Adam Hochschild | The Congo & King Leopold's Ghost In The Heart Of Darkness

Youtube Episode - https://youtu.be/fXVZCUR_Row

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Tim Butcher Episode - https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QIQLYuwbA2cFLCzJc8TGl?si=nKU21dGrRX-Z-otWklpxgw

King Leopold's Ghost Book - https://www.amazon.com.au/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Adam-Hochshild/dp/0618001905

From 1885, for 13 years, one man, King Leopold II, owned, as his personal property, one of the largest pieces of geography on earth. The Congo is four times larger than France, it’s bigger than India, it’s bigger than Texas, Alaska, California & Montana combined - the equator runs right through it’s middle and makes it the second largest rainforest on the globe - it’s impossibly rich in resources, and desperately poor in economics. In those 13 years of private ownership, Leopold oversaw potentially one of the most brutal regimes of extraction the world has ever known. The population was estimated to have halved in those 13 years, more than 10 million deaths. It was an exploit in mass slavery, mass death, bodily mutilation and mass extraction. Ivory and wild rubber were in high demand, and so under the guise of media manipulation and PR mastery, Leopold convinced the world that these goods were in fact being traded with, rather than extracted from, the Congo. 

The horror, however, could only be concealed for so long. A fella by the name of Ed Morell who worked for a shipping company in Liverpool noticed the bounty of ivory and rubber arriving from the Congo, with only men and arms making the journey back. His suspicion grew, he found accounts from missionaries and others who had been, and mounted a campaign to undermine the constant wall of propaganda Leopold had financed.

In 1908, the Belgium state purchased the Congo off Leopold… where the country remained a colony of Belgium until 1960. 

And for a myriad of reasons, for which we address in the podcast, the Congo today is still on the back foot. Kinshasa, the capital city already has a bigger population than Paris, and is projected to be as much as 40,000,000 by 2050. The Congo today is among the most resource rich nations on earth, but among the least developed. It still attracts the same predation for extraction as it ever has, although all together less forceful and less violent

The man I speak with on the podcast today wrote the definitive history of this period. His name is Adam Hochschild, he’s an author, journalist and historian and wrote in 1998, 'King Leopold's Ghost'. 

00:00 Congo's Dark History & Adam Hochschild
03:03 Leopold's Brutal Regime
09:02 Modern Parallels of Exploitation
12:11 The Unique Case of King Leopold
14:58 The Mechanics of Control & Media Manipulation
20:45 Campaigning Against Atrocities: The Legacy of Morrell
34:22 Colonialism and Forced Labor: The Belgian Congo
36:16 The Rubber Boom and Its Consequences
38:09 Criticism Of The Book & Congolese Resistance
42:57 Nationalism and Colonialism: Morel's Perspective
44:48 The Impact of Colonialism on Modern Nations
47:17 Geography and Development: The Congo's Challenges
49:51 Natural Resources and Corruption
52:27 The Future of the Congo: A Grim Outlook
57:22 Serendipity

(There was an technical difficulty right at the end of the conversation, which is why it cuts off) 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

From eighteen eighty five for thirteen years, one man, King Leopold II, owned, as his personal property, one of the largest pieces of geography on Earth. The Congo is four times larger than France. It's bigger than India, it's bigger than Texas, Alaska, California, and Montana combined. The equator runs right through its middle and makes it the second largest rainforest on the globe. It's impossibly rich in resources and desperately poor in economics. In those thirteen years of private ownership, Leopold oversaw potentially one of the most brutal regimes of extraction the world has ever known. The population was estimated to have halved in those thirteen years, which equates to more than 10 million deaths. It was an exploit in mass slavery, mass death, mass body mutilation, and mass extraction. Ivory and wild rubber were in high demand, and so under the guise of media manipulation and PR mastery, Leopold convinced the world that these goods were in fact being traded with, rather than extracted from, the Congo. The horror, however, could only be concealed for so long. A fellow by the name of Ed Morel, who worked for a shipping company in Liverpool, noticed the bounty of ivory and rubber arriving from the Congo, with only men in arms making the journey back. His suspicion grew, he found accounts from missionaries and others who had been, and mounted a campaign to undermine the constant wall of propaganda Leopold had been financing. In 1908, the Belgian state purchased the Congo of Leopold, where the country remained a colony of Belgian until 1960. And for a myriad of reasons, for which we address in the podcast, the Congo today is still on the back foot. Kinshasa, the capital city, already has a bigger population than Paris and is projected to be as much as 40 million by 2050. The Congo today is among the most resource-rich nations on earth, but among the least developed. It still attracts the same predation for extraction as it ever has, although altogether less forceful and less violent. The man I speak with on the podcast today wrote the definitive history of this period. His name is Adam Hotchchild. He's an author, journalist, and historian, and wrote in 1998 King Leopold's Ghost. It was an honor to have him on. Ever since I spoke with Tim Butcher three years ago, I've been keen to interview Adam. You'll see what we speak about in the timestamps. Consider listening to Tim Butcher's episode as well, which will offer a good companion to this history. A link to that will be in the podcast description. Tim told the story of economic decline in the Congo from a first person point of view when he walked across the country about fifteen years ago in the footsteps of one of the very characters who dominate Adam Hotchchild's story. Consider sharing this podcast with somebody, perhaps a friend who listened to the rest of History's Congo series. And finally, with absolutely no further ado, here he is Adam Hotchchild. Something so wild about all this is that from eighteen eighty five, the Congo was not a colony of Belgium, but rather the personal possession of King Leopold II, and run by a private bureaucracy and mercenary force. It became an official colony of Belgium thirteen years later. But I wanted to ask you, did those thirteen years of unaccountability, when it was Leopold's personal possession, did that allow for more brutality? Or can we suspect that even if it had been an official colony from the start, that similar practices would have occurred?

