If Africa wasn't Colonized? - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Early modern era & beginning of the modern era. Exploration, enlightenment, industrialisation, colonisation & empire (1492 - 1914 CE).
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The Immortal Goon wrote:Tribal conflict, it's no coincidence, is most violent where the Europeans were most interested in social engineering and whatnot. That is to say, the strip from what was German East Africa (where Belgium and Germany separated the Hutu and Tutsi into camps based upon material wealth and spirituality); on West to Belgian Congo (the crimes in which are notorious).

What sort of social engineering are we talking about here? If you mean the attempted amalgamation of people into one cultural group with European values rather than maintaining a separation into smaller and more diverse ones then yes this will obviously present problems at the outset, especially when they have a history of animosity towards each other. But this could work under the authority of an outside power that keeps its authority and agenda constant over the period of a few generations.
The Immortal Goon wrote:the imperialists come in, kill the leaders, rape the children, and systematically impose alien values upon a population that has never had it. With it comes new forms of hierarchies based upon abstractions drawn up in European boarding rooms instead of actual reality.

I doubt child rape by the colonialists was common back then, certainly less common than it already was and still is in many African and Asian countries. As stated previously, if the pressure was kept up over a period of 2 or 3 generations, there is little reason as to why these new forms wouldn’t work. I have to ask what the tribal and social situation was in terms of backwardness and violence before the Europeans arrived.
The Immortal Goon wrote:To do this for centuries and then step back and shake your head for Africans because sixty years later everything isn't caught up with much smaller places that were interfered with much less is the height of ignorance.

"Everything isn't caught up" is a pretty extreme understatement. I think the emphasis in usually on how catastrophically bad a lot of African countries are compared to everywhere else; it wouldn't be the only place that had foreign rules imposed on it. India, Morocco, Hong Kong, Vietnam the list goes on and on.
Fuser wrote:The important point here is that still in this day income that goes outside of Africa because of the vast amounts of capital owned by non Africans (mostly west) in Africa is more than three times the aid that Africa receives. The economical colonization never really stopped.

I’m against capitalism in a lot of ways as I’ve stated in other threads, but do you think this situation is actually so bad? How much aid are they receiving? It’s not acceptable that an African would have to work 12 hours a day sometimes in stressful work situations so they have enough money to pay for their accommodation and food, but this isn’t much different from someone working in a factory doing a night shift in England. You talk about a big amount of income earned by African workers going outside of Africa, but this can be compared to an American CEO making money off of Eastern or Western Europeans in factory towns.
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It’s not acceptable that an African would have to work 12 hours a day sometimes in stressful work situations so they have enough money to pay for their accommodation and food, but this isn’t much different from someone working in a factory doing a night shift in England.


You seriously can't compare living standards of sub saharan Africa and England. My point about aid also had to do with the fact that these liberal countries love to boast about "the aid" they are giving to Africa (I am not against the aid itself) while conveniently forgetting that they are also one of the reason for this state of Africa.

You talk about a big amount of income earned by African workers going outside of Africa, but this can be compared to an American CEO making money off of Eastern or Western Europeans in factory towns.


This comparison is faulty as Eastern and Western Europeans are also owning capitals in other parts of the world and get returns from it and over all the net income cancels out which is not the case with Africa or other poorer regions. The net African income is substantially negative.
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fuser wrote:You seriously can't compare living standards of sub saharan Africa and England.

I’m not comparing the living standards. I’m comparing the situation of both of them working all hours so that someone else (wherever they come from) can get rich off them. I was also comparing how when you look at the situation of the English man and the African man comparatively to their own neighbours, in that sense, the English man is lower down on the socio-economic ladder, and this is quite important.
fuser wrote:My point about aid also had to do with the fact that these liberal countries love to boast about "the aid" they are giving to Africa (I am not against the aid itself) while conveniently forgetting that they are also one of the reason for this state of Africa.

True enough about them bragging about the aid (which I don’t think they should be giving away unless there are strings attached). But do you mean historically they are one of the reasons behind the state of Africa or currently or both?
fuser wrote:This comparison is faulty as Eastern and Western Europeans are also owning capitals in other parts of the world and get returns from it and over all the net income cancels out which is not the case with Africa or other poorer regions. The net African income is substantially negative.

No doubt it’s happening on a larger scale in Africa than in Europe. But this capital that Europeans receive from other parts of the world is in the hands of the very few. I’m talking about when American bosses of McDonalds, Apple, Amazon, Kraft or whichever companies employ low paid Eastern European workers in companies in Belgrade or Sophia. The same principle of a foreigner making a lot of money off of workers in a different country still applies. Not to mention the fact that those multi-millionaire CEOs always find a way out of paying their taxes, so it’s not like the average American citizen will benefit much from the CEO’s income either.
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I’m not comparing the living standards. I’m comparing the situation of both of them working all hours so that someone else (wherever they come from) can get rich off them. I was also comparing how when you look at the situation of the English man and the African man comparatively to their own neighbours, in that sense, the English man is lower down on the socio-economic ladder, and this is quite important.


Yes, that's true for working class everywhere but I am not sure how this is related to any of my points.

True enough about them bragging about the aid (which I don’t think they should be giving away unless there are strings attached). But do you mean historically they are one of the reasons behind the state of Africa or currently or both?


Both.

No doubt it’s happening on a larger scale in Africa than in Europe. But this capital that Europeans receive from other parts of the world is in the hands of the very few. I’m talking about when American bosses of McDonalds, Apple, Amazon, Kraft or whichever companies employ low paid Eastern European workers in companies in Belgrade or Sophia. The same principle of a foreigner making a lot of money off of workers in a different country still applies. Not to mention the fact that those multi-millionaire CEOs always find a way out of paying their taxes, so it’s not like the average American citizen will benefit much from the CEO’s income either.


Yes mostly I agree but again I don't see how its related to my point. I am a commie btw.

The point here is, taxes, investment etc that these capital firm provide (by expropriating profit from her African assets) in their home countries contribute to national and capitalist's wealth of the said country regardless of average joe benefiting or not and it does contribute towards Africa's poor economical state.
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BBC: Police captain confirms children 'possessed by demons'


And this is a surprise to...who? Certainly nobody who has ever been a parent.
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fuser wrote:Yes, that's true for working class everywhere but I am not sure how this is related to any of my points.

You said I can’t compare living standards. I started my response with “I’m not comparing the living standards” then went on to say what I was comparing.
fuser wrote:Both.

You could be right. But it might be worth thinking about what sort of state the place would be in if it wasn’t for European intervention (or “interference” as others might like to put it). European medicine, engineering, education and all kinds of inventions for agriculture etc will have contributed towards Africa’s progress.
fuser wrote:Yes mostly I agree but again I don't see how its related to my point. I am a commie btw.

My point was to show that if you thought this was a bad thing for Africa (ie money leaving Africa and going into the hands of foreign capitalists), the same thing happens everywhere.
fuser wrote:The point here is, taxes, investment etc that these capital firm provide (by expropriating profit from her African assets) in their home countries contribute to national and capitalist's wealth of the said country regardless of average joe benefiting or not and it does contribute towards Africa's poor economical state.

This arguably isn’t true. There’s obviously a lot of profit to be made in setting up companies in Africa (otherwise the CEO wouldn’t be doing it) and after having worked hard in building relationships and building a cheap work force, the corporation owner is likely to set up more companies in Africa as well as some in his own country. This investment in Africa would obviously create employment as workers are needed to work in and build the new firms. The governments of these countries can tax the companies as well. True enough though that it adds to the national and capitalists wealth. But if the average joe doesn’t see any benefit from this wealth, does it matter what country the CEO is living in?
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Because at least there are some protections for American and Western workers. Starting a factory in Africa is like a big sign that says: I aim to get Exploitin'! This "investment" is not in the people, or their localities, but rather investment in a funnel to drain resources from Africa into the imperialist market.

And let's make no mistake, we western workers are only able to be paid what we are because of these fruits of imperialism. That is not our fault (completely anyways) but it is certainly true.
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Paul Sanderson wrote:What sort of social engineering are we talking about here? If you mean the attempted amalgamation of people into one cultural group with European values rather than maintaining a separation into smaller and more diverse ones then yes this will obviously present problems at the outset, especially when they have a history of animosity towards each other. But this could work under the authority of an outside power that keeps its authority and agenda constant over the period of a few generations.


