King Leopold's Ghost

...there are heroes...

...The worst savageries of the rubber terror were over...

...The rumor circulated among the Congolese that the canned meat white men liked to eat was not in fact corned beef...

...Equating Great Britain, not to mention the United States, with Leopold's regime, Hochschild does not think so much as merely accept the thought our time has given him: White man bad...

...The image was meant to characterize the Tories' moribund state, and to herald a cosmic shift in the paper's political line...

...The Force Publique was in large part an army of slaves...

...Specifically, he takes us back to an age when American journalists were more like their colleagues in the rump Yugoslavia...

...and given the chance, they will take everything they want, however inconvenient the satisfaction of their desires might be to those they are taking from...

...Bismarck, the German chancellor, shrewdly nosed out a fantastic swindle in the works...

...Although Leopold publicly professed to have no commercial interest in the Congo, he privately instructed Stanley to buy up all the ivory he could find...

...J. Budziszewski, University of Texas, Austin Available at barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com or Sage Publishing: WEB-ORDER@sagepub.com or call 1-805-499-0721 The American Spectator • February 1999 67 tribes mounted large-scale insurrections against Leopold's tyranny...

...That the Sun would admit to any party adherence at all, without even an election in sight, was considered neither remarkable nor unseemly...

...Hochschild cites Hillaire Belloc's distressingly merry jingle, "Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not...

...Why is that...

...White officers shot Africans in order to take their women, to convince survivors that slavery was not a bad alternative, or sometimes just for the hell of it...

...Reading of Stanley's feat, Leopold saw his chance to help himself to "a slice of this magnificent African cake," which the European powers were hungrily beginning to divide up...

...Winning over the European powers, especially Germany, took some more doing...

...He must be compelled to do it.' 77 dural guidelines for those short on imagination...

...He spent a month in Seville immersed in the General Archive of the Indies...

...How did "objectivity" become the overriding operating principle for virtually all of our journalists...

...Uncooperative villages would be wiped out, and soldiers would chop off the right hands of the dead, to prove to their superiors that each bullet they had been given was used properly...

...A few thousand white men did not put down and keep down twenty million Africans by dint of superior character...

...T he story Hochschild has to tell is not one exclusively of cruelty and horror...

...Churchill's —most notably, The River War, his account of the subjugation of the wretched Dervish Empire in the Sudan—do not shy away from the harsh facts about conquest, but they also make the case that this conquest will benefit the conquered...

...however, it won Leopold renown through\ out Europe for the splen\ did things he said every\ body was going to do for \ Africa...

...British and American moral indignation fastened upon the Congo because it was "a safe target...

...Leopold enlisted Stanley to return to the Congo as his man under the flag of the newly formed International Association of the Congo, which happened —a deft confusion—also to be the flag of the International African Association: a gold star on a blue field, hope in the darkness...

...An instruction manual even set forth proce44 'The native doesn't like making rubber,' an officer said...

...The chicotte got a lot of use in Leopold's Congo...

...he kept her as his mistress until his death, and she bore him two sons...

...Leopold alone was master there...

...In time the entire edifice would fall to bits...

...Methods of compulsion were not wanting...

...Mindich's first narrative thread begins one day in May of 1836 on the streets of lower Manhattan, just as James Watson Webb, editor of New York City's best-selling Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, catches up with his rival James Gordon Bennett, founding editor of the upstart Herald...

...While still a prince he dreamed of making little Belgium very grand and very rich...

...However, in the matter of Leopold, who presided over what was truly an empire of evil, and whom decent men brought down because his rule was nothing less than insufferable, the accepted idea fits only too well...

...As he told one of his advisers, the Belgian temperament was not nearly avaricious enough to suit him: "Belgium doesn't exploit the world...

...Everything you thought was true about the subject is false...

...The Congolese would not have feared the chicotte had there not been something even more fearsome to back it up...

...Of course, the King-Proprietor was accustomed to thinking in enviably large numbers...

...art, music, literature bored him, but he pored tirelessly over the vast record of the conquistadors' dealings in the Americas, "calculating the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies...

...his words of greeting to them strut precisely the desired tone: "To open to civ ilization the only part of our globe which has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress...

...None of these prospects came to anything, though, and it was not until the mid-187o's, when Leopold had been king for more than a decade, that he began to realize his imperial ambitions...

