Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 14:32:09 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: the (Belgian) Congo


---------- Begin Forward By Art McGee ----------
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:18:38 -0400
From: Art McGee <amcgee-AT-igc.org>
Reply-To: khayes-AT-alternet.org
To: brc-news-AT-lists.tao.ca
Subject: [BRC-NEWS] King Leopold's Ghost Makes a Comeback

http://www.alternet.org/PublicArchive/Straus924.html

AlterNet

Friday, September 24, 1999

King Leopold's Ghost Makes a Comeback

By Tamara Straus, Original to AlterNet

In the early 1990s, award-winning writer Adam Hochschild was
sitting on a plane, reading a book, when he came across a
footnote citing Mark Twain's involvement in a worldwide
movement against Congolese slave labor. The note said that
during Belgian King Leopold II's claim to the Congo five to
eight million people lost their lives. Yet Hochschild, an
historian and advocate of international human rights, had
never heard anything about the atrocity. Sitting there, it
occurred to him that an entire history had been erased.

"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism
in Colonial Africa," which will appear in paperback this
month, is the result of Hochschild's startling discovery and
his subsequent years of research. It is the kind of history
that comes about rarely, for it achieves a basic tenet of
historical writing: the retrieval of a buried past.
Hochschild describes how between 1884 and 1907 Leopold,
frantic to carve for himself a colonial empire, lay claim to
the Congo under the most paradoxical of guises --
humanitarianism -- while actually letting loose a system of
terror in which entire Congolese villages were forced to
harvest rubber or face death by their Belgian overseers.

Yet this is only half the tale assembled in "King Leopold's
Ghost." Hochschild is able to reconstruct the largely untold
history of the Congolese genocide through the work of
several men -- Europeans and Americans, black and white --
who risked much to unmask Leopold's crimes. Hochschild calls
these efforts "the first great international human rights
movement of the twentieth century," and his descriptions of
figures like Edmund Morel, a British shipping clerk who
uncovered Leopold's billion-dollar system of slave labor,
and George Washington Williams, a black American who was the
first to report on the atrocities in the Congo, give his
history the narrative expanse one finds in a novel. It also
allows him to situate his story within the wider context of
European and African history -- to show colonialism as not
something that just took place in Africa but that had
worldwide consequences with which we still must grapple.

AlterNet talked to Adam Hochschild about the reaction to his
provocative book, the history of the Congo and the political
landscape of the post-colonial era.


Tamara Straus (TS): It's an unusual thing when a book about
African history makes a bestseller list. Yours reached the
number 10 spot on the nonfiction bestseller list among
independent bookstores nationally this month. Why?

Adam Hochschild (AH): Publishers, like reporters, practice
herd behavior.  They think in categories. King Leopold's
Ghost was offered to 10 publishers. Nine turned it down.
They thought people weren't interested in African history.
And that may be true. But I deeply believe that if you have
a good story, and can tell it in a way that brings
characters alive, that brings out the moral dimension, that
lays bare a great crime and a great crusade, people will
read it. And they have. The book has been or soon will be
published in half a dozen countries so far, and there are in
total well over 100,000 copies in print.

TS: What has been the reaction to the book in Belgium?

AH: It's been fascinating to watch. It was published in both
French and Dutch, the country's two languages, and became
the number 1 bestseller in each. The reviews were very nice,
but the old colonials were absolutely enraged. There are
tens of thousands of Belgians who had to come home in a
hurry when the Congo became independent in 1960, and for
them King Leopold II is a great hero. If you read French,
you can follow their attacks on the book on the Internet.
There's also a website where Congolese students in Europe
have been talking about the book. One posted an anguished
message saying that when he quoted some figures from it in
making the oral defense of his thesis, his thesis chairman
promptly flunked him. So you can see that the wounds of that
whole colonial relationship are still very raw. Faulkner,
speaking of the American South, said it best: "The past is
not dead. It's not even past."

TS: How do you explain the erasure of the Congolese
genocide? What does it say about the West's attitude toward
the colonial period in Africa?

AH: Americans and Europeans are accustomed to thinking of
fascism and communism as the twin evils of this century. But
the century has really been home to three great totalitarian
systems -- fascism, communism and colonialism -- the latter
practiced at its most deadly in Africa. In the West we don't
want to recognize this because we were complicit in it.
Countries that were democratic in Europe conducted mass
murder in Africa -- with little or no protest from the U.S.

TS: You wrote there is something very modern about the fact
that Leopold never saw the holocaust he set into motion.
Would you elaborate on that?

AH: A white Southerner living on a plantation 150 years ago
would see slaves in the fields, and might see them being
sold, beaten or whipped. But in the age of globalization, we
seldom come face to face with the worst suffering. It is the
genius of something like the student campaign against Third
World sweatshops, for example, to start drawing some of
those connections. These are the same kind of connections
that the heroes of the Congo reform movement tried to draw:
to make Americans and Britons realize that the rubber in
their auto and bike tires was gathered by slave labor half a
world away. What fascinates me about the Congo reform
movement was that it faced some of the same problems
anti-globalization activists face today.

TS: In your chapter "Meeting Mr. Kurtz," you document how
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was based not on fictional
imaginings, as literary scholars and school teachers have
long deduced, but on Conrad's actual experience in the Congo
in 1890. How do you account for this oversight on behalf of
literary scholars and historians?

