A bit of this and that, Dutch life from an immigrant perspective
Monday, December 10, 2018
Mother Africa
As I continue to read and learn about the history that brought us to here, I am learning about colonialism in Africa. When Europeans first got there they called it "The Dark Continent". The more I read, the more I begin to think that the Europeans were the ones who darkened Africa with their presence. It was a lot nicer before they got there.
The names that figure in are ones like King Leopold II of Belgium, and Cecil Rhodes of England. They were there for things like rubber plantations and diamonds and later petroleum. We call former colonies "The Third World" because calling them former colonies would imply two things. One: that the former colonists are responsible for the state those countries are in, and Two: that the former colonists have a responsibility to make it right. On some level the European nations which took part in colonialism acknowledge that responsibility but not outright. They call it foreign aid payments to developing nations and they package it with a lot of conditions for the countries they give it to, like insisting on population control measures.
First came the missionaries. European missionaries first arrived in Africa during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Portuguese missionaries to Ethiopia were somewhat surprised to find a large community of Coptic Christians already there, but they were undeterred and decided to convert the country to Christianity anyway. They spread out and drew other more trade-minded Europeans to Africa. The slave trade began, which in turn led to Europeans deciding that there had to be more missionaries and along with them colonies, because there was gold in them thar' hills. And diamonds, and room for rubber plantations and chocolate plantations and coffee plantations.
When England ended slavery in their colonies they promised to pay compensation in the amount of what translates into about £17 billion. That money was not paid to the people newly freed from slavery or the countries in Africa that had had their people stolen into bondage overseas. It was paid to the owners to compensate them for the loss of their slaves. It wasn't paid off until 2015. In the meantime the families who received that compensation went on to become leading families who shaped England's policies and laws in the two centuries that followed the ending of slavery. When slavery was brought to an end in the Americas they decided they could just enslave the Africans where they were and take their land and put them to work on it producing European trade goods. All they really did was stop exporting humans from Africa. Except for the ones brought to Europe to be on display in human zoos. Europeans literally treated Africans like animals, both in Africa and in Europe.
Leopold II
After the end of the slave trade, different European countries started colonizing Africa and claiming they were there to "civilize". "Civilize" they did, down the barrel of a gun. King Leopold II of Belgium set up his own personal colony in what he called "Belgian Congo". The people of the Congo were put to work producing rubber for King Leopold. If they didn't, they got their hands chopped off or they had family members murdered by the white overseers and their hands were delivered to the malingering worker. All to get them to go back to work. Leopold killed more people than Hitler did later. In the present day Belgium is reopening the Africa Museum after renovations and Congo is asking for their stolen art back, along with an acknowledgement from Belgium for what they did to their country.
There were countless atrocities carried out against the people of the Congo. It was where Jameson's whiskey heir bought a little girl and had her cannibalized in front of him because he wanted to see it. Europeans did some extremely fucked up things to Africans during this period of colonization.
Congolese worker whose hand was chopped off
Cecil Rhodes
Then we have Cecil Rhodes. He was there for diamonds in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also a racist and a eugenicist who believed that if he could just clear out the natives in the country he named after himself, "Rhodesia", he could make room for excess Europeans to settle on. He was going to make the native people build the infrastructure and terraform the land for Europeans first though. In the official telling of the story he brought civilization to Africa in the form of railroads and industrialization. It wasn't meant for Africans to benefit from though. He got his diamonds too. So many diamonds that it threatened to devalue diamonds to a common semiprecious stone. He set up De Beers to create an artificial scarcity and keep the value of diamonds high. Later they ran extensive advertising campaigns to convince western women that they must demand diamonds in their engagement rings. Thanks to Rhodes and colonialism all diamonds almost without exception can be classed as "blood diamonds". He also set up the Rhodes scholarship, which he intended as a fund to educate well-to-do white men in his name.
To this day we don't know how much wealth Europe or England has extracted from Africa. The truth is that they never stopped. To them Africa is just one big plantation/mine/dumping ground. And the people who colonized Africa never intended to let them run themselves. They definitely never wanted them reaching any level of successful self-government that would allow them to take part in international forums with an equal voice. European countries had once divided up the continent and indeed the world between them.
America, for its part, had its own African colony. When slavery ended in America, the ruling class decided that they didn't want to extend full citizenship and rights to the newly liberated descendants of the people they'd enslaved. There was no way in hell they were going to let them become equals. To be fair, a lot of the newly freed people didn't want to live in America because they knew damned well that they weren't going to be treated equally. The compromise was to buy them a country in Africa and ship them over there. The result was Liberia. Of course America expected to control this new country and meddle in its affairs and extract value from it. They weren't giving it to the people they were sending there to run things.
And of course they didn't offer equality to the ones who stayed. Instead they instituted apartheid and claimed it was "separate but equal". When western artists boycotted South Africa's Sun City in the 80's to protest apartheid, they carefully avoided the topic of America's apartheid because they weren't going to do a song like "I Ain't Gonna Play America". That would be career suicide. Somewhat cynical of them in retrospect. The boycott song for Sun City reached the top 40 in the charts in Europe, but not in America.
Decolonization
After WWII when Europe was decolonizing, they gave the countries their independence and helped institute democracies because it turns out that western-style democracies are easily rigged and subverted. And so they rigged the elections in African democracies and installed presidents and dictators who, if not clear sycophants to western nations, were amenable to bribery and manipulation to suit the western agenda. Like letting them mine for minerals and drill for oil. The west rewarded the African leadership who went along with their plans by making them wealthy and teaching them to live a rich western lifestyle. They got to send their kids to prestigious western schools, after which they would come back to Africa still more disconnected from their own people. Those children of the elites would go on to become the next generation of political leaders. As long as they went along with European and American interests, they got to keep the wealth and power, but it was extremely localized power. If they are corrupt, it is because European colonial powers corrupted them.
Whenever the people in those countries get ideas of their own and overthrow the west-friendly leaders in favor of anti-colonialists or socialism or anything like that, the west engineers some political instability. There's a war. There's an imprisonment or an assassination. Then when things settle down again they put in someone friendly to them again. And then the "civilized" nations get to tut and talk about how countries in Africa just can't seem to get it together with all the help we give them. Not so mysterious considering they're still messing with them and holding them back while pretending to help them. "After all the trouble we took with them. They're like children. Isn't it cute when they imitate us and play at democracy?" All of it serves to reinforce the narrative of Africa needing the west to hold its hand because they're hopeless. It's a false narrative. We're holding them back because we still need to be able to say we're there to bring stability and civilization. If they're already stable and prosperous we can't continue to say they need us while we go on mining and shooting their animals for trophies or sending missionaries to save them from their own culture.
Mercantilism
England and Europe are not being very up-front about everything they stole from the continent of Africa during colonialism and it's very hard to find an accounting in monetary terms for how much profit they made from this period out any of their colonies. If the £17 billion compensation figure is anything to go by, it either represents an huge number of people being held in slavery or it represents the profits lost by their colonial owners with their loss. Probably it represents both. Either way, it's an intriguing figure in the trail of breadcrumbs leading back into the colonial past. Indian economists place the figure taken out of India during English colonization at around £45 trillion in today's money. As for what profit was made from the American colonies by western powers and out of Asia, financial figures aren't easy to find. There might be a reason for that. It would explain how western nations came by their prosperity now in relation to their former colonies. They built capitalism on the back of mercantilism which they built from colonialism. Asymmetry was built into the system for the benefit of the colonial powers. That asymmetry still exists today, but we paint it with humanitarian colors. We still practice mercantilism with them and take their resources and leave large swathes of the people living there without so much as electricity or running water.
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