...Little Belgium had no outsized aspirations, but just wanted to do her share of the civilizing work: to open routes to the uncharted interior, to put an end to the slave trade conducted by wicked Arabs, to bring peace and justice to unfortunate savages...

...Rubber vines grew wild throughout the Congo rain forest, and to harvest the rubber nothing was needed except labor...

...His denunciations of the Arab (more precisely, as Hochschild points out, Afro-Arab) slave traders were so zealously eloquent that he was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a British philanthropic association of supreme moral distinction...

...To woo that audience, the penny papers had divested themselves of the partisan ties and business-oriented outlook that had characterized American journalism since before the founding of the Republic...

...When some children laughed in the presence of a white man, all the servant boys in Leopoldville were given 25 strokes of the chicotte, a whip of hippopotamus hide that sliced like a knife...

...One hopes that Adam Hochschild's fine account of Leopold's brutal regime in the heart of Africa will gain the story some part of the notoriety it deserves...

...ciation of something or other that tended the place...

...Leopold made the Congo his, and what he did with this prized possession makes for a story as terrible as it is little-known...

...The industrial world suddenly wanted rubber, for everything from tires to gaskets to insulation for telegraph, telephone, and electrical wiring...

...and more important, Stanley was to negotiate treaties with the native chiefs that would effectively sign away their lands, rights, and authority to Leopold, usually in exchange for some gin and gaudy cloth...

...Mindich New YorkUniversity Press 201 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY John Lilly A few months ago, Britain's Sun newspaper commemorated the Conservative Party conference by splashing across its front page a mocked-up photo of a dead Norwegian Blue parrot, the prop from a classic Monty Python sketch...

...In French equatorial Africa, Portuguese Angola, and the German Cameroons, the imperial overlords used the same methods to bring in the rubber harvest that Leopold had introduced...

...Such dealing with the most infamous slaver in Africa caused the first cracks to form in Leopold's imposing facade...

...It was not some high-minded international assoAt the age of 65 he fell in love with an older woman—a 16-year-old prostitute at a Paris hotel...

...In 1888 Leopold founded the Force Publique, to serve as "counterguerrilla troops, an army of occupation, and a corporate labor police force...

...The state bought, sold, and stole slaves...

...Most of the bloodshed took place during the rubber terror...

...Leopold's next trick was to get other nations to recognize his acquisition...

...He got nothing less...

...During his rule he made over a billion dollars in today's money on his colony...

...But only in America do all the major papers deny that they are biased...

...The profit margin was handsome, to say the least...

...A lobbying campaign of unctuous duplicity—making it sound as though the Congo were a confederation of independent states, under the tutelage of the most enlightened international organization, which would abolish slavery and guarantee free trade throughout the region — convinced the United States to become the first nation to acknowledge Leopold's claim...

...George Washington Williams, a black American minister, historian, lawyer, and journalist, had a good look around the Congo in 1890, and in an open letter he charged Leopold with "crimes against humanity...

...In 1876 he invite some of Europe's leading explorers, geot raphers, humanitarians, businessmen, an soldiers to gather in Brussels and speak ( Africa...

...However, the work was extremely hard and dangerous, and, as one officer of the Force Publique put it, "The native doesn't like making rubber...

...it is perhaps less obvious, though still apparent to the observer who is not dazzled by his own post-colonial righteousness, that British rule was largely civilizing...

...The Association never did anything...

...the crusaders would have found taking on their own governments, or those of powers like France and Germany, a much rougher business than getting upset with little Belgium...

...Even so, the Africans did not always submit readily...

...modern sharpened his appetite...

...facHow the Press Lost Its Bias, Or at Least Its Bite The American Spectator • February 1999 69...

...he was proclaimed its King-Sovereign, though he was later to speak of himself as its "proprietor...

...many died in transit...

...the cost in African lives in the French territories was proportional to that in Leopold's Congo...

...many things you thought were false are true...

...Other British papers noted the Sun's front page with partisan articles of their own, and that was that...

...More than a dozen "Prepare to rethink...

...At the age of 65 he fell in love with an older woman—a 16-year-old prostitute whom he spotted at a Paris hotel...

...These are the sorts of questions David T.Z...

...This is only more true in continental Europe, where avowedly Communist papers are still rife, duking it out on the newsstands with their neo-nationalist nemeses...

...King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) was a man of prodigious appetites, not all of which were exactly regal...