SPEAKER_00 3:03

That's a good question, right. I think though that the answer is the second, that had it been a Belgian colony from the start, or had it been almost anybody's colony, similar practices would have occurred. Because if you look at the colonization of Africa, which was a startlingly rapid and often quite brutal experience, where the greatest death toll happened had not to do with who was owning the land involved, who was the colonial master, but what the crop grown there was. And where the greatest death toll happened was in areas where wild rubber was the wealth that Europeans were after. That was the case in Congo, and the same thing in the Cameroon, which was then a German colony, same thing in what was known as the French Congo, across the river from Leopold's Congo, same thing in northern Angola under the Portuguese. And in all of these places, and actually in the French colony, French Congo, they have the best statistics, the death rate approached 50%. The reason for this was that all of these places used the same technique for gathering wild rubber that King Leopold of Belgium has pioneered, which was forced labor. Essentially he sent his troops into village after village, held the women hostage in order to force the men of the village to go into the forest for days and eventually weeks out of each month to gather wild rubber, which was enormously lucrative. And of course, when you have women held hostage and men turned into forced laborers, people stop having children, communities have a hard time hunting, fishing, cultivating food, and doing all the other things that, you know, through which a village normally feeds itself, and the death rate was colossal.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

And is it particularly colossal because of the manner with which they harvested the rubber by spreading it on their skin and presumably making them very sick? Or was it such a hard crop that just more violence was needed for coercion?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

I think it was the fact that when you turn the population of a village into forced laborers, often for several weeks out of each month, that leaves many fewer able-bodied men to go hunting, to go fishing, to harvest the food. Plus, their wives and daughters were chained up as hostages so that they wouldn't run away when they were forced to go into the rainforest. In addition to that, when Leopold's army arrived in each village, they would requisition whatever food was on hand to feed the soldiers. Plus, when people when a whole population is weakened by being treated this way, diseases take a and when they're living in a state of near famine, diseases take a terrible toll that people otherwise might have survived. So for all these reasons the death rate was enormous. And in what today is Democratic Republic of Congo, then King Leopold's Congo, and after that the Belgian Congo, the best demographic estimates are that the population shrank between 1880 and 1920 by about half, from roughly 20 million people at the end of that time, at the beginning of that time to roughly 10 million at the end of that time. We don't know the precise statistics because there were no censuses taken during this period. But it was a huge loss of population, not just from the deaths, but because, as I said, under these conditions of people being forced laborers, people being having to flee into the rainforest to avoid being impressed as forced laborers, people stopped having children.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Is there anything as close to a 50% death rate in any type of forced labor agriculture?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Well, unfortunately, there was a much larger than 50% death rate in the conquest of the American West, when Americans who were descended from European immigrants took that land away from the Native Americans who were its original inhabitants. That was not a forced labor situation, but it was people being shoved off their land, being massacred, and we had a higher death rate than far higher than 50% in this country. Other forced labor situations, you know, very often there are not good statistics kept. One of the other largest forced labor situations in the 20th century was the gulag that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, where by some estimates 20% of the economy was goods produced by forced labor. But even today, when some Soviet archives opened up for a while, now they've closed again. But even when the archives were open, scholars disagree about what the death rate was. But it's certainly very high because any kind of forced labor situation is being operated without regard to human life.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Did the Europeans who were consuming the rubber back in the mainland, did they know how filthy the supply chain was for that rubber?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

I don't think so. And unfortunately, the same thing is true in the world today. People in Australia, the United States, Europe often have no idea even where the products they buy at the supermarket come from, much less the conditions under which they were produced. When I go to the supermarket to, you know, buy fruit and vegetables. It may be that the label says, you know, products of the United States or product product of Mexico. Do I know the conditions under which the people who gathered that crop worked, whether in the United States or Mexico or anywhere else? Well, often I don't. And I think the same was even more true in a world that wasn't electronically knit together as today's world is. So yeah, I don't think people had much idea of where the, in the case of the Congo, where the rubber was coming from that they used for rubber tires for their cars, for their bicycles, that covered the telephone wires coming into their homes. They had very little idea where that was coming from and under what conditions it was produced until the great campaign, really begun by a British journalist, Edmund Dean Morel, to publicize that to the world. And that campaign was largely the subject of my book, King Leopold's Ghost.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Regarding that, now we don't know where our goods are coming from as well. Lisa Christine, Matthew Friedman, Bruce Labadoo are all sort of activists in the slavery space. And they've been guests before, and uh estimates are as high as 40 million people at the moment are are slaves, and you know, much to do with sort of the raw goods of maybe how the cotton is put together, how the dyes are sourced, and then how it's all manufactured. Surely isn't as grim and dire as it was in the Congo, but that same theme does echo even today through most of the things maybe in my house.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

Yeah, I think that that's true. I mean, there are different estimates that one hears about how many people are in some sort of forced labor in the world today. Uh 25 million, 30 million, sometimes more. I think a difference between today and uh 100 or 150 years ago is it's often not so distinct. You know, in the American South, before our Civil War, you know, slaves were property, and there were, you know, legal documents that that proved that this man or that woman owned these slaves. In the Congo, you can see photographs of these forced laborers in chains, you know, manacled together with, you know, iron bands around their necks. It doesn't happen that way in the world today. It could be a workshop in the southern United States, in Bangladesh, and anywhere, a number of other places where the laborers are immigrants and the proprietor has kept all their passports. So they have no way of getting out. So it's forced labor enforced by documents rather than actual ownership or chains. And there are there are many degrees of it as well. Sometimes it's not completely clear cut. People are in debt to an unscrupulous business owner, an unscrupulous owner of a farm who puts them to work on his farm or his plantation, but it turns out that the store that he owns is the only place that you can buy food supplies, and they get deeper and deeper into debt buying them there. That can be a kind of forced labor too, that's very hard to escape from. And I'm glad there are activists in the world today who are working on that.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Yeah. Or you're a tuk-tuk driver in Bangladesh and one of your children falls sick and you have to buy medication that maybe costs 50 or 100 US dollars, and all of a sudden you've entered into some generational slavery because you can never amass so much money to pay that back. And it gets to the point where they'll maybe treat triage off a child as some sort of payment for that uh debt. Are there any other instances in history of such a colossal country actually being owned as property by one individual, such as the Congo with Leopold II?

SPEAKER_00 12:16

I don't think so, except, you know, I mean, there are plenty of empires and kingdoms where one emperor or one king was the boss. But uh uh in relatively modern times, I think the Congo is really the only instance like that. And really from 1885 till 1908, as you said at the beginning, Ryan, this territory, this enormous territory, the same, roughly the same boundaries as the Democratic Republic of Congo today, was the personal, privately owned property of King Leopold II of Belgium. And it was recognized as such by all the major nations of the world, starting with the United States, which was the first to extend recognition. Leopold got in at the beginning of the scramble for Africa. He bamboozled Americans, Europeans, ended recognizing this territory as his own. He managed to convince them that his aims were merely religious and philanthropic. Uh, you know, making money was the fartest, the farthest thing from his mind, but of course that was not the case.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

The role of Stanley, Livingston, Burton Speak, and all these other explorers of the time. Did did they sort of open up the map for these ambitious, extractive leaders? It was something about the glory and the celebration of what they were doing.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Yes. Stanley was the key person where the Congo is concerned. He was renowned, of course, for having been the man who found Livingston, and who supposedly said, Dr. Livingston, I presume. So he was certainly the most famous explorer of his time, in addition to the other folks you mentioned. And after Stanley came back to Europe from having found Livingston, he then embarked on another expedition where he crossed the African continent from east to west, which was a very difficult thing to do in those days. And in the course of that very harrowing journey, which took him several years, he discovered the course of the Congo River. And that's an absolutely crucial artery for Central Africa. It's the second largest river in the world, only the Amazon has more water. And there are many tributaries coming into this enormous river, which make a series of interconnected waterways, probably about ten thousand kilometers worth of interconnected waterways. And for an aspiring colonialist, which King Leopold was at that time, the idea of getting your hands on a territory like that, it was like conquering a vast country that already had a built-in railway network. Because of course, one technology they had then was steamboats. And once you could get a bunch of steamboats out of this river, you had a way of extracting the wealth of that territory. And that's what Leopold was after.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

But that turned out not to be the case, right? Navigating these rivers was not so simple.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

It was not so simple. Leopold, after this journey of Stanley's, Leopold hired Stanley to essentially stake out this vast territory for him, explore it further, come back with some maps which could then be used to persuade the United States and Europe to recognize it as Leopold's possession. The difficulty was that this enormous river goes down a series of rapids that extend over fifty or a hundred miles just before it reaches the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of Africa. And those rapids had for several centuries kept European seamen from exploring that river. They couldn't sail up it because the river drops uh a couple of thousand feet over these huge rapids. So to get the steamboats out of the river, they had to be built in Belgium, then cut into pieces, and then carried on the backs of porters around those enormous rapids up to the upper river network where they could sail that huge territory. So a lot of backbaking work involved. Eventually they were able to start building steamboats on the bank of the river. And uh before long, Leopold built a railroad around those rapids.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

So it was a railroad, once they got all the rubber and ivory, they would take it to where the rapids began and then chuck it on a train and take it to the coast.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

That's right. That's right. Yeah, that was absolutely crucial. But within the Great Territory, all the navigation in the early days was by river steamboats.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

You called it conquest under the guise of protection. So let's just go to young Leopold. He's a prince. He's a bit of an odd fellow. The only subject reportedly that only paid attention to was geography. He grew to be a truly horrible father. It was very awkward with women, and he said ominously at one stage, Belgium does not exploit the world. That is a mistake. So Stanley gets Congo onto his radar, but then it's a country roughly five times the size of France, half the size of the European Union. What about the mechanics of this empire? How does he manage to control a country of this size?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Well, it was built up gradually. I mean, you have to understand first Leopold's ambition. He had become king of Belgium in eighteen sixty five, but this was a time when it wasn't so much fun to be a king anymore, because monarchs in Europe, with the exception of the Tsar of Russia, who had absolute power, had to share power with elected parliaments. And the elected parliaments had more and more power, the king had less and less. This was very frustrating to Leopold. He was also openly frustrated with being king of such a small country, and so he wanted this vast territory for his for his own. Got the world to recognize it just at that moment that Africa was being divided up among the European powers. And then gradually he built his own privately owned state there, Congo Free State, as it was called in English. He put the steamboats on the river, built that railroad around the rapids, which allowed him to extract the wealth, which in those early days was primarily wild rubber and ivory. And he built up an administrative cadre of Europeans, maybe half of them Belgians, half from other countries, including from some from the United States, many from other countries in Europe, who worked supervising posts where the ivory and the rubber was gathered. And they of course got a share of what they gathered, so it was an enormously lucrative job for a young man to take. He built up a privately owned army, nineteen thousand officers and men. These were black conscript soldiers under white officers. And again, the officers, you know, maybe half of them were Belgians, half from other countries in Europe, one or two from the United States. And this was the instrument by which he controlled the territory and seized those resources, because his army had the most modern repeating rifles, had machine guns, had small mobile cannon, and had steamboats to travel around. Whereas the Africans he was subduing had at best old muzzle loading muskets left over from slave trading days, and usually not even that. So his army was able to establish complete military dominance of the territory by about 199 or 1910.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

At its height, how many Europeans were on the ground to administer this entire country?

SPEAKER_00 19:38

Uh I know the number was about 450 in 1890. And then it gradually grew. It was certainly several thousand by the turn of the century. By the time the Belgians were forced to leave and give up the Belgian Congo in 1960, it was over 100,000. So it grew gradually.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

And if the Congo's population was, best estimate, 20 million by the time the Belgians arrived, is it just the weapon superiority that meant that a thousand or two thousand people could actually exert their power over this many people?

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Well, that's true of many colonial situations. I mean, you look at a place with vastly larger population, India, and the British never had more than a tiny force there. But in any kind of colony, usually whoever the colonizer is manages to conscript some of the people in the colony who have a grievance against other people, so that you had, you know, Indian troops serving under British officers in India, just as you had, you know, the enlisted members of this force in the Congo, we shouldn't really call them enlisted because they were conscripted. They were all Africans. They were all Congolese serving under white officers. Now, of course, they were always worried about mutinies and rebellions because these guys were conscripted, they didn't want to be in the army, and they often took people from one part of the country, moved them a thousand miles or so by steamboat, and then put them to work subduing the African inhabitants of another part of the country. There were still many mutinies in the army, and actually if you look at the official history of Leopold's private army, which was published a few years after his death, roughly one quarter of its pages are given over to accounts of suppressing these mutinies. I don't think there's another army in history whose official history does that.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

How many languages were spoken amongst the Congolese before the Belgians arrived?

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Well, linguists often disagree about what counts as a language, what counts as a dialect, but the general figure people use today is anywhere from 200 to 400, depending how you count them. There are several lingua franca or lingua francae, I guess we should call it linguay francae, not my Latin. Not very good, where you have, for instance, in in eastern Congo, as in much of East Africa, Swahili is the lingua franca. In the western part of the country, it's a language called Lingala. And then there are similar languages like that that many people speak even if it's not their native.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

So even when this Congolese inscripted man is taken a thousand miles elsewhere in his country, there was presumably still a means of communication that he could talk with other Congolese?

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yes. Either through one of these languages it was commonly spoken, or, you know, the commands might be fairly simple, and you learn a certain basic vocabulary as a soldier that's necessary to survive in that regiment?

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Aaron Powell What about the the actual men on the ground overseeing the horror? You know, famously sort of romanticized by Joseph Conrad, but from all reports, just maybe one of the singular most horrific periods of human history, over 50% of the population dying in a 20-year period. Is there any reports back from how these Europeans on the ground holding the guns, forcing people into slavery, watching hundreds and thousands of people die of famine and execution and bodily mutilation? Morally, how can it be the case that so many people sort of fell in line for this?

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Well, I think you can ask the same question about the perpetrators of the Holocaust. You know, when you look at human beings as a whole, I remember some years ago there was a big scandal uh about corruption on the New York City police force. I'm a New Yorker originally, and somebody said about the graduates of the city's police academy, 10% will be crooked whatever happens, 10% will be absolutely incorruptible whatever happens, and the other 80% will go whichever way the wind blows. And I'm afraid that large numbers of people in any kind of situation, most of us tend to go whichever way the wind blows, and that's a great human tragedy. Of course, the people who went to the Congo and to other places in colonial Africa from Europe were self-selected. They went there in search of adventure and in search of money, because it was known that if you if you ran one of these rubber collecting posts, ivory collecting posts on the river, you got a share of what the take was, and people could get wealthy, and people came back to Belgium with money that they had earned there, and so the word spread. And the idea of being able to make money and have an adventure at the same time by being part of a military force that was fighting against people who were much more poorly armed than you were, that's attractive to a lot of young men. One thing that they didn't know that King Leopold kept secret is that at the time that he started recruiting Europeans to go to the Congo, Europeans had not developed defenses against all kinds of tropical diseases, malaria, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, and so forth. And of all the Europeans who went from Belgium to the Congo, roughly a third of them never came home because they they died of these diseases, deaths often accentuated by alcoholism. This statistic was kept silent, although notably Leopold himself never went to the Congo because he knew the statistic. He didn't want to get yellow fever. But these young adventurers, they wanted adventure, they want money. If they were lucky, they got both of them. Often they died, though. And there were some who once they got there had pangs of conscience. They were pretty rare, but there are a few such cases. I write about one guy in King Leopold's Ghost, Stanislas Lefranc, who was a Belgian magistrate, who was simply appalled at what he saw. He wrote pamphlets, letters to the newspapers in Belgium and so on. Nobody paid much attention.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Regarding further the sort of mechanics of how he administered this country, is he the first example of PR manipulation and this sort of shell game to create a mirage of coalition?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Of media manipulation?

SPEAKER_01 26:05

Yeah, like PR manipulation.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yeah, PR manipulation. Leopold was a master at that. He really could teach today's American tobacco companies a thing or two about public relations. He initially portrayed this as a crusade to bring the benefits of civilization, commerce, and Christianity to this benighted place in Africa. Commerce was touted because there was the idea that the Africans were inherently lazy, and so, you know, if you colonized a place, you would teach them the benefits of hard work. Christianity, of course, everybody knew was the correct religion and not whatever heathen faith the Africans had. So to encourage this idea, he encouraged many missionaries to go to Congo, and this actually backfired on him. The Catholic missionaries who went there were almost all from Belgium, some from France. They functioned pretty much as an adjunct of the regime. They ran the schools that trained the young men to become soldiers in his private army. But to curry favor with other countries, he allowed several hundred American, Swedish, and British Protestant missionaries to go there. There were a couple of dozen of them who most of them went along with the program, went the way the wind blew and didn't say anything. But there were a few dozen of them who were different, who had gone to Africa filled with earnest desire to save souls and preach the gospel and so forth, and they found themselves in the middle of this horror show. And they took pictures, they wrote letters to missionary magazines, they wrote to their congregations back home in the US and Sweden and Britain. They had very little effect until this remarkable man, Edmund Dean Morell, came along. And let me talk a little bit about him because I think he's really central to the story. Belgium was a small country, didn't have a navy, didn't have a merchant marine. So Leopold gave the exclusive contract on all cargo traffic between the Congo and Belgium, which basically meant bringing back these cargoes of ivory and wild rubber, gave it to a British shipping company based in Liverpool, the Elder Dempster Company. And this company had a young clerk on its staff, a guy at that time about twenty five years old, who was bilingual in English and French. He had a British mother and a French father. And because he spoke French, which was the business language at Belgium, they would send him to the Belgian port of Antwerp every couple of weeks to check in the company's ships when they arrived, tally up the cargo, make sure everything was in order. And so Morel stood on that dockside at Antwerp. It still gives me chills when I think about this moment. And he began to realize something, that when his company's ships arrived from Africa, voyage of thousands of miles to Belgium, they were filled to the hatch covers with these enormously valuable cargoes of ivory and wild rubber, and he knew how labor intensive gathering wild rubber was. But when they turned around and sailed back to Africa, they carried no trading goods in exchange. No merchandise was being sent to pay for all of this stuff. Instead, the ships were carrying mainly soldiers, firearms, and ammunition. So Morel looked at this month after month, and he realized he was seeing evidence of some kind of slave labor or forced labor system thousands of miles away because nothing else could have been generating all of this stuff. He went to the head of the shipping company and said something terrible is going on here and we shouldn't be a party to it. His boss told him to get lost. When that didn't work, tried to promote him to another job in another country. When that didn't work, tried to pay him some money to shut up. That didn't work. Morel quit his job and in the space of a few years turned himself into what today we would call an investigative journalist, and really became the most prominent investigative journalist in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth. Devoted himself eight or ten hours a day to putting the story of forced labor in King Leopold's Congo on the world's front pages. And he really succeeded. And of course, when an investigative journalist starts disclosing a story, people who have something to add to it get in touch. And in Morel's case, that was the missionaries who'd been working in Congo, trying to get the word out about the slave labor system. They brought him their stories, their photographs, and he used them and they cooperated in trying to bring the story to the world, and they really succeeded.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

How did he succeed in the face of Leopold's PR machine? Since media at the time is sort of the written word, Leopold's the king of a country and extremely wealthy. How did he manage to nonetheless break through all that noise?

SPEAKER_00 31:11

Well, Leopold generated an immense amount of PR material, even published a magazine trilingual in English, French, and German. And because distributed in all sorts of interesting ways, for example, he owned shares in the international sleeping car company that had sleeping cars on all the European railways. And when you went to bed in your sleeper for the night in the Paris-Berlin train or the Rome to Madrid train or whatever, there on your pillow was a copy of this magazine called The Truth About the Congo in three languages. And Leopold did much more as well. He tried to bribe journalists successfully in many different countries to write favorable articles about what he was doing. But Morel was very shrewd. He was a good writer, he was tireless, he was bilingual in English and French, which helped. He wrote pamphlets, he wrote books, and he used the great medium of photography because some of these missionaries and people work who worked with them had taken remarkable photographs in the Congo. They had taken photographs that showed these women hostages in chains. They had taken photographs that saw showed men being whipped. They had taken photographs that showed people with their hands cut off, which was punishment or a sign that a soldier needed a hand that he could claim to his commanding officer was from a dead body, so the officer wouldn't think that he'd wasted his bullet going hunting or worse yet, saved it for use in a mutiny. So Morel had pictures of all this. They did slideshows, actually as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Many slideshows in the United States, hundreds of them in Britain and on the European continent. And this eventually generated enormous international pressure on Leopold.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

And there was a Swedish missionary who sort of alerted him to the bodily mutilation, the hands being chopped off.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Yes. The Swedish missionaries were some of the first to start getting the word out. But there again, until Morel came along, they didn't have the means of reaching people because they were writing for missionary magazines in Sweden and couldn't reach a wider European public. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

So it really is sort of this exceptionalism of Morel that brought it to international attention.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Aaron Powell Yeah, he was an absolutely tireless campaigner. And he also managed, I think, to evoke in England, where he he did most of his work, the sense that there was that campaigning against these atrocities was in the tradition of people in England campaigning against the slave trade and slavery. That they, you know, there was an honorable tradition to build on there. Eventually he joined forces with missionaries who were actually, and and the Congo Reform Movement, as it was called, operated in conjunction with something called the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which was a descendant of the old abolitionist organizations that had managed to get rid of slavery in the British Empire but were busily campaigning against slavery in other parts of the world. And of course, this was a form of slavery in the Congo that they were campaigning against. So he was effective in making his case known. I think the limitation was that he and the missionaries, all these other people, they were horrified by the forced labor, but they more or less took colonialism for granted and tended to ignore the fact that in other colonies that were also growing wild rubber, French, German, Portuguese colonies, there was also equivalent forced labor on a large scale. They just didn't pay much attention to that. They thought that if the Congo that the horrible thing was the Congo being the possession of one man, King Leopold, and that if it became the Belgian Congo, they would be on their way to solving the problem. And eventually this created enough pressure on Leopold so that in 1908, the year before he died, he did turn the Congo over to Belgium and it became the Belgian Congo. But greedy as he was, he didn't just turn it over, he made Belgium pay him for it. So he sold his Congo, as he thought of it, to the government of Belgium. Did the forced labor system end? No. It became a little easier in some ways, a little more lenient, but basically that system remained in place as long as the price of rubber was high. And then when World War I happened, Belgium got overrun, but the colonial forces were still entrenched in the Congo. The pressure got even worse because there was tremendous pressure to produce goods to pay for the war effort there. It was only around 1920 when the Belgian colonial authorities in the country began realizing that if they continued this system, the death rate was such that they would eventually have no labor force left. And you can actually find them saying this on paper. At that point, they made the system much less harsh. They began instituting basic medical care for the Africans and so on.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Aaron Ross Powell And did the amounts of rubber that they would receive at that point reduce? Which is another way of asking, like what was the intensity of the conditions they forced them under even necessary?

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Aaron Powell Well, the intensity of those conditions was necessary to produce the rubber when it was growing wild, because it's one thing if you have people working on a plantation where you can supervise them. But if you've got to force people to walk for miles into the rainforest to tap rubber, because these rubber vines, there may be only one or two per acre in a rainforest near a village, tended to get tapped out pretty quickly. You need to do something like holding their wives hostages in order to make them do this. The things also eased because the reason there was such a rubber boom was that there was tremendous demand in Europe, the United States, Australia, elsewhere for rubber products because they'd invented the inflatable bicycle tire in the 1880s. Soon after that came the automobile. They also needed rubber to coat telephone and telegraph wires. Huge demand for it. But to plant a plantation of rubber trees and have it grow to maturity can take as long as fifteen years. When the rubber boom began around 1890, people began planting these plantations in tropical areas around the world. But it took them a while to grow to maturity. And by the time we're a decade or two into the 20th century, wild rubber was no longer the commodity people were after in the Congo. But it's a territory enormously rich in many other things as well copper, uranium, coal tan, cobalt, minerals that we use in our cell phones today.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

You've just spoken a lot about how morel was really the spearhead of bringing the atrocities of the Congo to the world's attention. And my suspicion is just that the Congolese people didn't have access to international media. There was a huge language barrier. They were also enslaved and so forth. But there's a critique of the book that reforms around the the Europeans, morel encasement, which so goes the critique. Congolese resistance and influence just therefore goes unrecognized in the sort of eventual liberation of their country. You've had to respond to this question many times. How is it how have you gone over time thinking about it? How has the response changed?

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Well, there was a lot of Congolese resistance. There was resistance within the army itself, as I mentioned, you know, there were there were mutinies from these soldiers who didn't want to be conscripted for Leopold's army. There was enormous resistance from villagers all over the country who didn't want to be made forced laborers. I wish I could have told more of that story, but the problem was all of these folks were defeated, usually killed, and didn't survive to leave a written record of the struggles that they fought. There were undoubtedly tens of thousands, if not more, Congolese who died fighting this regime. But we barely know even the names of any of them. There are a few exceptions where a missionary happened to write something down. It's always a problem when you're writing a book about something, and I've dealt with this in other situations too. Um the material that you have to work from when you're a historian, working from the written record, is always more plentiful from some people than from others. More there's much more from the conquerors than the conquered, from the masters, from the slaves, from men than from women, and so forth. We don't have a full oral history of a single Congolese during this period of enormous slaughter. I wish there had been one.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

Could you could you double down on the shell game and the NGOs Leopold created and maybe break it down into a family tree if possible for how he did sort of convince the world that this was a uh sort of uh a mission to civilize the Congolese and bring them into the 20th century?

