King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
A king who never set foot in the Congo turned it into a private slaughterhouse for rubber.
Hochschild reconstructed how Leopold II of Belgium ran the Congo Free State as personal property, a forced-labour regime whose death toll reached into the millions. Drawing on the records of the era's reformers, he restored to popular memory both the atrocity and the first modern human rights campaign that exposed it. The book returned a half-forgotten mass killing to Western public awareness and sold in the millions.
Its legacy. It reopened argument in Belgium over how the Congo should be remembered.
- Author
- Adam Hochschild
- First published
- 1998
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- Colonialism and Its Critics
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- Discourse on Colonialism — Aime Cesaire
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- Black Skin, White Masks — Frantz Fanon
He began with the wound that colonialism leaves inside the mind.
- The Colonizer and the Colonized — Albert Memmi
Two figures locked in a single, deforming relationship that neither could leave.