...He learned that, provided you said the right thing, you could do pretty much as you pleased...

...William Sheppard, the first black American missionary in the Congo, wrote boldly of the human devastation caused by the rubber boom...

...In arguing that the U.S...

...White traders and state officials abducted African women and kept them as concubines...

...He must be compelled to do it...

...press changed fundamentally in the nineteenth century under a variety of social, cultural, and economic pressures, Mindich takes his reader back to an age when American journalists were more like their European colleagues...

...one tribe, the Chokwe, kept up the fight for zo years...

...To the Belgian finance minister, who had no use for empire, he presented a marble fragment from the Parthenon, inscribed with the imperative II faut a la Belgique une colonie (Belgium must have a colony...

...All the while Leopold kept up a semblance of disinterested purity...

...Although Leopold was a constitutional monarch in Belgium, the Belgian parliament had no part in ruling the colony...

...Superior weaponry was indispensable to the enterprise...

...An English white slaver reportedly kept him supplied with young girls just the way he liked them, more or less pubescent and certified virginal...

...In Bennett's response to Webb's attacks, Mindich claims to have found the seeds of "detachment" as the term is now understood by professional journalists—one of the five essential ingredients that for him compose the doctrine of objectivity...

...Hochschild further adduces the German extermination of the Hereros in South West Africa, the English slaughter of Australian aborigines, the United States' killing of American Indians and suppression of Filipino guerrillas as examples of imperialist "mass murders [that] went largely unnoticed except by their victims...

...The treaties must be as brief as possible, and in a couple of articles must give us everything...

...In Spain, for instance, there are the reliable voices of Catalan and Basque separatism, as well as the monarcho-Catholic viewpoint expressed in the gloriously anachronistic daily ABC...

...However, cruel exploitation continued...

...For the second time that year...

...He ate like a lumberjack: six eggs and a jar of marmalade for breakfast, two entrees at dinner, once a pair of roast pheasants at a sitting...

...By 1900 Leopold was extracting 11 million pounds of rubber annually from the Congo...

...Only the fact that the paper had switched parties, and that it had proclaimed the switch in such a typically extravagant way, were deemed worthy of comment...

...Of course, one could easily argue that the New York Times is biased in its coverage, and one would be right...

...The rubber boom of the 1890's disclosed in Leopold a rapacity so profound even he had not suspected its dimensions...

...The King did buy the freedom of some thousands of Tippu Tip's slaves, but there was a catch: The free men were obliged to serve a seven-year hitch in the Force Publique...

...Writing ceaselessly, editing a newspaper, establishing the Congo Reform Association, soliciting the aid of the wealthy and prominent—peers, bishops, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Arthur Conan Doyle all did their part—Morel ultimately did Leopold in...

...With the noblest intentions, the assembled dignitaries founded the International African Associa\\ tion, to be headed by Leopold...

...Yet in 1887 Leopold installed as one of the Congo's provincial governors Tippu Tip, the pre-eminent slaver of all...

...in Morel's words, the evil would not die "till the native of the Congo [became] once more owner of his land and of the produce which it yields...

...It's a taste we have got to make her learn...

...The treaties Stanley had signed made the Congo Leopold's exclusive domain...

...The campaign that Morel led against Leopold's iniquities became a moral crusade of irresistible momentum, particularly in England and the United States...

...Although one might think at first glance that nobody would have less in common with Morel than Winston Churchill—Morel actually ran for Parliament against the incumbent Churchill in 1922, and beat him—the books about imperial warfare that Churchill wrote in his youth tellingly amplify Morel's praise of the British Empire...

...What he actually did was something else again...

...Along with several other "penny papers," the Herald was underselling the omnipotent and elitist six-centers, making up for its lower price by selling to a mass-market audience...

...Morel would have seen the truth of the distinction that Jeffrey Hart has drawn between barbarizing imperialism and civilizing imperialism...

...Soldiers would take hostage the women, children, or elders of a village to persuade the men to bring in the rubber harvest...

...B 0 0 K S 1 N R E V p Evil Empire King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Adam Ho chschild Houghton Mifflin /366 pages / $26 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas S ome men simply want more, much more, than ordinary men do...

...sometimes, if a soldier had wasted a bullet by, say, shooting an animal, he would cut the hand off a living man...

...Robert Weissberg's closely researched and crisply written study puts a chill on all the warmed-over platitudes of the official tolerance industry...