This is historically almost never the case. Look at Iraq now, a nation built in the same way African nations were built at about the same time. The imperialists would often take two or three ethnic groups and put them together specifically to play them off of each other so that a minority in charge could only rule with consent of the imperialist. The Hutu and Tutsi are the specific examples I gave, but this has been true in almost all African imperialism and is still leading to problems today.

I doubt child rape by the colonialists was common back then, certainly less common than it already was and still is in many African and Asian countries. As stated previously, if the pressure was kept up over a period of 2 or 3 generations, there is little reason as to why these new forms wouldn’t work. I have to ask what the tribal and social situation was in terms of backwardness and violence before the Europeans arrived.


We know most about Belgian Congo since the most work was done about it. This said, Stanley worked for the British and Casement mentions that, while particularly bad, the practices weren't uncommon in colonized Africa. This includes child rape. We know also in Asia the Dutch made official policies about harems with native women and children and this was not considered particularly problematic. Heather Streets, an old colleague of mine, does a lot of work on the subject. Regardless, raping native children was quite common, as was arbitrary murder and everything else described.

The accusation that the Europeans were just falling into native customs doesn't check out for several reasons. First, our primary sources from missionaries and investigators like Roger Casement conflict with it. Further, we can track natives escaping Congo (and other areas) and arriving in other areas in order to escape from the violence imperialists brought with them. The British, especially, kept records of this as it was part of a broader campaign to recruit natives to their own side and pacify their own areas. Finally, there is no reason to assume that there was this kind of abuse before the imperialists arrived but there is all kinds of evidence that supports the notion that the kind of power structures the imperialists brought in encouraged a dehumanization and abuse of natives.

"Everything isn't caught up" is a pretty extreme understatement. I think the emphasis in usually on how catastrophically bad a lot of African countries are compared to everywhere else; it wouldn't be the only place that had foreign rules imposed on it. India, Morocco, Hong Kong, Vietnam the list goes on and on.


They were areas, as mentioned, specifically designed not to develop or work. It will take time.

The reason that Africa seemingly lags behind Asia in decolonization has several reasons. First, China made a comeback as it held out for long enough and didn't succumb to being formally broken up into new countries as it was being pushed into at the end of the 19th century, and China is a huge mother culture to Asia in the same way Rome is in Europe. It would be like the Songhai Empire never collapsed in Africa, or came back and rallied the Bantu people in Africa.

Secondly, and most importantly, Asia wasn't divided out in an organized way like Africa was after the Berlin Conference. Everything Europe did in Africa was rubber stamped by everyone else exactly because Asians learned to play imperialists against each other and retain some shred of autonomy as a result. Africans had no chance to do this as European imperialists went into Africa with specific play books they followed.
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You could be right. But it might be worth thinking about what sort of state the place would be in if it wasn’t for European intervention (or “interference” as others might like to put it). European medicine, engineering, education and all kinds of inventions for agriculture etc will have contributed towards Africa’s progress.


Japan, Iran etc managed to have all those things without being colonized, colonization isn't the only way. Inventions and discoveries can travel (as they travel now) without tanks travelling with them too. But without colonization, millions of Congolese wouldn't had died (just to give one example) in mere decades effectively retarding the development of the region.

My point was to show that if you thought this was a bad thing for Africa (ie money leaving Africa and going into the hands of foreign capitalists), the same thing happens everywhere.


And as I already told you not at the level of Africa, it doesn't even come close.

This arguably isn’t true. There’s obviously a lot of profit to be made in setting up companies in Africa (otherwise the CEO wouldn’t be doing it) and after having worked hard in building relationships and building a cheap work force, the corporation owner is likely to set up more companies in Africa as well as some in his own country. This investment in Africa would obviously create employment as workers are needed to work in and build the new firms. The governments of these countries can tax the companies as well. True enough though that it adds to the national and capitalists wealth. But if the average joe doesn’t see any benefit from this wealth, does it matter what country the CEO is living in?


Government can't tax these companies heavily to compensate for its loss as it will take away the incentives for these companies and the "money" these corrupt government officials receive.

There are many ways employment can be generated and not only through foreign capital in its current form.

Finally, as Dagoth said, average joe in west also benefits from it although obviously not as much as capitalists of their respective countries.
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Dagoth Ur wrote:Because at least there are some protections for American and Western workers. Starting a factory in Africa is like a big sign that says: I aim to get Exploitin'!

Africans don’t have to work in these companies if they don’t want to. So similar to the West, its exploitation but voluntary exploitation.
Dagoth Ur wrote:This "investment" is not in the people, or their localities, but rather investment in a funnel to drain resources from Africa into the imperialist market.

When a multi-millionaire business man sets up a new battery hen style factory in England, he’s not thinking about the local people or what he can do for the community. He’s looking to get as much money out of his minimum wage workers as he can, draining their resources to increase his bank balance.
Dagoth Ur wrote:And let's make no mistake, we western workers are only able to be paid what we are because of these fruits of imperialism. That is not our fault (completely anyways) but it is certainly true.

Maybe it is true. But I’ve not been convinced as to why an African is getting a particularly hard time. True, their working conditions are worse, but you need to look at it relatively to someone else living in the same region as them. What would the situation be for this African if he wasn’t working in an American or European company?
The Immortal Goon wrote:The imperialists would often take two or three ethnic groups and put them together specifically to play them off of each other so that a minority in charge could only rule with consent of the imperialist.

Grouping people together with the exact intention of causing hostility would be where they went wrong. This is not what I would encourage. One point I would raise about your argument is, why were the Europeans purposefully trying to sow animosity when they would benefit from a workforce that weren’t constantly killing each other? If you say to “divide and rule” then why not use this tactic in India and other countries? And if it was used in India and other colonies, why do you use this as a reason for Africa’s comparatively terrible development?
The Immortal Goon wrote:We know also in Asia the Dutch made official policies about harems with native women and children and this was not considered particularly problematic.

What were the official policies about harems and native women?
The Immortal Goon wrote:The accusation that the Europeans were just falling into native customs doesn't check out for several reasons. First, our primary sources from missionaries and investigators like Roger Casement conflict with it.

Do we know what the original feeling about the Empire was of people like Casement? In the present day we still see liberals covering up/bending the truth, conveniently not noticing the truth or simply outright lying to further their agenda. I don’t think this is only characteristic of liberals though. The moment I hear a reporter or presenter say “a recent survey has shown”, immediately I give it less regard. We shouldn’t rely on the testimony of a handful of human rights workers and especially missionaries, these people need a cause.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Further, we can track natives escaping Congo (and other areas) and arriving in other areas in order to escape from the violence imperialists brought with them.

I don’t doubt that they had to flee because of violence, this is the way it has always been. But I’m curious about the way you say “brought with them”. Do you mean the Europeans turned up and started up some kind of massacre almost immediately? Or do you mean the Europeans were attacked by the natives on arrival thus starting a war that led to the evacuation of other natives?
The Immortal Goon wrote:Finally, there is no reason to assume that there was this kind of abuse before the imperialists arrived but there is all kinds of evidence that supports the notion that the kind of power structures the imperialists brought in encouraged a dehumanization and abuse of natives.

Yes I would say there actually was a dehumanisation and abuse of natives, but why would you assume that this hadn’t been going on before? I’ve often heard/read and it definitely sounds reasonable that slavery had been going on in Africa long before Europeans arrived. Add that to cannibalism and the practice of killing children because they are thought to be witches and you see a distinct barbarity about their culture. There was also a communal responsibility for child rearing (as records show). If children don’t actually belong to anyone specifically, it lessens the inclination for parents to show great concern towards any one or two children therefore causing a serious vulnerability for them. In a country that will slaughter a 3 year old for saying the wrong prayer at the wrong time or will eat a fellow human being, it’s not unreasonable to think that these children were abused in other ways based on their previously mentioned vulnerability.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The reason that Africa seemingly lags behind Asia in decolonization has several reasons. First, China made a comeback as it held out for long enough and didn't succumb to being formally broken up into new countries as it was being pushed into at the end of the 19th century, and China is a huge mother culture to Asia in the same way Rome is in Europe. It would be like the Songhai Empire never collapsed in Africa, or came back and rallied the Bantu people in Africa.

