King Leopold's Ghost

Hochschild opens Chapter 15 with the “crucial question: what was the death toll in Leopold’s Congo?” (225). He notes that this is a difficult question to answer absolutely, as Leopold’s Congo was in existence for twenty-three years, but “many Congolese were already dying unnatural deaths by the start of [1885], and important elements of the king’s system of exploitation endured for many years after its official end” (225). “Furthermore,” Hochschild writes, “although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions, it was not, strictly speaking, a genocide. The Congo state was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth” (225). It was, instead, about labor, and the death toll, therefore, was considered “incidental” (226) by the Congo state. Thus, the figure Hochschild arrives at for the death toll in the Congo during Leopold’s imperial adventure is comprised of “historical detective work” (226) around “four closely connected sources: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting birth rate” (226). 

Hochschild details information about death tolls gathered from a variety of sources, including newspaper articles, missionary reports, the diaries of Congo state officials and Force Publique officers, and contemporary assessments of population drops. Finally, he cites an “official Belgian government commission in 1919” (233) that “estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold’s state, the population of the territory had ‘been reduced by half’” (233).