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King Leopold’s Ghost was authored by Adam Hochschild in 1998. It is the alarming tale of one man’s desire to acquire a colony and the immense devastation caused due to his misrule. Seeming a philanthropist and one of great humanitarian effort, King Leopold managed to overtake the Congo and decrease its population by ten million in a very short period of time. Finally, some men, such as E.D. Morel, Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, and William Sheppard stood up to reveal the atrocities that were being committed in Africa and consequently started one of the first civil rights movements in history. “This is the story of that movement, of the savage crime that was its target, of the long period of exploration and conquest that preceded it, and of the way the world has forgotten one of the great mass killings in recent history (pg 2).” So starts the point of this entire work. Hochschild’s mission is to present us with the slaughter and mayhem which occurred in the Congo and to help us to understand the evils that can emerge when someone uses his or her power to oppress and kill.
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