China from my understanding was very often invaded and conquered by outsiders who established their own rules, the Mongols being one of the more well-known groups- the have had more than their fair share of experience with imperialism. But China being a huge mother culture to Asia? China was too big and too disunited to enforce a recognisable culture even within its own borders, I would think that this would have proven impossible as far as the rest of Asia is concerned. What influence did this mother culture really have in Asia concerning the likes of India, the Arab countries, Japan, Russia, Burma…
The Immortal Goon wrote:Secondly, and most importantly, Asia wasn't divided out in an organized way like Africa was after the Berlin Conference. Everything Europe did in Africa was rubber stamped by everyone else exactly because Asians learned to play imperialists against each other and retain some shred of autonomy as a result. Africans had no chance to do this as European imperialists went into Africa with specific play books they followed

I don’t really understand what this means. Could you elaborate?
fuser wrote:Inventions and discoveries can travel (as they travel now) without tanks travelling with them too.

I know but there would need to be a reason for them to travel. Europeans wouldn’t just turn up on people’s shores with inventions hoping someone can make use of them. These inventions travelled because there was something in those countries that the Europeans wanted. As well as the usual natural resources that people mention, there is also the prestige of the Empire which was constantly at the front of the minds of Europeans. Since the locals were likely to attack them, they would have to use force in return.
fuser wrote:Government can't tax these companies heavily to compensate for its loss as it will take away the incentives for these companies and the "money" these corrupt government officials receive.

Indeed they can’t tax them too heavily because business will go elsewhere. But again this isn’t much different from anywhere else. The last part of your sentence is the part that I believe accounts for the problems in Africa today. Appallingly incompetent and corrupt politicians, who use arguments such as “colonialism has caused our country to become the mess that it is today, the ANC have been doing everything we can to try to rid this country of its legacy, we can only do it with you support...”
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Paul Anderson wrote:Grouping people together with the exact intention of causing hostility would be where they went wrong. This is not what I would encourage. One point I would raise about your argument is, why were the Europeans purposefully trying to sow animosity when they would benefit from a workforce that weren’t constantly killing each other? If you say to “divide and rule” then why not use this tactic in India and other countries? And if it was used in India and other colonies, why do you use this as a reason for Africa’s comparatively terrible development?


India was, in fact, explicitly run as divided people that played against each other, hence the, "martial races." (primary source, secondary source). In India, specifically, the issue became the British infrastructure itself unifying too well. The Royal Indian Navy rebelled, putting three flags up: The Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Red Flag of the Communist Party of India as their symbols.

They still haven't really been able to unify since then. The Muslims became Pakistan, the National Congress became India, and the Communists were dealt with during the Cold War.

Africa was different for several reasons, most notably the way it was carved up, which I shall address later.

Paul Anderson wrote:What were the official policies about harems and native women?


Justin Tung wrote:During the 19th century, the Dutch colonial government like other European colonial governments in Southeast Asia executed their plans to civilize and modernize the region. The ideology held by these governments was that there was single evolutionary path to modernity and Europe was at the highest point of human development (Loos). Because of this view, which matched with concepts of imperialism and colonialism, the colonial government felt it necessary to portray the superior elements of European society to the natives and clearly delineate the separation between the colonizer and the colonized (McClintock et al. 348). The ability to achieve these political goals was due to the colonial authoritarianism that existed in the Dutch East Indies throughout most of the colony’s history (Taylor 7). In her essay “Making Empire Respectable”, Stoler argues that the part of the colonial government’s goal to preserve European superiority was through “sexual” (European male) dominance in domestic affairs (McClintock et al. 346). As a result, Stoler states that sexual prohibitions were “racially asymmetric and gender specific” (McClintock et al. 366). This resulted in male dominated Dutch populations such as the 2:25 women to men ratio in Sumatra during the late 19th century.

The regulation of gender in the Dutch East Indies that first appeared in the early 18th century was specifically targeted at restricting female immigration to the colony either by preventing female immigration or refusal of employment of married men by colonial Dutch companies (McClintock et al. 349). The reason for this policy was due to the nature of the women who had come to the colonies previously. Many of these women came from the lowest elements of European society and it was government’s view that these women “scandalized” the natives through their actions by misrepresenting European society. As a result, the colonial government placed a ban on female immigration exempting only wives of officials. The Dutch colonial government then went further to secure its goal of portraying the Europeans society as superior by banning European males from returning to Europe unless they had financial capabilities to provide for their natives wives forever. Since many of these men were poor workers or soldiers, it was essentially a disincentive to marry native women (Loos). Therefore, by the late 18th century, women in the Dutch East Indies faced more rigid social regulation in Southeast Asia than in metropolitan Europe (McClintock et al. 344). The government’s answer to the “needs” of European males was concubinage. Stoler defines concubinage as the “cohabitation” of European men with native women for domestic and sexual affairs (McClintock et al. 348). The government and Dutch colonial companies adopted a policy to promote and accommodate such a lifestyle to compensate for the lack of European women in the colony. Concubinage suited the colonial political goals at the time and encouraged a cheaper, healthier, and more stable lifestyle for European males corresponding to the development level of the colony. As a result, the policies mentioned above and native concubines were the core gender regulations of the Dutch government before the early 1900s.


Also, there's a wiki.

Paul Sanderson wrote:Do we know what the original feeling about the Empire was of people like Casement?


Casement writes at the time, and comments several times, that he was very much a British imperialist that believed in the civilizing mission. It was not until he saw the actual results that he became disgusted with it. Nonetheless, his official work on the subject is universally held to be subjective and neutral—which was why it was as effective as it was.

Paul Sanderson wrote:But I’m curious about the way you say “brought with them”. Do you mean the Europeans turned up and started up some kind of massacre almost immediately? Or do you mean the Europeans were attacked by the natives on arrival thus starting a war that led to the evacuation of other natives?


This depends very much on the area. In Northern Africa, it was often the Europeans arriving and starting a war that led to evacuation of the natives. In the interior we get some of that (The Kingdom of Kongo for instance, and maybe even the Zulu), but we also see a lot of exploitation and profit-mongering. I keep going back to Belgian Congo, but that's because we know most about it. The Europeans wanted rubber. They don't know how to get rubber, so they gather up a bunch of the natives and abuse them horribly and send them off to go find rubber through threat of starvation, hostages, etc, etc. While there, they also promote another class to watch the majority of the workers, the so called, "forest guards."

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The forest guards had to account for every bullet shot by proving it was used efficiently via producing a hand, head, or penis.

In doing this, because it's very hard to kill someone with one shot, a black market develops of native hands, heads, and penises. As it becomes a currency, it also becomes a standard punishment. So when you see pictures of Africans escaping, they often are handless:

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Obviously, this being the late 19th and early 20th century, they did not document the penises visually, but it was well known.

This wasn't limited to the Congo, incidentally. When the Europeans went into Central and South America, they often used a similar system. Here is a Putomayo Indian pulled from the forest and forced to gather rubber:

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If the natives didn't find enough rubber, they were often beaten or chopped up by being tied to the ground. Here's the former (again, no pictures of the latter as this was its time and place):

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You'll note too that the guards were imported blacks from colonies in the Caribbean—though, of course, always under orders from the Europeans.

Why are people so cruel? There are theories that they were in a new place, with a diverse group of people, and perpetuating atrocities on the natives was a sort of psychological way to deal with it. Maybe there's something to the idea, but really I think it comes down to money. You can make these people work for free by terrorizing them, and you get more money in the end. Meanwhile in Europe, they get their rubber and gold and whatnot, and don't have to see where it comes from.

We do it today. We know the computers we're on right now were assembled by children for an almost nonexistent salary. We all don't really like the idea that much, but it's across the seas and we can pretend it's someone else's problem. But it's not. We're as guilty as any other individual person.

Paul Sanderson wrote:Yes I would say there actually was a dehumanisation and abuse of natives, but why would you assume that this hadn’t been going on before? I’ve often heard/read and it definitely sounds reasonable that slavery had been going on in Africa long before Europeans arrived.


There certainly was slavery before the Europeans, and war and everything else. But it was a different kind of exploitation. It was like the slavery and war that existed in Europe or the Americas before expanding out.

