To put it mildly: I disagree with Bruce Gilley on many points in his lengthy diatribe about my book The Ghost of King Leopold (” The King Hochschild Hoax, April 17, 2023).
The first thing to do is define the terms. Prof. Gilley claims that my “central lies,” my “first, and biggest deceit,” was to equate the Etat indépendant du Congo – the regime King Leopold II controlled for 23 year – with colonialism. Gilley is not familiar with the British India Company or Dutch East India Company and other similar entities. Just like the government-controlled colonial regimes that seamlessly supplanted them, they issued regulations, conscripted forced laborers, built prisons, and deployed police and soldiers, all for the major purpose of extracting wealth. The Belgian government, which took over Leopold’s Etat indépendant to administer the Congo and it became Belgian Congo – many officials from the king’s personal regime remained in their same or similar positions in the new one. The Biographiecoloiale Belge, a quasi-official encyclopedia of people who worked under both regimes, notes this many times. Belgians seeking their fortunes in Africa during Leopold’s reign boasted of the conquests they made in the La Belgique Colonialiale magazine. At the time of his death, Leopold had built a World School of Colonialism for more men like him. They and he would be surprised to learn that his Congo state was not considered a “colony”.
The dramatic population loss in the area was the most obvious sign of Leopold’s reign and its immediate aftermath. This occurred while his forced labor system continued. Tens of thousands were killed in revolts or by Leopold’s regime. However, the effects of his forced labor accounted for a much larger portion of the losses. People stop having babies when the able-bodied males of a village are forced to work as wild rubber gatherers, while their wives are held as hostages. In such conditions, the communities have a difficult time cultivating or harvesting enough crops. Diseases also took a toll on an already weak population. Many of those who fled the forced-labor regime had no place to go except deep in the jungle, where they found little food and shelter. They died. Many conquests, such as when Europeans arrived on the American continent, spread diseases to which local populations were not immune.
Prof. Gilley makes the astonishing claim that the population of the area actually increased during the reign of the king. He quotes a writer who made this claim, and claims that other “French or Belgian demographers”, unnamed, support it. The majority of scholars would call this nonsense. Of course, no one can be sure of the exact population numbers from an era prior to a census. However, many officials at the time, as well as historians, demographers and anthropologists later, have estimated a great loss. In The Ghost of King Leopold I mentioned a few for the years 1880-1920. Things began to improve in 1920 when Belgian colonial officials realized that they would have no workers left if they didn’t lessen the severity of the forced labour system.
The Commission Permanente pour la Protection des Indigenes, which was part of the colonial government, later estimated that the population of the Congo River Basin had been “reduced by half” in those four decades. In an interview, I found that Jan Vansina, who spent his entire career studying the peoples in the Congo River Basin, agreed with this estimate. Gilley ignores the source note and says Vansina spoke about something different, in a novel. Vansina repeated this estimate in the documentary made from my book. Prof. Vansina also generously read the King Leopold’s Ghost manuscript, and I incorporated his suggestions and corrected dozens.
Other scholars have also estimated a massive loss in population in the Congo during the Leopold era and the immediate aftermath. In his Histoire du Congo : From the Origins to the Democratic Republic, historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem estimates a total population loss of 10 million. The latest edition is published by Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. Leopold founded this institution. It includes a foreword by the director of the museum.
The Ghost of King Leopoldreproduces a number of photographs that depicted the atrocities committed in the Congo during the first decade. These photos fueled worldwide protests. Gilley claims that these “fake” photos were “staged by the photographer.” Some photos are posed, but that was true for most of them in the days when cameras were large tripods and subjects had to stay still for a couple seconds. Gilley believes that Alice Harris, a British Baptist missionary who was in Congo at the time, put Congolese woman in chains to take photos of them pretending they were hostages. In other photos from this period, taken by the African photographer Hezekiah Shanu in another part of colony, people are also seen in chains. Jules Marchal, a Belgian scholar and diplomat, found in the archives of his country that local officials ordered large quantities of chains. In the Manual du Voyageur et du Resident du Congo of the regime, there are detailed instructions on how to take hostages. Is the entire multivolume book a fake?
