King Leopold's Ghost by Adam HochschildMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is an amazing and well-researched deep dive into the genocidal assault, mass slavery, and extractive economy that was the Belgian Congo. In three acts, King Leopold of Belgium, finally gets the foreign land he seeks to wring out and obtains the Belgian Congo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo. For the second act and the closing decade of the 19th Century, Leopold enacts a rule of terror resulting in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." The final act finds, largely in the US and UK, an activist front that exposes the rapacious tactics over the 20th Century's first decade.
Along the way we meet Joseph Conrad as a steamboat captain, a possible basis for Kurtz in Léon Rom, the oddball characters drawn to lawless frontiers like the sketchy Morton Stanley and more.
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