1st Reading of King Leopold's Ghost

      For homework in my advanced world history class, I was instructed to read the first 35 pages of the book King Leopold's Ghost. The first part I read was the introduction. It talked about the background of a man that would alter history, Edmund Dene Moral. Moral was a very common man who didn't seem like "the sort of person likely to get caught up in an idealistic cause", but when he discovered the slave trade in Africa, he "almost single-handedly" "put the subject on the world's front page for more than a decade" (Hochschild 1, 2). As the introduction goes on, the author, Adam Hochschild, admits that he himself had heard of this great genocide in Africa and yet had filed it in his mind not as fact, but as fiction. The prologue talks of a time 500 years prior when people first began to go south towards Africa. They had many reasons. Some were drawn to the supposed riches, some to the source of the nile and some to the Legend of Prester John, a king who lived in Africa and would welcome strangers into his extravagant castle. This part of the reading caught my attention because it discusses how the people first got interested in moving south and how slowly but surely their curiousity began to get the better of them. They had wandered for so long that eventually the anticipation became to much and they started to attempt to go further and further into Africa. Most went on boats in the dangerous Congo River and the brave few would attempt to walk. I also found the section on how the priests were even betraying their promise to god and began to take slaves. It helped me to better understand how popular slave trade had become and how it was affecting more and more people. Another section that highly interested me was the beginning life of John Rowlands. He was a bastard child who spent most of his life wandering around. He lived with his grandpa, his uncles, a foster family and soon to St. Asaph Union Workhouse. John would go on to to be known as Henry Morton Stanley, the man who became a permanent roving foreign correspondent for the Herald at twenty-seven years old.

     One part that I found myself getting a bit disinterested in the reading was when Hochschild began to discusss Mbanza Kongo and how he changed things. I don't know why, I just found myself struggling to pull myself back in on this part, but it only laster the few pages discussing him and his rule. 

    Overall I found the reading very interesting and am already asking myself some questions such as...

1.) How was the story of such a mass genocide forgotten in history? It seems like a pretty hard event to forget.

2.) WHy do you think Europeans were willing to risk their lives traveling south down into Africa because of a silly fairytale? Was it purely curiosity or something more?