was the benevolent father figure of their country. That is the definition of revisionist history, yet books like this one are more likely to be attacked as being revisionist. Hochschild has written a history that reads with the ease of a newspaper about a subject that has been buried in the annals of mis-history. 10 million Africans were killed for the enrichment of one man and his partners and yet most people have never heard of this story! That this genocide is virtually unknown to most people is a sad reminder of how much injustice has been perpetuated upon Africans over the centuries that has been "forgotten." Among the more fascinating aspects of this book are the profiles of the leaders of the human rights movement, white and black, who at the turn of the century showed super-human courage and integrity in fighting against political and journalistic malfeasance, bribery, and significant risks to their own lives in order to expose to the world the magnitude of the Belgium atrocities committed in the Congo. Dinesh D'Souza, to whom my title refers, is among those who seek to deny or downplay the crimes committed by or for colonialists. Hopefully this book will cast too bright a light for such distortions of the truth to prevail. An enlightening book that I highly recommend.
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Title: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch ISBN: 0312243359 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo by Michela Wrong ISBN: 0060934433 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 28 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad ISBN: 0486264645 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 July, 1990 List Price(USD): $1.50 |
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Title: Scramble for Africa... by Thomas Pakenham ISBN: 0380719991 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 December, 1992 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa by Bill Berkeley ISBN: 0465006426 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 05 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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