Word: hochschild
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA By Adam Hochschild '63 Houghton Mifflin...
...book, King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild '63 tells a haunting story that has been forgotten for nearly 85 years. Hochschild himself knew nothing of the murders that claimed 10 million lives in King Leopold's colony between 1890 and 1913, and only came across the information by chance. In a recent talk given at the Kennedy School in conjunction with the Human Rights Initiative, Hochschild said that he learned about the atrocities in the Congo from a "footnote in a book I was reading...written as part of the worldwide movement protesting atrocities in the Congo that had taken...
...Hochschild's curiosity was indeed tremendous--King Leopold's Ghost is an extraordinarily dense work filled with Steamboat schedules, diary entries, calculations of the price of harvesting rubber from 1897 to 1904 in exact francs per kilo, and fantastical newspaper headlines from various countries. Yet Hochschild's carefully controlled pen never allows the data to dominate the story; he integrates the information into a fluid narrative style. This story is far from a series of dry laundry lists. Hochschild begins each chapter with a vivid character portrait that provides an accessible segue into the heart of the story...
...Hochschild is at no loss for characters in this story; one of the earliest we meet is Sir Henry Morton Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame. Stanley is hired by King Leopold II of Belgium--according to one of Leopold's best PR men, Henry Shelton Sanford--in order to create "a chain of posts or hospices, both hospitable and scientific, which should serve as means of information and aid to travelers...and ultimately, by their humanizing influences, to secure the abolition of the traffic in slaves." Stanley was the first to betray this rhetoric in service to Leopold...
Leopold and Stanley were certainly not the only villains in this story; even the infamous Mr. Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness makes an appearance. Specifically, Hochschild has found no less than three men who could feasibly have served as models for the character of Kurtz. One of these men, Leon Rom, was station chief at Stanley Falls, on which Conrad's "Inner Station" may be based, and kept 21 heads as a decoration around his flower bed. But Hochschild makes an important distinction--he asserts that while Conrad's tale may have many levels of literary significance...