What did Rand make of the good capitalists working on behalf of King Leopold, perchance?
Hochschild's sketches of these three individuals are vivid, and his depiction of what they and many
others were confronting is masterly. It shows, above all, that during Leopold's rule in Africa from
1885 to 1908, and in the years on either side of it, the peoples of the Congo River Basin suffered,
in Hochschild's words, ''a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.'' This is not said lightly. The strategy
adopted to plunder the area was, in effect, a war of enslavement against the indigenous population.
Much of the death toll was the result of killing, pure and simple. Villages were dragooned into
tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but failed to meet European quotas, they
were punished. The hands of dead Congolese were severed and kept by militias to account to their
quartermasters for spent ammunition. And, as Morel said, the practice of mutilation was extended to
the living. By far the greatest number of deaths, however, were caused by sickness and starvation.
The effect of the terror was to drive communities from their sources of food.
A Belgian Government commission estimated that from the late 1870's, when the explorer Henry
Morton Stanley made his first forays into the Congo on King Leopold's behalf, until 1919, the year
the commission published its findings, the population of the Congo Basin had been reduced by half.
In 1924 there were thought to be some 10 million inhabitants -- which means, Hochschild says, that
''during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by
approximately 10 million.'' archives.nytimes.com:80/plweb-cgi/fastweb?view=book-rev&docrank=4&numhitsfound=17&query=Adam%20Hochschild&query_rule=%28$query%29&docid=25298&docdb=bookrev-arch&dbname=bookrev-cur&dbname=bookrev-arch&numresults=10&operator=AND&TemplateName=doc.tmpl&setCookie=1 |
