Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost is that strangest of non-fictions tomes: it tells an extraordinary true story is both virtually unknown and almost universally familiar. The means by which it pulls off this juggling act transforms the book from a work of historical research into an meditation on the power of fiction.
The historical foundation of the story is one which pulls back the curtain on the lesser examined nooks and crannies of world history to present a portrait of a singular figure so monstrous as to be worthy of comparison to a Shakespearean villain, as well as the most perverted abominations of the 20th century, from Hitler to Pol Pot. That figure is King Leopold II of Belgium, “a man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and char, as any of the more complex villains of Shakespeare.” He earns this distinction as a result of vicious exploitation of the natives of the Congo for the purpose of accumulating a personal fortune in first the lucrative ivory trade and then, later, taking advantage of the sudden spike in the price of rubber at the end of the 1800’s.
It is not just that King Leopold grew rich off the blood and sweat of Congolese slave labor which brought him the infamous notoriety of drawing parallels with Joseph Stalin, however. Although estimates range from across a vast swath of possibilities stretching from just one million to more than fifteen million, contemporary assessments of the number of people died as a result of the brutality of Leopold’s regime over the Congo stands around ten million. That figure is, of course, higher than the traditional figure of the six million Jews who died at the hands Hitler, but when non-Jewish victims are added to mix, Leopold and Hitler appear to be closely vying to run a distant second to the twenty million Russians estimated to have died under the rule of Stalin. Whatever the figure actually is, it is yet another breathtaking display of the bottomless pit of inhumanity to which certain men do not fear to tread.
King Leopold’s Ghost is not merely an exploration of a monster who is rarely mentioned in the same breath as those with whose company he belongs. It also seeks to answer the question of why Leopold’s genocidal rule is not as well known as others, ultimately adopting the racially charged premise that, even if only without actual conscious intent, “we feel closer to the victims of Stalin and Hitler because they were almost all European.”
It is the introduction of a second singularly important character that elevates the text from simply being a thought-provoking and maddening exploration of the heart of darkness lurking inside powerful men, however. One member of the crew of a merchant marine ship engaged in the trafficking of important and exports between England and the Congo was a young Polish exile named Konrad Korzeniowski. Korzeniowski was natural sailor more than equipped to do the job, but his true ambition to become a writer. And, eventually, he published a book about his experiences dealing with the madness of greedy ivory traders operating with the essential lawlessness of an Africa controlled almost entirely by white European powers operating entirely in the interest of white European men. Korzeniowski would write that book under his adopted Anglicized pen name, Joseph Conrad. And so it is through the intensely familiar story told in Heart of Darkness and later adapted into Apocalypse Now (and, later, to a point not realized by a lot of viewers, Skull Island) that fiction made the story of King Leopold II known to people across the planet long before historical non-fiction finally got the job done.