...reliance on the "inverted pyramid" structure...

...In the main, Hochschild has written a moving and important book about wickedness triumphant and defeated...

...His appointed emissaries did all the things that men will do whenthere is no reason not to...

...The other four are: nonpartisanship...

...In 1885 his royal decree re-named his possession the Congo Free State...

...Yet neither food nor sex was really the thing he lived for...

...In 1877 the Anglo-American explorer and journalist Henry M. Stanley became the first man to travel overland from Africa's east coast to the west, 66 February 1999 • The American Spectator following the Congo River for much of the distance...

...Edmund Dene Morel, who workedfor the English shipping company that handled all cargo traffic between Belgium and the Congo, remarked that great quantities of ivory and rubber were coming from the Congo and almost nothing except guns and ammunition was going to the Congo...

...Newspapers in the United Kingdom, ranging from the Sun (downmarket, populist, and tabloid) to the Guardian (upmarketly socialist and broadsheet) hold self-consciously to their socio-economic allegiance and political line...

...And he rutted like a monkey, though without the monkey's inherent modesty and reserve...

...These histories of Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism David T.Z...

...Hochschild faults his hero Morel for his general approval of British colonialism, indeed makes him out to be something of a simpleton for writing a book favorable to the British regime in Nigeria, and for believ68 February 1999 The American Spectator ing imperial rule to be morally acceptable "if its administration was fair and just...

...Rather than congratulate Bennett on his newfound success, or take him to task verbally for mocking Webb's obesity in print, Webb throws him down a flight of stairs and savagely thrashes him with a cane...

...In 1908, under intense international pressure, the Belgian government took over the Congo from Leopold, buying him out for a royal sum...

...Leopold's proprietorship was hard on his property...

...Hochschild's case against Leopold swells into an indictment of colonialism in general...

...Visiting the Dutch East Indies, British colonies in South Asia, imperial cities ancient and ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...The severed hands were smoked so that they would keep until they could be brought to the appropriate officials...

...He employed an Oxford legal scholar to make the case for "the right of private companies to act as if they were sovereign countries when making treaties with native chiefs...

...JOHN LILLY is co-owner of Liberia Vertice, a bookstore in Seville, Spain...

...he correctly drew the conclusion that Leopold was looting the Congo's riches, with slave labor at gunpoint...

...It is unmistakable that Leopold's rule was barbarizing, to put it mildly...

...And during his rule the population of the Congo fell by some ten million persons—that is, roughly by half...

...From now on, the formerly Thatcherite Sun (along with most of the British electorate) would be firmly in Labour's camp...

...but Leopold adroitly courted the powerful Gerson BleichrOder, and Bismarck's banker gained Bismarck's approval...

...So-called volunteers were handed over in chains...

...State agents, white men, got a bonus that depended on the number of recruits they provided, and they either purchased potential soldiers from agreeable chiefs or, to cut down on expenses, captured the men themselves...

...and the unspeakable became standard business procedure...

...American newspapers are different...

...There is of course a very famous story of Leopold's Congo, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but Conrad never mentions either Leopold or the Congo in it, and few readers are aware that he is telling the truth about a particular time and place...

...Mindich sets out to answer in Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism...

...When Stanley went back to Europe in 1884, he had staked out in Leopold's name an area as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, and 76 times as big as Belgium...

...Closed minds will be untouched by the book, but for those interested in reality, I recommend it most highly...

...composed of African men serving under white officers, it became the foremost army in central Africa, and over half the colony's budget was eventually devoted to its maintenance...

...Ever on the lookout for a morsel to his taste, young Leopold eyed some choice parts of Argentina, tried to pick up Fiji, fantasized about railways in Brazil, and priced a small kingdom in Abyssinia...

...One doesn't hear much about the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer nowadays, and according to Mindich, the reason has a lot to do with Webb's reasons for beating his rival senseless: Bennett's Herald was defeating the Courier and Enquirer in a circulation war...

...But Morel was more discriminating than Hochschild...

...His Leopold merits a place among the great modern enemies of civilization...

...The savages had no idea how unfortunate they could get...

...The unrestrained enthusiasm for plunder thatmarked Leopold's youth gave way to a mature and considered observance of the proprieties...

...Leopold's rivals, who mostly considered Belgium too small to be a rival of theirs, did not suspect what he was really up to...

...What he craved above all else was Empire...