Colonialism is only one of the many forms of conquests that have shaped human history. Conquest can spread both good and evil: from languages, alphabets, and technology to weapons of war, torture and enslavement. Even in systems that are geared towards the worst, there can be decent people. In Leopold’s Congo there were certainly some, such as the magistrate Stanislas Lefranc who bravely but futilely wrote pamphlets, articles and protested the regime’s profligate usage against its subjects of a brutal rhinoceros hide whip, the Chicotte. or the three judges who were appointed by the King to a commission of inquiry in 1904-05, which noted, among other things the dramatic decline in the population. This commission’s verbatim testimony from eyewitnesses regarding the forced labor system was so damaging, Leopold suppressed all of it. Subsequent Belgian governments also kept it hidden for over 60 years. Gilley dismisses these witnesses, suggesting that all regime critics are foreigners with their own nefarious agendas.
Professor Gilley’s views on colonialism are fundamentally different than mine, but they are his right. It is difficult to assess colonialism’s impact in a thoughtful and sophisticated way. It is important to examine why some former colonial states are far more prosperous today (such as Botswana) than in the colonial period, and others like Congo are not. It should look at how land ownership and education systems affected the fate of different territories. Also, it should consider whether the cash crops that colonizers wanted to cultivate were grown by small farmers, or forced labor. It should look at the societies that colonial regimes replaced. There is no need to think they were all lost paradisiac paradises. This is an important discussion. It’s not a discussion I want to have with someone who says that my book is “a vast hoax” full of “deceit,” falsehoods, and “dark art,” which is nothing but “narcissistic guilty porn.”
No matter how rosy or critical one’s opinion of a system may be, it is important to remember that no one can take the words of its officials at face value. It is not an honest disagreement over the benefits and harms of colonialism, but rather a case of being naive. Gilley’s comments about The Ghost of King Leopold are largely based on this naiveté. Gilley seems to have been duped by Leopold’s claim that he colonized Congo to “eliminate the endemic Arab slavery empires and African tribe wars”, rather than to make a fortune. Leopold’s con was successful for most of his life, but it is surprising that people still believe in his myths more than 100 years after his death.
Gilley assumes, in a similar way, that the lower officials of the regime are all well-meaning and truthful and care benevolently about the native residents and conscript soldiers under their control. Gilley quotes George Bricusse, who describes a rubber-gathering camp where women make bracelets, and “nobody ever misses meals.” He defends Leon Fievez as having good intentions, even though he boasted about cutting off 100 heads.
These men were not humanitarians, but soldiers of fortune. Bricusse describes in his journal his delight at not feeling any distress as he watches an African being hanged, which he ordered. Fievez received 1,308 severed fingers in a single day, proving his troops’ victory over rebels. Do such men have good intentions and are they reliable witnesses?
Gilley was right to point out that I misled Gilley with regard to a quote I had cited by Charles Lemaire, another official. It is a mistake and should be corrected. Lemaire’s case was more complex. In his early diaries (which I have quoted elsewhere in the book), he boasts of a long list of villages that he had burned down and of the death tolls he had racked up: “20 natives” here, “around fifteen blacks” there and other such boasts. Lemaire, in later life, had regrets. I should have mentioned them. He wrote about his role in colonization Gilley admires: “My African Education began with rifle and cannon shot, in burning villages…in other words, abuse and overabuse ….I read my first reports in horror.”
Bruce Gilley replies:
Adam Hochschild’s 1998 tale about the État Independant du Congo has been a success for a long time. He has been so successful with the story for so long that he seems unable to admit its many fabrications. The story about “chopped fingers for red rubber” is not only anchored by the doctoring the quote (which he has acknowledged), but also the vast web of distortions in which this little dodge is embedded.
