Blog #34 - Red Rubber, White King, Black Death

So far throughout World History A and B, you have studied how Africa had grown as a multi-ethnic continent with different tribes and thousands of languages before the Europeans came to become the crossroads for trade and commerce like it is today.


The northern African countries, the ones that have had the most interaction with Europe (good and bad) like Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are more economically advanced than their sub-Saharan brethren. Those countries that lie South of the Equator are the ones that we will focus on for most of our imperialism unit in Chapter 24 and revisit before the end of the semester.


The British and the French were the two biggest colonizers of sub-Saharan Africa, but the Belgians, Germans, Dutch and Portuguese also carved up the continent after 1800. This period is known as the "new imperialism" - as if the time period of slavery when up to possibly 20 million Africans were stolen from the continent and shipped over to the Americas was somehow "old" imperialism and this was more "enlightened" because the Euros didn't sell humans and instead sold the resources? Yeah, right.


Some of the worst abuses of Africans were done by the Belgians in the resource-rich Congo. The Belgians extracted tons of rubber (this is where the title of our blog comes from), copper and ivory. Those villages who didn't harvest enough rubber would have children or sometimes women lose a hand. This was when the king himself, Leopold II, owned the Congo, until 1908 when the outrages over such treatment forced him to give it up. To quote a BBC documentary with the same name as our blog, "Until Adolf Hitler arrived on the scene, the European standard cruelty was set by a king."

Link to King Leopold's genocide: http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/king-leopold-ii-congo
A BBC news link that traces the current state of the region to the mess from the 19th Century: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3516965.stm

One thing that is included in your history book that was never included in the stuff that I learned was info from the Africans' points of view. The best examples are in Ch. 24, sec. 2, on p. 754-5 and p. 759-761. I had seen a movie about Shaka Zulu but it really was more about the brave whites who had to take on the Zulus in the scary war in southern Africans. I never got to learn the "other side" of the story or the Africans' side of the story unless I watched Roots which came out when I was 9 (in 1977, I think) or read stuff on my own.

As Americans, we can't claim any kind of moral superiority over the Europeans because of the U.S.'s genocidal policies enacted towards our Native Americans between the 1600s - 1800s. 

Your questions:
1. Can you think of an instance in history that we have studied where one person has had so much power over so many people and abused it so consistently?  Explain.
2. Give at least three examples of abuses that King Leopold's agents forced upon the Congolese people (as mentioned in the people).
3. How were the abuses of King Leopold's Free State exposed in 1904 - 1906?  What eventually happened to his ownership of the Congo?

300 words total.  Blog due Friday, May 29 by class.  

Blog #4 - Most influential person in early Russian history?

Yeah! Happy Cold Day!

Blog #4 due Tuesday, January 20th.

Who is the most influential person in early Russian history?

In class today, we talked about the monk, Cyril, who helped bring the written language to the Russian people by mashing the Hebraic and Greek alphabet together around 800-900 C.E./ A.D. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius

Also, there was Prince Vladimir who converted to Christianity and then made Eastern Orthodox the official religion of the Russian realm wen it split with the Roman Catholic Church in 1054 C.E./ A.D. Prince Vladimir: http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/saints/vladimir_prince.htm

Could your candidate be Ivan the Great who shifted the center of power to Moscow in the 15th Century? He strengthened the Russian empire by expanding its boundaries. Wikipedia's site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_III_of_Russia

Sometimes, your candidate for most influential could be in a negative way. Ivan the Terrible of the 16th Century set the Russian people back two centuries by pushing them farther into feudalism. He also influenced Russia in other negative ways. Most of the bad stuff during his reign, however, came in the latter half of his life after his wife died and his paranoia rose to unbelievable proportions.

Ivan the Terrible and some of the famous people in history he's connected to: http://www.nndb.com/people/933/000092657/

Or is your candidate Peter the Great who strove to modernize Russia by catapulting it into the 18th Century? History Learning site (domestic, military, and government achievements at the bottom of the page) on Pete: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/peter_the_great.htm

150 words minimum - Due Tuesday, January 20th.