It's now thought that between eight and ten million people died during Leopold II's catastrophic stewardship of the Congo. Most were Congolese natives, many of them murdered as part of a sadistic programme of forced labour. Those unwilling to work in the rubber plantations were liable to be mutilated or beaten to death with a hippo-hide whip.
Morel's campaign against the atrocities spread far and wide. His cause was aided by a report from another fascinating character. Roger Casemount, an Irish official in the British consular service, journeyed to the region, and his first-hand account of the pitiful conditions and brutality inflicted on the people of the Congo turned public opinion against Leopold.
When he knew the game was up, Leopold made a desperate attempt to cover his tracks. It’s said the furnaces in Brussels burned for eight full days to destroy his Congo archives. But even in handing over his colony to the Belgian government, Leopold emerged a winner: for a handsome sum, he sold the Congo to his own country.
Occasionally, the author points to parallels between colonial rule in the the Congo and the tyrannical regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. But Hochschild steps back from describing Leopold's rule as genocide: for the colonialists, mass murder had more to do with personal enrichment than with ethnic cleansing. However, he isn't so reticent about pointing the finger at the track records of other colonial powers. The pitiful conditions in the Belgian Congo were replicated in colonies administered by the French, British, Germans, and Americans.
After Leopold's death, and even post-independence, things got no better for the Congo. Hochschild chronicles the country's miserable record of corruption, coups d'etat, war, and poverty. The region that has more hydroelectric potential than all the lakes and rivers of the United States and which produced the lion’s share of uranium for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs is as poor today as it was when Stanley first arrived.
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