We can tell this from the Kingdom of Kongo as they converted early to Catholicism and had a good relationship (initially) with the Pope. Alfonso was very devout, but as the Portuguese began to get bigger and more powerful, Alfonso's prisoners of war, and murderers, and other people that were slaves as punishment were running low. African slaves were desirable because they were easy to see, didn't know the terrain like the Native Americans, and were more resistant to diseases than the Native Americans. We have letters of Alfonso protesting when the Portuguese stop getting slaves through POWs and whatnot, and start just grabbing any black person:

Even though I have this in a book, wiki's the best source on the internet from a glance at google, Alfonso wrote:"Each day the traders are kidnapping our people - children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. This corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. It is our wish that this Kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves."
Many of our subjects eagerly lust after Portuguese merchandise that your subjects have brought into our domains. To satisfy this inordinate appetite, they seize many of our black free subjects.... They sell them. After having taken these prisoners [to the coast] secretly or at night..... As soon as the captives are in the hands of white men they are branded with a red-hot iron.


The Vatican, actually, took the side of Alfonso, and reiterated that there had to be some kind of reason for slavery instead of just grabbing a bunch of people. But the Europeans kept doing it, and I really think it proves how powerful the financial incentive was: they were willing to go to hell to keep the system going. So slavery and these other things take on a huge exaggerated bearing in Africa that they didn't have before the Europeans arrived.

Paul Sanderson wrote:China from my understanding was very often invaded and conquered by outsiders who established their own rules


They did, but like the Roman Empire in Europe, they were a symbol for THE empire, more than anything else in a lot of ways.

Paul Sanderson wrote:What influence did this mother culture really have in Asia concerning the likes of India, the Arab countries, Japan, Russia, Burma…


It was symbolic of the old Asian ways throwing out the new imperialism. Symbolic for the Arabs, Russians, everyone else. Really, not so much the Japanese as they came into the fold earlier and dealt with their stuff, but Japan was an enemy of Korea and Vietnam while China was a distant memory—like Rome or Babylon. Not any more of course, but uniting and beating themselves back up to fight for themselves was probably a model for what worked if nothing else.

Paul Sanderson wrote:I don’t really understand what this means. Could you elaborate?


So Europe had been pretty much everywhere by the 19th century, but Africa was still largely an unknown. As Europe poised to go into Africa, Portugal was worried about losing their colonies to France and the UK; France and the UK were worried about going to war with each other over land; and German wanted in on this; as did Italy. Bismarck organized a conference, the Berlin Conference.

Here they agreed on how Africa would be carved up by the Europeans. It would make sure everyone got something at least, that the Europeans wouldn't go to war with each other, and that commerce could pass through everything and everyone would get more money. It was a calculated colonization with everyone working together to break Africa up into colonies that could be run. The Germans helped the British, the French, and everyone helped everyone.

This was much different than in Asia or the Americas where wars would frequently break out. I don't know if you're American, but a good example is the Seven Years War (and French-Inidian War, same thing) in which the natives chose sides with the French and colonists took sides with the British, and then a war broke out. Had there been, say, a London Conference about the colonization of the Americas, the primary concern of both France and Britain would be to break the backs of the natives and keep the colonists in line. There would have been no question of them going to war because they both would lose money and lives in it, when they could work together to both pull in more money.

Africa, alone, was subjected to that kind of very particular and clean imperialism. Sucks to be them.
#14439811
I must say IG that you lay out the horrors of the capitalist iteration of colonial slavery rather well. It remains to convince people that Imperialism is alive and well as the final phase of Capitalism, that it didn't disappear with the de-colonialization that occured after WWII.
#14439964
I know but there would need to be a reason for them to travel. Europeans wouldn’t just turn up on people’s shores with inventions hoping someone can make use of them. These inventions travelled because there was something in those countries that the Europeans wanted. As well as the usual natural resources that people mention, there is also the prestige of the Empire which was constantly at the front of the minds of Europeans. Since the locals were likely to attack them, they would have to use force in return.


What are you talking about here? It doesn't follow your original point at all? Has ideas stopped travelling in today's world? You claimed that only because of colonialism, European ideas (be it science, political or whatever) travelled to Africa, I am simply telling you that these ideas can travel without colonialism too as they did in the colonial era as well as in today's era. Are you seriously contesting this issue?

Indeed they can’t tax them too heavily because business will go elsewhere. But again this isn’t much different from anywhere else. The last part of your sentence is the part that I believe accounts for the problems in Africa today. Appallingly incompetent and corrupt politicians, who use arguments such as “colonialism has caused our country to become the mess that it is today, the ANC have been doing everything we can to try to rid this country of its legacy, we can only do it with you support.


Corruption is one of the issue (every developing/underdeveloped country has corruption) and not "the" issue.

And for the nth time as I clearly had made it clear, its very much different from everywhere else. As already stated the wealth that is taken outside of Africa by foreign ownership of capitals inside Africa is way more larger than any other regional/continental block. If Americans are owning European assets, then Europeans are also owning American assets but that's not the case with Africa. I fail to see what's so hard to understand about it? Why keep pressing the same debunked point over and over again.



Also, TIG's post was excellent.
#14440070
The Immortal Goon wrote:India was, in fact, explicitly run as divided people that played against each other, hence the, "martial races." (primary source, secondary source). In India, specifically, the issue became the British infrastructure itself unifying too well. The Royal Indian Navy rebelled, putting three flags up: The Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Red Flag of the Communist Party of India as their symbols. They still haven't really been able to unify since then. The Muslims became Pakistan, the National Congress became India, and the Communists were dealt with during the Cold War.

Fair enough, so they were separated into individual states with continuing problems like in Kashmir. I should point out though that there would be inevitable friction caused by the difference in religion without British involvement in the partition. Even Pakistan which is somewhat of a basket case because of its internal division and paranoia about India doesn’t come close to African backwardness.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The government and Dutch colonial companies adopted a policy to promote and accommodate such a lifestyle to compensate for the lack of European women in the colony. Concubinage suited the colonial political goals at the time and encouraged a cheaper, healthier, and more stable lifestyle for European males corresponding to the development level of the colony. As a result, the policies mentioned above and native concubines were the core gender regulations of the Dutch government before the early 1900s.

I didn’t quote your whole section of writing there because it was very long but it does sound reasonable. I know that colonial troops have been taking native wives since colonialism began, this was extremely useful for the French soldiers in Vietnam. Though when I asked you about the official policy towards women and children I thought you would relate it to how it would have brought about the child rape problem which to me was the main issue we were talking about (I know it seems quite some away now though). Still related to this, another point of confusion for me is the apparent contradiction in the effort that the Europeans went to to put up a veneer of respectability by removing scandalous European women among other things but child rape was still something that continued (if this is what you’re saying).
The Immortal Goon wrote:Casement writes at the time, and comments several times, that he was very much a British imperialist that believed in the civilizing mission. It was not until he saw the actual results that he became disgusted with it. Nonetheless, his official work on the subject is universally held to be subjective and neutral—which was why it was as effective as it was.

I did a Wikipedia search and it turns out Casement was Irish. Given his country’s own history of colonialism with the British it’s questionable whether he was truly in favour of British imperialist policy. One other thing this Wikipedia article states is that the authorities found Casement’s diaries and they reveal that he was a “promiscuous homosexual with a fondness for young men”. He may not be the most reliable source for British misdeeds (particularly concerning children) in the colonies if this is true. I‘m not going to claim this is the truth though because as the same Wikipedia article states, this kind of slander would have been useful in reducing support for him.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The Europeans wanted rubber. They don't know how to get rubber, so they gather up a bunch of the natives and abuse them horribly and send them off to go find rubber through threat of starvation, hostages, etc, etc. While there, they also promote another class to watch the majority of the workers, the so called, "forest guards."

I’m surprised they didn’t know how to get rubber or at least didn’t very soon learn, but I’m not doubting the abuse went on.
In doing this, because it's very hard to kill someone with one shot, a black market develops of native hands, heads, and penises. As it becomes a currency, it also becomes a standard punishment. So when you see pictures of Africans escaping, they often are handless:
Accounting for every bullet doesn’t mean only using one or two or 10 of them to kill each enemy. Would the Europeans be so unreasonable as to expect every bullet to be a lethal one? I doubt it. They were experienced and skilful soldiers themselves who knew about the use of ammunition and would’ve expected the natives to be much less skilled than themselves. By the sounds of it though, the practice of amputation of bodily parts was the Africans’ own idea.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Obviously, this being the late 19th and early 20th century, they did not document the penises visually, but it was well known.

