Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Chargement... King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (original 1998; édition 1999)par Adam Hochschild
Information sur l'oeuvreLes Fantômes du roi Léopold : Le terreur coloniale dans l'Etat du Congo, 1884-1908 par Adam Hochschild (1998)
Five star books (187) » 9 plus Best Biographies (52) Books Read in 2018 (1,759) Books Read in 2015 (3,083) Read This Next (65) Review 1 (28) Tour of Africa (2) Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Before reading this book, my knowledge of African history was scanty. I have read a few books on North Africa, but none on the history of the sub-Saharan continent. Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, proved to be a startling introduction. First off, the book has a reputation for brutality. Before I began, people warned me to prepare myself. I don’t think anything could prepare someone for the horrors perpetrated on the people native to Africa by the European colonizers. The term “colonize” sounds so innocuous that it masks the violence of the process. Hochschild highlights King Leopold II, king of the small and relatively new country of Belgium. Leopold’s bottomless well of greed and ruthless ambition caused him to gain control, underhandedly, of the massive area of central Africa called the Congo. He didn’t share this wealth with his country. So, the people of Belgium didn’t even profit from any of his activities using slavery to gain riches from the sale of ivory and rubber at the beginning. This changed after the king died. To make it clear that terror and exploitation are not unique to Leopold or Belgium, Hochschild talks about violence perpetrated by Africans on other Africans before the Europeans arrived. He also touches on inhumanity demonstrated by other countries worldwide, but primarily by Europeans in their colonization of Africa and theft of its natural resources. He takes pains to discuss the complicity of the United States in similar outrages within its borders. People have told me that Hochschild cherry-picked his facts and that this book presents an unfair view of the place and the period. I find this difficult to believe. He provides his sources, and the sheer number of damning statistics, facts, and anecdotes cannot be denied. Though the story sickened me, I cannot discount it, and I am glad I read it. We need to know history, no matter how horrible it may have been. Looking at historical darkness in the heart of Africa should prompt us to search for traces of that darkness in ourselves because that’s the only way to ever rid ourselves of it. An outstanding book that clinically and calmly exposes the outrage of the Belgian King's appalling crimes in colonial Africa. Along with Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Alice Seeley Harris's photos of severed hands, this book should be required reading for all westerners so we never forget the worst aspects of European colonial history. While not all colonial leaders were as depraved as King Leopold, the colonial era was fundamentally founded on exploitation. The Belgians, in the Congo, merely took that exploitation to an extreme.
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. Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes. Wikipédia en anglais (17)History.
Nonfiction.
HTML: In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million??all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo??too long forgotten??onto the conscience of the W Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)967.51022History and Geography Africa Central Africa Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa); Rwanda & Burundi Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa -- former Zaire)Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |
"Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. Hear how the demons chuckle and yell Cutting his hands off, down in Hell." (p. 266)
There has been a a great forgetting of the tragic deaths of millions of Africans just a mere 125 years ago. This well - researched book thoroughly documents the Belgian atrocities in the Congo from 1890 until approximately 1910. ( )