For the first two-thirds of this book, I felt immensely guilty that I didn\u2019t feel more compelled by the story.\u00a0 The recounting of the colonization of the Belgian Congo shouldn\u2019t be that hard to ache over.\u00a0 Maybe it was the mass scale\u2014I just couldn\u2019t get my head around it?\u00a0 Maybe it was that the picture of a greedy European king willing to exploit Africans for his own personal economic gain (and be just an all-around dick otherwise\u2014sleeping with teenagers, disinheriting his daughters, abusing his wife) wasn\u2019t all that surprising?\u00a0<\/p>\n
What was more interesting was the part of the book after King Leopold dies.\u00a0 First of all, the epilogues for the \u201cgood guys\u201d are so poignant.\u00a0 They remind us that there\u2019s nothing particularly superhuman about being heroic\u2014it\u2019s just flawed human beings like the rest of us deciding to choose the harder path, simply because it\u2019s the right thing to do.\u00a0 Then there are the moral questions Hochschild poses\u2014the crux of every human rights issue ever\u2014do we aim for what we know is right, or do we do what\u2019s possible given the political context of the times?\u00a0 And why do some conflicts grab our attention while other mass violations slip under the headlines?<\/p>\n
I did a lot of thinking about this last question just after the Haiti earthquake.\u00a0 I was more overwhelmed by that disaster than I\u2019ve ever been by a foreign crisis in my lifetime.\u00a0 I kept wondering why that was.\u00a0 I have no natural affinity for Haiti.\u00a0 I\u2019m not Creole.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never been there.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have any close friends who are Haitian.\u00a0 Maybe it was the scale of destruction?\u00a0 Maybe, but I certainly wasn\u2019t this affected by, say, the tsunami in 2004.\u00a0 Why is it that we focus our attention on some crises and not others?\u00a0 Why is a Haitian, in my mind, more worthy of my sympathy and attention than a North Korean or a Darfurian?\u00a0 I still haven\u2019t come up with a good answer for this.<\/p>\n
The expediency vs. what\u2019s right conundrum was maybe the lasting impression from the book.\u00a0 In the Congo context, E.D. Morel, the most vociferous of the anti-Leopold organizers, was often trying to balance his own deeply-held belief that African ownership of African land was the ultimate goal with the reality that he could lose everything else if he pushed too hard on that issue:<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite some doubts raised in his private correspondence, Morel decided to publicly claim victory.\u00a0 \u2018I do not wish to paint the present in roseate hues.\u00a0 The wounds of the Congo will take generations to heal.\u00a0 But\u2026the atrocities have disappeared\u2026 The revenues are no longer supplied by forced or slave labour.\u00a0 The rubber tax is gone.\u00a0 The native is free to gather the produce of his soil\u2026 A responsible Government has replaced an irresponsible despotism.\u2019\u00a0 The one major goal not achieved, he acknowledged, was African ownership of land.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
History, naturally, has proven Morel right:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Morel\u2019s writing of the period, we can begin to see signs of how his involvement with the Congo had changed and deepened him.\u00a0 In 1909, decades ahead of his time and in stark contrast to the self-congratulatory mood around him, he wrote a trenchant warning of the \u2018far-reaching consequences over the wider destiny, not only of South Africa, but of all Negro Africa\u201d that would flow from the fact that Britain had set up the new, independent Union of South Africa with an all-white legislature.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Of course, it was beyond the realm of human imagination at the time to consider putting Africans in charge of their own government.\u00a0 If Morel had taken up the cause of land ownership and self-governance instead of fighting against the image of an evil king committing atrocious acts, would the Congolese ever have been freed?\u00a0 Or could he have brought people around and laid the groundwork for a healthy African continent in the 20th<\/sup> century?<\/p>\n
This question reminds me of another book I read recently, a masterpiece (really, a life changing book) called Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the era of reconstruction and Jim Crow in the South, and argues that the glaring human rights violation of American slavery was in some ways less oppressive than the sheer terror inflicted upon African-Americans in the hundred-plus years that followed it.\u00a0 The lack of political will to follow through on protecting the rights of freed slaves\u2014by the very people who had been committed to ending slavery\u2014paved the way for levels of economic, psychological, and physical devastation that are still being worked out.<\/p>\n
By nature, I\u2019m pretty temperate, and I tend to look for workable solutions to problems rather than holding fast to all-or-nothing positions.\u00a0 Sometimes that\u2019s the right path, but that position is much easier to take when it\u2019s not my rights being violated.\u00a0 As MLK said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: \u201cwhen you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of \u2018nobodiness\u2019 then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.\u00a0 There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.\u00a0 I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first two-thirds of this book, I felt immensely guilty that I didn\u2019t feel more compelled by the story.\u00a0 The recounting of the colonization of the Belgian Congo shouldn\u2019t be that hard to ache over.\u00a0 Maybe it was the mass scale\u2014I just couldn\u2019t get my head around it?\u00a0 Maybe it was that the picture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2061,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2061"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}