King Leopold's Ghost

Though Joseph Conrad is a character in this book in his own right, the focus is on the years before he writes Heart of Darkness. The Conrad we meet is the young man who traveled to Africa, not the slightly older author still struggling to come to terms with what he saw there. His most famous book, however, has a presence of its own in King Leopold’s Ghost. As “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature” (146), Heart of Darkness certainly has its place here. But it also represents our tendency to dismiss the darker aspects of Africa’s history as “fiction,” as Hochschild points out in the Introduction and later in Chapter 9. As a symbol, then, it has the dual function of representing both “the horror” wrought by the colonization of Africa, as Mr. Kurtz calls it, and, in Hochschild’s terms, “the great forgetting.”

The lack of African voices in the story of the Congo is a concern that Hochschild returns to so often that it becomes a motif. Hochschild makes significant efforts to include the few black voices he finds through his research, so that the story of King Leopold’s Congo does not remain one told solely from a white European perspective. This motif also supports the theme of human rights—as the right to tell one’s own story, to voice one’s own perspective is a basic human right. It is also central to the theme of race and imperialism, because denying non-white people a voice in history is a basic tool in imperialism. 

In this story, it is not only the Congolese who are denied a voice, which is why Hochschild takes care to spend so much time chronicling the efforts of George Washington Williams—the first black American in the Congo and the first person to leave a written record criticizing Leopold’s Congo –and William Sheppard, the first black American missionary in the Congo and another ardent critic of the abuses he saw there. Even though both Williams and Sheppard contributed valuable writings in response to the situation in Congo, neither man’s perspective was given the attention it deserved because of their race. Hochschild means to rectify that.

Modernity

Hochschild makes many comparisons between the events and characters of Leopold’s Congo and more recent manifestations of similar violence in order to question our understanding of modernity and what it means to be modern. Hochschild draws our attention to the celebrity status of African explorers, Stanley’s use of multimedia in his publications and Leopold’s deft manipulation of international media to shape public opinion. In doing so, he asks us to consider what other practices have been perpetuated and expanded upon from in our own time, whether it be the explosion of celebrity culture or the covering up of atrocities.