How, in the first place, did the 10,000 deaths in skirmishes involving the EIC and natives over a period of 20 years mushroom into 10,000,000 dead, “mass killing on a huge scale” and “a forgot Holocaust”? Hochschild does not retract this absurd claim that Jean Stengers, the dean of Congo studies at Harvard, has called “absurd and polemical”. Instead, Hochschild reiterates it. His source? His source?
Hochschild appears to be unaware that Vansina explicitly rejected his previous conclusion. Vansina claimed that he had been “misled” by the population decline in his book Being colonized published in 2010. 145-147). He later acknowledged that rubber and military operations of the EIC played a negligible role. The main reason for the population decline was disease, which was brought about by Arab and Western incursions in Central Africa, as well as Congolese who travelled further afield. His claim of a “50% decrease” was “erroneous.” The Kuba populations had been artificially swollen by the importation slave women both before and during the early years EIC. The women were raped repeatedly to increase the population. It peaked in 1899. The population dropped dramatically after the Belgians freed all slaves in 1910. Porters returning from World War I brought new diseases with them, further reducing the population. He concluded that the Kuba population actually grew during the first 20 years of colonial rule, not decreased. The decline started with the conquest of the [EIC] in 1900, and continued until 1919. Conflicts with EIC contributed only to a fraction of the estimated 25 percent population decline by 1929. The majority of the population decline was due to local diseases, slave emancipation and global epidemics caused by the Great War.
Hochschild’s right that Leon de St. Moulin, the demographer, analyzed the possibility of a 50 percent decline (in his 1987 and 1990 work). Hochschild forgets to mention that Moulin and Vansina believed that rubber and EIC had nothing to do it. Moulin’s causes were in order: sleeping sickness, smallpox (or Spanish flu), venereal disease, and Spanish influenza. In his 1990 chapter, Moulin didn’t even refer to EIC or rubber. He, like Vansina later on, recognized that these were only footnotes to the demographic history in the Congo.
It is difficult to track the claims of the Congolese Historian Isidore e Nziem (13 million dead in 1998 and then 5 to 10 millions killed in 2008). The first estimate dated the beginning of his claims to 1880, five years before the EIC and ten before rubber harvesting. However, the second estimate extended the ending year up to 1930 (22 after the EIC). In a second estimate of this kind, the date was shifted to 1885 without any explanation. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. In all three editions, Ndaywel cites Moulin. In a long essay about the EIC, published in Histoire 2020, Ndaywel does not make any population claims anymore, but only states that the EIC’s effects were “worse-than-dreadful” (” Plus Que Macabres“) Ndaywel, in the end is not credible. The Royal Museum for Central Africa, in Belgium, publishes his works because he’s black. It helps them “decolonize Eurocentric Narratives”, which is to say, using blacks to protect their radical accounts against criticism.
In contrast, dozens serious demographers–not only the Jean-Paul Sanderson that I mention–have concluded that the population increased slightly or remained unchanged between 1885 and 1908 at 8-10 million. Bruce Fetter and Guy Vanthemsche are also notable. Pierre-Luc Plasman. Anatole Romaiuk. Jean-Luc Vellut. The EIC, taken on its own merits, had a positive impact on the black population of the Congo, thanks to its campaigns against slavery and cannibalism. Infrastructure and trade provided income that was life-saving. The only reason the population remained constant was because of the endemic diseases and slavery. Romaniuk claims that venereal diseases alone are responsible for the slowdown in population growth following 1900, when the EIC brought peace and prosperity back to the region.
