King Leopold's Ghost Analysis
According to one account, Adam Hochschild's descriptions of thecolonization of Congo in Central Africa during the 19th century by KingLeopold II of Belgium resulted in his being admired throughout Europe asbeing a "philanthropic" monarch. This attitude was largely based on thedescriptions of the people provided by European merchants returning fromthe Congo 400 years after its "discovery" by Portuguese explorers seeking anew route to India. These descriptions suggested that the Congolese were"heathen who bowed down to wood and stone" and were in dire need of theevangelical intervention on the part of the enlightened Europeans - mostespecially the King of Belgium (Wellard 1970:501). After reading the novelby Hochschild, however, most readers would likely conclude that KingLeopold was anything but "philanthropic." This paper will provide ananalysis of Hochschild's book, King Leopold's Ghost, to identify themethods used to repress the Congolese, the efforts on the part of the U.S.to liberate the Congo, followed by an assessment of the effects of thecolonization of the Congo on its indigenous people. A summary of theresearch will be provided in the conclusion.
Thesereasons were based on a paternalistic view that also assumed the Congolesewere ripe for the plucking because they worshiped animals and rocks, buthad plenty of resources for the taking. The great Congo River became virtually the only viable form of surfacetransportation; nevertheless, there was a paucity of boats to which to plyit, and scarcely any gasoline to fuel them. According to thehistorian and journalist Adam Hochschild, in his chilling 1998 narrative,King Leopold's Ghost, there were an estimated 5 million to 10 millionCongolese natives who perished from overwork, malnutrition and outrightslaughter during the king's brutal hold on the Congo. According to Bond and Gibson, "Congo was demonstrably acolossus, driven at a slow, structured pace to collective death, albeit fora clearly identifiable economic purpose, the exploitation of rubber" (397). Finally, it has been well documented that African population growthfell from the onset of colonialism until well into the 20th century as aresult of the slave trade, wars of conquest, and the spread of old diseasesthat indigenous practices and practitioners could no longer keep undercontrol; for instance, the use of variolation against smallpox, and hedgedboundaries against trypanosomiasis, as well as new diseases against whichAfricans had no natural immunity and for which they had no experience oftreatment such as tuberculosis and syphilis, etc. Furthermore,Washington himself was involved in the "outcry over Belgian atrocities" inthe Congo (Hochschild 1998:241). The Belgian government appears to have been motivated by the sameeconomic forces that compelled King Leopold to annex the Congo in the firstplace. Furthermore, thecolony was an important source of uranium for the United States duringWorld War II. In the final analysis, the Belgian colonial regime was less brutalthan some others, but not much more enlightened, and it failed utterly tolay a groundwork of legitimate institutions or educate the populace. Colonialism enabled young men to marry earlier byproviding them with the means of obtaining dowries that were independent ofparental dispensation (Berkeley 2001). By the late I980s, per capita income was less than one tenth of whatit had been at independence. Roads, railroads, electric stations, and public buildings werealso constructed by forced labor (Nicol 2004). However, Washington's leadership in this regard wasmerely the most successful of a wide-ranging series of trends andinitiatives that helped to bring an end to the genocide taking place in theCongo for the personal enrichment of His Majesty (Winant 2001).
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