AH: College and high school English teachers would like to
have us believe that Heart of Darkness is about the evil in
us all, rather than the evil of a particular place and time.
Well, as befits a great work of literature, it is about us
all, but it is also very much about a particular place and
time -- where Conrad himself spent six hellish and memorable
months. I didn't intially intend to write much about Heart
of Darkness, but after immersing myself in the history of
the Congo in that era, I gradually began to see that
virtually everything in Heart of Darkness is based on things
and people Conrad saw directly or heard about -- and
sometimes we can even figure out who he heard it from. His
biographers have missed much of this, because they've
concentrated mainly on Conrad's letters and diaries, which
are skimpy for this period. After publishing an early
version of the Conrad chapter in The New Yorker, I did get a
couple of helpful letters from two Conrad scholars who share
my interest in the specific history behind the book. Such
people are rare. Most English professors would rather
pontificate about its universality.

TS: Why was it that so many witnesses turned a blind eye to
the atrocities in the Congo while Edmund Morel, who became
Leopold's most feared foe, didn't? How can we understand
Morel's accomplishment?

AH: Morel to me is one of the great heroes of the century.
Not just because of what he did regarding the Congo, but
because of his extraordinarily brave stance -- for which he
went to prison at hard labor -- protesting British
participation in World War I. He was one of these people who
had the ability to follow his own conscience when
*everybody* else around him was accepting the myths of the
day, or else having a few doubts but not voicing them. Such
men and women are great treasures. He had an internal moral
compass that always pointed true north. I wish one like that
for us all.

TS: The United States has had a long involvement in the
Congo, beginning when Leopold orchestrated the Arthur
administration's recognition of a Congo under his
"protection." What was particularly galling about Leopold's
lobbying campaign and the U.S.'s complicity in it? Do
similarities exist between the international lobbying
efforts of 100 years ago and today?

AH: It is quite amazing that the United States was the first
country anywhere to officially recognize Leopold's personal
claim to the Congo. This allowed him to persuade the major
European countries to do the same. The U.S. wasn't directly
involved in the Scramble for Africa at that point, but the
recognition -- the result of Leopold's brilliant Washington
lobbying campaign -- sure helped it along. And so much of
this campaign involved things that still go on today --
money being passed quietly under the table, wining and
dining of Senators and Representatives, and the lavish
entertaining of the President himself on vacation. In this
case, it was a Florida orange plantation owned by Leopold's
friend and lobbyist, Henry Shelton Sanford.

TS: Historians of Africa have argued that perhaps no country
in Africa today displays the consequences of European
colonialism as harshly as the Congo. After the country
achieved independence in 1960, it reeled from one tragic
situation to the next: the CIA-led assassination of
President Patrice Lumumba; the three-decades long
dictatorship of Mobuto Sese Seko; and the recent genocide in
Rwanda that has spilled over into the Congo. How much did
the Congo's colonial experience lead to the political,
social and economic instability we see there today?

AH: For some 80 years -- first under Leopold, and then in a
more orderly and less murderous way under the Belgian
colonial administration -- the Congo had the experience of
being plundered, for the profit of those overseas. No one
should be surprised that this was followed by more decades
of plunder, at the hands of Mobutu and the multinational
corporations he was in league with. And let's not forget the
devastation wrought by slavery -- both indigenous African
slavery and the transAtlantic slave trade -- for centuries
before then. Democracy is a pretty fragile plant under the
best of circumstances, and none of the Congo's heritage has
been fertile soil for it to grow in.

TS: The Congo reform movement shares a sobering similarity
with the recent movement to prevent genocide in Kosovo,
namely that even with mass activism the killing and
devastation was enormous. Given this, how hopeful can we be
about the effectiveness of human rights movements?

AH: No great movement achieves all it sets out to. But I'm
still glad for the intervention, late, timid and bungled
though it was, in Kosovo. More people would be dead or
homeless otherwise. And I'm still glad for the Congo reform
movement -- probably even more people would be dead if it
had not existed. Part and parcel of any struggle for human
rights is that you'll only achieve a small part of what
you're aiming at. But you still have to do it. Otherwise
we'd make no progress at all.

TS: Your previous book, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember
Stalin, also documents a system of terror and mass murder
and the ways in which a horrible period of history was
erased. What fascinates you about falsified or buried
histories?

AH: Maybe the question what draws me to terror and mass
murder emotionally should be left to the psychiatrists. But
what draws me to these things intellectually is the mystery
of seeing and denial. How is it that Stalin could send some
20 million Soviet men, women and children to their deaths --
millions of whom remained true believers to the very end?
How is it that thousands of people worked on the docks of
Antwerp for years, watched ships arrive from the Congo
loaded with cargoes of valuable ivory and rubber, then turn
around and sail back to Africa carrying mainly soldiers and
firearms, and thought nothing of it? Then E.D. Morel came
along, stood on the dock, and deduced: this means the ivory
and rubber is being gathered by slave labor. Evil has long
fascinated people -- or there would be no market for
storytelling, from the Greek playwrights onward. I'm also
fascinated by who recognizes evil for what it is and who
doesn't.

TS: Africa watchers in the U.S. constantly comment on their
struggle to follow events on that continent. How do you keep
abreast of events in the Congo and Central Africa? What
newspapers and journals to you rely on? What are their
shortcomings?

AH: For southern African news, The Mail and Guardian of
Johannesburg is excellent. Le Soir of Brussels
(www.lesoir.com) probably pays more attention than any U.S.
publication. The New York Times and the Washington Post each
have several correspondents in Africa, but how well they
cover the news varies wildly with the quirks and personality
of each correspondent. There are few Western correspondents
in Africa, which is bad in one sense, but in another it's
good because there's relatively little reportorial herd
behavior -- there's no herd. Some of these reporters are
good, some are abysmal. You have to read them carefully and
figure out.


Alternet is a project of Independent Media Institute

Copyright (c) 1999 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.


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---------- End Forward By Art McGee ----------



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