Adam Hochschild Quotes

“Why did Hochschild put such store in plainly erroneous data about a loss of life caused by the EIC? Here we come to the horror at the heart of King Hochschild’s Hoax: his attempt to equate the EIC to the Nazis and to the sacred memory of the Holocaust. Throughout the book there is a nauseating, indeed enraging, use of Holocaust and Auschwitz comparisons. In part these reveal an insecurity about his main thesis and the knowledge that one way to silence criticism is to play on the fact that no one wants to be called a Holocaust denier. While we know “how many Jews the Nazis put to death,” he menaces readers, insisting on such precision in the EIC is distasteful. You have been warned!”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The further falsehoods and distortions that make up King Hochschild’s Hoax all collectively derive from the problems above. Perhaps most remarkably, the book is not really much about the history of the EIC at all. The central activity that justified, motivated, absorbed, and in the end defeated the EIC is missing: the battle against the Afro-Arab slave trade. This is akin to writing a history of the 68 years of colonial Kenya that limits itself only to the eight years of Mau Mau counter-insurgency campaign.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The black American missionary George Washington Williams, visiting in 1890, noted “the most revolting crimes” committed by the natives: “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.” Oddly, Hochschild quotes Williams’ testimony against native practices to criticize the EIC for being insufficiently vigorous in its attempts to govern the territory. Heads I win, tails you lose. As this logical slip implies, a justifiably proportionate response to the scourge of the slave trade required keen efforts by the EIC to recruit and feed soldiers, clear villages in areas prone to slave raids, establish military and governance posts, and pursue slave armies to the death. “Accommodating the Arab slave traders would be a crime,” wrote the EIC captain, and later WWI hero, Jules Jacques de Dixmude in 1892.”
― Bruce Gilley

“The reader is lured into believing that every conflict he documents is about the drive for rubber, not the drive against slavery (or inter-tribal vendettas). One of many egregious examples will have to suffice.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Hochschild describes the EIC official Léon Fiévez as a “sadist” who “terrorized” the rubber-rich Équateur district where he was commissioner. His source is the George Bricusse mentioned above. Bricusse lasted only three years in the Congo before dying of either typhoid or malaria, a common occurrence for the EIC where the annual mortality rate for European soldiers was 20 percent. In the 1894 incident recalled, Fiévez is recounting to Bricusse his desperate attempts to feed his soldiers while battling slave lords in the area. There is no mention of rubber because this particular place had little of it. The slaving business, on the other hand, is flourishing and Bricusse notes its devastation everywhere. Fiévez had arrived a few days earlier and held parlay with local chiefs. They had agreed to supply his soldiers with food for payment. They then reneged and fled into the forest. Fiévez sent his troops in pursuit and, in the ensuing fight, 100 of the chiefs’ soldiers were killed. After that, the chiefs made good on their promise.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Hochschild is at pains to convince the reader that anyone opposing the EIC was good, whether brutal slave trader, inveterate cannibal, fetish priest, or ethnic-cleansing warlord. His treatment of the 1895 rebellion by native soldiers at a military camp named Luluabourg in the southern savannah strains to portray the rebels as noble savages pining for freedom and a return to pastoral life. In his telling, the Belgian commander Mathieu Pelzer was a “bully” who “used his fists” and thus got his comeuppance at breakfast with a knife to the throat. Actually, Pelzer had nothing to do with it. The rebels were former soldiers for a black slave king. The EIC had brought them to the southern camp to reintegrate them as government soldiers. But their loss of royal prerogatives to whore, steal, and maim caused them to rebel. The group never exceeded 300 (Hochschild speculates that it reached 2,500) and petered out in the northern jungles in 1897, a rag-tag criminal gang gone to seed.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“This egregious example of “Belgians bad, natives good” is the conceptual foundation of King Hochschild’s Hoax. And it bleeds into what is, for most readers, the enduring imaginative impact of the book, to have put a nasty Belgian face onto Mistah Kurtz, the phantom who draws Marlow’s steamboat up the Congo river in Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness. Like generations of English professors, Hochschild has misread the book as an indictment of colonialism, which is difficult to square with its openly pro-colonial declarations and the fact of the “adoring” natives surrounding the deceased Kurtz.