King Leopold's Ghost was, indeed, a huge wake up call. The majority of the novel covered everything but nothing, and it read more like a text book then an actual novel. But the context and the detail covering the suffering of the African people made me want to cry. King Leopold was a lying, power-driven, daranged and evil white man who used his cuning ways and authority to fool the rest of the world. I could not get into the story; I felt some what ashamed that I, as well as all of my classmates, wer completely oblivious to the extent of the poor Africans massacre. There was one Character that I enjoyed reading up on, George Washington Williams. I thought he was a bit of a jerk, but I respected his passages reagarding the Congo and Leopold's order there. I was angry his pamplet discussing Leopold's lies and death didn't get the response it deserved.
There is a part in Chapter nineteen that pretty much sums up the whole story of the Congo for me:
"And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we clelebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history."
3 comments:
I loved Williams too, I have heard of him before but after reading this book I realized that his history books are something I should read since they where researched of the 1st person.
I really liked your quote at the end the blog I thought it was a very powerful statment about society.
I found the juxtaposition between the two prodigious hustlers Williams and Leopold to be interesting, too. I particularly liked the part in Williams' bio where in later years he would pronounce "Howard" University dangerously close to "Harvard" University. Nice trick!
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