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.
... a superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa ... Hochschild's sketches of these three individuals are vivid, and his depiction of what they and many others were confronting is masterly. It shows, above all, that during Leopold's rule in Africa from 1885 to 1908, and in the years on either side of it, the peoples of the Congo River Basin suffered, in Hochschild's words, 'a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.' This is not said lightly ... Hochschild is right to think of this story as a template of modernity, not only in terms of Leopold's public-relations skills but also in terms of the great distance between the violence unfolding in the Congo and its instigators in Europe. Hochschild puts this bluntly, without oversimplifying ... He also argues, convincingly, that the story of the Congo was 'the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera.'
... an absorbing and horrifying account of the traffic in human misery that went on in Leopold's so-called Congo Free State, and of the efforts of a handful of heroic crusaders to bring the atrocities to light. Among other things, it stands as a reminder of how quickly enormities can be forgotten ...
Hochschild's book is not simply a recital of horrors, though. It also tells the story of a few people who waged what can be seen in retrospect as the world's first human-rights campaign ...
Hochschild's gripping narrative, as dense as a novel and laden with subplots, shows among many other things the roots of the chaos and bloodshed ravaging the Congo today.
Adam Hochschild has taken most of the material for his new book from published sources; but about that I have no inclination to complain. Far from it. The findings of specialist historians have constantly to be ‘translated’ for the benefit of general readers, and Hochschild has done a valuable job in combining a biography of Leopold with a coherent, comprehensible account of how he realised his dream of a vast and ultimately profitable empire in the middle of Africa ... Unfortunately the book has faults which run almost as deep as its merits. Hochschild’s naive zeal for cliché is accompanied by lunges into a general metaphoric confusion ... He rebukes the Victorians for their overweening contempt for African society and culture, but it never occurs to him that his attitude to the Victorians might be tainted by an analogous philistinism and incomprehension. He refers slightingly to ‘European maps’ of the period which showed the interior of Africa as ‘blank’ – as if there were African maps or Moghul maps or Chinese maps which did any better ... Newton said that he saw as far as he did because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Here we have the spectacle of someone standing on the shoulders of giants and kicking them for their pains.
