Leopold Ii Quotes

“If there are these abuses in the Congo, we must stop them, If they continue, it will be the end of the state.”
― King Leopold II of Belgium

“The abuses were first reported by an American missionary in The Times of London in 1895 and quickly brought Léopold’s censure: “If there are these abuses in the Congo, we must stop them,” he warned EIC officials in 1896. “If they continue, it will be the end of the state.” For the next ten years, reforming the Congo’s rubber industry absorbed an inordinate amount of attention in the British and American press and legislatures, not to mention within Belgium and the EIC itself, leading to formal Belgian colonization in 1908. Hochschild thus takes a very limited, unintentional, unforeseen, and perhaps unavoidable problem of native-on-native conflict over rubber harvesting and blows it up into a “forgotten Holocaust” to quote the subtitle given to the French edition of his book. Inside this great invention are many more perfidious Russian dolls.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Most memorably for readers, Hochschild reprints staged photographs taken by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and supplied to the anti-Léopold campaign through the English missionary John Weeks. The missionaries knew that showing these fake photos at “lantern shows” in community halls in Britain won more attention and donations than their detailed accounts of cannibalism and sleeping sickness ravaging their areas. Hochschild does not tell the reader that the photographs are staged, nor does he explain that the photographs of people with severed hands were victims of gangrene, tribal vendettas, or cannibalism having nothing to do with rubber. In the most famous photo of them all, a man whom Seeley got to sit on the veranda of her mission station with a severed hand and foot before him, the original caption given by Morel reads: “Sala of Wala and remains of his five year old daughter; both wife and child were eaten by king’s soldiers at a cannibal feast. Until Hochschild, no one had suggested that the girl or her mother were killed for rubber, only that the EIC had failed to control the eating habits of its citizens. Hochschild, however, captions the photo thus: “Nsala, of the district of Wala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter, Boali, a victim of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (A.B.I.R.) militia.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“As a self-proclaimed human rights activist, Hochschild can be forgiven for his economic illiteracy. But since it is the keystone that begins his tale, it is another fib worth correcting. The EIC’s large trade surplus (more physical goods going out than coming in) was because virtually none of the revenue from the goods sold in Europe was sent back to pay for labor, which was “paid for” as a fulfillment of the EIC labor obligation. Instead, the revenue paid for European administration, infrastructure, and trade services in the Congo as well as profits that were parked in Belgium (an overall payments deficit). For Hochschild to claim that Africans were getting “little or nothing” for the goods they produced because fewer goods were being sent to Africa displays a stunning economic ignorance. It is like saying that the empty container ships returning to China from today’s port of Long Beach show that China’s workers are being paid “little or nothing.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“the big headline of the book, a whopper really, is Hochschild’s claim that the population of the Congo fell by 50 percent or 10 million on Léopold’s watch. The EIC, he claims, caused “depopulation” and “mass murder” of “genocidal proportions” due to its drive for rubber profits. In fact, the most knowledgeable estimates today suggest that the general population of the Congo rose slightly during the EIC era and that any deaths attributable to the limited abuses in the rubber areas were far outweighed by the lives saved and created by the EIC’s direct interventions in other respects. Even if we can agree that any life lost to senseless violence and negligent governance is always and everywhere deserving of condemnation, Léopold’s regime was a monumental achievement in saving and promoting black lives.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“How could Hochschild go so wrong? He was highly motivated from the start to “find” a genocide because, as he notes, his project began by reading the American humorist Mark Twain’s claim that eight to ten million people had died in the EIC. But no scholar has ever made such a charge. His source was a chapter by the Belgian ethnographer Jan Vansina, citing his own work on population declines in the entirety of central Africa throughout the 19th century that included only what became the northern areas of the EIC. In any case, Vansina’s own source was a Harvard study of 1928 that quoted a 1919 Belgian claim that “in some areas” population had fallen by half, but quoted it in order to assert that it was almost certainly false.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Even taking Sanderson’s pessimistic estimate as correct, does this mean that Léopold’s rule “killed” 500,000 people? Of course not, because, in addition to the misplaced personalization of long-term population changes, the rubber regions, as mentioned, experienced both population increases and declines. Even in the latter, such as the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control. The modest population gains caused by EIC interventions were overwhelmed by a range of wholly separate factors, which in order of importance were: the slave trade, sleeping sickness, inter-tribal warfare, other endemic diseases (smallpox, beriberi, influenza, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and venereal disease), cannibalism, and human sacrifice.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Why did Hochschild put such store in plainly erroneous data about a loss of life caused by the EIC? Here we come to the horror at the heart of King Hochschild’s Hoax: his attempt to equate the EIC to the Nazis and to the sacred memory of the Holocaust. Throughout the book there is a nauseating, indeed enraging, use of Holocaust and Auschwitz comparisons. In part these reveal an insecurity about his main thesis and the knowledge that one way to silence criticism is to play on the fact that no one wants to be called a Holocaust denier. While we know “how many Jews the Nazis put to death,” he menaces readers, insisting on such precision in the EIC is distasteful. You have been warned!”