King Leopold's Ghost

“This is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it, and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings of recent history.”  

This, in a nutshell, is the whole of Hochschild’s project in King Leopold’s Ghost. The bulk of the book is taken up with the first two items on the list, with the Prologue covering the third, and the last chapter addressing the final item.

“Except for Affonso’s letters, the written record of these times still shows them entirely through white men’s eyes. How did the Europeans, beginning with Diogo Cão and his three ships with faded red crosses on their sails, appear to the people living at the great river’s mouth?”  

This passage is one of the first to address a much-repeated motif in Hochschild’s book—the lack of African voices in the story of the Congo. Here, and throughout the book, he disrupts the assumption that the white, European, male perspective is the norm.

“He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, as one historian has remarked, ‘the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers.’ His articles, books, and speaking tours brought him greater riches than any other travel writer of his time, and probably of the next century as well. With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.” 

This passage highlights an aspect of Stanley’s character that Hochschild returns to repeatedly—his ability to craft a public persona that made him an international celebrity—in a way that reveals how calculated his self-representation was. The idea that he “planned how to tell the story once he got home” emphasizes how much “spin” Stanley put on the stories he told about himself, and the use of the word “sculpting” implies the artistry of it. This passage also reiterates the motif of modernity, suggesting, perhaps, that Stanley was a precursor to contemporary superstars who also must carefully control access to the details of their personal lives and spin misleading stories in the press to maintain a particular image.