Bruce Gilley Quotes

“So you can say: That man was a collaborator. But I think he is representative of the indigenous reaction to the British. Now everyone who expresses the anti-colonial sentiment is counted as the authentic voice of conscience. Everyone who speaks out in favour of colonialism, was practicing self-censorship, was insincere, etcetera. That is far too simple for me.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Colonialism spread rapidly, with relatively little force from the colonial powers and also with relatively few Westerners in the colonies. That is a sign that the colonial regimes enjoyed legitimacy in the eyes of the indigenous population. See also the large numbers of locals who worked for tax offices, police, and the administration.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Then you can say: those people had a bad conscience. But perhaps those people, in that time and context, really believed this to be the best choice for their country. Regardless of its limitations the colonial world offered more opportunities and protection than indigenous governance would have done. And the post-colonial experience has taught us that those people were right!”
― Bruce Gilley

“Colonialism isn’t just railroads. I do not need those railroads in order to defend colonialism. It is also legitimate governance, opportunities, protection, self-development, emancipation. And dignity. Colonialism gave people dignity, for the first time in their life. Regardless of who you are, which tribe you belonged to, or whether you are friends with The Big Man.”
― Bruce Gilley

“People had status as subjects of the colonial empire. Maybe not yet as citizens, with voting-rights, but certainly as subjects who were treated as equals by the institutions and the law. And that was an improvement. That is why the colonial justice system was constipated: people could suddenly go to the judge over a piece of land.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Yes, many bad things happened under colonialism. But why would you only emphasize that? Then you assume that without colonialism far fewer people would have suffered, and that is a figment of the imagination.”
― Bruce Gilley

“In Asia the people who argued for continuity with the colonial institutions became the leaders. In Africa they were imprisoned.”
― Bruce Gilley

“For the past 25 years, the idea of the Congo has been closely linked in the Western imagination to the 1998 book King Leopold’s Ghost by the American journalist Adam Hochschild. The book is widely assigned in high schools and colleges, and it regularly tops best-seller lists in colonial, African, and Western history. Hochschild has become a sort of king of the Congo, or at least of its history. The book is reflexively cited by reputable scholars in their footnotes any time they wish to assert that it is “well known” and “beyond doubt” that sinister men in Europe wrought havoc in Africa over a century ago. Any discussion of the Congo, or of European colonialism more generally, invariably begins with the question: “Have you read King Leopold’s Ghost?” I have read it. And I can declare that it is a vast hoax, full of distortions and errors both numerous and grave. Some people might view “King Hochschild’s Hoax,” as we might call it, as an empowering fable for modern Africans at the expense of the white man.”
― Bruce Gilley

