KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. By Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mifflin. 384 pp. $26

Ever hear of the Congo Holocaust? Neither had journalist and Mother Jones cofounder Adam Hochschild, despite years of writing about human rights and a visit to central Africa. Tantalized by a footnote referring to millions of lives lost to slave labor around the turn of the century, Hochschild delved deeper. He soon realized that he had in fact encountered the story before—in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In King Leopold’s Ghost, Hochschild draws on memoirs, missionary accounts, government records, and the testimony of Africans themselves to unearth the long-forgotten facts behind Conrad’s fiction.

The tale begins with Europe’s scramble for Africa. Frustrated by his "small country, small people," King Leopold II of Belgium desperately searched for a colony to call his own. He tried to buy Fiji; he offered to take the Philippines off Spain’s hands. With the help of the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, he finally settled on the Congo—a virtually unknown area larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. By 1884, Leopold had established the Congo Free State as his personal property.

A master of spin and a genius at manipulation, King Leopold played on the European public’s desire to combat the "Arab" slave trade and civilize the region’s inhabitants. Lauded as a humanitarian, the king in reality presided as self-appointed "proprietor" over a colony characterized by slave labor, severed hands, kidnapping, and mass murder. Between 1890 and 1910, his quest for ivory and rubber cost the lives of half of the region’s 20 million inhabitants and brought him more than $1 billion (in today’s dollars).

Although the king remains a shadowy villain, Hochschild vividly brings to life the activists whose battle against Leopold dominates the book’s second half. At the heart of the effort to expose his abuses are the journalist and Congo Reform Association founder E. D. Morel and the atrocity investigator Roger Casement, the colony’s first British consul. Also of great interest are two African Americans—the journalist George Washington Williams and the missionary William Shepherd— whose impassioned activism helped launch the 20th century’s first international human rights campaign. By focusing on characters such as these, Hochschild manages to transform what might have been dry history into a page turner.

"Did the Congo reformers . . . save millions of lives?" Hochschild asks. "It would be a fitting climax to our story if this were so, for a splendid movement deserves splendid results." But that wasn’t exactly the case. Although reports of atrocities dropped off after the king was forced to sell his colony to the Belgian government in 1908, the reduction resulted primarily from such changes as the shift from wild to cultivated rubber. And forced labor, hostage taking, and beatings with the infamous hippopotamus-skin whip called the chicotte continued until World War II. Still, Hochschild argues, the movement succeeded in making Leopold’s atrocities part of the historical record and in keeping alive the "human capacity for outrage."

—Rebecca A. Clay