The Belgian intervention in the Congo is one of the great forgotten crimes of the 20th century. As many as ten million Congolese people may have died in slavery under
King Leopold. Adam Hochschild, the author of this book, has been fascinated and horrified by Western intervention in the Congo for most of his adult life. When he was in the Congo in 1961, he overheard a CIA agent boasting about the recent assassination of
Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister. Hochschild realized that the Western powers had been interfering in the Congo for hundreds of years. Furthermore, he realized that his main source of information about Congolese history was
Joseph Conrad’s fictional novella,
Heart of Darkness. Frustrated, Hochschild resolved to learn the truth about the Congo.