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