And so imagine my surprise, when, a few weeks ago, in a theater in a giant mall, I encountered two characters I had written about in King Leopold’s Ghost. In case you hadn’t noticed, that film has yet to be made. The movie, I was certain, would make viewers in multiplexes across the world realize at last that colonialism in Africa deserved to be ranked with Nazism and Soviet communism as one of the great totalitarian systems of modern times. And so I pictured myself on location with the cast, a voice for good politics and historical accuracy, correcting a detail here, adding another there, making sure the film didn’t stint in evoking the full brutality of that era. At the very least, they would undoubtedly seek my advice. Perhaps the film-makers would offer me a part. I found myself thinking about how to structure it and which actors might play what roles. How could all of this not make a great film? When he finally got his impressions on to the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel in English: Heart of Darkness. Into the middle of this horror show, traveling up the Congo river as a steamboat officer in training, came a young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. And it would surely have included the remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds.Īmong them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people an Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the British two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to the outside world and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was hounded to death for doing so.
It would, of course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber, with millions dying in the process.
Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story.
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