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“he main point is that Conrad realistically described the terrible things done by Belgians in the Congo. Hochschild certainly wishes this was Conrad’s purpose. He repeats an old theory that Kurtz was based on the EIC officer Léon Rom whom Conrad “may have met” in 1890 and “almost certainly” read about in 1898. Visitors noted that Rom’s garden was decorated with polished skulls buried in the ground, the garden gnomes of the Congo then. But Kurtz’s compound has no skulls buried in the ground but rather freshly severed “heads on the stakes” that “seemed to sleep at the top of that pole.” As the British scholar Johan Adam Warodell notes, none of the “exclusively European prototypes” for Kurtz advanced by woke professors and historians followed this native mode of landscape gardening. By contrast, dozens of accounts of African warlords and slavers in the Congo published before 1898 described rotting heads on poles (“a wide-reaching area marked by a grass fence, tied to high poles, which at the very top were decorated with grinning, decomposing skulls,” as one 1888 account had it). Far from being “one of the most scathing indictments of [European] imperialism in all literature,” as Hochschild declares it, Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of the absence of European imperialism in all literature. Kurtz is a symbol of the pre-colonial horrors of the Congo, horrors that the EIC, however fitfully, was bringing to an end.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Hochschild repeats the urban legend that Léopold burned all the EIC documents, going “to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence.” Quite the opposite: Léopold was proud of the EIC and went to extraordinary lengths to leave behind an extensive record. The testimony of his military aide that Hochschild cites about “burning the State archives” and turning “most of the Congo state records to ash” was a misunderstanding: what the aide saw burning were ruined and unreadable papers among the thousands of documents that came back in crates from the Congo in 1908. Léopold left behind 14 trunks filled with his personal letters and financial statements. Everything was carefully cataloged in “a vast room that looked like a post office,” the aide recalled. Some of it went missing in the turmoil of World War II before resurfacing in the basement of a house in 1983. Just last year, researchers at the Royal Museum for Central Africa who work on the EIC archives published a new book, The Congo Free State: What Could Archives Tell Us?”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“For all our modernist beliefs in truth, evidence, logic, and fairness, perhaps we have reached a point of no return in the writing of history where modern progressives attack the historical record with malice aforethought, leaving us stupider than we were before this movement took shape in the 1960s, when the twentysomething Hochschild was at the barricades protesting Vietnam and all the rest. It is for future generations to re-colonize history using the precious intellectual resources of the Enlightenment. Until then, we do well to fight the progressive warlords like Hochschild who enslave formerly colonized peoples in distorted victimization narratives that rob them of agency, all the while keeping the white man front and center.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man. But its debilitating effects on Africa, and on the Congo in particular, make the opposite more nearly the case. It is a callous and negligent chicotte (hippo whip) lash on the backs of all black Africans, narcissistic guilt porn for white liberals at the expense of the African. The Congolese lawyer Marcel Yabili calls it “the greatest falsification in modern history,” a compliment of sorts, I suppose.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“On another point: King Leopold’s Ghost reproduces some of the photographs of Congo atrocities that fueled the worldwide protests against Leopold’s rule during the first decade of the twentieth century. These “fake photos,” Gilley declares, were “staged” by the photographer. Yes, some images appear posed—something true of most photos everywhere in an era when cameras were bulky contraptions on tripods whose subjects had to remain still for a few seconds.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Bruce Gilley is right, that I was misleading in respect to one quotation I cited from another official, Charles Lemaire. I am sorry about that and it should be corrected. Lemaire was a more complicated case. His early diaries, which I quote elsewhere in the book, unroll a lengthy list of villages he ordered burned to the ground and a triumphant roster of death tolls: “20 natives killed” here, “around 15 blacks killed” there, and many more such boasts. But later in life, to his credit, Lemaire had deep regrets, and in fairness to him I should have referred to them.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Adam Hochschild has enjoyed a long run of success with King Leopold’s Ghost, his distortionary 1998 tale about the État Indépendant du Congo (EIC). So long, in fact, that he appears unable to come clean about its many fabrications. It is not just the doctoring of the quotation that anchors the story of “chopped hands for red rubber” (which I am grateful he has admitted), but the vast skein of distortion in which that little dodge is embedded.