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Adam Hochschild - Author Of 'King Leopold's Ghost'

Adam Hochschild on Curious Worldview - Spotify

Adam Hochschild On Curious Worldview - Apple

Adam Hochschild On Curious Worldview - Youtube

Tim Butcher Episode - https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QIQLYuwbA2cFLCzJc8TGl?si=nKU21dGrRX-Z-otWklpxg

King Leopold's Ghost Book - https://www.amazon.com.au/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Adam-Hochshild/dp/0618001905

From 1885, for 13 years, one man, King Leopold II, owned, as his personal property, one of the largest pieces of geography on earth. The Congo is four times larger than France, it’s bigger than India, it’s bigger than Texas, Alaska, California & Montana combined - the equator runs right through it’s middle and makes it the second largest rainforest on the globe - it’s impossibly rich in resources, and desperately poor in economics. In those 13 years of private ownership, Leopold oversaw potentially one of the most brutal regimes of extraction the world has ever known. The population was estimated to have halved in those 13 years, more than 10 million deaths. It was an exploit in mass slavery, mass death, bodily mutilation and mass extraction. Ivory and wild rubber were in high demand, and so under the guise of media manipulation and PR mastery, Leopold convinced the world that these goods were in fact being traded with, rather than extracted from, the Congo. 

The horror, however, could only be concealed for so long. A fella by the name of Ed Morell who worked for a shipping company in Liverpool noticed the bounty of ivory and rubber arriving from the Congo, with only men and arms making the journey back. His suspicion grew, he found accounts from missionaries and others who had been, and mounted a campaign to undermine the constant wall of propaganda Leopold had financed.

In 1908, the Belgium state purchased the Congo off Leopold… where the country remained a colony of Belgium until 1960. 

And for a myriad of reasons, for which we address in the podcast, the Congo today is still on the back foot. Kinshasa, the capital city already has a bigger population than Paris, and is projected to be as much as 40,000,000 by 2050. The Congo today is among the most resource rich nations on earth, but among the least developed. It still attracts the same predation for extraction as it ever has, although all together less forceful and less violent

The man I speak with on the podcast today wrote the definitive history of this period. His name is Adam Hochschild, he’s an author, journalist and historian and wrote in 1998, 'King Leopold's Ghost'. 

Adam Hochschild on Curious Worldview - Spotify

Adam Hochschild On Curious Worldview - Apple

Adam Hochschild On Curious Worldview - Youtube

Tim Butcher Episode - https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QIQLYuwbA2cFLCzJc8TGl?si=nKU21dGrRX-Z-otWklpxg

King Leopold's Ghost Book - https://www.amazon.com.au/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Adam-Hochshild/dp/0618001905

Consider sharing this interview with a mate, colleague, brother, sister, whoever you think might be interested in this as well.

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
Something so wild about all this is that from 1885, the Congo was not a colony of Belgium, but rather the personal possession of King Leopold II and run by a private bureaucracy and mercenary force. It became an official colony of Belgium 13 years later. But wanted to ask you, did those 13 years of unaccountability, when it was Leopold's personal possession, did that allow for more brutality? Or can we suspect that even if it had been an official colony from the start, that similar practices would have occurred?

Adam
That's a good question, Ryan. I think, though, that the answer is the second, that had it been a Belgian colony from the start or had it been almost anybody's colony, similar practices would have occurred. Because if you look at the colonization of Africa, which was a startlingly rapid and often quite brutal experience, where the greatest death toll happened had not to do with who was owning the land involved, who was the colonial master, but what the crop grown there was. And where the greatest death toll happened was in areas where wild rubber was the wealth that Europeans were after. That was the case in Congo, and the same thing in the Cameroon, which was then a German colony, same thing in what was known as the French Congo, across the river from Leopold's Congo, same thing in northern Angola under the Portuguese.

And in all of these places, and actually in the French colony, the French Congo, they have the best statistics, the death rate approached 50%. The reason for this was that all of these places used the same technique for gathering wild rubber that King Leopold of Belgium has pioneered, which was forced labor. Essentially, he sent his troops into village after village, held the women hostage in order to force the men of the village to go into the forest for days and eventually weeks out of each month to gather wild rubber, which was enormously lucrative. And of course, when you have women held hostage and men turned into forced laborers, people stop having children, communities have a hard time hunting, fishing, cultivating food and doing all the other things that, you know, through which a village normally feeds itself, and the death rate was colossal.

Ryan
And is it particularly colossal because of the manner with which they harvested the rubber by spreading it on their skin and presumably making them very sick? Or was it such a hard crop that just more violence was needed for coercion?

Adam
I think it was the fact that when you turn the population of a village into forced laborers, often for several weeks out of each month, that leaves many fewer able-bodied men to go hunting, to go fishing, to harvest the food. Plus, their wives and daughters were chained up as hostages so that they wouldn't run away when they were forced to go into the rainforest.

In addition to that, when Leopold's army arrived in each village, they would requisition whatever food was on hand to feed the soldiers. Plus, when people, when a whole population is weakened by being treated this way, diseases take, when they're living in a state of near-feminine, diseases take a terrible toll. The people...

otherwise might have survived. So for all these reasons, the death rate was enormous. And in what today is Democratic Republic of Congo, then King Leopold's Congo, and after that, the Belgian Congo, the best demographic estimates are that the population shrank between 1880 and 1920 by about half, from roughly 20 million people at the end of that, at the beginning of that time to roughly 10 million at the end of that time. We don't know the precise statistics because there were no censuses taken during this period, but it was a huge loss of population, not just from the deaths, but because, as I said, under these conditions of people being forced laborers, people having to flee into the rainforest to avoid being impressed as forced laborers, people stop having children.

Ryan
Is there anything as close to a 50 % death rate in any type of forced labor agriculture?

Adam
Well, unfortunately, there was a much larger than 50 % death rate in the conquest of the American West when Americans who were descended from European immigrants took that land away from the Native Americans who were its original inhabitants. That was not a forced labor situation, but it was people being shoved off their land, being massacred, and we had a higher death rate than, far higher than 50 % in this country other forced labor situations, you know, very often there are not good statistics kept. One of the other largest forced labor situations in the 20th century was the Gulag that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, where by some estimates 20 % of the economy was goods produced by forced labor. But even today,

When some Soviet archives opened up for a while, now they've closed again, but even when the archives were open, scholars disagree about what the death rate was. But it's certainly very high because any kind of forced labor situation is being operated without regard to human life.

Ryan
Did the Europeans who were consuming the rubber back in the mainland, did they know how filthy the supply chain was for that rubber?

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.