King Leopold's Ghost, part 1

I read most of the first 100 pages of this book, just like Things Fall Apart, leaning against a
counter and hiding behind an espresso machine at work. So far, King Leopold's Ghost has held my attention better than Things Fall Apart. I didn't like how Things Fall Apart would jump around to flashbacks or memories or the time of the story, so I was immediately grateful that Hothschild starts this book with a prologue, lots of character development, and a chronological storyline.

One of the first ideas that grabbed my attention was how the Africans thought the white men were ghosts, because they believed their skin turned to the color of chalk when they died. I then thought of the title of the book, and I originally thought it was titled to mean King Leopold's ghost as in what he left behind when he died (the "colonization" and destruction of the Congo), but I thought it was interesting that it could also mean what King Leopold would have been to the Africans if they had seen him, just another "ghost."

My first post for this class was about the early migration out of Africa, and I found a lot of information about the theory that the human race originated in Africa. Thousands of years ago, the first humans ventured out of Africa to Asia and Europe, to the Americas, and I started to realize that everything sort of came full circle and the rest of the world eventually came back to their homeland to colonize the land of their ancestors.