King Leopold's Ghost

This chapter describes the five years Stanley spent in Africa working for Leopold to covertly establish his Belgian colony. He was paid 50,000 francs a year to “construct a road around the rapids, through the rugged Crystal Mountains” (63) and then build “a chain of trading stations along the thousand-mile navigable main stretch of the Congo River” (63). Stanley was “a harsh taskmaster” (67). As Hochschild notes, “[i]n the first year alone, six Europeans and twenty-two Africans under his command died, including one eaten by a crocodile” (68). He was also harsh with himself, as well: he nearly died from illness twice, the second time even returning to Europe to recuperate. However, he returned to Africa against doctor’s orders (and at Leopold’s insistence) to finish his work. Built into Stanley’s contract was the right to write a book about his experiences, subject to Leopold’s right to edit the book before it was published.

As Hochschild documents, Leopold was very careful that his plans were “seen as nothing more than philanthropy” (65). While he claimed to be working toward purely philanthropic ends—conducting scientific research and bringing civilization, medicine, and religion to the native peoples—his real focus was on claiming African land, purchasing it for “almost nothing” (71) through “treaties” (71) that tribal chiefs had no way of reading and establishing “a complete trading monopoly” (71). The chapter also clarifies why Africa had to be the place for Leopold to realize his imperial dreams: “There was no more unclaimed territory in the Americas […]. Nor were there blank spaces in Asia: the Russian Empire stretched all the way to the Pacific, the French had taken Indochina, the Dutch the East Indies, and most of the rest of southern Asia […] was colored with the British Empire’s pink. Only Africa remained” (61).

We learn more about the area that came to be known as “the Congo.” The Congo river’s watershed covers “more than 1.3 million square miles” (61), and “the river and its fan-shaped web of tributaries constitute more than seven thousand miles of interconnecting waterways, a built-in transportation grid rivaled by few places on earth” (62). The peoples of the Congo “were as diverse as the land” (72), which included savanna and rain forest, as well as volcanic hills and mountains. The peoples of the savanna tended to organize into kingdoms, while those who lived in the rain forest were smaller and “sometimes seminomad[ic]” (73). All told, “there were more than two hundred different ethnic groups speaking more than four hundred language and dialects” (62) in the Congo, which, coupled with the impact of hundreds of years of European-driven slave-trading in the area, made “potential opposition […] fragmented” at best (62). The chapter closes with Stanley’s return to “a Europe that had awakened to Africa” (74). Now, it seems, other European countries were beginning to notice the increased activity in the Congo, largely due to Stanley’s French rival, Count Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza’s more publicized exploits in the Congo, where he claimed, through “treaty” a “strip of the northern shoreline” of the river (70).

This chapter covers Leopold’s ultimately successful attempts to have his claim on the Congo recognized diplomatically, starting with the United States, where Henry Shelton Sanford is dispatched to wine and dine American politicians, including President Chester A. Arthur on Leopold’s behalf. Hochschild provides a well-documented account of how much misdirection went into this process: from Sanford’s comparison of the Congo to the independent country of Liberia; to Leopold’s alteration of sample Congo treaties to exclude mention of his trade monopoly. As Hochschild wryly observes, “Long before Stalin, who also edited writers’ manuscripts with his own hand, Leopold knew the uses of rewriting history” (81-82): he also edited Stanley’s books about Africa and paid journalists to write about the Congo and his interest there in ways that amplified his supposed humanitarian and philanthropic goals.

Hochschild notes that Sanford finds his greatest political ally in the Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan, who imagined the Congo as the perfect place to send newly emancipated Southern blacks. Together, Sanford and Morgan succeeded in convincing the U.S. government, in April, 1884, to acknowledge the Congo and Leopold’s claims to it. It also helped that discussion of the Congo, particularly of who would control it—the International African Association? the International Association of the Congo?—left everyone, in Hochschild’s words, “pleasantly confused” (81).

