King Leopold's Ghost Book Report

The author of King Leopold’s Ghost is Adam Hochfeld. In the book he describes being disappointed by the lack of interest by publishers to release his book. This was caused by the apparent lack of interest for African history among americans. This was until Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, published it because (according to Hochfield) they had “more faith in reader’s ability to see connections between Leopold’s Congo and today” (Hochfield,309). He wrote his book in hopes to capture the attention of more people on Leopold’s atrocities. This book has been a great success and has shown millions of people around the world a lesson that they would not forget. His viewpoint in the book is quite obvious. He opposes the holocaust brought upon the Congo, as almost everybody who has heard of it in the present world has. His book is nonfiction. He describes in …show more content…
In Leopold’s Congo, the Congolese workers were primarily Black, while the Force Publique usually had a White demographic. This differentiation of class based race is what makes these two themes are what makes the Unites States and Leopold’s Congo similar at the time. This separation of races is what caused, in both situations, a stall in the growth of economic wealth of the African/African American people. One thing that sets apart Leopold’s Congo from the USA in terms of slavery/extreme work labor is how it was approached after it was abolished. When the Belgian government took back the Congo from Leopold, it began an economic cleanup. Most Europeans were against the rubber quotas and chicotte punishments, and so a new congo was formed over Leopold’s. On the other hand in the United States, it had a civil war to just get rid of slavery(the 13th amendment), and then took nearly a century for segregation to get officially abolished with the civil rights act of