King Leopold's Colony: the Congo

This essay is based on jeanne's notes from King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Grred, Terrror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. Houghton Mfflin Company. Boston. 1998. ISBN: 0-395-75924-2.

The very first thing I want to tell you about this book is that it gives you a breath-taking sense of how silence is imposed on exploited peoples:

• First of all, the pervading climate of belief that those exploited deserve to be exploited and that the "colonizers" deserve the profit (read "plunder") from the work of the exploited.

• Then, the violentization of the "functionaries" who are in direct contact with the colonized people.

• Then the controlled marketing of the surplus produced by the plundered work product or resource.

• Then the collective denial that anything is not as it should be. "Inevitable," Gordon Fellman would say.

• Then the convenience of the history, as written by the colonizers, in which the global society can reinforce its collectivel denial: "I have not done anything wrong, and, therefore, am neither accountable nor responsible."

I don't mean for this list to be exhaustive. It comes about as overall affect to the reading of the subjection of a people. And it strikes me again, as it has in my readings of Gayatri Spivak, that we are all colonized to some extent. There was a time, when sovereignty of land was the issue. But today, with so many of the world's peoples deprived of the exorbitant wealth that conveys decision-making power, with so many of the world's peoples reduced to the selling of their labor as a commodity, even within the Genoa 8, such exploitation of labor seems to me to have many of the same effects as colonization and empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries. I understand, and will discuss later, some of Spivak's concern that "mere racism" not be included with colonialism. Even so, I fear that she underestimates the harm of exploitation within the culture, as well as abroad. To suggest that the exploited in the Genoa 8 do have "voices" is to fail to grasp the power of language to limit the imaginary. (Richard Delgado on critical race theory.)

Perhaps the focus we need is the one that Susan and I took in Oppression and Revolution, that the matter of dominance and exploitation pervades every level of social interaction, and that we must each ultimately decide on what our view of social justice really is. This site is devoted to a self-reflexive critical apprach to understanding that ultimate value, not to any particular statement or definition of what the value and definition of social justice "ought" to be.

More soon . . .

---

---