Colonialism in “King Leopold’s Ghost”
Colonialism is “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically”. King Leopold did just this. From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium took over Congo, and is responsible for over ten million African deaths. So how did a man from Belgium take over Congo and maintain it without anyone stopping him? Leopold did this through money, torture, and help from agents, because he didn’t do it alone.
Leopold “bought” Congo by investing his own money and buying out other investors. He convinced everyone that he wanted to help Africans, and hosted conferences to receive donations. But it was all a scam. It
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was the coverup for his 23 year long reign over Congo. Leopold also received a loan (over a million dollars in 1890) because the people were still under the impression that he had a “philanthropic organization”. He crawled up the population chain quickly, and became the ruler of Congo. But why Congo? It had a large source of ivory and rubber, which means money. Leopold wanted all the money to himself and for his family in Belgium. All that time people thought he was going to help Africans, when all he wanted was territory. His hypocritical fortune funding to “stop slavery” only led to the exact opposite. Although he ruled Congo and became very wealthy, he did not raise all the money himself. Leopold needed slaves to help retrieve rubber and ivory. It was this that started the mass killings of over 10 million Africans. Leopold put more than 10 million Africans through physical and emotional torture.
Families were put to hard work for little or no pay. Even children were whipped if not done what they were told. Men were brutally beaten if they failed to retrieve a certain amount of ivory or rubber. Sometimes King Leopold would even have soldiers hold their families hostage, have their hands cut off, or killed. "I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people... but that allowed five hundred others to live." His idea was that he would “scare” the others into working harder, and they would get more supplies, and more profit. “A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river.... Rubber caused these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.” The emotional and physical pain that Africans endured even caused death. Some died from disease, others died from getting appendages cut off(heads,legs,arms). All of this was happening in Congo when the rest of the world was completely oblivious to it. Other forms of torture included shooting holes into their
ears, and forcing them to drink castor oil, and eating dirt/pebbles if they tried to mix it with rubber to meet requirements. King Leopold was responsible for the mass genocide of more than ten million Africans. Twenty three years of killing innocent people just for wealth. With the help of money, agents, and physical torture of slaves, he was able to control an entire population.
The book mainly chronicles the efforts of King Leopold II of Belgium which is to make the Congo into a colonial empire. During the period that the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River.
Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" is a lost historical account starting in the late 19th century continuing into the 20th century of the enslavement of an entire country. The book tells the story of King Leopold and his selfish attempt to essentially make Belgium bigger starting with the Congo. This was all done under an elaborate "philanthropic" public relations curtain deceiving many countries along with the United States (the first to sign on in Leopold's claim of the Congo). There were many characters in the book ones that aided in the enslavement of the Congo and others that help bring light to the situation but the most important ones I thought were: King Leopold, a cold calculating, selfish leader, as a child he was crazy about geography and as an adult wasn't satisfied with his small kingdom of Belgium setting his sites on the Congo to expand. Hochschild compares Leopold to a director in a play he even says how brilliant he is in orchestrating the capture of the Congo. Another important character is King Leopold's, as Hochschild puts it, "Stagehand" Henry Morton Stanley. He was a surprisingly cruel person killing many natives of the Congo in his sophomore voyage through the interior of Africa (The first was to find Livingston). Leopold used Stanley to discuss treaties with African leaders granting Leopold control over the Congo. Some of the natives he talked to weren't even in the position to sign the treaties or they didn't know what they were signing.
Leopold paid a large monthly price to a journalist to ensure a stream of sympathetic articles about his activities in the Congo. The French did not feel threatened by Belgium or by Leopold’s claims. Their main fear was that when the king ran out of money, as they were sure he would, in his expensive plan to build a railway, he might sell the whole territory to their rival, Britain. When talking to the British, Leopold hinted that if he didn’t get all the land he wanted, he would leave Africa completely, which meant he would sell the Congo to France. The bluff worked, and Britain gave in. Staff in place and tools in hand, Leopold set out to build the infrastructure necessary to exploit his colony. Leopold’s will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited land to be disposed of by its owner. Leopold established the capital of his new Congo state at the port town of
...abor to get what he wanted, ivory and rubber. Leopold was able to colonize and pillage Congo for its resources during the Scramble for Africa through forced labor. The quote that sums up my essay and the book is best described at the end of chapter 15. Massacring huge numbers of natives will eventually frighten the survivors into gathering rubber. This shows the intentions of forced labor by the Force Publique and the reason for the population drop in Congo during Leopold’s rule.
So when he does this he set up fake chair organizations which only help one to meet but still had and publish Literature but all which course actually from King Leopold and he commissions famous explorer Henry Morgan Stanley best known for finding doctor Livingstone. Stanley was the guy who actually explore Africa for King Leopold and mark out the territory for his organization which pretends not to be Belgium. This is an important powerful book which provides concise account of the abuses which have really held Africa backs for so long. The focus of the colony after a while became the Rubber trade so there we be basically a cowry labor system where people would be a force by the threat of destruction of their villages or suction of their children to me rubber codes. The problem with harvesting rubber is the vines near the village will gets exhausted will not
The story starts with King Leopold II of Belgium. In the scramble for Africa, many nations rushed to establish colonies, and those who did made a great profit from them. The king himself wanted to compete with them, as well as amass a profit. He traveled to several British colonies and learnt how to establish and manage a colony of his own. The king himself then secretly bought the Congo, and supported an expedition led by Henry Morton Stanly.
