Blog #10 - White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

So far, you guys 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.

Your questions:
1. Why did Europeans colonize Africa in the 1800s?
2. Why do you think America stayed away from Africa and Asia during the 19th Century?
3. Do you think that the current economic and political state that many sub-Saharan countries are in today might have anything to do with their previous colonization? Why or why not?

200 words minimum. Due Wednesday, January 13.