King Leopold’s Ghost and Apocalypse Now.

I just read Adam Hochchild’s King Leopolds Ghost. It deals with the exploitation of the DRC (then the Congo Free State) by King Leopold II of Belgium at the end of the 19th century. Not only gives the book an impassionate account of the attrocities commited by the Europeans in order to obtain ivory and rubber, but also of people like George Washington Williams, William Henry Sheppard and especially Edmund Dene Morel who make the world aware of these attrocities.

King Leopold’s Ghost

There were several things that caught my attention; one of them was how similar the situation is now compared to then. Two examples:

First, the Belgians made use of forced labor to obtain ivory and, especially, rubber. The book discusses in much detail how women were kidnapped so that the men had to collect rubber, and the harse punishments if not enough rubber was collected (villages were burned, right hands chopped off, women raped, etc). It shocked me how similar this is to messages we receive today from Voix des Kivus where we consistenty receive messages indicating how villagers are forced to carry loads for FARDC or FDLR troops into the forests. Other reports confirm this as well. In a recent report from Global Witness regarding mining in the DRC they note how “Local human rights organisations have reported cases where civilians have been arrested and tortured for not complying with soldiers’ orders to work for them, for not satisfying their military “bosses”, or for denouncing extortion, theft of minerals and other abuses by themilitary.’ (p. 39)”

Second, Edmund Morel – who a.o. led the campaign against slavery in the Congo Free State – found out about the attrocities while working for Elder Dempster (a Liverpool shipping firm) in Antwerpen. He noticed that ships leaving Belgium for the Congo carried only guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, but no commercial goods, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products (ivory and rubber). I hope you all saw the movie “Darwin’s Nightmare”...

Apocalypse Now

The book mentioned that the movie Apocalypse Now - a movie about the Vietnam War – is based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. So, yesterday evening I watched the movie; it could not have been more obvious:

Apocalypse is set in a beautiful country, but where conflict is rife (like in the DRC). The US soldier takes a boat up the Nung river [the Congo] to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz of Special Forces [yes, they even kept the same name] who went insane [Conrad’s Kurtz also went insane and is also lording over a small tribe as a god]. At minutes 1:15 and 2:20 we see stakes with severed heads on it [the same is what Marlow sees when looking at Conrad’s Kurtz's house via his binoculars]. To make things even more obvious, when Colonel Kurtz dies he screams “The horror! The horror!” and shortly after that we see that he wrote in his book "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them All". In Heart of Darkness Kurtz screams the same thing when dying and had written down "Exterminate the brutes!".

The question now is why? Is Francis Ford Coppola indicating that the US regime was like the one of Leopold II? Does he want to show us the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness"? Or did simply think (correctly) that using Heart of Darkness would bring in lots of money? It is a great movie.