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild is correct that the demographer Léon de St. Moulin assayed the 50 percent decline possibility (in 1987 and 1990 works). But Hochschild fails to mention that Moulin, like the later Vansina, believed that the EIC and rubber had nothing to do with it. The causes for Moulin were, in order, sleeping sickness, smallpox, Spanish flu, and venereal diseases. Moulin did not even mention the EIC or rubber in his 1990 chapter. Like the later Vansina, he recognized that these were footnotes in the demographic history of the Congo.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“As for the claims by the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (“13 million killed” in 1998, then “5 to 10 million killed” in 2008), they are hard to keep track of. Initially, the starting year for his assertions was 1880 (five years before the EIC was founded and ten years before any rubber harvesting) while the latter estimate extended the end year to 1930 (22 years after the EIC). A second edition of the latter estimate, without explanation, moved up the starting date to 1885. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. All three editions of his book merely cite Moulin. It is notable that in a lengthy essay on the EIC published in L’Histoire in 2020, Ndaywel no longer makes any specific population claims, asserting only that the effects of the EIC were “worse than grim” (“plus que macabres”). In the end, Ndaywel is not credible. His works are published by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium because he is black. This helps them to “decolonize Eurocentric narratives,” which means using blacks as shadow puppets to shield their radical accounts from criticism.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“By contrast, dozens of serious demographers and statisticians—not just the Jean-Paul Sanderson I mention—have concluded the overall population rose slightly or was unchanged at around 8 to 10 million from 1885 to 1908. Others include Bruce Fetter, Guy Vanthemsche, Jean-Luc Vellut, Pierre-Luc Plasman, Anatole Romaniuk, and, as mentioned, the later Jan Vansina. Taken on its own, the EIC was a positive influence on the black population in the Congo because of its campaigns against slavery, endemic tribal warfare, cannibalism, and polygamous rape and torture. Infrastructure and trade brought life-saving income. Population remained unchanged only because of the persistence of endemic disease and slavery. According to Romaniuk, venereal disease alone can explain the depression of population growth after 1900 when the EIC had finally brought a modicum of peace and prosperity to the region.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild insists on calling the EIC an example of “colonialism”, stretching the term beyond its meaning. European colonies were governed by and accountable to the institutions of a liberal state at home. That was the fundamental structural fact of a European colony, meaning the characteristic that explains its behavior. This fundamental fact was absent from the EIC. This explains its evolution and eventual takeover by Belgium. The EIC was a second-best solution to the absence of colonialism. Hochschild will have none of it because his intention all along was to use his tale as an indictment of European colonialism (“A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa”, as the subtitle put it). A fevered ideological agenda does not collapse a valid conceptual distinction.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Comparing the EIC to the Nazis is grotesque. Hochschild has nothing to say about this odious rhetorical maneuver, an insult not just to Jews but to the Congolese who fought and remained loyal to the memory of the EIC. Referring to my essay as “polemical” in defense of a book that makes regular references to Auschwitz is rich indeed.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild’s sweet reason in his letter on the complex question of European colonialism appears to have abandoned him while writing the book (or is newfound). “Communism, Fascism, and European colonialism each asserted the right to totally control its subjects’ lives,” he wrote grandly in the book. How is it possible that he now writes about the “subtle and complex business” of assessing colonialism?”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I am glad that Hochschild admits that the photographs in his book are fake. Still, to his point, I do not doubt that the traditional African hippo whip was used by EIC officials. Nor do I doubt that chains were used to confine prisoners in the EIC when prisons were not available. Nor do I doubt that the Arab tradition of chopping off the hands of fallen enemies persisted well into the EIC era, even among natives employed by the government or concession companies. So what? If Hochschild’s argument is that the area should have been colonized from the start (as his hero Edmund Morel argued), I would agree. If his argument is that the EIC should have been financed by liquor imports or village hut taxes rather than the 40 hours per month labor requirement for those who could not pay individual taxes, I will side with the King.