I’m sure they would have at some point and the reason you might not be able to find any evidence of it is because it could well not have happened. Not often enough to document it anyway. These are hardened colonial troops who have seen all kinds of savagery, I can’t see them being prudish about a penis. Also I think the Europeans would’ve have known that there could’ve been an abuse of this system; what if the natives were bringing the penis and hands of the same man and claiming they had killed two of them?
The Immortal Goon wrote:Why are people so cruel? There are theories that they were in a new place, with a diverse group of people, and perpetuating atrocities on the natives was a sort of psychological way to deal with it. Maybe there's something to the idea, but really I think it comes down to money. You can make these people work for free by terrorizing them, and you get more money in the end.

Yeah pretty much. Also in order to stop some sort of rebellion they would need to instil a certain amount of fear in the natives. No one can hold onto that sort of authority without people fearing the consequences of bringing you down. This is true of everywhere.
The Immortal Goon wrote:There certainly was slavery before the Europeans, and war and everything else. But it was a different kind of exploitation. It was like the slavery and war that existed in Europe or the Americas before expanding out.

I read what you wrote with interest but didn’t quote the whole piece because again it would take up a lot of space. But the thing I wanted to ask you about was your main point at the beginning, about it being “a different kind of exploitation”. How do you know this and how was it different exactly? Apparently slavery has been going on in Africa in a massive way since ancient Egyptian times. If we’re to believe what we’re told, slavery was carried out on an huge scale already and there wouldn’t be enough people around to only take people who were convicted of a crime or the children of current slaves (although that would arguably be worse anyway).
The Immortal Goon wrote:It was symbolic of the old Asian ways throwing out the new imperialism. Symbolic for the Arabs, Russians, everyone else. Really, not so much the Japanese as they came into the fold earlier and dealt with their stuff, but Japan was an enemy of Korea and Vietnam while China was a distant memory—like Rome or Babylon. Not any more of course, but uniting and beating themselves back up to fight for themselves was probably a model for what worked if nothing else.

It was definitely characteristic of these people to fight out imperialists, but then that is characteristic of nearly every country that was ever colonised, and so many of them have been all over the world. You could have a point in saying that people saw China partially withstand imperialism and they took encouragement from it, but this is far from making China the “mother culture of Asia”. Besides, they’d all done it of their own accord at some point in their history as well. Russia removed the Mongols before China did. The Arabs throwing off the Ottomans had nothing to do with Chinese influence either. The Viets, the Koreans and the Japanese held off the Mongols as well. This would be only naming a few.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Here they agreed on how Africa would be carved up by the Europeans. It would make sure everyone got something at least, that the Europeans wouldn't go to war with each other, and that commerce could pass through everything and everyone would get more money. It was a calculated colonization with everyone working together to break Africa up into colonies that could be run. The Germans helped the British, the French, and everyone helped everyone.

I see, although I can’t see this lasting through World War I or the build up to it. I would assume that Britain and France would still have stuck to their agreement with each other but after the war, there wouldn’t be much chance to fight each other over land anywhere else in the world either and that would continue through the inter war years and WW2 and after as well. Also, I have to ask, were there not any agreements (even if unwritten) between European powers regarding their colonies before the Berlin Conference?
#14440107
The Immortal Goon wrote:India was, in fact, explicitly run as divided people that played against each other, hence the, "martial races." (primary source, secondary source). In India, specifically, the issue became the British infrastructure itself unifying too well. The Royal Indian Navy rebelled, putting three flags up: The Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Red Flag of the Communist Party of India as their symbols. They still haven't really been able to unify since then. The Muslims became Pakistan, the National Congress became India, and the Communists were dealt with during the Cold War.

Fair enough, so they were separated into individual states with continuing problems like in Kashmir. I should point out though that there would be inevitable friction caused by the difference in religion without British involvement in the partition. Even Pakistan which is somewhat of a basket case because of its internal division and paranoia about India doesn’t come close to African backwardness.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The government and Dutch colonial companies adopted a policy to promote and accommodate such a lifestyle to compensate for the lack of European women in the colony. Concubinage suited the colonial political goals at the time and encouraged a cheaper, healthier, and more stable lifestyle for European males corresponding to the development level of the colony. As a result, the policies mentioned above and native concubines were the core gender regulations of the Dutch government before the early 1900s.

I didn’t quote your whole section of writing there because it was very long but it does sound reasonable. I know that colonial troops have been taking native wives since colonialism began, this was extremely useful for the French soldiers in Vietnam. Though when I asked you about the official policy towards women and children I thought you would relate it to how it would have brought about the child rape problem which to me was the main issue we were talking about (I know it seems quite some away now though). Still related to this, another point of confusion for me is the apparent contradiction in the effort that the Europeans went to to put up a veneer of respectability by removing scandalous European women among other things but child rape was still something that continued (if this is what you’re saying).
The Immortal Goon wrote:Casement writes at the time, and comments several times, that he was very much a British imperialist that believed in the civilizing mission. It was not until he saw the actual results that he became disgusted with it. Nonetheless, his official work on the subject is universally held to be subjective and neutral—which was why it was as effective as it was.

I did a Wikipedia search and it turns out Casement was Irish. Given his country’s own history of colonialism with the British it’s questionable whether he was truly in favour of British imperialist policy. One other thing this Wikipedia article states is that the authorities found Casement’s diaries and they reveal that he was a “promiscuous homosexual with a fondness for young men”. He may not be the most reliable source for British misdeeds (particularly concerning children) in the colonies if this is true. I‘m not going to claim this is the truth though because as the same Wikipedia article states, this kind of slander would have been useful in reducing support for him.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The Europeans wanted rubber. They don't know how to get rubber, so they gather up a bunch of the natives and abuse them horribly and send them off to go find rubber through threat of starvation, hostages, etc, etc. While there, they also promote another class to watch the majority of the workers, the so called, "forest guards."

I’m surprised they didn’t know how to get rubber or at least didn’t very soon learn, but I’m not doubting the abuse went on.
The Immortal Goon wrote:In doing this, because it's very hard to kill someone with one shot, a black market develops of native hands, heads, and penises. As it becomes a currency, it also becomes a standard punishment. So when you see pictures of Africans escaping, they often are handless

Accounting for every bullet doesn’t mean only using one or two or 10 of them to kill each enemy. Would the Europeans be so unreasonable as to expect every bullet to be a lethal one? I doubt it. They were experienced and skilful soldiers themselves who knew about the use of ammunition and would’ve expected the natives to be much less skilled than themselves. By the sounds of it though, the practice of amputation of bodily parts was the Africans’ own idea.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Obviously, this being the late 19th and early 20th century, they did not document the penises visually, but it was well known.

I’m sure they would have at some point and the reason you might not be able to find any evidence of it is because it could well not have happened. Not often enough to document it anyway. These are hardened colonial troops who have seen all kinds of savagery, I can’t see them being prudish about a penis. Also I think the Europeans would’ve have known that there could’ve been an abuse of this system; what if the natives were bringing the penis and hands of the same man and claiming they had killed two of them?
The Immortal Goon wrote:Why are people so cruel? There are theories that they were in a new place, with a diverse group of people, and perpetuating atrocities on the natives was a sort of psychological way to deal with it. Maybe there's something to the idea, but really I think it comes down to money. You can make these people work for free by terrorizing them, and you get more money in the end.

Yeah pretty much. Also in order to stop some sort of rebellion they would need to instil a certain amount of fear in the natives. No one can hold onto that sort of authority without people fearing the consequences of bringing you down. This is true of everywhere.
The Immortal Goon wrote:There certainly was slavery before the Europeans, and war and everything else. But it was a different kind of exploitation. It was like the slavery and war that existed in Europe or the Americas before expanding out.

