King Leopold’s Ghost Study Guide

Adam Hochschild was born and raised in New York City, and studied history and literature at Harvard University in the early 1960s. Immediately following his graduation, he worked with civil rights activists in Mississippi, and later with anti-government journalists in South Africa. In the mid-1970s, he co-founded the influential progressive magazine Mother Jones. Hochschild published his first book in 1986, a memoir called Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son. Since then, he’s published a series of successful nonfiction works on a variety of human rights subjects, including the legacy of Josef Stalin, the Boer War in South Africa, the British Empire’s sponsorship of slavery, and the Vietnam War. King Leopold’s Ghost, published in 1998, was one of his most successful books. Hochschild continues to write and lecture across the world.

Hochschild alludes on several occasions to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (first serialized in 1899, published in 1900). Conrad, who worked in the Congo as a young man, witnessed Belgian soldiers commit dozens of human rights atrocities on Congolese people. Many of these atrocities made their way into Heart of Darkness, which is about a young European man, Marlow, who travels up the Congo River to investigate the life of the mysterious Mr. Kurtz, a brutal European colonialist. Hochschild suggests that Conrad partly modeled Mr. Kurtz on a real-life colonialist named Léon Rom, who—much like Kurtz in the book—was rumored to collect the heads of his Congolese victims. It’s also worth mentioning Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), which takes place in the Congo, fifty years after the events of King Leopold’s Ghost and alludes to many of King Leopold’s human rights atrocities.