King Leopolds Ghost Essay Example For Students

King Leopolds Ghost Essay King Leopolds Ghost tells a story of the Belgian King Leopold II and his misrule of an African colony, named (at the time) the Congo Free State. It is a wild and unpleasant story of a mans capacity for evil and the peculiar manifestation of it. In telling this story, Hochschild does a wonderful job of giving detailed descriptions, especially of the colorful individuals involved, both good and bad. His analysis of the situation is very solid, starting with the movement when the Congolese hero (Morel) finds out a very terrible fact and moving on through his (Morel) analysis and actions, all the while telling the story of a treacherous monster. Set in the palaces and boardrooms of Europe and in the villages of central Africa, it tells the story of the tragedy that took place during Leopolds so called rule, a tragedy that is so familiar to African-Americans, being told of our African brothers residing in the homeland. This horror story is just in fact that, a horror story, giving and rev ealing the utter most secrets of the respected King Leopold. Allow me to take you on a journey, pointing out the Kings determination and, reasoning for what hed done and the scars he left deep within the heart of the Congo. In the introduction I stated that Morel was the character that I considered to be the hero of this story, now the main question behind that would be, why? Along with, Who is Morel? His complete name was Edmund Dene Morel; he was a young clerk who worked for a Liverpool based firm where his duties were to supervise the unloading and reloading of the ships arriving in Antwerp, Belgium. As Morel watched the shipments arrive he noticed something, a great amount of ivory and rubber were being transported into Belgium but nothing was being taken out, as the book states: There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivorywith almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor. (p.2)With his newfound revelation at hand Morel does not sit still. Demonstrating that he refused to turn a blind eye to what fortune had allowed him to see, he soon becomes active with his ne wfound knowledge. Soon afterward Morel devoted his life to stopping slavery in the Congo. From the early 1900s until after the death of Leopold in 1909, Morel, having become a radical human rights campaigner, used the information smuggled out of the Congo by missionaries and Leopolds employees, to set up the Congo Reform Association (CRA) and mount a campaign that won the support of prominent politicians and churchmen, both in Britain and in the United States. Among these supporters was the highly respected Joseph Conrad (author of Heart of Darkness). So what about this Mr. King Leopold? As of now you must understand that he has done something far worse than inhabit slave labor and import ivory and rubber to have caused such a controversy across the world? Simply, Leopold wanted a colony, any colony to give his position some leverage; he felt that by owning more than just his small country, that hed somehow be validated as a King. Since hed noticed the world flying by him quickly with new developments and technological advancements, not to mention anyone who was anyone owned a piece of the colonialism pie, Leopold just had to have his piece. Leopold feeling squeezed out by the British, French Empires, and the rising power of Germany, studied forms of colonialism from the Dutch East Indies, to the British possession in Indian and Africa. Leopolds regime, despite his studies, differed from those of those of his fellow colonialists. Leopold schemed to build himself a forced labor camp on a massive expanse of central Africa and was qu ite smooth with pulling all of this off. Through methods of bribery, chicanery, brute force and almost supernatural sense of cunning, Leopold had acquired an enormous private colony in Africa and gotten the rest of the worked to accept his claim as legally binding. The Lottery Argumentative EssayThe Congo region was turned from a preservation society into a grotesque forced-labor camp on behalf of Leopold, running on slave labor, enforced by mostly Belgians driving the local population into slavery as porters, road and railroad builders, ivory hunters and rubber gatherers. A typical tactic was to burn down a village and kidnap the women and hold them until the men agreed to whatever demands were made of them. Discipline was arbitrary, fickle and often fatal. Hochschild identifies in the text that, the soldiersattacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the chief of the district brought in the required number of kilograms of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected. (p161) Those that refused to cooperate with the officers faced a punishment installed by the officer known as Fievez the text give the example of this stating that, a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies ever since. (p.166) It saddened my heart and practically swept he breath from my lungs to grasp the mental picture of theses traumatized men, possibly haven starved for days and severely malnutrition, strapped, chained, and bound to one another, walking in syncopation, all the while straining their necks and possibly giving themselves a headache for the sake of possibly saving a limb, or a family member. Another horror of this was the during the expeditions, force publique soldiers were instructed to bring back a hand or head for each bullet fired, to make sure that none were wasted or hidden for use in rebellions. Hochschild goes on to point out that the killing of the Congolese was not an elaborate program of the ethnic genocide, it nonetheless represented murder on a grand scale. This massacre, as I like to call it, killed between five and eight million Africans and I cant help but think of how devastating that must have been to their entire nation. In the early 1900s (1908 to be specific) when Moral began to publicize the events taking place in Leopolds Congo, Leopold attempted to destroy the evidence. For eight days the furnaces in Leopolds Brussels headquarters were at full blast, as Congo State archives were turned to ash. He sent word to his agent in the Congo to do likewise. Therefore the entire Belgian State followed the Politics of Forgetting,. As it may have been so easy for them to forget I am quite sure that the residence of the Congo have not. The ghosts are unhappy there, I presume, and the gallons of slain blood have turned into hard clay but they have not forgotten. Considering it was in the early 1900s, it is most amazing and almost surreal to grasp the realization that in a time when blacks in America were coming into their own, getting educated, and even going to the lengths of forming Greek organizations, that their fellow brother in Africa were being brutally mutilated and stripped of their humanity. Hochschild has done an exemplary job of writing this book by gathering details and evidence not to mention the wonderful writing skills that hes displayed throughout the entire book. In my opinion, the account of shocking and brutal nature of Belgian colonial rule, is worth reading on its own, if only to remind us of the horror of the colonialism from which the US has recently escaped. And anyone with an interest in the way we car for or mistreat other humanbeings may find a great deal of food for thought here as well. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hochschild, a renowned journalist has taken on Stalin and Russian psyche in previous books. He has been criticized the almost exclusive focus of the CRA movement on Belgium, citing comparable brutality by the US in the Philippines, the British in Australia, the Germans in what is now Namibia. BibliographyHochschild, Adam King Leopolds Ghost:a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. First Mariner Books 1998. New YorkBook Reports