Gantt Center Book Club - King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Join the Gantt Center Book Club for a series of reads inspired by an upcoming exhibition, Venturing Out of the Heart of Darkness. Opening February 7, 2015, and curated by Rehema Barber, this exhibition is a brilliant response to Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness, and an exploration of post-colonial identity and the effects of western imperialism on Africa, the Americas, and the world.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

In the 1880s, as the European powers were 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, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth 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, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.

Author: Adam Hochschild