“Congo reformers like Morel, much to the annoyance of Hochschild, advocated either German or British colonization of the area (Congo). Morel’s view, according to Hochschild, speaking ex cathedra from the hallowed seat of modern California, “seems surprising to us today” and was among his “faults” and “political limitations.” Quite the opposite. The moment the Belgians colonized the Congo in 1908, a miraculous improvement was noted on all fronts. Seeking to debunk colonialism, Hochschild’s book demonstrates the opposite. This is the first and biggest lie at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Prof. Gilley declares that my “central lie,” my “first and biggest deceit,” is to equate the État independant du Congo, the regime King Leopold II of Belgium controlled for 23 years, with colonialism.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“On another point: King Leopold’s Ghost reproduces some of the photographs of Congo atrocities that fueled the worldwide protests against Leopold’s rule during the first decade of the twentieth century. These “fake photos,” Gilley declares, were “staged” by the photographer. Yes, some images appear posed—something true of most photos everywhere in an era when cameras were bulky contraptions on tripods whose subjects had to remain still for a few seconds.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Bruce Gilley is right, that I was misleading in respect to one quotation I cited from another official, Charles Lemaire. I am sorry about that and it should be corrected. Lemaire was a more complicated case. His early diaries, which I quote elsewhere in the book, unroll a lengthy list of villages he ordered burned to the ground and a triumphant roster of death tolls: “20 natives killed” here, “around 15 blacks killed” there, and many more such boasts. But later in life, to his credit, Lemaire had deep regrets, and in fairness to him I should have referred to them.”
― Adam Hochschild, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Adam Hochschild has enjoyed a long run of success with King Leopold’s Ghost, his distortionary 1998 tale about the État Indépendant du Congo (EIC). So long, in fact, that he appears unable to come clean about its many fabrications. It is not just the doctoring of the quotation that anchors the story of “chopped hands for red rubber” (which I am grateful he has admitted), but the vast skein of distortion in which that little dodge is embedded.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Most centrally, how did approximately 10,000 people killed in skirmishes between the EIC police and natives in a small portion of the territory over a 20-year period mushroom into 10 million dead, “mass murder on a vast scale” and “a forgotten Holocaust”? Rather than climb down from this ludicrous claim, which the doyen of Congo studies, Jean Stengers, called “absurd” and “polemical,” Hochschild repeats it. His source? The same Jan Vansina whose work, I noted, was based on an erroneous reading of an earlier report (a Harvard study that rejected the report of the Permanent Committee for the Protection of the Natives of 1919 that Hochschild cites in his letter) and whose own work was based on nothing more than “oral traditions.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild is correct that the demographer Léon de St. Moulin assayed the 50 percent decline possibility (in 1987 and 1990 works). But Hochschild fails to mention that Moulin, like the later Vansina, believed that the EIC and rubber had nothing to do with it. The causes for Moulin were, in order, sleeping sickness, smallpox, Spanish flu, and venereal diseases. Moulin did not even mention the EIC or rubber in his 1990 chapter. Like the later Vansina, he recognized that these were footnotes in the demographic history of the Congo.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“As for the claims by the Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem ( “13 million killed” in 1998, then “5 to 10 million killed” in 2008), they are hard to keep track of. Initially, the starting year for his assertions was 1880 (five years before the EIC was founded and ten years before any rubber harvesting) while the latter estimate extended the end year to 1930 (22 years after the EIC). A second edition of the latter estimate, without explanation, moved up the starting date to 1885. Ndaywel cites no data or methods. All three editions of his book merely cite Moulin. It is notable that in a lengthy essay on the EIC published in L’Histoire in 2020, Ndaywel no longer makes any specific population claims, asserting only that the effects of the EIC were “worse than grim” ( “plus que macabres” ). In the end, Ndaywel is not credible. His works are published by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium because he is black. This helps them to “decolonize Eurocentric narratives,” which means using blacks as shadow puppets to shield their radical accounts from criticism.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“By contrast, dozens of serious demographers and statisticians—not just the Jean-Paul Sanderson I mention—have concluded the overall population rose slightly or was unchanged at around 8 to 10 million from 1885 to 1908. Others include Bruce Fetter, Guy Vanthemsche, Jean-Luc Vellut, Pierre-Luc Plasman, Anatole Romaniuk, and, as mentioned, the later Jan Vansina. Taken on its own, the EIC was a positive influence on the black population in the Congo because of its campaigns against slavery, endemic tribal warfare, cannibalism, and polygamous rape and torture. Infrastructure and trade brought life-saving income. Population remained unchanged only because of the persistence of endemic disease and slavery. According to Romaniuk, venereal disease alone can explain the depression of population growth after 1900 when the EIC had finally brought a modicum of peace and prosperity to the region.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild insists on calling the EIC an example of “colonialism”, stretching the term beyond its meaning. European colonies were governed by and accountable to the institutions of a liberal state at home. That was the fundamental structural fact of a European colony, meaning the characteristic that explains its behavior. This fundamental fact was absent from the EIC. This explains its evolution and eventual takeover by Belgium. The EIC was a second-best solution to the absence of colonialism. Hochschild will have none of it because his intention all along was to use his tale as an indictment of European colonialism ( “A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa”, as the subtitle put it). A fevered ideological agenda does not collapse a valid conceptual distinction.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Comparing the EIC to the Nazis is grotesque. Hochschild has nothing to say about this odious rhetorical maneuver, an insult not just to Jews but to the Congolese who fought and remained loyal to the memory of the EIC. Referring to my essay as “polemical” in defense of a book that makes regular references to Auschwitz is rich indeed.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild’s sweet reason in his letter on the complex question of European colonialism appears to have abandoned him while writing the book (or is newfound). “Communism, Fascism, and European colonialism each asserted the right to totally control its subjects’ lives,” he wrote grandly in the book. How is it possible that he now writes about the “subtle and complex business” of assessing colonialism?”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I am glad that Hochschild admits that the photographs in his book are fake. Still, to his point, I do not doubt that the traditional African hippo whip was used by EIC officials. Nor do I doubt that chains were used to confine prisoners in the EIC when prisons were not available. Nor do I doubt that the Arab tradition of chopping off the hands of fallen enemies persisted well into the EIC era, even among natives employed by the government or concession companies. So what? If Hochschild’s argument is that the area should have been colonized from the start (as his hero Edmund Morel argued), I would agree. If his argument is that the EIC should have been financed by liquor imports or village hut taxes rather than the 40 hours per month labor requirement for those who could not pay individual taxes, I will side with the King.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I wish that Hochschild would come clean on the litany of other errors I catalogue in my essay: Conrad could not have seen any of the alleged rubber atrocities; Léopold did not burn his archives, and nothing was “locked away from outside view”; Kurtz’s head-strewn compound was not based on a Belgian official but on African warlords; Léon Fiévez’s African troops killed 100 warriors of local tribal chiefs who had reneged on a promise to supply food, not 100 hapless villagers who failed to turn in rubber; the trade surplus of the EIC reflected payments that went for infrastructure, administration, and security, not a slave economy.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“As I wrote, despite the malicious craft practiced by Hochschild and others, I am glad that an extensive documentary record of the EIC and of European colonies more generally survives, not that I expect any honest use of them in our current moral panic. Hochschild was merely an early entry into a genre that has since blossomed into an industry of scholars who “interrogate” the archives to cough up evidence of the evils of the West. There is of course no such documentary record of the horrific conditions the Europeans replaced, and in any case most Western readers would not buy a book on endemic venereal disease in Africa or stool disputes among the Kuba. A salacious tale on the Belgian king and his mistresses torturing black people to pay for their follies? Now you’re talking!”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“I also do not begrudge Hochschild his millions, although, unlike him, I have untold praise for the capitalist system that produced them (he recently compared Amazon warehouses to slave plantations and in a 2016 book he lamented the failure of a socialist revolution in Spain). But to write history requires an immersion in the context, constraints, and worldviews of those involved.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Hochschild just can’t seem to get over the fact that life was very, very different long ago. I, for one, am less ready to leap to condemnation for the petty abuses of the EIC, especially against people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. If he wants to join the Congo Reform Movement, so be it. It has been going on for over 100 years and is not likely to stop. When I call this white guilt porn, I do not intend it as polemic, but merely description.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Much is at stake. In giving Hochschild its Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2008, the American Historical Association claimed that King Leopold’s Ghost “broke through one of the most impenetrable silences of history” by revealing the “mass death” and “rampant atrocities” in the EIC. Be reminded that the AHA is the representative of professional historians in the United States, not the editorial board of Dissent magazine. The AHA went on to call the book “a key text in the historiography of colonial Africa for college and graduate students.” The AHA and Hochschild are also agreed on the really excellent quality of the 1619 Project, which Hochschild calls (micro-aggression notwithstanding) “masterful.” He has described the writing of history as uncovering “shame.” The AHA, warming to the idea, praised Hochschild’s “humanist agenda” with its mission “to combat inhumanity.” History should have no agenda other than uncovering the truth. It should combat only ignorance about the past. If this is the state of public history in the West, we are in a very bad place indeed.”
― Bruce Gilley, The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind

“Pendant les 25 dernières années, l’idée du Congo a été étroitement liée dans l’imaginaire occidental au livre de 1998 intitulé “Le fantôme du roi Léopold” de l’écrivain américain Adam Hochschild. Ce livre est largement étudié dans les lycées et les universités, et il figure régulièrement en tête des listes des meilleures ventes en matière d’histoire coloniale, africaine et occidentale. Hochschild est devenu une sorte de roi du Congo, ou du moins de son histoire. Le livre est systématiquement cité par les universitaires réputés dans leurs notes de bas de page chaque fois qu’ils veulent affirmer qu’il est “bien connu” et “indiscutable” que des hommes sinistres en Europe ont semé le chaos en Afrique il y a plus d’un siècle. Toute discussion sur le Congo, ou sur le colonialisme européen en général, commence invariablement par la question: “Avez-vous lu Le fantôme du roi Léopold?”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.

“Certaines personnes pourraient considérer “Le canular du roi Hochschild”, comme nous pourrions l’appeler, comme une fable valorisante pour les Africains modernes aux dépens de l’homme blanc. Mais ses effets débilitants sur l’Afrique, et sur le Congo en particulier, en font le contraire. C’est un coup de chicotte (fouet en forme de lanière de cuir) insensible et négligent sur le dos de tous les Africains noirs, un porno narcissique de la culpabilité pour les libéraux blancs au détriment de l’Africain. L’avocat congolais Marcel Yabili l’appelle “la plus grande falsification de l’histoire moderne”, un compliment en quelque sorte, je suppose.”
― Bruce Gilley, King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.