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I wish that Hochschild would come clean on the litany of other errors I catalogue in my essay: Conrad could not have seen any of the alleged rubber atrocities; Léopold did not burn his archives, and nothing was “locked away from outside view”; Kurtz’s head-strewn compound was not based on a Belgian official but on African warlords; Léon Fiévez’s African troops killed 100 warriors of local tribal chiefs who had reneged on a promise to supply food, not 100 hapless villagers who failed to turn in rubber; the trade surplus of the EIC reflected payments that went for infrastructure, administration, and security, not a slave economy.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“As I wrote, despite the malicious craft practiced by Hochschild and others, I am glad that an extensive documentary record of the EIC and of European colonies more generally survives, not that I expect any honest use of them in our current moral panic. Hochschild was merely an early entry into a genre that has since blossomed into an industry of scholars who “interrogate” the archives to cough up evidence of the evils of the West. There is of course no such documentary record of the horrific conditions the Europeans replaced, and in any case most Western readers would not buy a book on endemic venereal disease in Africa or stool disputes among the Kuba. A salacious tale on the Belgian king and his mistresses torturing black people to pay for their follies? Now you’re talking!”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I also do not begrudge Hochschild his millions, although, unlike him, I have untold praise for the capitalist system that produced them (he recently compared Amazon warehouses to slave plantations and in a 2016 book he lamented the failure of a socialist revolution in Spain). But to write history requires an immersion in the context, constraints, and worldviews of those involved.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild just can’t seem to get over the fact that life was very, very different long ago. I, for one, am less ready to leap to condemnation for the petty abuses of the EIC, especially against people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. If he wants to join the Congo Reform Movement, so be it. It has been going on for over 100 years and is not likely to stop. When I call this white guilt porn, I do not intend it as polemic, but merely description.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Much is at stake. In giving Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008, the American Historical Association claimed that King Leopold’s Ghost “broke through one of the most impenetrable silences of history” by revealing the “mass death” and “rampant atrocities” in the EIC. Be reminded that the AHA is the representative of professional historians in the United States, not the editorial board of Dissent magazine. The AHA went on to call the book “a key text in the historiography of colonial Africa for college and graduate students.” The AHA and Hochschild are also agreed on the really excellent quality of the 1619 Project, which Hochschild calls (micro-aggression notwithstanding) “masterful.” He has described the writing of history as uncovering “shame.” The AHA, warming to the idea, praised Hochschild’s “humanist agenda” with its mission “to combat inhumanity.” History should have no agenda other than uncovering the truth. It should combat only ignorance about the past. If this is the state of public history in the West, we are in a very bad place indeed.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Pendant les 25 dernières années, l’idée du Congo a été étroitement liée dans l’imaginaire occidental au livre de 1998 intitulé “Le fantôme du roi Léopold” de l’écrivain américain Adam Hochschild. Ce livre est largement étudié dans les lycées et les universités, et il figure régulièrement en tête des listes des meilleures ventes en matière d’histoire coloniale, africaine et occidentale. Hochschild est devenu une sorte de roi du Congo, ou du moins de son histoire. Le livre est systématiquement cité par les universitaires réputés dans leurs notes de bas de page chaque fois qu’ils veulent affirmer qu’il est “bien connu” et “indiscutable” que des hommes sinistres en Europe ont semé le chaos en Afrique il y a plus d’un siècle. Toute discussion sur le Congo, ou sur le colonialisme européen en général, commence invariablement par la question : “Avez-vous lu Le fantôme du roi Léopold ?”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Certaines personnes pourraient considérer “Le canular du roi Hochschild”, comme nous pourrions l’appeler, comme une fable valorisante pour les Africains modernes aux dépens de l’homme blanc. Mais ses effets débilitants sur l’Afrique, et sur le Congo en particulier, en font le contraire. C’est un coup de chicotte (fouet en forme de lanière de cuir) insensible et négligent sur le dos de tous les Africains noirs, un porno narcissique de la culpabilité pour les libéraux blancs au détriment de l’Africain. L’avocat congolais Marcel Yabili l’appelle “la plus grande falsification de l’histoire moderne”, un compliment en quelque sorte, je suppose.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.