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The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

Book by Bruce Gilley · 5 quotes · Bruce Gilley, King Leopold Ii, Leopold S Ghost

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The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind Quotes

“No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Prof. Gilley declares that my “central lie,” my “first and biggest deceit,” is to equate the État independant du Congo, the regime King Leopold II of Belgium controlled for 23 years, with colonialism.”

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“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.”

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