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The further falsehoods and distortions that make up King Hochschild’s Hoax all collectively derive from the problems above. Perhaps most remarkably, the book is not really much about the history of the EIC at all. The central activity that justified, motivated, absorbed, and in the end defeated the EIC is missing: the battle against the Afro-Arab slave trade. This is akin to writing a history of the 68 years of colonial Kenya that limits itself only to the eight years of Mau Mau counter-insurgency campaign.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Belgium had no prior history in the slave trade, nor of African slaves. Léopold could fight against slavery without any hint of hypocrisy, even of the ahistorical type advanced by Hochschild. And it was slavery, not rubber operations, that contemporary observers viewed as the biggest threat to the people of the Congo.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The missionary Fanny Emma Fitzgerald Guinness was allowed to visit one Arab slave fort in 1890, seeing “rows upon rows of dark nakedness, relieved here and there by the white dresses of the captors” in one pen holding 2,300 souls. She estimated that for every one slave eventually sold, seven died either in the raids, in the camps, or while being transported to the Indian Ocean.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“In 1892, a Belgian trader and his entire caravan of six Europeans and 40 porters were beheaded by a thug controlled by the notorious slaver and warlord Msiri, who asked that their heads be returned to him to decorate his compound. The trader had tried to persuade Msiri and other local tyrants to sell their ivory to his company, which could transport it by river, thus obviating the need for slaves.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Hochschild describes the EIC official Léon Fiévez as a “sadist” who “terrorized” the rubber-rich Équateur district where he was commissioner. His source is the George Bricusse mentioned above. Bricusse lasted only three years in the Congo before dying of either typhoid or malaria, a common occurrence for the EIC where the annual mortality rate for European soldiers was 20 percent. In the 1894 incident recalled, Fiévez is recounting to Bricusse his desperate attempts to feed his soldiers while battling slave lords in the area. There is no mention of rubber because this particular place had little of it. The slaving business, on the other hand, is flourishing and Bricusse notes its devastation everywhere. Fiévez had arrived a few days earlier and held parlay with local chiefs. They had agreed to supply his soldiers with food for payment. They then reneged and fled into the forest. Fiévez sent his troops in pursuit and, in the ensuing fight, 100 of the chiefs’ soldiers were killed. After that, the chiefs made good on their promise.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Hochschild is at pains to convince the reader that anyone opposing the EIC was good, whether brutal slave trader, inveterate cannibal, fetish priest, or ethnic-cleansing warlord. His treatment of the 1895 rebellion by native soldiers at a military camp named Luluabourg in the southern savannah strains to portray the rebels as noble savages pining for freedom and a return to pastoral life. In his telling, the Belgian commander Mathieu Pelzer was a “bully” who “used his fists” and thus got his comeuppance at breakfast with a knife to the throat. Actually, Pelzer had nothing to do with it. The rebels were former soldiers for a black slave king. The EIC had brought them to the southern camp to reintegrate them as government soldiers. But their loss of royal prerogatives to whore, steal, and maim caused them to rebel. The group never exceeded 300 (Hochschild speculates that it reached 2,500) and petered out in the northern jungles in 1897, a rag-tag criminal gang gone to seed.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“This egregious example of “Belgians bad, natives good” is the conceptual foundation of King Hochschild’s Hoax. And it bleeds into what is, for most readers, the enduring imaginative impact of the book, to have put a nasty Belgian face onto Mistah Kurtz, the phantom who draws Marlow’s steamboat up the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Like generations of English professors, Hochschild has misread the book as an indictment of colonialism, which is difficult to square with its openly pro-colonial declarations and the fact of the “adoring” natives surrounding the deceased Kurtz.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Hochschild repeats the urban legend that Léopold burned all the EIC documents, going “to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence.” Quite the opposite: Léopold was proud of the EIC and went to extraordinary lengths to leave behind an extensive record. The testimony of his military aide that Hochschild cites about “burning the State archives” and turning “most of the Congo state records to ash” was a misunderstanding: what the aide saw burning were ruined and unreadable papers among the thousands of documents that came back in crates from the Congo in 1908. Léopold left behind 14 trunks filled with his personal letters and financial statements. Everything was carefully cataloged in “a vast room that looked like a post office,” the aide recalled. Some of it went missing in the turmoil of World War II before resurfacing in the basement of a house in 1983. Just last year, researchers at the Royal Museum for Central Africa who work on the EIC archives published a new book, The Congo Free State: What Could Archives Tell Us?”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“For all our modernist beliefs in truth, evidence, logic, and fairness, perhaps we have reached a point of no return in the writing of history where modern progressives attack the historical record with malice aforethought, leaving us stupider than we were before this movement took shape in the 1960s, when the twentysomething Hochschild was at the barricades protesting Vietnam and all the rest. It is for future generations to re-colonize history using the precious intellectual resources of the Enlightenment. Until then, we do well to fight the progressive warlords like Hochschild who enslave formerly colonized peoples in distorted victimization narratives that rob them of agency, all the while keeping the white man front and center.