by Elena Hayashi
“Slavery had come to an end throughout most of the world for one reason only: British virtue” (P.27). Despite the formal abolition of slavery by imperial powers by the late 19th century, the Scramble of Africa proved to be as dehumanising as the slave trade. In King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild documents how the Congo Free State — presented as a humanitarian, philanthropic project — transformed into a system of exploitation and terror. Central to this transformation were the views recorded by Henry Morton Stanley, an American explorer and journalist whose travel writings portrayed Africa as in-need-of European civilization. Such representations shaped European public opinion, fostering a sense of racial superiority. The brutal extraction of labor and resources hence was framed as necessary and morally justified; necessary, by being purported to lift up the uncivilized, and justified, because the standards of civilization were defined purely by the colonizers.
“Unpeopled country”: this was the phrase that Stanley famously used to describe the continent of Africa. Africa, a place rich in culture and history was trashed by the imperial powers to be disregarded as an empty space (P.31). As an international celebrity, Stanley’s words carried enormous authority and influence on views of Africans. His description of them as lazy and cannibal-like animals allowed U.S. senators like John Morgan to see Leopold’s new state as “heaven-sent” for the growing population of freed black slaves (and send them back to Africa, their ‘uncivilised’ community) (P.79). Supported by Social Darwinism, a pseudo-scientific ideology that applied Charles Darwin’s theory of “Survival of the Fittest” in socio-political spheres, such accumulation of inferior thoughts of Africa essentially made it easier for them to dominate the natives, as they were no longer considered as human beings but rather wild vicious animals to be kept in captivity by the civilised, Western people. Hochschild demonstrates as to why the mission of Africans forced to help in the ivory trade for Belgium wasn’t considered as ‘for profit’, but rather to, “rescue these benighted people from their indolence” (P.118).
The whole civilising mission of Africa (in focus, Belgian Congo) was outstandingly filled with brutality. The countries that had patted themselves on the back for abolishing slavery, turned to an alternative solution of keeping themselves in power — indentured labour. Porters who were utilised to increase profit were “sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food…beasts of burden with thin monkey legs” (P.119). As one of the few reliable sources that weren’t told from Leopold’s servants’ perspective, it was devastating to read the porters’ physical and mental deterioration of health, who were eventually dazed with exhaustion. The ability of the imperialists to treat them in such a barbarous way opposes their so-called civilising mission, and is something that cannot be justified with their sense of superiority.
“In payment for rubber…I could eat them, or kill them, or use them as slaves — as I liked” (P.164). In the Congo Free State, the gathering of rubber was paid in exchange for human beings. The imperial powers were so blood-thirsty for rubber that they slaughtered millions of innocent native Africans. In a way, the number of hands brought back by the army was treated as proof of hard work and loyalty, but also as a way to remind the uncivilised Africans that they were under the authority of the civilised Europeans.
Hochschild’s novel is powerful for its moral indictment but also for its emotional narrative. By weaving together academic research with compelling storytelling techniques, he helps reconstruct a history obscured by self-justification narratives. The native Africans were exploited and violently oppressed by the imperial powers not just for economic growth, but also as a way to prove themselves more worthy and civilised than the rest of humanity. Europeans’ view of moral superiority developed through Stanley’s accounts allowed them to colonise the ‘empty lands of Africa’, intentionally used to justify the immoral practices undertaken in the Belgian Congo by King Leopold. Ultimately, King Leopold’s Ghost demonstrates the illusion of the civilising mission — an ideological mask that provided unscrupulous justifications to the horrible working and living conditions of the native Africans.
Bibliography
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost : A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Mariner Books, 1998.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 