Years ago, I remember while on a morning walk in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, watching off in the distance as the morning mist rolled in over Mount Stanley, part of the mountain range that makes up the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. During my time in Uganda I had heard many stories for the first time about the spiritual, political, and social darkness as well as the amazing beauty and people of that massive country. As I stood there taking in the beauty and mystery of the scene, I felt that whatever the future brought, the DRC would be part of it. Originally I thought that call was a call to pursue missions in the DRC. This seemed to be confirmed when the church I was working at in Los Angeles began to share our building with a congregation of dear Congolese brethren, many of whom where recent refugees from DRC.
For the time being it does not look like God is is leading us to live and work in DRC. However, we believe that He has called us to be involved with DRC in a much more intimate way. We are in the process of adopting two twins from DRC and making them part of our family. That is another story in itself, one that you can follow here.
As God has kept DRC on our mind and heart, now is making it part of our family, Sarah and I have begun to look for resources to help us understand the history and culture of this vast country. That's where King Leopold's Ghost comes in.
It's hard to know where to start in praising this book. Although a work of historical nonfiction, it reads like a thriller. It would be a fantastically entertaining story...if it weren't true. You couldn't make up some of these characters - A heroic, homosexual with an English Bulldog, a Baptist missionary, an obese slimy lawyer, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, countless (literally) African victims, Parisian courtesans - the list goes on and on.
In reality it is truly haunting. The extent to which this one man was able to exploit such a vast population and area is horrifying. Yet it is in understanding this history that one begins to understand how such instability and corruption exists in the region today. I do need to say that Hochschild, while focusing on the depravity of King Leopold and the type of people his exploitative rule attracted, doesn't gloss over the depravity of the other parties - African, Arab, and American alike. However the extent to which Leopold oppressed the people of the Congo has few parallels in the history of injustice.
This book hit me in a personal place. These are people I know. Now through adoption, these are people I am related to. It is one thing to read about atrocities that happened in an exotic far away place in a time very different from our own. It is quite another to read about your kids great - great -grandparents being treated like animals, and to see your kids living in the fallout of racist, imperialistic, systematic explotation today.
This is one of the best and most important books I have read in a long time. I highly recommend it.
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