3 Mulligans

Way back when I worked at Get Lost Travel Books in San Francisco, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost came out. I don’t know what it was that kept the book in my mind all these years, but Ghost seemed to be something really special. More than 10 years later, I took the time to read it and immediately regretted I hadn’t gotten to it sooner. It was a shocking reminder of how ignorant people are — how ignorant I am — of major world events. In sheer numbers, Leopold’s slave state killed between 5 and 8 million people at the beginning of the 20th century, a fact mostly unknown or ignored today. The institutionalized system of forced labor, kidnappings, beatings and maimings was all in the name of bleeding the Congo of as much money and resources as possible before the rest of the world caught on. Hochschild deftly tells the story of the Congo, its explorers, famous visitors like Joseph Conrad, and Leopold’s eventual downfall, but I don’t intend to focus on that here. What I found to be most chilling about the book was the massive system of collusion and trickery that went into sustaining the entire operation. All I could think of is how modern it all sounded. Journalists were bribed, whistle-blowers hounded, lobbyists were paid to bend governments to Leopold’s will, excesses were justified as casualties in the war on marauding Arabs, dummy organizations with innocuous names were set up to channel funds, state archives were burned, some surviving documents were treated as national secrets and kept out of public scrutiny until the 1980s (!), and my favorite trick – “leaking” English-language press releases that were misleading summaries of French-language reports full of damning evidence. After all this, when world outrage reached its peak, Leopold forced the Belgian government to buy the Congo from him for an outrageous sum, ensuring that the system of abuses would continue while Belgium recouped its losses. Hochschild’s final chapter “The Great Forgetting” is a sobering reminder of how the dominant powers get to spin the histories, or in this case, wipe them out altogether.