King Leopold's Ghost

For a long time, I was longing to read 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild and I laid my hands onto it a couple of days ago.

Back in the late nineteenth century, when Europe enjoyed its 'hundred years peace', its cost was being borne by colonies across the world. KLG is the story of one such place - Congo. King Leoplod II, the long bearded Monarch of neutralist Belgium, bought, not through money but deceit and treachery, a vast expanse of land in Africa - 66 times of the size of Belgium. For more than two decades (1890-1910), while Leopold was celebrated as the benign sovereign of Belgium in Europe, his rapacity cost about 10 million lives in Congo. The poor Congolese were subjected to a reign of terror that could be compared to Hitler's savagery in Auschwitz, even more. Symbolically, 'severed hands' could be identified with Leopold's rule, just as 'severed fingers' around Anghulimaal's neck in Indian mythology. In Leopold's Congo, his forces were ordered to cut the hands of the people they have killed to account for the number of bullets fired. Often, the no of hands were more than the no of bullets fired, for cuting hands became a hobby as well as signifier of power for the soldiers who often belonged to the emasciated lower middle class in Europe.

'Congo's plunder' is a story that is rarely found in the chronicles of the history, for history is written by and for the conquerer. KLG also brings out how modernity, progress, development in Europe came at the cost of murder, rape, savagery elsewhere. European civility is full of silences of its barbarity. A mustread!!