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King Leopold’s Ghost : A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa -Adam Hochschild
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KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST : A Story of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa

Adam Hochschild
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM29.00

A Provocative Study Of King Leopold II of Belgium’s Genocidal Plunder Of The Congo In 1880s, & Reveals The Heroic Efforts That led To The First International Human Rights Movement

ISBN 9780358212508
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher MARINER BOOKS
Publication Date 03 Mar 2020
Pages 416
Weight 0.42 kg
Dimension 20.5 × 13.5 × 3 cm
Retail Price RM93.01
Availability: 1 in stock

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★★ A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist ★★
★★ A New York Times Notable Book ★★
 
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild is an account of the colonisation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium and the humanitarian disaster that followed. Hochschild offers a detailed account of the way in which Leopold turned a vast area around the Congo River into his own personal empire and thereby offers a very interesting insight into the nature of empire building in the 19th century. Therefore , It is a detailed account of the atrocities committed under King Leopold II’s rule in the Congo Free State during the late 19th centuries.
 
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.
 
The book focuses on King Leopold II of Belgium and his exploitation of the Congo region for his personal financial gain. Leopold’s colonization of the Congo resulted in widespread human rights abuses, including forced labor, brutal treatment of the Congolese people, and the deaths of millions due to starvation, disease, and violence.
 
The book begins with a brief history of the Congo region, from its early inhabitants to the arrival of European explorers in the 19th century. Hochschild then describes how Leopold II, who was eager to expand Belgium’s colonial empire, convinced other European powers to allow him to establish a personal colony in the Congo. Once in control of the Congo, Leopold set about exploiting its resources, particularly rubber. He forced the Congolese people to work long hours in terrible conditions, and he often used violence to enforce his will.
 
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. King Leopold’s Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains.
 
It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.


Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold.
 
Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold’s Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo—too long forgotten—onto the conscience of the West.
 
The book was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013 more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages.
 
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, privately controlled and owned the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908. In 1908, the area was annexed by Belgium as a colony known as the Belgian Congo. Leopold used his personal control to strip the country of vast amounts of wealth, largely in the form of ivory and rubber.
 
These labor-intensive industries were serviced by slave labor, and the local peoples were forced to work through various means, including torture, imprisonment, maiming and terror. Christian missionaries and a handful of human rights organizers internationally publicized these atrocities. Slowly, various nations, including the United Kingdom and the United States of America, began to object to Leopold’s tyranny with the result that the country’s administration was transferred to Belgium. Little changed inside the country, however, until the ivory and rubber were exhausted.
 
European interest in the African continent can be traced back to the late 1400s, when the European explorer Diogo Cão sailed the west coast and saw the Congo River. By the 1860s, most African coastal regions were claimed as colonies of European powers, but the vast interior of the continent remained unknown to Europeans.
 
Henry Morton Stanley, a complicated man and renowned explorer, ventured through much of that unknown during a descent of the Congo River. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and focused upon claiming the interior of Africa—the only unclaimed sizable geographic area.
 
Moving within the European political paradigm existing in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State. His rule of the vast region was based on tyranny and terror. Under his direction, Stanley again visited the area and extracted favorable treaties from numerous local leaders. A road and, eventually, a rail line were developed from the coast to Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa).
 
A series of militarized outposts were established along the length of the Congo River, and imported paddle wheelers commenced regular river service. Native peoples were forced to gather ivory and transport it for export. Beginning c. 1890, rubber—originally manufactured from coagulated sap—became economically significant in international trade.
 
The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory supplies to the burgeoning rubber market. Slavery, exploitation and the reign of terror continued and even increased. Meanwhile, early missionaries and human rights advocates such as Roger Casement, E. D. Morel, George Washington Williams, and William Henry Sheppard began to circulate news of the widespread atrocities committed in the Congo under the official blessing of Leopold’s administration. Women and children were imprisoned as hostages to force husbands and fathers to work.
 
Flogging, starvation and torture were routine. Murder was common—tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet issued. Rape and sexual slavery were rampant. Workers failing to secure assigned quotas of rubber were routinely mutilated or tortured. Administration officials so completely dehumanized local peoples that at least one decorated his flower garden with a border of severed human heads. News of these atrocities brought slow, but powerful, international condemnation of Leopold’s administration leading, eventually, to his assignment of the country to Belgian administration.
 
In 1908, Belgium annexed the Congo as a colony and proclaimed a general sea-change in administrative policy. Actual change, however, was nearly imperceptible. The era of World War I shifted attention from atrocities in Africa to European trench warfare. In the post-war era, the global demand for reform was largely forgotten.
 
However, commercial rubber tree farming had become firmly established and the collection of wild rubber became commercially insignificant, just as ivory supplies had been exhausted years earlier.Because of this, the slave labor industries of the Congo diminished in importance and atrocities became far less frequent. Finally, in 1960, the Congo gained independence.
 
However, what is truly fascinating about King Leopold’s Ghost is that it does not limit itself to a political history of colonialism told from the point of view of the colonisers. Hochschild attempts, as much as it possible, to recall as many African voices as possible. His study of rebellion against as well as cooperation with colonialists offers a more complex and nuanced view of the dynamics of imperialism. This makes it a challenging, but also a fascinating, read which pushes you to question any assumptions you might have about colonialism in Africa as well as African history more generally.
 
Finally, Hochschild’s book is particularly well-written and accessible making it an excellent history book to start off with. It has a good balance between the intrigue of individual characters and a wider analysis of an era combining murky political wrangling, the infectious world of explorers, and the power of journalism with the struggle of oppression.
 
King Leopold’s Ghost is a powerful and disturbing book. It is a reminder of the dark side of human nature, and it is a call for us to never forget the victims of colonialism. The book has been praised by critics and historians alike. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It has also been translated into over 20 languages.
 
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About the Author :
 
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it “an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection.”
 
It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award.
 
It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award in the United States, and the Duff Cooper Prize in England. His books have been translated into twelve languages and four of them have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in Nonfiction and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.
 
His last two books have also each won Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international affairs and the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards. In 2005, he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.
 
Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. His articles have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and elsewhere. He was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
 
Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and spent half a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, sociologist and author Arlie Russell Hochschild. They have two sons and two granddaughters.
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