King Leopold's Ghost

Hochschild asserts that Edmund Morel, the “David” to Leopold’s “Goliath,” succeeded where others failed because of his “access to the facts and figures from the Congo administration in Europe” (185) and his “rare skill at publicizing his message” (185). At first, he attempted to convince his employers to act on his discovery; in response, they attempted to buy him out and made him feel unwelcome at work. In 1901, at age twenty-eight, however, he quit his job and, after a couple of years as a newspaper journalist, started the West African Mail, “a forum where no one could censor him” (186).

Not only did Morel edit the West African Mail, he also wrote “three full books and portions of two others, hundreds of articles for almost all the major British newspapers, plus many written in French for papers in France and Belgium, hundreds of letters to the editor, and several dozen pamphlets” (187). Hochschild describes his writing as “controlled fury” (187) combined with “meticulous accuracy” (187), with “[e]very detail in his books [coming] from careful research, the evidence amassed as painstakingly as in a lawyer’s brief” (188). Morel’s work is also notable for its condemnation of the entire state of Leopold’s Congo, which was “deliberately and systematically founded on slave labor” (188_, and therefore “a case apart” (188).