I read what you wrote with interest but didn’t quote the whole piece because again it would take up a lot of space. But the thing I wanted to ask you about was your main point at the beginning, about it being “a different kind of exploitation”. How do you know this and how was it different exactly? Apparently slavery has been going on in Africa in a massive way since ancient Egyptian times. If we’re to believe what we’re told, slavery was carried out on an huge scale already and there wouldn’t be enough people around to only take people who were convicted of a crime or the children of current slaves (although that would arguably be worse anyway).
The Immortal Goon wrote:It was symbolic of the old Asian ways throwing out the new imperialism. Symbolic for the Arabs, Russians, everyone else. Really, not so much the Japanese as they came into the fold earlier and dealt with their stuff, but Japan was an enemy of Korea and Vietnam while China was a distant memory—like Rome or Babylon. Not any more of course, but uniting and beating themselves back up to fight for themselves was probably a model for what worked if nothing else.

It was definitely characteristic of these people to fight out imperialists, but then that is characteristic of nearly every country that was ever colonised, and so many of them have been all over the world. You could have a point in saying that people saw China partially withstand imperialism and they took encouragement from it, but this is far from making China the “mother culture of Asia”. Besides, they’d all done it of their own accord at some point in their history as well. Russia removed the Mongols before China did. The Arabs throwing off the Ottomans had nothing to do with Chinese influence either. The Viets, the Koreans and the Japanese held off the Mongols as well. This would be only naming a few.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Here they agreed on how Africa would be carved up by the Europeans. It would make sure everyone got something at least, that the Europeans wouldn't go to war with each other, and that commerce could pass through everything and everyone would get more money. It was a calculated colonization with everyone working together to break Africa up into colonies that could be run. The Germans helped the British, the French, and everyone helped everyone.

I see, although I can’t see this lasting through World War I or the build up to it. I would assume that Britain and France would still have stuck to their agreement with each other but after the war, there wouldn’t be much chance to fight each other over land anywhere else in the world either and that would continue through the inter war years and WW2 and after as well. Also, I have to ask, were there not any agreements (even if unwritten) between European powers regarding their colonies before the Berlin Conference?[/quote]
#14440390
Paul Sanderson wrote:Fair enough, so they were separated into individual states with continuing problems like in Kashmir. I should point out though that there would be inevitable friction caused by the difference in religion without British involvement in the partition. Even Pakistan which is somewhat of a basket case because of its internal division and paranoia about India doesn’t come close to African backwardness.


And a good reason for that was that India was perpetually under control of the British, challenged by the French (Seven Years War for instance), the Dutch, and the Russians, not to mention their own internal groupings. Had France, Germany, Spain, and Russia been there to back up Britain whenever someone got uppity in India, it would have been a totally different game.

Paul Sanderson wrote:I know that colonial troops have been taking native wives since colonialism began, this was extremely useful for the French soldiers in Vietnam. Though when I asked you about the official policy towards women and children I thought you would relate it to how it would have brought about the child rape problem which to me was the main issue we were talking about (I know it seems quite some away now though). Still related to this, another point of confusion for me is the apparent contradiction in the effort that the Europeans went to to put up a veneer of respectability by removing scandalous European women among other things but child rape was still something that continued (if this is what you’re saying).


The child rape just happened. It's well enough documented by people going into the regions, though this happened in Europe too. But the official policy in colonies was often to brutalize the men and impregnate native women in order to, "fix," their genetics. And, of course, destroy the old culture. There are some interesting articles about the topic, specifically how the young women born were often brought into such concubines or at least with European men. Then the native women would be disgusted with the native men, who were used as labour and whatnot, and they could try to run a line out.

Anyway, here's a report given to Edward Grey from the Congo:

Congo Report Enclosures wrote:August 12- (Enclosuere 3) Bikela’s Statement. “Ehanga did not want to take rubber to the white man. We and our mothers ran far away very far into the bush. The Bula Maradi soldiers are very strong and they fought very hard. One soldier killed and they killed one Ehanga man (this would be Bikela’s person]. Then the white man said let us go home and they went home, and then we, too, came out of the bush…After that another fighting took place. I, my mother, grandmother, and my sister Nzaibiaka, we ran away into the bush. The soldiers came and fought us, and left the town and followed is into the bush. When the soldiers came into the bush near us they were calling my mother by name, and I was going to answer, but my mother put her hand to my mouth to stop me. Then they went to another side, and then we left that place and went to another. When they called my mother, if she had not sopped me from answering, we would hall have been killed then. A great number of our people were killed by the soldiers. The friends who were left buried the dead bodies and there was very much weeping. After that there was not any fighghting for some time. Then the soldiers came again to fight with us and we ran into the bush, but they really came out to fight with [the] Iyembe. They killed a lot of Iyembe people and then one soldier came out to Ehanga, and the Ehanga people killed him with a spear. And when the other soldiers heard that their friend was killed they came in a large number and followed us into the bush. Then the soldiers fired a gun and some people were killed. After that they saw a little bit of my mother’s head, and the soldiers ran quickly towards the place where we were and caught my grandmother, my mother, Nzaibainka, and another little one, younger than us.
“Several of the soldiers argued about my mother, because each wanted her for a wife, so they finally decided to kill her. They killed her with a gun-they should her through the stomach-and she fell and when I saw that I cried very much, because they killed my mother and grandmother and I was left alone…and I saw it all done. They took hold of Nzaibiaka and asked her where her older sister was and she said: “She has just run away.” They said, ‘Call her.’ She called me, but I was too frightened and would not answer, and I ran and went away and came out at another place and I could not speak much because my thread was very sore. I saw a little bit [of] ‘kwanga’ lying on the ground and I picked it up to eat. At that place there used to be a lot of people, but when I got there there were none. Nzaibiaka was taken to Bikolo, and I was at this place alone. One day I saw a man coming from the back country. He was going to kill me but afterwards he took me to a place where there were people, and there I saw my step-father, Nzaibiaka’s father. He asked to buy me from this man, but that man would not let him. he said, ‘She is my slave now; I found her.’ One day the men went out fishing and when I looked I saw the soldiers coming, so I ran away, but a straight caught my foot and I fell, and a soldier named Lombola caught me. He handed me over to another soldier and as we went away we saw some Ikoko people fishing, and the soldiers took a lot of fish from then…and they took me to the white man.” “The white man set me to work.”


I did a Wikipedia search and it turns out Casement was Irish.


Sir Roger Casement was also a northern Protestant, the child of a British soldier. He was very close with unionists like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and was a knight. He eventually became a rebel when he became disgusted with imperialism. He was, very much, a British imperialist that worked enthusiastically for the British Foreign Office when his reports were made. Nobody disputes them,

It's true that he became an Irish nationalist that hated imperialism, but as mentioned, this was because he saw what imperialism was doing. He sent a private correspondence to Alice Stopford Green:

Sir Roger Casement, letter from Brazil April 20, 1906 wrote:It is a mistake for an Irishman to mix himself up with the English. He is bound to do either one of two things - either go to the wall, if he remains Irish - or become an Englishman himself. You see I very nearly did become one once! At the Boer War time. I had been away from Ireland for years - out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind - trying hard to do my duty and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer the idea of the Englishman. I had accepted Imperialism - British rule was to be extended at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun, and those who opposed that extension ought right to be ‘smashed.’ I was on the high rod to being a regular Imperialist jingo - altho’ at hear underneath all and unsuspected almost to myself I had remained an Irishman. Well, the war gave me qualms at the end - the concentration camps bigger ones - and finally when up in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold - I found also myself - the incorrigible Irishman. I was remonstrated there by British, highly respectable and religions missionaries. ‘Why make such a mother’ they said - ‘the state represents Law and Order and after all these people are savages and must be repressed with a grim hand.’ Every fresh discovery I made of the hellishness of the Leopold system threw me back on myself alone for guidance. I knew that the FO wouldn’t understand the thing - or that if they did they would take no action, for I realized then that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race - of a people once hunted themselves, whose hears were based on affection as the root principle of contact with their fellow men and whose estimate of life was to something eternally to be appraised at its market ‘price’. And I said to myself then, far up the Lulgana river, that I would do my part as an Irishman, wherever it might lead me personally...When the Irish had lost their freedom they were to be used to destroy the freedom of others.


It should be noted, that he wrote that while he was investigating a company in the Amazon that was getting rubber the same way Belgian had in Africa. Britain had published the report and Casement was a hero, but upon finding the same or worse abuses in Brazil, he also learned that the British did not want to publish the report because it was a British company that was making the crimes.

Regardless, nobody questions Casement's findings. They were collaborated several times over, most notably by Graham and Morel.

Paul Sanderson wrote:I’m surprised they didn’t know how to get rubber or at least didn’t very soon learn, but I’m not doubting the abuse went on.


