Download King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism by Adam Hochschild PDF
By Adam Hochschild
Within the Eighteen Eighties, because the ecu powers have been carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the sizeable and as a rule unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. conducting a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its humans, and finally slashed its inhabitants by means of ten million--all the whereas shrewdly cultivating his attractiveness as a very good humanitarian. Heroic efforts to reveal those crimes ultimately ended in the 1st nice human rights move of the 20 th century, within which each person from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of vast proportions, a guy as crafty, fascinating, and vicious as any of the nice Shakespearean villains. it's also the deeply relocating portrait of these who fought Leopold: a courageous handful of missionaries, tourists, and younger idealists who went to Africa for paintings or experience and without warning stumbled on themselves witnesses to a holocaust.
Adam Hochschild brings this mostly untold tale alive with the wit and talent of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he is familiar with that heritage frequently presents a miles richer forged of characters than any novelist might invent. leader between them is Edmund Morel, a tender British delivery agent who went directly to lead the foreign campaign opposed to Leopold. one other hero of this story, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his existence on a London gallows.
Two brave black americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked a lot to carry facts of the Congo atrocities to the skin international. crusing into the center of the tale was once a tender Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above all of them, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II.
With nice energy and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will model the tragedy of the Congo--too lengthy forgotten--onto the sense of right and wrong of the West.
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Extra resources for King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
Example text
Birds were never eaten, but certain species were killed so that their bodies and feathers could be used to create elaborate headdresses for newly circumcised boys. Ilmurran especially prized ostrich feathers for their headdresses. Other natural phenomena, especially those concerned with the sky and weather, were also attributed to the interventions of Eng’ai and read as expressions of divine power and judgment—rain as blessing, drought as displeasure, thunder and lightning as anger, rainbows as approval, and comets as portents of bad luck (see many of the myths recounted in Hollis 1905; Baumann 1894: 163; Merker 1910 [1904]: 205–207).
Chapter 1 attempts to historically reconstruct Maasai religious beliefs 16 Introduction and practices before the advent of the missionaries, with attention to the centrality of gender and power to these domains. Chapter 2 examines the origins and early history of the Spiritans in Africa, and then analyzes the similarities and differences in the lives, thoughts, and experiences of individual missionaries through detailed profiles of three American Spiritans who worked with Maasai in Monduli. Chapter 3 recounts the history of Catholic evangelization of Maasai in Tanzania, with specific attention to the gendered assumptions and outcomes of the three main evangelization approaches of the missionaries and their catechists.
They sharply intensified efforts to “develop” these seemingly intransigent people, including renewed measures to increase livestock production and offtake. 21 Among Maasai men, the collaboration of elders with colonial authorities in the formation and running of the MNA aggravated the already tense relationships between elders and ilmurran (men of the “warrior” agegrade). 22 Ilmurran resented the interference in their lives, and responded with increased hostility to the elders and the colonial state and a firmer embrace of their own sense of male cultural identity.