Reading King Leopold's Ghost: some thoughts on the hero of the martial arts novel.

From Adam Hohschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa

"A parade of witnesses offered horrifying testimony. One of the most impressive was Chief Lontulu of Bolima, who had been flogged with the chicotte, held hostage, and sent to work in chains. When his turn came to testify, Lontulu laid 110 twigs on the commission's table, each representing one of his people killed in the quest for rubber. He divided the twigs into four piles: tribal nobles, men, women, children. Twig by twig, he named the dead." - p250


King Leopold's Ghost is a thorough, moving, and jarring portrayal of one of the major systematically committed and oft ignored conspiracies of recent memory. Beyond shedding light on to the forced labor, mass murder and rape, and the depopulation of the Congo, Hochschild delves deeply into the personalities invovled: a megalomaniacal king, an explorer who had everything to compensate for, an empathetic missionary, an ardent journalist on a crusade for justice, and a nationalistic Irishman whose homosexuality doomed him to the gallows.

Not only a story of human darkness and falliability, King Leopold's Ghost is also a story of heroism and nobility, seen in the tragic resistance of African tribal leaders and the long-suffering and ceasless demand for justice from those who campaigned in the media and in the Parliaments for the end of Leopold's macabre regime.

These men stood up for just causes and took on, often putting their own careers and lives at risk, men much larger and much stronger than they are.

So what does this have to do with the martial arts novel?

The martial arts novel centers on the concept of a xia (俠) , a very difficult idea to translate, something lying between a superhero (without mutant powers) and a knight-errant (without the courtly mumbojumbo). The xia rights wrongs where he sees them. He defends the weak from oppressors, whether they be bandits, warlords or demons. He works outside of the state apparatus. He (and often she) has his own independent sense of morality that conforms not to the social practices of his time, but to a much deeper, universal sense of ethics.

But, we often forget, that the xia does not only exist in the super human, a man or woman who can scale walls and use strange powers. The men we see described in King Leopold's Ghosts embody the fundamental ideal of the xia. They did not wield swords, nor did they possess uncanny techniques. Instead, with a pen (or typewriter), an undautable spirit, indignant from witnessing injustice, they fought a bandit, warlord and demon all in one.

After all, what is the xia in the martial arts novels of Louis Cha and Gu Long, or even the superheroes in our graphic novels? Are these modern (and not so modern) knight-errants too people who right wrongs where they see them?

In the end, I think, it is representations of a human need for justice, a desire to see things set straight that drives us on, that turn these mortal men into veritable xia . And it is the same indignance one feels on the sight of injustice that keeps the xia alive in these novels.