In the 1880s, few Europeans had heard of the vast interior of Africa. Into this great silence sailed King Leopold II of Belgium.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
The bodies lay so thick on the ground that natives of the region became expert in carving out the ivory. 'The tusks,' writes one, 'are more numerous than those of men.'Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
The villain of the story is humanity itself.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Leopold, with the calculus of conquest in mind, said in 1890: 'I am determined to get my share of this great African cake.'Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
The Congo Free State is that part of the African continent closest to Dante's Inferno.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Perhaps the colonial experience always ends like this: nations come with a Bible and a sword, and leave with a profit.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
To get his way in Africa, Leopold once spent more than a year courting just one vote, that of Portugal.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
In the end, all that remained were the graves.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Leopold's Congo was a slave state of the special twentieth-century sort in which the workers' main duty is to produce wealth for the foreign corporations.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
In Africa as in Europe, the most deadly wars are the ones fought on the home front.Adam Hochschild - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa