[BOOK REVIEW] King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

In the 1880s, as Europe was carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River.

Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalised its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million—all the while shrewdly cultivating a reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the 20th century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.

King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travellers, and young idealists who came to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with great wit and skill. He knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. If you never read another book this year, I won't mind terribly.