In King Leopold`s Ghost, the author Adam Hochschild conveys many attempts to challenge the actions of King Leopold`s control in the Congo. This was to reach an international audience at the time of the 20th century. Protestors depended on a variety of writing techniques to make their case successful. For example the use of direct letters to officials, published “open letters”, articles in newspapers, and public speeches. These protesters were George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, Edmund Dene Morel, and Roger Casement. These protesters became aware of the situation in the Congo in different ways. They also had diversity in how they protested through their writing. Although Edmund Dene Morel and Roger Casement share a comparative approach.
The land Leopold had obtained was about eighty times larger than that of Belgium itself. Plus, Leopold was proclaimed the “sovereign” ruler of the entire Congo Free State, granting him the power to exercise total control, where as, in Belgium, Leopold was forced to rule under a constitutional monarchy.... ... middle of paper ... ... “Africa Imperialism” History of Imperialism.
During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, King Leopold II of Belgium invaded the Congo and used it to procure more wealth for himself and his nation. In doing so, as many as ten million Congolese were decimated, and they faced unspeakable horrors. Hochschild argues in King Leopold’s Ghost that all actions taken by King Leopold II were done out of nothing more than sheer greed and selfishness, and he used any means necessary to get what he wanted, and manipulated others into following suit by exploiting their own greed and racism. The only way the brutality was combated, Hochschild further goes on to describe, was through the actions of the few with a higher moral character.
During the 17th century, slavery was a widely used commodity with the Europeans, little do people know however that African kings also had and accepted slavery in their own nations. King Nzinga Mbemba of Congo and the King of Ouidah had similarities on the issue of slavery; they tolerated the use of slaves. Congo’s king had no contingency with slavery; in fact, he had slaves in his country. When the Portuguese were purchasing goods in Congo, the king had men “investigate if the mentioned goods are captives or free men” (NZ, 622). The fact that the king differentiates the men between ‘free’ and ‘captives’ illustrates that not all people in Congo are free. Whether these captives are from the country of Congo or not, they are still caught and held all across the nation against their will. King Mbemba kept slaves because the population of Congo was vastly declining due to the slave trade. In his letter, he pleads with the king of Portug...
In the 19th Century King Leopold II was the king of Belgium and he was looking for a way to expand his power and influence of the Belgium state. During this time imperialism was becoming very prominent, especially in European countries. Imperialism was a way for a country to easily gain wealth by implementing military force on another country or group of people. They would extract resources and goods from these places and, in its wake, imperialism destroyed these societies and their cultures. King Leopold II is a perfect example of European Imperialism and in his book King Leopold’s Ghost; Adam Hochschild details the effects that King Leopold II had on the Congo in Africa. Hochschild also argues that Leopold’s rule had an impact in the Congo
As a political figure, King Leopold of Belgium had minimal power, yet he acknowledged the political and financial advantages of colonization, and acquired the Congo as a private colony whereas Britain snatched up colonies globally, including the “crown jewel” of all colonies, India. Belgium and Britain demonstrated a stark contradiction of two opposing methods of colonization. These two countries methods’ of domination ultimately decide the fates of each party, conqueror and conquered, in the precarious gamble that is imperialism.... ... middle of paper ...
While rebels had control of the diamond mines, they killed approximately 4 million people and countless families were displaced. The acts of violence that were perpetrated by rebels in Africa were horrific. Adults and children were murdered, mutilated, tortured, and raped. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone performed despicable acts of cutting off people's body parts with machetes to instill fear in the community. If you were working in the diamond mines and not performing up to the standards of the rebels, you would lose a body part as punishment.
While Leopold II, the King of Belgium, desperately wanted an overseas colony, The Belgian people did not share his enthusiasm; which created the feelings of neglect and apathy Belgium had towards Congo. The Congo Free State, established “in the margins of the Berlin Conference” in 1885, allowed Leopold to “gain international recognition of his possession” which he had begun to take control of since the 1870s. However, while Leopold was securing control of the Congo, the Belgian people were not interested in controlling colonies, as they believed that colonies “would merely soak up resources that would be better used for social purposes at home.” Thus, the Belgian people decided to solve the problem of having an unwanted colony by separating the Belgian government from...
...ermore established imperial rule in the Congo. The Force Publique was Leopold’s governing army. They were to oversee the work of the now colonized people of the Congo. Another of Leopold’s objectives was to gain wealth from his acquired colony. With the Force Publique, he would force the Congolese to gather ivory from the land. Those who refused had their elders, women and children held hostage until they complied. Leopold’s International African Association was to be a humanitarian project that would help to end slavery, however, by forcing the people to work for him, he was enslaving those he supposedly sought to help. When the popularity of the bicycle rose in the late 19th, manufactures were in need of rubber for their tires. Leopold saw this as an opportunity to gain more wealth and quickly had the Force Publique force the people into harvesting rubber.