Summary Of King Leopold's Ghost

The Berlin Conference and the division of Africa is an example of how powerful elites dictate and narrate the legacies of the past, thereby controlling how society perceives current situations. In Adam Hochschild’s excerpt. “King Leopold’s Ghost: A story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” the author exemplifies the irony in the rise of the west, considering European colonial powers appropriated the land and labor of indigenous Africans in order to build Western Empires. The Author also demonstrates how capitalist ideology normalized the exploitation of human labor by expanding the westernization of culture and society.

Africa has the potential to be the wealthiest nation, but ends up being filled with rampant poverty and violence. Africa is the most diverse, ecologically, yet they remain unable to develop and expand successful
Western Europe’s ecological assets are nowhere as wealthy as the diversity of Africa, thereby highlighting the irony in the expansion of Western Empires, considering they appropriated labor and land from the people of Africa to transform into a wealthy imperial vacuum. Western political forces ensure dictators remain in power, in order to continue the powerful legacy of exploiting land and labor, in a continent that has been labelled uncivilized and helpless.

The systems of exploitation were extremely violent, whereas the imperial forces used the motives of “divide and conquer”, by turning indigenous workers against each other through various terrorist tactics. The military action of coercing labor psychologically branded the indigenous people, by imposing tactics to promote the ideology of divide and rule, in which the land and people become