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Well, certainly one thing is that the world, if we're talking about Europe and the United States, didn't need much convincing because almost everybody in Europe and uh almost everybody in the United States, with the exception of our black population and our Native American population, were totally on board with the idea of colonies. They thought it was only natural that more developed countries or more civilized, as they use the word they used in those days, should own and control parts of the world that were not that way. The United States, you know, acquired some colonies from Spain in 1898 and fought a very ruthless war against independence advocates in the Philippines during just this same period when Leopold was uh up his hold on the Congo. So people didn't require a lot of convincing. But Leopold, as I mentioned, you know, he maintained this propaganda machine, he bribed journalists to write favorable articles, he published a magazine, uh, and he employed lobbyists. He hired a former American ambassador to Belgium to be his lobbyist who got Washington to be the first capital to recognize his his hold over the Congo. He had other lobbyists in other countries. The head of that shipping line that Morel worked for in Liverpool was Leopold's honorary consul there and exerted his influence on behalf of Leopold. But it was a world that, at least in Europe and those in power in the United States, it didn't take people didn't take much persuading that colonialism was a good thing, a benevolent thing, and that we're doing something for those poor outfit.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Right. So there's this very little scratching under the surface, just taken for a given always the king of European country. Obviously, he's gonna try and um spread his good morals into another part of the world.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

Yeah. And as I was saying about Morel, you know, he didn't really question colonialism itself. In fact, he went to what today is Nigeria and wrote quite favorably of British colonialism as it was practiced there. He thought it was a matter of either practicing it well or practicing it badly. Interesting. Today we would take a different view.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Is there a sense of nationalism to Morrell as well? That because it's the that because it's the great empire, the United Kingdom, that of course it's going to be done better than these uh mainlanders, Belgians?

SPEAKER_00 42:57

I think so. I think he was a he was a British patriot in that sense. But at the same time, he was a very brave man, especially in the subsequent part of his career. When Britain uh entered the First World War in 1914, he was one of a considerable minority of people in Britain who felt it was a mistake to join this huge war that was obviously going to remake the world for the worse in every way. He spoke out very strongly against that, and eventually he served six months in prison at hard labor for doing so. And it broke his health and he died quite a young man.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Adam, you published this book in 1998, so almost thirty years ago, and you've presumably been asked thousands of questions about the Congo and Leopold's grip on the country in that time period. But what what do you think is the most important but unattended question from your work? Something which you wish was more often asked.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Gosh, I think we don't pay enough attention to how colonialism shaped the world that we live in. In so many different ways. I mean, huge parts of the world today, almost all of Africa, much of Asia, were countries that were once colonies, the Caribbean nations as well, South America in a different way. We need to pay more attention to that heritage, how it has shaped these different countries, and I think we need to pay attention to why some countries have been able to recover from colonialism much more successfully than others. The Congo, for instance, is in terrible shape today. I've been there a couple of times in recent years. The average per capita income adjusted for inflation is probably less than it was when the Belgians left 60 plus years ago. On the other hand, only two countries away in Africa, you have a state like Botswana that's quite prosperous, has managed to seize control of its own natural resources and not farm them out to foreign corporations, has one of the highest per capita incomes, if not the highest per capita income on the continent, a low level of corruption is quite successful. What accounts for that difference? I don't pretend to know all of the answers. I have some thoughts of what could be part of it. Yeah, what do you suspect? Well, I think the key thing is that it was probably somewhat better to be colonized by the British than by the Belgians in Africa, because the British had had the experience of seeing the independence movement grow over the course of the twentieth century in India. And even before India finally became independent in 1947, the British knew it was in the cards. And they made some preparations for this in Africa by extending high school education and higher education to sizable numbers of people in some of their colonies there. The Belgians did not. Only at the very last minute did they start a university, for instance. Very, very few Congolese had higher education. When the country became rather abruptly independent in 1960, there were only about three dozen Congolese who had in this enormous country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River, as you said, I think half the size of the European Union. There were only about three dozen people in this whole country who had university degrees. The country has never really gotten on its feet ever since then. We, the Americans, did not help by heavily supporting for many years a kleptocratic dictator, Mabutu Sasiseko, who ruled his country for 32 years, accepted lots of American aid, and plundered it more ruthlessly even than Leopold had. He had much better, much more developed economy to plunder. Congo is one of the worst cases, worst case scenario on Africa. A place like Botswana, I suspect, although I don't know, I haven't been there, I haven't really studied it, but I think one thing that may have made a difference there is that Botswana's great natural resource is diamonds. The diamonds weren't discovered until after the British left. I have the feeling if they'd been discovered decades earlier, uh the British would have left under very different terms where they continued to own large diamond mines and the like. I don't know. I'm just speculating there. But these are the kinds of things that I think we need to do more study of.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

To invite maybe another explanation, it's regarding sort of Tim Marshall's worldview about prisoners of geography. And it's not a geographical determinist worldview, but it's nonetheless like a real assessment of the limitations that geography placed on a country. And so also inviting Tim Butcher's work, Blood River, you know, there's a striking moment where he goes through a village, has a conversation with an elderly man, and in the conversation, the man reflects that he's seen more of the future than his own grandchildren have. Because when he was a young man, there was a train that ran through, the hotel served cold European beer, and now, 40 years later, they're living in the shells of those former buildings. And this theme is constant throughout Butcher's reporting uh throughout his journey in the Congo of development in reverse, like undevelopment, a country in decline. And so the question is how much of this is due to their colonial history and how much is due to do with rather the prisoner's geography worldview, where the DRC is this huge, dense rainforest, mountains, some navigable rivers, but not down all the way to the coast. So the sort of infrastructure is fragmented, to say the least. The DRC borders nine countries, many of which have their own conflicts and unstable governments, where often there will be huge flows of immigration into the Congo because of that. And then to top it all off, the DRC sits on cobalt, copper, coal-tan, gold, diamonds, oil, like you said, a bunch of natural resources, which had they still been colonies, the uh the details under which they would have left would have looked very different. And so therefore, instead of fostering development, the wealth attracts predation, corruption, and sort of foreign interference. So, you know, how much how much of Congo's really bad hand that they have today is uh due to those factors versus their colonial history?

