59 pages • 1 hour read
Adam HochschildKing Leopold's Ghost
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Henry Morton Stanley
The first chapter of the book is devoted to Hochschild’s exploration of the boy, John Rowlands, who would eventually become the famous African explorer, Henry Morton Stanley. Just as he does for Leopold in the second chapter, Hochschild provides a fairly detailed account of Stanley’s birth, childhood, and young adulthood in order to account for how he becomes the man who oversaw the early phase of the creation of Leopold’s Congo. His abandonment and abuse as a child is offered as the reason for his ability to perpetrate violence on such a large scale as an adult.
Also key to Stanley’s characterization is Hochschild’s description of his tendency toward deceit. In his early life, Stanley’s lies seemed motivated by shame about his illegitimate birth (shame that was likely compounded by the sexual abuse he endured as a child in the workhouse); he makes up stories about experiences that paint him as a stronger, braver, better person. As Stanley matures, his lies get bigger as well. He doesn’t just tell fabricated stories about himself, he makes up entirely new personas, so that by the time he is a young man, he has renamed himself and exchanged his Welsh origin for an American one, fought on both sides of the American Civil War, and is well on his way to making a profession out of making up stories about his experiences that paint him as a stronger, braver, and better person than he is.
Becoming an “African explorer” on the cusp of Europe’s “Scramble for Africa” is exactly the kind of role Stanley needs to act out his deep-seated rage and mythologize his experiences with varnished accounts of his “heroic” deeds. It also dovetails nicely with his fear of intimacy, since his public incarnation as “Henry Morton Stanley, African explorer”, keeps everyone from knowing who he truly is.
King Leopold II
Hochschild provides an account of Leopold’s childhood and young adulthood, and it is not pretty. Leopold is the oldest child of the first King Leopold. His parents do not like each other, nor do they like him. And like Stanley and his stories, Leopold fosters a coping mechanism--an obsessive interest in geography; he dreams of other places to distract himself from the misery of the place he’s in. This habit persists throughout Leopold’s life, distracting him from his loveless marriage and estranged daughters, and it is what drives his monomaniacal obsession with owning his own country. He also distracts himself with home renovation projects, only in Leopold’s case, the “home” in question is a palace that requires ever bigger and better features.
If Stanley has a pathological need to appear to be a hero, Leopold has a pathological need for control. The constant renovations of his palace testify to this, but the best evidence is the Congo itself: the territory is seventy-six times the size of Belgium, and he alone controls it, without any troublesome government to interfere, and it is full of subjects whose opinions and needs he does not need to take into account.
Leopold is also characterized by his insatiable greed. Even after he establishes himself as king-sovereign of an enormous chunk of the Congo territory, he still wants more—he continues “shopping” for other territories he might take as his own. For Leopold, it’s not just a question of money, though he certainly has an insatiable greed for money as well; he wants more space, and with it, more power. Given this understanding of Leopold’s monstrous and seemingly infinite desire for more, it is all the more remarkable that one middle-class man from Britain could eventually force him to give up his beloved Congo.
Edmund Dene Morel
Edmund Dene Morel is the hero of the story. His psychology, though, is decidedly more opaque than that of his archenemy Leopold, or Leopold’s sidekick, Stanley. As Hochschild puts it, “Morel is harder to fathom” (187) because nothing about his life before the late 1890s, when he began overseeing the Elder Dempster shipments arriving in Belgium, suggests that he would become a moral crusader for anything, much less take on a king. Because of this, Hochschild’s depiction of Morel is built around his deeds rather than his psychology.
Morel’s deeds, however, speak loudly. He is a dogged researcher, a skilled and prolific writer, and an energetic, talented activist. He is also, it would seem, fearless. His family and friends love him, and he commands a kind of respect that is categorically different than the kind someone like Stanley might enjoy. Whereas Stanley was a celebrity and his admirers might have had a kind of awed respect for his supposed heroism, Morel earned respect for his unerring commitment to humanity—his own included.
Roger Casement
Roger Casement might also be considered a hero of this story, but a tragic hero. Hochschild describes him as a closeted homosexual and frustrated poet, a nineteenth-century version of a “rebel without a cause”—that is, until takes up the cause of Congo reform. Once his report has been submitted and he has met and befriended Edmund Morel, with whom he founded the Congo Reform Association, Casement is once again set adrift. The Congo has given him a taste for activism and clarified his ideas about human rights and imperialism, so he gradually increases his involvement in the fight for Irish independence.
This will ultimately prove to be Casement’s downfall. Compared with his friend, Morel, whose long days are spent researching and writing his way towards Leopold’s defeat, Casement is all action and passion. He wants something to do, whether it is spending months in the African rainforest amassing details for his report on the Congo, or doing similar work in Peru with the Putumayo. When he turns his attention toward Irish independence, this passion is his undoing. Believing so fully in “freedom for all peoples” (286) is the fuel to his fire and it leads him to collude with Gemany, Britain’s enemy, during WWI. He is caught and hanged for treason, a tragedy because, as Hochschild notes, “he was rare, perhaps unique, in proclaiming something in common between the struggle for freedom of Europeans like the Irish and of Africans like the Egyptians and the Congolese” (286).
Related Titles
By Adam Hochschild
