King Leopold's Ghost

The beginning of Chapter 18 is devoted to an account of all the ways that Leopold hid his money and assets from the his daughters and the Belgian people, culminating in the question of exactly how much money Leopold made from his exploitation of the Congo. Hochschild cites the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, who estimates that 220 million francs ($1.1 billion today) would be a “conservative” (277) figure. Hochschild ends this first section by noting that, while the Belgian government did eventually get most of Leopold’s money, there was no one “to argue that the money should have been returned to the Congolese” (277).

Hochschild then turns to the question of whether Morel’s Congo Reform Association “did […] any lasting good” (277). “For many years,” he says, “the conventional answer was yes” (277), but he goes on to assert that “the truth is more somber” (278). Leopold’s system of forced labor, which relied on violence and terror, was replaced by “a new method of forcing people to work that saw much less protest from missionaries and humanitarians: taxes” (278). The use of the chicotte remained legal, chiefs were still pressured and bribed to provide workers in chains, and workers’ families were still threatened to ensure that they did not try to leave.