King Leopold's Ghost

The 1903 House of Commons resolution prompted Britain’s Foreign Office to send the British consul in Congo, Roger Casement, “to the interior” (195). As Hochschild describes in this chapter, Casement had many incidental ties to this story before this: his first visit to the Congo in 1883, when he was nineteen years old, was as a worker on an Elder Dempster ship; he also “ran the supply base for the ill-fated Sanford Exploring Expedition and worked for the surveyors charting the course for the railway around the rapids” (195-6). He spent a week with Stanley on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, and he met and became good friends with Joseph Conrad when Conrad was in the Congo in 1890. Casement also met Leopold when he became the first British consul in the Congo, but “appears not to have been charmed by Leopold” (198) as he “had already seen too much of the Congo” (198).

Casement, Hochschild surmises, was bored and frustrated in his role as consul, and could not realize his ambitions as a writer. He was also a closeted homosexual who “lived in a time when to be found out meant disgrace or worse” (199). His trip to the interior, however, was taken on with energetic commitment, and he “sent a ceaseless flow of dispatches to the Foreign Office” (201) along with a “torrent of letters to Congo state officials condemning specific atrocities and, most undiplomatically, the entire way the colony was run” (201). As Hochschild puts it, “[h]e was a man possessed. His anger at what he saw had a dramatic effect on many of the other Europeans he encountered; it was as if his visible outrage gave them permission to act on stifled feelings of their own” (201).

Casement’s report on “the rubber terror” was important because it “was to be laid out with the authority of His Britannic Majesty’s Consul” (203) and “all the more authoritative because Casement was a veteran of Africa who made frequent comparisons between the Congo he had once known and the same territory under the rubber terror” (203). His report, however, was watered down in its publication by the removal of names, which “lent [it] a strangely disembodied tone, as if horrible things had been done but not to or by real people” (204) which “made it impossible for Casement to defend himself by reference to specific people and places when Leopold’s staff issued a long reply” (204). Though Casement was angry and disappointed by this setback, his eventual meeting with Edmund Morel was a palliative, and the two men became lifelong friends—in their letters they referred to one another as “Dear Tiger” and “Dear Bulldog” (207). Casement convinced Morel to start the Congo Reform Association, and even provided the founding donation in the form of a hundred-pound check. The chapter ends with Hochschild’s acknowledgement that both men “ended up paying a high price” (208) for their convictions.

Chapter 14 comprises three main sections. The first is an analysis of Morel, whose “crusade […] now orchestrated through the Congo Reform Association exerted a relentless, growing pressure on the Belgian, British, and American governments” (209). As Hochschild puts it, “[a]lmost never has one man possessed of no wealth, title, or official post caused so much trouble for the governments of several major countries” (209), as Morel did for over a decade. Morel was also “one of the few people in this entire story who was happily married” (209), something Hochschild considers integral to his success; he had a “devoted wife to run his household” (209) while he spent twelve to fourteen hours a day working on the campaign against Leopold’s Congo genocide. 

Hochschild also includes an analysis of the “limitations” of Morel’s politics—“from his faith in the magic of free trade to his belief that African men had a higher sexual drive than white men” (210). He also believed that Africans were a version of “Rousseau’s idealized Noble Savage” (210) before the white man arrived, focusing on “what was peaceful and gentle and ignor[ing] any brutal aspects” (210) in his writing about Africans. He also points out that while Morel thought Leopold’s version of colonialism was bad, colonialism in and of itself was all right, “if its administration was fair and just” (210), as in the British Empire.

Despite these political limitations, Morel had few limitations as an organizer and activist, and he ran his campaign “largely from his study” (214). He was a “master of all the media of his day” (215) and “made particularly effective use of photography” (215), displaying slide shows of photographs of atrocities committed in the Congo taken by the missionaries John and Alice Seeley Harris at all the protest meetings.

The second section of this chapter focuses on the sad story of Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a Nigerian schoolteacher who began working for Leopold’s regime in 1884 and went into business for himself in the Congo in 1893. He was successful as a businessman and was initially a supporter of Leopold’s Congo but, at some point, he had “a change of heart” (219). He “supplied Roger Casement with information about the mistreatment of West African workers in the Congo” (219) and sent Morel a check for his writings. In 1904, he sent Morel court documents about the prosecution of “a trigger-happy rubber-company agent named Charles Caudron, [who] was accused of several crimes, including the murder of at least 122 Africans” (220). Following his first betrayal of the Congo regime, Shanu was exposed by a Congo state official as Morel’s accomplice. He was harassed and ruined by Congo authorities and committed suicide in July, 1905.

The final section of this chapter focuses on sixty-five-year-old Leopold’s courting of the sixteen-year-old woman who would become his mistress of many years, Caroline. As Hochschild puts it, “[t]o the extent that someone like Leopold was capable of love, this teenage prostitute proved to be the love of his life” (223), a love that threatened his popularity with the Belgian people. This, along with his tendency to spend the profits of his exploitation of the Congo on his mistress’s wardrobe and his own grandiose construction projects, made him the target of much criticism.