SPEAKER_00 48:56

Well, I think you're right that the geography makes things tough. It's a very difficult country to travel in today. Was, you know, at the end of the colonial period, it was somewhat easier because there were rudimentary highways which allowed you to get most places. And of course, there was still a lot of travel on river steamboats in those days, but it's still a hard country to get around. You can't hop on your motorbike and drive from one corner to another very easily. So I think that had a lot to do with it, but I think also having natural resources, especially minerals, can be a disadvantage when you don't have a strong government because everybody else wants a piece of them. It's as if you're um, you know, a wealthy, enormously wealthy young person who doesn't a young woman who doesn't have anybody to protect her, and everybody wants to marry her and get those riches. And I've had Congolese friends say to me, you know, we wouldn't have had so much trouble if we weren't so rich. And indeed, you can sort of see the wealth flowing out of the country. In eastern Congo, I remember standing at the border and seeing truck after truck uh carrying what were they carrying? I believe it was stuff from the tin mines across the border into Uganda. You see people crossing the border, you know, on motorbikes or on foot, and you know that they're probably smuggling gold dust in the seams of their clothing or places where it can't be detected, because it's estimated that 98% of the gold leaving the country never is tallied for customs purposes. So when you've got a weak, chaotic, corrupt government and all these natural resources, it's sort of too tempting for outside forces to come in, whether they be multinational corporations, whether they be the armies of neighboring countries, and seize this stuff for themselves. And indeed that's what's happening in eastern Congo right now, where a huge swath of that territory is overrun and controlled by a militia group that is basically an arm of the Rwandan government.

SPEAKER_01 51:03

And when you are the second largest rainforest in the world, it's exponentially more difficult and more costly to say, build a road system than it would be in the Midwest of America or the eastern coast of Australia. And so you do have these compounding problems that just get worse and worse. I watched this documentary on YouTube. It was amazing. I think it was like 10 years ago, it was a French guy, and he just rode a bus from one town in the Congo to another town. And attached to this bus was just the most absurd journey ever. It was barrels of oil that were hanging over the side, it was sacks of rice that people were sitting on top of. And the whole point of this documentary was just to say that to get anywhere outside of Kinshasa or one of the major cities is almost impossible. And therefore, the cost of goods upon arrival are expensive to someone living in Stockholm, let alone in the Congo. And this is for the most base materials. And so when you when you're relying on when we live in a very globalized world, and very few of the things that you're actually going to consume are grown in your own country, the sheer problem of transport and getting them there is this extraordinary limitation, which is going to further hamstring the country going forward that might not necessarily have much to do with their colonial history. Not to not to dismiss the colonial history, which obviously plays a huge role in it, but it's like they still have this very steep hill in front of them.

SPEAKER_00 52:27

Yeah, I think that's very, very true. Everything you said is is really true. It is very difficult to get around. There are very few miles of paved road in the country. And uh that is the way we're used to traveling these days. And to get from one corner of it to the next, you really have to fly, which is something that only a few people can afford to do.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

And just to further compound the problem, Kinshasa is set to be, I have this statistic here. Kinshasa's uh the DRC is already going through a population boom, but they're projected double by 2050, making Kinshasa one of the world's largest cities. And today it's already larger than Paris. So you have an increase in constraint of more mouths to feed, more people, and the same base problems of not being able to go anywhere, not being able to find economic opportunity for yourself. And so naturally, like if you can't afford to leave, you probably will leave. And again, it's just compounding and compounding and compounding. And it sets this it sets a rather grim future for this country. Like Reuters re uh reported over the weekend that a tinderbox conflict is ready to explode in the Congo. Yeah, because of these militia groups out in the East. And no sort of central form of government. It's just a very grim setting.

SPEAKER_00 53:38

It already has exploded, really, because especially in the East and Northeast, the minerals are so plentiful. Whoever controls these mines has a spigot of money. And for, you know, the better part of three decades now, there's been sort of an ongoing war between the government and a constantly shifting set of different militia groups, really reached its most extreme point so far, where this militia M23, that is basically controlled by the government of Rwanda, has essentially taken over a large swath of eastern Congo.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

J just to add one further sort of negative compounding factor here, Adam, I think it was Tim Butcher who said this to me as well. But in the Congo, they have this wealth of hydropower that runs down right past through Kinshasa. But despite multiple international companies trying to come in and convert it into a power station, the project has failed over and over again for largely the same reasons. Getting access to the parts to fix it when it breaks down and so forth is almost impossible.

SPEAKER_00 54:39

Yeah, I mean, building we as when we think about building a huge dam, and this would have to be perhaps the largest in the world if we're talking about damming the whole river, which as I say is that only the Amazon has more water. When we think about building a huge dam, we always assume there are roads and railroads that can bring in all the equipment you need, and all the the concrete and the rebar and everything like that. Very, very hard to do when that stuff doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_01 55:07

But then it leaves us in a position where pretty much the only attraction for international organizations who have the scale of labor and money to make a difference to the country are almost by definition just going in there for extractive reasons to get access to the cobalt, to get access to the oil, to get access to the hydropower. And therefore, when they go in and they build roads, it's only to service whatever the part of the forest is that they're going to to extract these things. And it doesn't connect any villages and just continues this problem. Anyway, so it's uh it's a lot of sort of depressing notes one after another, but sort of where does that where does that leave the Congo? And as someone who obviously has quite an intimate relationship with the country, like how do you feel about it in the in the remainder of your lifetime? What's gonna happen here?

SPEAKER_00 55:52

Well, I wish I saw some cause for optimism. It's hard to see that right now. I think it's gonna be a long, long, hard road. You know, the the sheer raw military power of these militia groups has proven more effective than that of the Congolese army at this point. The army itself is quite corrupt and has, you know, many commanders have lined their pockets by gaining control of a of a post that gives them control of a key mine or something like that. There have been efforts by the United Nations, by the European Union to send a peacekeeping force, but and there are UN peacekeepers, I've seen a lot of them there, but they don't really have the mandate to interfere when the fighting starts. They end up protecting the international aid workers, but not doing much else. So I I don't see a lot of cause for optimism. I wish I could say otherwise, but at the moment I don't I don't see it. Because I know some enormously talented Congolese. Proof of that, I think, is that they generate some of Africa's best music. Um and there is a lot of life in a city like Kinshasa, but it's gonna be a long haul for this country to really put itself back together.

SPEAKER_01 57:06

We don't have to end on such a depressing note. Uh the book is now 25 years old. The world has changed, even in those 25 years, quite massively, and history is evolving, obviously, all the time. What parts of the book stand out to you more than ever that's relevant for the current moment?

