A heart of darkness

King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
Papermac £12, pp366
Buy it at BOL

Henry Morton Stanley has gone down in popular history as the nineteenth-century adventurer who mapped Central Africa, meeting a fellow explorer with that classic line: 'Dr Livingstone, I presume.' But one should presume nothing about Stanley. This Welshman who claimed to be an American was addicted to the cult of his own personality, and to the conquest of the people he claimed to be saving from the 'heart of darkness'.

This astonishing book, winner of the 1999 Duff Cooper prize, reveals that it was Stanley who began a systematic subjugation of the tribes of the Congo basin which was to lead to the deaths of between five and eight million people, a mass killing that is all but forgotten.

In the 1870s, 80 per cent of Africa was still under indigenous rulers and ripe for conquest or, as King Leopold II of Belgium preferred to call it, protection. He paid the explorer the equivalent of £250,000 a year to spend five years in the Congo, claiming that 'magnificent cake' for Belgium, buying up vast chunks of land and claiming the right to exploit the people.

Stanley left in 1884, but by 1897 a movement had been established to expose the cruelties of Belgian colonists to the world. Edmund Dene Morel, a British shipping company employee, realised that slavery was flourishing in the Congo and set about forming the first great human rights organisation of the twentieth century.

Adam Hochschild writes a compelling narrative in lucid prose, one that chronicles a conveniently forgotten atrocity that stains the pages of world history.