The severed hand was the symbol of Leopold’s Congo—it was associated with King Leopold in political cartoons of the day, one of which is reprinted in the photographic insert between pages 116 and 117. In Hochschild’s book, it represents the horrible things that were done to the Congolese—from murder and kidnapping, to forced labor and corporal discipline. It also symbolizes the dreadful irony of maiming and killing the very labor force—the “hands”— needed for Leopold and his network of administrators and companies to exploit the wealth of the Congo territory. 

Though Joseph Conrad is a character in this book in his own right, the focus is on the years before he writes Heart of Darkness. The Conrad we meet is the young man who traveled to Africa, not the slightly older author still struggling to come to terms with what he saw there. His most famous book, however, has a presence of its own in King Leopold’s Ghost. As “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature” (146), Heart of Darkness certainly has its place here. But it also represents our tendency to dismiss the darker aspects of Africa’s history as “fiction,” as Hochschild points out in the Introduction and later in Chapter 9.