SPEAKER_00 57:22

Well, I hope that we can take some inspiration from the people in the book who fought for justice in one way or another. You know, Morel was really a key figure in this movement that uh put the world's eye on the Congo and its slave labor system. As I say, I don't think his solution to it was sufficient, but just take the country out of the king's hands and put it into Belgium's hands. But he was a brave man who did a lot to help people understand how colonialism works. His associate, Roger Caseman, a remarkable figure, an Irishman who worked in the British Foreign Office, was British consul in the Congo, did an investigation of conditions there for the Foreign Office, and in the course of that began to realize Ireland is also a colony, and he became part of the Irish independence movement, and was hanged by his former employers, the British, in nineteen sixteen. There were great African patriots, Andrew Chaneu, the people I talked about in the book, whose lives we know much less about because there isn't the written record remaining. If I had one wish in rewriting this story, it would be that there were as rich written records about the Congolese patriots as there are about people like Morrell and Caseman. Sadly they're not, but these people need to be honored as well.

SPEAKER_01 58:47

Just a few more for you, Adam, a quick one. Did you notice that the rest of history, an extremely popular history podcast in the UK, they did a series on the Congo recently?

SPEAKER_00 58:56

Somebody told me about it. A neighbor of mine told me about it, but I haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

Okay, okay. They did an episode uh covering your book. This this is probably genuinely one of the biggest media arms at the moment in terms of the reach that they would get. Millions of people would have listened to it.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

The book has had many translations. It continues to amaze me because I had a hard time getting it published to begin with. The idea for the book, the book proposal, was turned down by nine out of the ten publishers, American publishers it was submitted to. Um but now it's been translated into about twenty languages. In fact, just today I signed a contract for its translation into Croatian. Wow, congratulations.

SPEAKER_01 59:35

Do you do you know if it sells in the Congo?

SPEAKER_00 59:37

Uh yes, the French language edition uh is sold there because French is the the language of the Congo government and education system and so on. And book distribution, like much else, is uh not well developed there. But when I went to Congo uh uh about 15, I made a couple of trips there in in recent years. The first uh was about 15 years ago. I was with some people from the organization Human Rights Watch, and we took a carton of uh a hundred copies of the French language edition of the book and we gave it out to school principals and so forth there. So it does get read. I know the book was parts of the book were excerpted in a newspaper in Kinshasa when it was first published. Do you get emails from Congolese saying I had no idea about this using the yes, from time to time, not many of them, because very few people there have emails, but I have I have heard from a few people.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:36

How's that make you feel?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

Well, I'm delighted. If I've helped people learn something about their history, I'm grateful to have been able to do that. The appalling thing is that when it comes to using the written resources that a historian uses, government records, books, publications of all kinds, newspapers and magazines of the period and so on, somebody working in the United States or Europe with access to a good library has far more resources than somebody working in Congress today. It's a tragedy. You know, so Congolese historians have I've talked with about this, and it's it's a tough thing to overcome. It's one reason why I value organizations like the Internet Archive that digitize literally millions of books and make them available for free to anybody anywhere in the world. I think that's one thing that can begin to equalize this access to information that is so unjust to the distribution of it today.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:33

Yeah, theoretically, if you've got a smartphone and access to a free LLM, you can quite quickly learn even more than you would have if you had the British Library around you and you were sitting in the middle of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

I still believe actually going to the library and looking at the books and documents. If you want to really get everything right, that's what you wanted.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:53

Adam, would you would you say that you you're a historian of colonialism?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

No. I would say that I'm a writer who writes about things which interest me. I've done eleven books. Only King Leopold's ghost is concerned purely with colonialism. The book I wrote after it, Bury the Chains, was about the anti-slavery movement in the British Empire, which of course did involve British colonies in the West Indies. Other books I've done have been on other subjects. Almost all of them have been, in one way or another, about people struggling for justice, trying to make a better world, trying to fight against an unnecessary war. I've done two books about the First World War era, one about that era in the United States, one about that era in Britain. I did a book about how Russians were trying to come to terms with Stalinism. Fascinating. I traveled around, saw the sites of the old gulag camps, interviewed former Gulag prisoners, retired secret police types, some of them repentant, some of them not repentant. So, but stories of good and evil, people fighting for justice, people fighting against impression, oppression of one sort or another. That's what interests me.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:05

Did Australia ever get on your radar?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:07

Not yet. Maybe that lies ahead. I don't know. I have not been there, unfortunately. I would love to go. Uh there are far too many parts of the world that I haven't been to yet.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:18

Absolutely. All right, Adam. Well, last question, nothing to do with the Congo. Well, not necessarily, but it's something that I try to ask every guest who comes on, which is what is the role that serendipity has played in your life? Serendipity.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

Well, if you mean good luck, I've had a lot of good luck. Uh in every way. Uh I was born in comfortable circumstances. I was born in a house full of books with parents who read aloud to me, parents who showed me how to use libraries, parents who read themselves. This was hugely useful to me as a writer. Was able to get a good education and I hope make use of it. And I've had serendipity in uh some things that have happened to me when writing these books. For example, in the Congo book, King Leopold's Ghost, if you look at it carefully, you'll find more footnotes than any than anything else. Than referring to anything else, you'll find probably a hundred out of nine hundred or so footnotes referring to works by Jules Marchal. Who's Jules Marchal? He is a Belgian who had been a colonial official in the Congo and then had gone into the Belgian diplomatic service after the Congo became independent. One day in the 1970s, he was serving as Belgian ambassador in West Africa and Liberia. He saw an item in the newspaper that said referred to 10 million people killed in King Leopold's Congo. And he wrote to the Foreign Office in Brussels, his employer, and said, Can somebody send me some information about this so I can correct this unfortunate slander on our country in the paper here? And he said to me, 20 years. Twenty years later, I got no reply. And that's when my curiosity began. He eventually retired from the Belgian Foreign Service and spent some 15 years writing a four-volume comprehensive series of books about King Leopold's Congo, delving into the archives in a way that nobody had done before. Found all sorts of rich material. It was enormously useful for me. I went to see him. I found out about him by chance. His books were published only in Dutch and French, the two languages of Belgium. Never received a single review in a Belgian newspaper magazine academic journal. I found out about him by chance, talking to somebody else, I went to see him. We became good friends. I was able to draw on his books, which, as I say, had gotten very little attention at that point. He read my manuscript twice, correcting errors. Meeting him was one of the greatest acts of serendipity that's ever happened to me as a writer.