The monster who plundered the Congo

Author: By Richard Taylor, Globe Correspondent

Date: WEDNESDAY, September 16, 1998

Page: C6

Section: Living

Adam Hochschild's spellbinding account of imperial machinations and how these led to the first major human-rights movement of this century presents a dynamic story. Largely forgotten now, its very obscurity suggests the success of the monarch's role-playing in his day, and indeed "King Leopold's Ghost" is the first comprehensive account in English for the general reader.

During the 1880s and '90s, when the "scramble for Africa" was under way, the king decided to grab his slice of the colonial cake. Leopold was never crude; he would call conferences, form committees, court distinguished delegates, all the time professing the noble purpose of bringing civilization to the natives.

Civilization meant the Maxim gun. No one was more adept at spreading its gospel than the Welsh-born American journalist H. M. Stanley, part intrepid explorer, part sadistic madman. Once Stanley carved out the territory, by means of treaties with chiefs who didn't know what they were signing, Leopold moved in, building stations along the route. His purpose was always plunder, his main objective ivory. After the invention of the inflatable tire Leopold enslaved countless gatherers of rubber; his mercenaries applied the lash, burned villages, committed grisly atrocities, cut off hands, beheaded victims. But outside Africa the image of the benign ruler persisted, owing to his public relations efforts, his bribery of public officials and editors, and the association of his name with philanthropic enterprises.

Leopold considered the Congo his personal turf, the equivalent of a Tudor deer park. Out of it, though, came a literary masterpiece, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Conrad, a steamboat pilot in the Congo, probably based his portrait of the villainous Mr. Kurtz on three different officers. Hochschild's is a morality tale in which light eventually dispels darkness, and it has a hero: a Liverpool shipping agent named Edmund Morel.

Morel noticed the discrepancy between the imports going into the Congo, articles remote from trade, and the rubber and ivory flowing out. Suddenly he realized he was witnessing theft and mass murder; he quit his job, and despite blackmail and other efforts at intimidation, launched an international reform movement. Leopold's opponents also included the African-American George Washington Williams, briefly pastor of Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church. Journalist, historian, soldier, and lawyer for the Cape Cod Canal Co., Williams was inclined to embellish his credentials, though these were remarkable in themselves. He wrote the first full eyewitness expose of Leopold's reign of terror in the Congo. Then there was the black American Presbyterian missionary, William Sheppard, sued for his excoriating report on starvation and brutality. And Roger Casement, the Irish patriot, executed for his part in the 1916 rising, but earlier knighted while in the British diplomatic service. As consul in the Congo, Casement risked disgrace because of his homosexuality. Nevertheless, he carried out his investigations, and his findings eventually reached the House of Commons.

Perhaps the oddest of characters involved in the Congo's chaos was a 300-pound narcoleptic lawyer, Henry I. Kowalsky, who once provoked gunslinger Wyatt Earp to draw a pistol, whereupon Kowalsky fell asleep. Hired as Leopold's lobbyist, Kowalsky later sold his Congo correspondence to the Hearst papers, thus revealing that Leopold had bribed a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Colonialism as practiced by the Belgian king has more or less disappeared, even if cruelty and egregious violations of human rights have not. The story of Leopold is enough to make egalitarians out of the most diehard of royals -- and it is salutary to be reminded that his greed was invisible for a time, tucked behind the smiling, eminent public face.