Description

In the 1880s, whilst 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. Conducting a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately reduced its population by ten-million--even while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as an excellent humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes ultimately resulted in the very first great human-rights movement of the twentieth-century, by which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost may be the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a guy as cunning, charming, and vicious as the great Shakespearean villains.