When I started this book, George Floyd was alive. His name was known only to his loved ones, friends and community. Now his daughter is without her Daddy, and we know his name.
Imagine a mountain of corpses, George's body is flung somewhere near the top of this pile. I say near the top since bodies have been added since his murder. Hochschild's points to the nameless dead, beneath poor George's black body.
Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost needs to be widely read. While it deals with the particular horrors of King Leopold’s reign of terror in the Congo, it makes clear that the butchery characteristic of King Leopold’s reign were features of all European colonies.
I first moved from Ireland to England in 1995. Quickly making English friends, one of the striking observations was how these otherwise well informed and articulate individuals knew next to nothing about Ireland, it’s history and how that history informed it’s current politics. The information was there, I could see it on the news and read it in the papers, but the Great British Forgetting meant that Ireland was somehow absent. In the same way, much evidence of Europe's colonial past exists, yet it remains unseen thanks to our collective refusal to look at it. It is Europe's Great Forgetting. Our forgetfulness has been helped by institutions of the state, which burned the evidence and murdered dissenting voices.
We are versed in the dangers of communist and fascist totalitarianism. Why the silence on the utter totalitarianism of colonial Africa? Today Googling totalitarianism brings back results on Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, but not a word on Leopold and the ten million who died under his boot.
Hochschild names Conrad's Heart of Darkness as the novel of the Congo. Yet, here too, the great forgetting is at play. Hochschild considers the university professors wringing their hands and long wondering what could Conrad have meant by severed human heads on posts. Sadly Heart of Darkness is not allegory, it is realism. Mr Kurtz not some figurative device but a literal man, a man with a white face whose house is surrounded by the heads of his black victims and who made the gallows a feature for his garden.
The image is from the American Museum of Natural History. You'll notice that this piece of art is not in an Art Gallery, it's in a Museum of Natural History. In 1904 Leopold gave three thousand African artefacts to the American Museum of Natural History. This art was looted, and the swag of this robbery continues to be in this American museum. You can buy it. Who gives this museum the right to sell it? You'll notice that the image contains a copyright watermark. Who owns these images? What gives this company the right to claim ownership of this image? This is looting.
The River Congo still runs red as mining robs them of their lives and our countries are still historically illiterate. As I write this, fascist protesters riot on the streets of London, chanting ‘We're proud to be racists’, marching on the pretense of defending a statue of Winton Churchill, while one was photographed pissing on a memorial to a murdered police officer. Could anything be more emblematic of the far-right and it’s intense ignorance?
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