They needed large amounts of rubber very quickly and suddenly. They didn't know how to make it synthetically, and it was very valuable. They couldn't make a farm of rubber trees, they had to use what was growing naturally. So it was sending natives out to go get whatever they could.

Paul Sanderson wrote:Accounting for every bullet doesn’t mean only using one or two or 10 of them to kill each enemy. Would the Europeans be so unreasonable as to expect every bullet to be a lethal one? I doubt it. They were experienced and skilful soldiers themselves who knew about the use of ammunition and would’ve expected the natives to be much less skilled than themselves. By the sounds of it though, the practice of amputation of bodily parts was the Africans’ own idea.


This happened, and it was very much not the Africans' idea. They were ordered to do this by whites:

Yale wrote:Genocide scholar Adam Jones comments, “The result was one of the most brutal and all-encompassing corvée institutions the world has known . . . Male rubber tappers and porters were mercilessly exploited and driven to death.”[6] Leopold's agents held the wives and children of these men hostage until they returned with their rubber quota.[5] Those who refused or failed to supply enough rubber often had their villages burned down, children murdered, and their hands cut off.[1,3]

Although local chiefs organized tribal resistance, the FP brutally crushed these uprisings. Rebellions often included Congolese fleeing their villages to hide in the wilderness, ambushing army units, and setting fire to rubber vine forests.[2] In retribution, the FP burned villages and FP officers sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill hiding rebels. To prove the success of their patrols, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back dead victims’ right hands as proof that they had not wasted their bullets.[3] If their shots missed their targets or if they used cartridges on big game, soldiers would cut off the hands of the living and wounded to meet their quotas.[3]


The Independent wrote:Villages were assigned a quota for the amount of rubber they had to collect and process and terror ensued if they failed to meet that quota. Military personnel, mostly made up of west Africans, ran the show and carried out the infamous practice of cutting off the hands and feet of villagers who failed to meet the quota.

"The violence was triggered by a bureaucratic system that meant these mercenaries had to justify the use of every one of their bullets by bringing back severed and smoked hands and feet," says Van Reybrouck, who was the first to gain access to rare testimonies of the time. "I read accounts of villagers who had pretended to be dead hoping to escape the terror but who then felt their limbs being cut off.

"But there is an obsession with these hands and people also forget that most of those limbs were cut off from people who were already dead."

Women would also be taken into custody until their husbands came up with the required amount of rubber. "It was a relentless policy of squeezing out local populations. Apart from the manslaughter, there was huge migration as people fled into the forest as they didn't want to work in the service of the King anymore."

Historians have struggled to come up with an estimate of the scale of the slaughter, though they are revising downwards the former figure of 10 million victims, as many deaths were also caused by disease.


I mean, really, this is pretty universally known. You can also google more sources.

Paul Sanderson wrote:I’m sure they would have at some point and the reason you might not be able to find any evidence of it is because it could well not have happened. Not often enough to document it anyway. These are hardened colonial troops who have seen all kinds of savagery, I can’t see them being prudish about a penis. Also I think the Europeans would’ve have known that there could’ve been an abuse of this system; what if the natives were bringing the penis and hands of the same man and claiming they had killed two of them?


No, they knew it happened, but it was considered poor taste to publish it. For instance (since you don't seem to believe my own work on Casement):

Hartford Publishing wrote:Casement's findings were so damning that the Foreign Office in London was too embarrassed that it could not publish the original.

Casement's description of "sliced hands and penises was far more graphic and forceful than the British government had expected". When the Foreign Office finally published a sanitised version of his report, an angry Casement sent a stinking 18-page letter of protest to his superiors in the Foreign Office, threatening to resign. He called his superiors "a gang of stupidities" and "a wretched set of incompetent noodles."


I can't find the primary source at the moment, but I have in a book here or at work a description from a missionary complaining that a pile of penises had been left from castrated Africans in a pile next to a tree. This too, was of course, not published until modern times.

Paul Sanderson wrote:But the thing I wanted to ask you about was your main point at the beginning, about it being “a different kind of exploitation”. How do you know this and how was it different exactly?


Because of the primary sources going back and forth from Africans, like Alfonso, to Portugal and Europe. From the Papal Bulls of the time. From the sheer numbers of Africans that were sent over to the Americas verses the agricultural and other work that Africans had used slaves for—which was probably comparable to slavery in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Paul Sanderson wrote:But Apparently slavery has been going on in Africa in a massive way since ancient Egyptian times. If we’re to believe what we’re told, slavery was carried out on an huge scale already and there wouldn’t be enough people around to only take people who were convicted of a crime or the children of current slaves (although that would arguably be worse anyway).


Like every other continent, African slavery was historically used mainly upon prisoners of war. Same as the Greeks, the Romans, and the rest of the Europeans. [url=Barbados]The British initially used the Irish they would capture in war to populate their slave colonies[/url]. However, as more labour was needed in the New World, it was easier just to buy a bunch of blacks than to wait until you're in another war and capture prisoners of war.

Let's use this time period as an example, the 1600s. The Portuguese had already been in Africa for some time, and had made some allies (like Alfonso of the Kingdom of Kongo). They need more slaves as they go to the New World, so they just keep grabbing more blacks from Kongo until the kingdom essentially disintegrates (it's more complicated than that, but let's just leave it there). In order to keep a foothold and destroy the last of the Kongo that had been resisting them, the Portuguese make a new friend in the region, specifically the Mbwila. They give the Mbwila a shitload of guns and they get put in charge (again, I'm really simplifying the history here).

So now the Mbwila go around and expand out. Everyone in the area clamors toward the Portuguese to get guns so that they can defend themselves. The Portuguese are there to make money and so ask what they have in exchange. Fucking beads or something that Portuguese has no use for? Rubber that has no use yet? No, the Portuguese want only slaves. So the neighbor sells off as many people possible, either from themselves or by raiding another neighbor to get prisoners of war so they can bring a bunch of slaves to the Portuguese in exchange for guns. Now the Mbwila lose against the neighbor, both need more ammunition, so they both go find a bunch of slaves to give to the Portuguese in order to get guns.

Right, so this was the Portuguese at their least offensive as it was them starting a domino going (though they're still probably raiding at this point). They need these slaves though. So let's say this neighbor and the Mbwila decide to fuck Portugal, just like the Kongo had done when they were over slaved.

The Portuguese come in there and murder the fuck out of everyone until someone comes to power that will play ball.

It was hardly the Africans having this amazingly active slave system that the Europeans just tapped into. The Europeans had their own slave systems until the African slave system was set up; and the African slave system was very deliberate.

Paul Sanderson wrote:It was definitely characteristic of these people to fight out imperialists, but then that is characteristic of nearly every country that was ever colonised, and so many of them have been all over the world. You could have a point in saying that people saw China partially withstand imperialism and they took encouragement from it, but this is far from making China the “mother culture of Asia”. Besides, they’d all done it of their own accord at some point in their history as well. Russia removed the Mongols before China did. The Arabs throwing off the Ottomans had nothing to do with Chinese influence either. The Viets, the Koreans and the Japanese held off the Mongols as well. This would be only naming a few.


I don't really understand the point of this. The Sokoto were divided by the French and British with more organized brutality than China had been for various reasons. Had the successor to the Mali risen up and thrown the Europeans out, it would have had two big likely affects:

1. The Africans would have a template or pattern for how to deal with imperialism from Europe. The Chinese, really, benefitted much from the Russians having come to the same conclusion in undermining the market entirely instead of making deals in trying to work with it.

2. There would have been a skew of support from everyone attempting to emulate the success. You'll note, for instance, Vietnam copied China's model. As did Korea.

This did not happen in Africa, mainly because of the Berlin Conference.

Paul Sanderson wrote:I see, although I can’t see this lasting through World War I or the build up to it. I would assume that Britain and France would still have stuck to their agreement with each other but after the war, there wouldn’t be much chance to fight each other over land anywhere else in the world either and that would continue through the inter war years and WW2 and after as well.


It lasted until WWI, where the Germans actually had an undefeated front.

It goes back into a kind of unofficial place between the wars (Germany has to cede everything to Belgium, Britain, and to a lesser extent Portugal and France), and after the wars it falls apart and decolonization begins.

