King Leopold Summary

King Leopold is an egotistical ruler who attempts to make Belgium a superior power then it was starting with taking control of Congo. All events were completed under an extravagant "humanitarian" public relations initiative by misleading numerous countries alongside with the United States. In reality, King Leopold was a cold, manipulative, selfish leader who wasn't content with his small empire of Belgium putting his eyes on the Congo to expand his legacy. But he couldn’t do this on his own; he had a country to lead, so he hires Henry Morton Stanley. He, like King Leopold, was a remarkably brutal individual slaying many natives of the Congo in his second voyage through the heart of Africa (The first was to find Dr. Livingston). Leopold employs
Hochschild illustrates this with telling the reader that, "An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold's state, the population of the territory had 'been reduced by half.' Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative judgment today comes from Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest living ethnographer of Congo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on 'innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more.' His estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut 'by at least a half.' Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people." (p.