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it “the greatest falsification in modern history,” a compliment of sorts, I suppose.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“On another point: King Leopold’s Ghost reproduces some of the photographs of Congo atrocities that fueled the worldwide protests against Leopold’s rule during the first decade of the twentieth century. These “fake photos,” Gilley declares, were “staged” by the photographer. Yes, some images appear posed—something true of most photos everywhere in an era when cameras were bulky contraptions on tripods whose subjects had to remain still for a few seconds.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Bruce Gilley is right, that I was misleading in respect to one quotation I cited from another official, Charles Lemaire. I am sorry about that and it should be corrected. Lemaire was a more complicated case. His early diaries, which I quote elsewhere in the book, unroll a lengthy list of villages he ordered burned to the ground and a triumphant roster of death tolls: “20 natives killed” here, “around 15 blacks killed” there, and many more such boasts. But later in life, to his credit, Lemaire had deep regrets, and in fairness to him I should have referred to them.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Adam Hochschild has enjoyed a long run of success with King Leopold’s Ghost, his distortionary 1998 tale about the État Indépendant du Congo (EIC). So long, in fact, that he appears unable to come clean about its many fabrications. It is not just the doctoring of the quotation that anchors the story of “chopped hands for red rubber” (which I am grateful he has admitted), but the vast skein of distortion in which that little dodge is embedded.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild is correct that the demographer Léon de St. Moulin assayed the 50 percent decline possibility (in 1987 and 1990 works). But Hochschild fails to mention that Moulin, like the later Vansina, believed that the EIC and rubber had nothing to do with it. The causes for Moulin were, in order, sleeping sickness, smallpox, Spanish flu, and venereal diseases. Moulin did not even mention the EIC or rubber in his 1990 chapter. Like the later Vansina, he recognized that these were footnotes in the demographic history of the Congo.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“As for the claims by the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (“13 million killed” in 1998, then “5 to 10 million killed” in 2008), they are hard to keep track of. Initially, the starting year for his assertions was 1880 (five years before the EIC was founded and ten years before any rubber harvesting) while the latter estimate extended the end year to 1930 (22 years after the EIC). A second edition of the latter estimate, without explanation, moved up the starting date to 1885. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. All three editions of his book merely cite Moulin. It is notable that in a lengthy essay on the EIC published in L’Histoire in 2020, Ndaywel no longer makes any specific population claims, asserting only that the effects of the EIC were “worse than grim” (“plus que macabres”). In the end, Ndaywel is not credible. His works are published by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium because he is black. This helps them to “decolonize Eurocentric narratives,” which means using blacks as shadow puppets to shield their radical accounts from criticism.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“By contrast, dozens of serious demographers and statisticians—not just the Jean-Paul Sanderson I mention—have concluded the overall population rose slightly or was unchanged at around 8 to 10 million from 1885 to 1908. Others include Bruce Fetter, Guy Vanthemsche, Jean-Luc Vellut, Pierre-Luc Plasman, Anatole Romaniuk, and, as mentioned, the later Jan Vansina. Taken on its own, the EIC was a positive influence on the black population in the Congo because of its campaigns against slavery, endemic tribal warfare, cannibalism, and polygamous rape and torture. Infrastructure and trade brought life-saving income. Population remained unchanged only because of the persistence of endemic disease and slavery. According to Romaniuk, venereal disease alone can explain the depression of population growth after 1900 when the EIC had finally brought a modicum of peace and prosperity to the region.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Pendant les 25 dernières années, l’idée du Congo a été étroitement liée dans l’imaginaire occidental au livre de 1998 intitulé “Le fantôme du roi Léopold” de l’écrivain américain Adam Hochschild. Ce livre est largement étudié dans les lycées et les universités, et il figure régulièrement en tête des listes des meilleures ventes en matière d’histoire coloniale, africaine et occidentale. Hochschild est devenu une sorte de roi du Congo, ou du moins de son histoire. Le livre est systématiquement cité par les universitaires réputés dans leurs notes de bas de page chaque fois qu’ils veulent affirmer qu’il est “bien connu” et “indiscutable” que des hommes sinistres en Europe ont semé le chaos en Afrique il y a plus d’un siècle. Toute discussion sur le Congo, ou sur le colonialisme européen en général, commence invariablement par la question : “Avez-vous lu Le fantôme du roi Léopold ?”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Certaines personnes pourraient considérer “Le canular du roi Hochschild”, comme nous pourrions l’appeler, comme une fable valorisante pour les Africains modernes aux dépens de l’homme blanc. Mais ses effets débilitants sur l’Afrique, et sur le Congo en particulier, en font le contraire. C’est un coup de chicotte (fouet en forme de lanière de cuir) insensible et négligent sur le dos de tous les Africains noirs, un porno narcissique de la culpabilité pour les libéraux blancs au détriment de l’Africain. L’avocat congolais Marcel Yabili l’appelle “la plus grande falsification de l’histoire moderne”, un compliment en quelque sorte, je suppose.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“My rights to the Congo are not for sharing; they are the fruits of my labours and my expenditures . . . The adversaries of the Congo are pressing for immediate annexation. These persons no doubt hope that a change of regime would sabotage the work now in progress and would enable them to reap some rich booty.”
― Leopold II