"King Leopold's Ghost"

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" is a brilliant historical account of how Leopold II, King of the Belgian, carved a personal empire and fortune from the Congo and how Edmund Morel, a clerk for the Elder Dempster shipping company, led an international campaign to expose the monarch's criminal enterprise. The author points out that Leopold's single-minded ambition, adroit diplomacy, skillful corruption and ruthless brutality brought him, already one of Europe's wealthiest men, untold riches, while for the Congolese people it brought only unbelievable suffering. The paper states that the "ghost" in the book's title relates to (1) after Leopold's death, rumors abounded that he had not really died but instead had gone to live in the Congo or (2) a more plausible claim emerged that Leopold's ghost would return to haunt the Congo for more than three decades after independence in the form of Mobutu Sese Seku, also a master criminal driven by vampire avarice.

From the Paper:

"From the start, Leopold's Congo administration required Congolese labor, at first as portage to carry ivory, then to construct the railway. With the commercial emphasis switching to rubber, the Congo Free State was faced with a problem. Obviously, the state could purchase ivory, or seize it at the point of a gun, but it was impossible to oversee the harvesting of rubber latex, Its collection required going deep into the rain forests to find the rubber vines. So the Congo Free State's militias, the Force Publique, developed a brutal system which involved raiding villages and seizing women and children as hostages, only releasing them when the men brought in quotas of rubber."

More papers on "King Leopold's Ghost":

• Analytical Essay # 123366 : "King Leopold's Rule of the Congo"
• Analytical Essay # 49401 : "King Leopold's Ghost" and Historical Merit"
• Essay # 5072 : "King Leopold"

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