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At the end of the 19th century, when the European powers divided Africa for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium carried out a brutal sacking of the territory surrounding the Congo river that provoked the death of over 10 million Africans. A rich and perturbing story, it describes a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the moving portrait of African rebels who did not kneel and a handful of valiant missionaries and explorers who traveled to Africa in search of adventure and instead became witnesses to a genocide. El fantasma del rey Leopoldo relata como a finales del siglo XIX, cuando las potencias europeas se repartían África a golpe de escuadra, el rey Leopoldo II de Bélgica llevó a cabo un brutal saqueo del territorio que rodeaba el río Congo. Provocó la muerte de diez millones de personas mientras cultivaba, irónicamente, su fama de monarca humanitario. El fantasma del rey Leopoldo es un relato rico y perturbador: es la descripción de un megalómano de proporciones monstruosas; y es también el retrato conmovedor de quienes desafiaron a Leopoldo, los dirigentes rebeldes africanos que lucharon a la desesperada y un puñado de valientes misioneros, viajeros y jóvenes idealistas que fueron a África en busca de trabajo o aventura y que acabaron siendo testigos de un genocidio.… (más)
Stbalbach: Sheppard's book is discussed in King Leopold's Ghost. It's a vivid account and visually interesting to use Google Maps to track Sheppard's trail through the Congo.
VonKar: In "Leopold II, Het hele verhaal" (Horizon, 2020) haalt Johan op de Beeck de these van Adam Hochschild onderuit en hekelt zijn eenzijdige en onwetenschappelijke benadering van het thema.
Although much of the material in "King Leopold's Ghost" is secondhand -- the author has drawn heavily from Jules Marchal's scholarly four-volume history of turn-of-the-century Congo and from "The Scramble for Africa," Thomas Pakenham's wide-ranging 1991 study of the European conquest of the continent -- Hochschild has stitched it together into a vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.
Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" is an absorbing and horrifying account of the traffic in human misery that went on in Leopold's so-called Congo Free State, and of the efforts of a handful of heroic crusaders to bring the atrocities to light. Among other things, it stands as a reminder of how quickly enormities can be forgotten.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For David Hunter (1916-2000).
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverberations still sound today.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. "Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away...The officers made a wager of 5 pounds that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head."
A Force Publique officer who passed through Fievez's post in 1894 quotes Fievez himself describing what he did when the surrounding villages failed to supply his troops with the fish and manioc he had demanded:" I made war against them. One example was enough: a hundred heads cut off, and there have been plenty of supplies at the station ever since. My goal is ultimately humanitarian. I killed a hundred people ...but that allowed five hundred others to live."
Witness Mingo of Mampoko: "While I was working at brick-making at Mampoko, twice the sentries Nkusu Lomboto and Itokwa, to punish me, pulled up my skirt and put clay in my vagina, which made me suffer greatly. The white man Likwama [a company agent named Henri Spelier] saw me with clay in my vagina. He said nothing more than,"If you die working for me, they'll throw you in the river."
Once underway, mass killing is hard to stop; it becomes a kind of sport, like hunting. Congo annals abound in cases like that of Rene de Permentier, an officer in the Equator district in the late 1890's. The Africans nicknamed him Bajunu (for bas genoux, on your knees), because he always made people kneel before him. He had all the bushes and trees cut down around his house at Bokatola so that from his porch he could use passersby for target practice. If he found a leaf in a courtyard that women prisoners had swept, he ordered a dozen of them beheaded. If he found a path in the forest not well-maintained, he ordered a child killed in the nearest village.
Two Force Publique officers, Clement Brasseur and Leon Cerckel, once ordered a man hung from a palm tree by his feet while a fire was lit beneath him and he was cooked to death. Two missionaries found one post where prisoners were killed by having resin poured over their heads, then set on fire. The list is much longer.
But Conrad himself wrote, "Heart of Darkness is experience ... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case." Whatever the rich levels of meaning the book has as literature, for our purposes what is notable is how precise and detailed a description it is ..."
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
At the end of the 19th century, when the European powers divided Africa for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium carried out a brutal sacking of the territory surrounding the Congo river that provoked the death of over 10 million Africans. A rich and perturbing story, it describes a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the moving portrait of African rebels who did not kneel and a handful of valiant missionaries and explorers who traveled to Africa in search of adventure and instead became witnesses to a genocide. El fantasma del rey Leopoldo relata como a finales del siglo XIX, cuando las potencias europeas se repartían África a golpe de escuadra, el rey Leopoldo II de Bélgica llevó a cabo un brutal saqueo del territorio que rodeaba el río Congo. Provocó la muerte de diez millones de personas mientras cultivaba, irónicamente, su fama de monarca humanitario. El fantasma del rey Leopoldo es un relato rico y perturbador: es la descripción de un megalómano de proporciones monstruosas; y es también el retrato conmovedor de quienes desafiaron a Leopoldo, los dirigentes rebeldes africanos que lucharon a la desesperada y un puñado de valientes misioneros, viajeros y jóvenes idealistas que fueron a África en busca de trabajo o aventura y que acabaron siendo testigos de un genocidio.
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