Quotes from Adam Hochschild

I'm after a snake and please God I'll scotch it.

I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.

For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

It was several decades later that I encountered that footnote, and with it my own ignorance of the Congo's early history. Then it occurred to me that, like millions of other people, I had read something about that time and place after all: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. However, with my college lecture notes on the novel filled with scribbles about Freudian overtones, mythic echoes, and inward vision, I had mentally filed away the book under fiction, not fact.

The exclusive focus of the reform movement on Leopold's Congo seems even more illogical if you reckon mass murder by the percentage of the population killed. By these standards, the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

At first, Africans apparently saw the white sailors not as men but as vumbi—ancestral ghosts—since the Kongo people believed that a person's skin changed to the color of chalk when he passed into the land of the dead.

Around the time the Germans were slaughtering Hereros, the world also was largely ignoring America's brutal counterguerrilla war in the Philippines, in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed some 20,000 rebels, and saw an estimated 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease.

Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.

In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of figures from one or more of four closely connected sources: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting birth rate. In the worst period in the Congo, the long rubber boom, it came in abundance from all four:

Power is tempting, and in a sense no power is greater than the ability to take someone's life.

The standard of emancipation is now unfurled . . . I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch: And I will be heard, Posterity will bear testimony that I was right.

In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the populations of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In

For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth?

For several years now, Kipling had been sprinkling his prose and poetry with anti-German barbs. He believed this war would do "untold good" for his beloved British tommies, preparing them for the inevitable clash with Germany. The Boer War, said a character in a story he wrote at the time, was "a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And so the full history of Leopold's rule in the Congo and of the movement that opposed it dropped out of Europe's memory, perhaps even more swiftly and completely than did the other mass killings that took place in the colonization of Africa.

Its monarch, the ManiKongo, was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders. Like his European counterparts, he

We are tired of living under this tyranny. We cannot endure that our women and children are taken away And dealt with by the white savages. We shall make war. . . . We know that we shall die, but we want to die. We want to die.

Earp forced Kowalsky into a back room, pulled out a revolver, and told the lawyer to get ready to meet his maker. Kowalsky's jowly face dropped onto his chest and he dozed off. Earp stormed from the room, saying, "What can you do with a man who goes to sleep just when you're going to kill him!

once awakened, a sense of justice is something not easily contained. It often crosses the boundaries of race, class, and gender.

There was nothing inherently wrong with colonialism, he felt, if its administration was fair and just. He

Dans cet océan blanc, où la vie Se recueille; et bientôt l'horizon Se couvrira de fleurs ... Chère maison amie Qui nous protège tous de la froide saison!

Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects. . . . They sell them . . . after having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night. . . . As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.

it is easy to see how Stanley's painful poorhouse childhood may have fostered his cruel streak and the drive to place his mark on the world. The origin of the fiery passion for justice that fueled Morel is less evident. He

With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.