King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa

"In the late 1890s Edmund Morel, a young British shipping company official working in Antwerp, began to notice something that made him suspicious. When his company's ships docked from the Congo, the new colony that the Belgian king, Leopold II, had just carved out for himself, they were filled with immensely valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. Yet when they sailed back to Africa, they carried nothing in exchange. Nothing, that is, except soldiers, military supplies and firearms. Horrified, Morel realized that there could be only one source for the lucrative cargo: slave labor on a vast scale. He abandoned his job and swiftly became the greatest investigative journalist of his time. A man of torrential energy and conviction, Morel almost single-handedly made the Congo's slave-labor regime, and the millions of lives it took, into a cause that would unite the whole world"--