Let’s move on to other topics. Hochschild is insistent on referring to the EIC as an example of colonialism, stretching the meaning of the word. The institutions of the liberal state in Europe governed and were accountable for European colonies. This was the structural fact that explained the behavior of European colonies. The EIC lacked this fundamental fact. It is this fact that explains the EIC’s evolution and its eventual takeover by Belgium. The EIC is a solution that was second best to the absence colonialism. Hochschild won’t have it, because his intent was all along to use his story as an indictment of European colonialism (A Story of Greed Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa, as the subtitle stated). The fervor of an ideological agenda is not enough to undermine a valid concept distinction.
Comparing the EIC with the Nazis is grotesque. Hochschild says nothing about this offensive rhetorical move, which is an insult to not only Jews but also to Congolese soldiers who fought for the EIC and were loyal to its memory. To call my essay “polemical,” in support of a book which makes frequent references to Auschwitz, is a rich and generous statement.
Hochschild’s sweet reasoning in his letter about the complex issue of European colonialism seems to have left him (or has been newly discovered) while writing the book. In the book, he said that “Communism and Fascism as well as European colonialism all claimed the right to control the lives of their subjects”. How can he write about colonialism, a “subtle but complex” business?
Hochschild’s admission that his photographs are fake is a good thing. To his point, however, I don’t doubt that EIC officials used the traditional African Hippo whip. In the absence of prisons, I do not doubt that EIC officials used chains to confine prisoners. The Arab custom of cutting off the hands and feet of enemies who had died continued well into the EIC period, including among natives working for the government or concession companies. What’s the point? Hochschild believes that the area was colonized at the beginning, as his hero Edmund Morel believed. I agree. I would agree with Hochschild if he argued that the EIC could have been funded by liquor imports, village hut taxation or the 40 hour per month requirement of labor for those who couldn’t pay individual taxes.
I would like Hochschild to clarify the other mistakes I list in my essay. Conrad was not present at any of the rubber atrocities, Leopold didn’t burn his archives and nothing was “locked from view”. Kurtz’s compound, with its head-strewn heads, was not modelled on an African official, but rather on warlords. Leon Fievez killed 100 warriors, local tribal chiefs, who had broken a promise of food supply, not 100 innocent villagers who refused
In my article, I stated that despite the malicious practices of Hochschild and other scholars, I was glad to see that a large number of documents about the EIC, and European colonies in general, survived. I do not expect that they will be used honestly by our current moral panic. Hochschild is merely a pioneer in a genre of scholars that “interrogates” archives to find evidence of Western evils. It is true that there are no documents describing the horrifying conditions in which the Europeans were replaced. And in any event, most Westerners would not purchase a book about endemic venereal diseases in Africa or stool conflicts among the Kuba. What about a salacious story of the Belgian King and his mistresses torturing Black people as punishment for their follies. You’re now talking!
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In the same way, I do not resent Hochschild’s millions. However, I am not like him. I praise the capitalist system for producing them. (He recently compared Amazon warehouses with slave plantations, and in his 2016 book, he bemoaned the failure of the socialist revolution in Spain.) To write history, you must immerse yourself in the worldviews, constraints and context of the people involved. Hochschild can’t get over how different life used to be. I am not as quick to condemn the EIC for its petty abuses, especially when they are committed against people who can no longer defend themselves. So be it. This has been happening for more than 100 years, and it is unlikely to stop. It is not meant to be polemic.
There is a lot at stake. The American Historical Association awarded Hochschild the Theodore Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson Award for 2008 because King Leopold’s Ghost “broke one of the most impenetrable silents in history” by revealing “mass deaths” and “rampant” atrocities in the EIC. Remember that the AHA represents professional historians of the United States and not the Dissent editorial board. The AHA called the book “a crucial text in the history of colonial Africa” for college and graduate level students.
It is a good thing that the AHA and Hochschild agree on the excellent quality of the Project. Hochschild has called it “masterful” (despite the micro-aggressions). The AHA, warm to the idea, praised Hochschild for his “humanist agenda”, with its mission of “combatting inhumanity.” It should only combat ignorance of the past. We are in a bad situation if this is what the West’s public history looks like.