But think about what they were left with. For the last half a millennium, Europeans had been in there thoroughly fucking everything up. Borders alone account for a huge amount of problems in Africa as the Europeans drew their borders to be in compliance with the Berlin Conference, not so that it made any sense for Africans. And, to loop back to the beginning, so that Africans would be deliberately lumped with their rivals and reliant upon the west.

That's not even getting into 500 years of sheer brutality being thrown at them constantly.

To go to the very beginning, this is why it's absurd to sit back after a few decades and ask why Africans are so backward. They're not: they are just crawling to get back on their feet after a giant organized closer fuck
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The Immortal Goon wrote:And a good reason for that was that India was perpetually under control of the British, challenged by the French (Seven Years War for instance), the Dutch, and the Russians, not to mention their own internal groupings. Had France, Germany, Spain, and Russia been there to back up Britain whenever someone got uppity in India, it would have been a totally different game.

I can’t really find anything on Google that says the Europeans powers would come to each other’s aid if something went wrong with the natives. It seems the Berlin conference was more of a recognition of each other’s territory than an agreement to help one another. You might be able to find something that shows otherwise though. Something else about the Berlin Conference was it instated the abolition of slavery (even though it carried on). Having a treaty in place that bans it would have not caused it to increase, if anything it would have lessened. Additionally it seems like after the Napoleonic wars there was very little enthusiasm to go to war against other European powers. So it sounds as though we’ve got 25 years of colonialism in Africa (as Africa was comparatively untouched until just before the Berlin Conference) against hundreds of years of colonialism in Asia.
The Immortal Goon wrote:The child rape just happened. It's well enough documented by people going into the regions, though this happened in Europe too.

It depends on how many people have said it and who they are. But using some kind of reason, it makes sense from what I said before that it was most likely no more of a European problem than an African.
The Immortal Goon wrote:Sir Roger Casement was also a northern Protestant, the child of a British soldier. He was very close with unionists like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and was a knight.

That same Wikipedia article (and others) tells us that he was secretly baptised as a Catholic when young. If he had similar feelings about Britain as do many contemporary Catholics living in Northern Ireland he wouldn’t be looking favourably on Britain. He was born in Dublin as well, but I understand that he moved to Northern Ireland when he was young. I should repeat what I said before, the testimony of one man, especially one of questionable background and integrity shouldn’t be taken as the truth automatically.
The Immortal Goon wrote:I can't find the primary source at the moment, but I have in a book here or at work a description from a missionary complaining that a pile of penises had been left from castrated Africans in a pile next to a tree. This too, was of course, not published until modern times.

None of those quotes you posted actually mentioned the cutting off of penis’s as it happens. And one of them specifically mentions “right hands” which sounds more believable. One thing I should have clarified better myself was that I do believe that the Europeans would say “bring back the right hand to prove you have killed them” but the idea of cutting off people’s hands for no reason was something unforced on the Africans and they could well have been doing this to impress their masters or as you said, use it as currency.
I left out the articles etc that you posted but it seems like you have done some research into the subject way before this thread was started. I have to say though that it’s not easy to persuade someone of a vastly differing viewpoint to yours to change their mind by posting 5 articles over the course of a post. If I post 5 articles claiming the opposite of what you’re saying, are you going to change your mind and believe me?
The Immortal Goon wrote:Because of the primary sources going back and forth from Africans, like Alfonso, to Portugal and Europe. From the Papal Bulls of the time. From the sheer numbers of Africans that were sent over to the Americas verses the agricultural and other work that Africans had used slaves for—which was probably comparable to slavery in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

I know I would be repeating myself to ask this, but I don’t know if you actually answered the question “how did the exploitation differ?”
The Immortal Goon wrote:Like every other continent, African slavery was historically used mainly upon prisoners of war. Same as the Greeks, the Romans, and the rest of the Europeans. The British initially used the Irish they would capture in war to populate their slave colonies. However, as more labour was needed in the New World, it was easier just to buy a bunch of blacks than to wait until you're in another war and capture prisoners of war

Prisoners of war are not the only sort of slaves that can be taken. People who are simply prisoners without a war condition have sufficed. This gives an incentive to imprison people on flimsy grounds I’m sure you’ll agree. Secondly, how can we strictly define “war”? If one tribe goes and attacks a smaller tribe unexpectedly and the smaller tribe resists but with barely any effect, the people who the larger tribe capture can be called prisoners of war.
The Immortal Goon wrote:So now the Mbwila go around and expand out. Everyone in the area clamors toward the Portuguese to get guns so that they can defend themselves. The Portuguese are there to make money and so ask what they have in exchange. Fucking beads or something that Portuguese has no use for? Rubber that has no use yet? No, the Portuguese want only slaves. So the neighbor sells off as many people possible, either from themselves or by raiding another neighbor to get prisoners of war so they can bring a bunch of slaves to the Portuguese in exchange for guns. Now the Mbwila lose against the neighbor, both need more ammunition, so they both go find a bunch of slaves to give to the Portuguese in order to get guns. Right, so this was the Portuguese at their least offensive as it was them starting a domino going (though they're still probably raiding at this point). They need these slaves though. So let's say this neighbor and the Mbwila decide to fuck Portugal, just like the Kongo had done when they were over slaved.

What sort of guns are we talking about in this era? Why would the Portuguese sell them guns for slaves instead of selling them something else or just taking them for free? If they arm all these Africans to the teeth surely that puts the Portuguese in the precarious position of having potential armed enemies surrounding them?
The Immortal Goon wrote:I don't really understand the point of this. The Sokoto were divided by the French and British with more organized brutality than China had been for various reasons. Had the successor to the Mali risen up and thrown the Europeans out, it would have had two big likely affects: 1. The Africans would have a template or pattern for how to deal with imperialism from Europe. The Chinese, really, benefitted much from the Russians having come to the same conclusion in undermining the market entirely instead of making deals in trying to work with it.

A template like what exactly? Do you not think that if it had happened somewhere else those tactics could’ve been able to be used effectively in Africa? With all those weapons coming in from the Portuguese or anyone else that had an interest in seeing the European powers fall, they would’ve had numerous opportunities to remove the Europeans. Also the Chinese did make deals with the British and Portuguese for a long time. I'd still like to know why you think China has been/is the mother culture of Asia.
The Immortal Goon wrote:2. There would have been a skew of support from everyone attempting to emulate the success. You'll note, for instance, Vietnam copied China's model. As did Korea.

This isn’t necessarily true either. In other regions of the world that were colonised old animosities still came to the fore and were exploited. It would only make sense that generations of tribalism would have the same effect in Africa. The country doing the colonising can always rely on native troops as well. But the main thing here is that it comes down to the ability of the guerrilla commander and this would be something the Africans lacked. Ho Chi Minh etc did use Mao’s book “on guerrilla warfare” but he always used a great deal of Napoleon’s tactics and especially TE Lawrence’s.
The Immortal Goon wrote:But think about what they were left with. For the last half a millennium, Europeans had been in there thoroughly fucking everything up.

This could be misleading. I read on Google that just before the Berlin Conference was when Europe deeply colonised Africa and that shortly before this, not much of it was actually colonised. Previously, you actually did see European rivalry and conflict between powers fighting each other over land.
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Well known that many Africans blame the white man for destroying the continent. No doubts Europeans had large influences on this continent. I guess North Africa would remain the same, but a bit more developed without French or Spanish invasion. Western Africa countries (for example, Mali) would learn armory and be deep into Feudal wars. and there also would be a lot more people with their own slave system that might be ongoing. I had similar task on term paper writing service so this theme is not new for me. And at the end I would like to add that maybe we could see an empire as big as Rome, for example, that include everything from Mali to Nigeria, with colonies and influence to the Atlantic coast.
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Emy wrote:Well known that many Africans blame the white man for destroying the continent. No doubts Europeans had large influences on this continent. I guess North Africa would remain the same, but a bit more developed without French or Spanish invasion. Western Africa countries (for example, Mali) would learn armory and be deep into Feudal wars. and there also would be a lot more people with their own slave system that might be ongoing. I had similar task on term paper writing service so this theme is not new for me. And at the end I would like to add that maybe we could see an empire as big as Rome, for example, that include everything from Mali to Nigeria, with colonies and influence to the Atlantic coast.

Honestly the problem is tribalism, remove that and it will be easy.
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