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

Book by Adam Hochschild · 4 quotes · Congo, Africa, African Art

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

“Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries. It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism. The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.”

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“France and Germany, long jealous of the king's lucrative rubber profits, had their eye on pieces of Congo territory. President Roosevelt hinted that he was willing to join Britain in convening an international conference to discuss the Congo’s fate. Three times the British and American ministers in Brussels went, together, to see the Belgian minister of foreign affairs and press for Belgian annexation. But sharply limited as Leopold II’s powers were in Belgium itself, the worried Belgian government had no legal authority over him in his role as ruler of the Congo. In the end, the king held the key cards, and he knew it.”

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Book:King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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“Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso.”

African Art
Book:King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
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“High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststrucuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of killing Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and place.”

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