Leopold uses similar tactics in convincing France and Germany to acknowledge his claims on the Congo, accurately diagnosing each country and their government’s unique concerns and changing his message in response. With France, he intimated that he might end up selling to Great Britain, so in exchange for “right of first refusal” (82), France agreed to respect his claim. Germany’s Chancellor, Bismarck, was a tougher “nut to crack” (83), but Leopold accomplishes his goal in part due to his “man on the inside” (84), Bismarck’s banker, who convinced him “that it was better for the Congo to go to the king of weak little Belgium, and be open to German traders, than go to protection-minded France or Portugal or to powerful England” (84). Bismarck then hosted the “Berlin Conference,” during which Leopold’s representatives (Sanford and Stanley among them) managed to get him “what he most wanted, the seaport of Matadi on the lower stretch of the river and the land he needed to build a railway from there around the rapids to Stanley Pool” (86). The Berlin Conference also brought about a “web of bilateral agreements he made with other countries […] recognizing his colony-in-the-making and marking out its boundaries” (86), boundaries that were considerably larger than anyone realized: “bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself” (87).

None of these international acknowledgements of Leopold’s claim to the Congo are made with full understanding of his intentions, or, even, of the “treaties” that have been signed made on his behalf. Furthermore, over the course of these negotiations, Hochschild notes how “the entity that came to be recognized by a lengthening list of countries […] gradually changed from a federation of states under the benevolent protection of a charitable society to one colony ruled by one man” (83). On May 29, 1885, Leopold named his “new, privately controlled country the État Indépendant du Congo, the Congo Free State” (87) and declared himself its king-sovereign.

Chapter 6 opens with Hochschild’s account of Leopold’s miserable home life, his equally miserable treatment of his daughters (particularly in his choice of their husbands), and the assertion that his “main relief from domestic misery was his new colony” (89). There were “a number of tools at his disposal” (89), Hochschild observes, “that had not been available to empire builders of earlier times” (89), most notably: advanced weaponry, advanced medical knowledge, and the steamboat. These things cost money, however, and this chapter also focuses on Leopold’s obsessive search for the funds with which to continue his plans in the Congo, as, by this point, he has already used up the considerable fortune left to him by his own father.

During the Anti-Slavery Conference held in Brussels in November 1889, at which he was touted as the “‘humanitarian’ king” (92), Leopold was able to convince the conference to “authorize him to levy import duties to finance” (93) his proposed attack on slave-trading in the Congo. In this way, Leopold rendered null any promises of free trade in the Congo, a move that, according to Hochschild, deeply upset Sanford, who “died the year after the conference ended, bitterly disillusioned with Leopold and deeply in debt” (93), partly as a result of his failed business ventures in the Congo. The ability to levy taxes in the Congo is one thing, but Leopold still needed the capital to build and maintain infrastructure there. This he received from the Belgian government, in exchange for a promise to leave the colony to Belgium in his will.

The chapter’s final section is devoted to Stanley’s expedition through the Congo to the Sudan, to “rescue” the governor, Emin Pasha—“a slight, short German Jew, originally named Eduard Schnitzer” (97)—from “a rebel Muslim fundamentalist movement, the Mahdists” (96). Stanley was still under contract with Leopold as a “consultant,” so Leopold demanded that Stanley take his expedition through the Congo to get to the Sudan, rather than traveling from the eastern coast, so that more of his territory can be explored. He also hoped that Stanley’s expedition might gain him a foothold in the Nile River valley. Stanley’s expedition was just as poorly planned and difficult as any other—more than half the men died en route, and countless people were raped, murdered, or rendered homeless by “the expedition [which was more] like an invading army” (98-99)--but this time, Leopold was not footing the bill. Rather, it was funded by “sources ranging from the Royal Geographical Society to British traders […] to press barons” (97), one of them the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who insisted the expedition carry the flag of the New York Yacht Club.

When Stanley finally reaches Emin Pasha, he no longer needs rescuing, and does not wish to return to Europe with Stanley, nor does he wish to “join his province to the new Congo state” (100). He finally agrees to visit Europe with Stanley, getting as far as a German port on the Tanzanian coast, where Emin falls out of a window and has to spend months in recuperation. Hochschild ends the chapter with the ominous assertion that though the “Emin Pasha Relief Expedition had indeed been brutal” (100), it would prove to be only “a sideshow” compared with “the bloodshed beginning just then in central Africa” (100).