Arch-Appropriator

Dan Jacobson

  • King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Central Africa by Adam Hochschild
    Macmillan, 366 pp, £22.50, April 1999, ISBN 0 333 66126 5

Leopold II is best known as the founder and owner of the ill-famed Congo Free State. To most English-speaking readers his name evokes ‘Red Rubber’ and a world of plunder and atrocity: the Congo Reform Association which campaigned against his ruthless exploitation of the Free State has left behind it a notion of an aged, snow-bearded Satan who used black slavery to get money, and money to buy the favours of young girls.

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