King Leopold’s Ghost

Last week I finally finished Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, a book that was a must-read when I first flew to Congo in 2005, but which I’ve only recently got around to reading. The remarkable book highlights the outrageous tyranny of King Leopold’s regime in what is now the DR Congo, and the utter savagery of the colonial project there. We forget these things far too easily.

An encouraging part of the book was the role played by Anglo-Saxon Evangelical missionaries in denouncing the abuses, something that is well stated in the main text, while in the end notes the author says that with hindsight he should have given even more prominence to the subject. It’s fair to say that in the secular circles I move in you hear a lot of negative criticism of these sorts of people, and many of the churches here are indeed appalling. But good to know that people of good character were part of the story as well.

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