King Leopold’s ghost

King Leopold’s ghost is a book I read some time ago, and is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s a historical novel, that’s why the author spent ten years searching public files in order to find useful information.

This book recounts how Leopold II, king of the new-born state of Belgium, tried to make his country politically influent by gaining a colony at the end of the XIXth century. At that time, the most powerful European countries like France, Great Britain and even Germany had their own colonies. However the Belgian people weren’t very interested in having a colony so the king tried to purchase a colony with his own money. In 1885, thanks to Henry Stanley, a famous explorer, he gained the possession of a huge territory in Central Africa, the Congo Free State, a land 76 times bigger than Belgium with abounding natural resources like ivory, rubber and gold. The only problem is that in a land as big as the Congo there weren’t enough men in Belgium to extract all these natural resources. The only possible issue was to exploit the local inhabitants. Thanks to his private army, the Force Publique, he established a system of forced labor where the people were mistreated and lived in slavery conditions.

 That’s the whole interesting part of the book: the different accounts given by the Congolese people give us a precise description of slavery conditions set by King Leopold. The truth can be shocking: for instance, every Congolese man who didn’t want to extract rubber had his hands cut off. Moreover sometimes the army kidnapped wives and children: the only way for a man to see his wife and kids again was to go and work. Men and women were constantly flogged.  Some Belgian soldiers were paid according to the number of hands they cut a day.

Eventually the other European countries noticed these abusive exploitations and forced King Leopold to stop and he had to cede his domain to the Belgian government in 1907.

According to the author, from 1885 to 1907 the death toll in the colony approaches ten million victims, which is even more than the holocaust. Of course, we will never know if this number is true or not. We can consider this period as a genocide carried out by Leopold II.

The reason I really enjoyed reading this book is that it opened my mind to a historical fact never mentioned in our history program and totally forgotten. In this book, the “bad guys” are the Belgian but in French colonies such as Algeria the same thing probably happened and I think that we should face the truth and start talking about it.
Quentin Gaydon