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Impact of colonialism in africa
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George Washington Williams, an African American legislator, and Kande Kamara, an African colonial subject, both experienced some of the most brutal products of European Imperialism. Williams, in the late nineteenth century, toured the Belgian controlled Congo and witnessed the harsh measures King Leopold implemented to maintain absolute control and bleed the country of its resources. Kamara, on the other hand, bore witness to the end result of overzealous imperial ambitions when he was forced to fight for the allies in the trenches of WWI. These two men’s experiences, although considerably different, both shed light on Europe’s colonial philosophy of racism and ethnic superiority and its position of immense power during this period.
Summary of the text: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a historical fiction published in 1998 (Hochschild, 1998). It comprises a myriad of evidence to testify the Belgian King Leopold II’s atrocities in Congo between 1885 and 1908 for the sake of capturing the attention of various readers towards the Belgian imperialist delinquencies through a detailed narration of a number of main characters’, including George Washington Williams and William Henry Sheppard, experiences in Belgian Congo (Hochschild, 1998). In this excerpt, it illustrates William’s peaceful exploration in Congo as the first American-Black missionary. During his journey, not only did he explore the Congolese culture,
In that quote you can see the true disgust and hatred for something that was not European. This is just one of many different captains and scholars who traveled to Africa and to their surprise, were stunned by the amazing towns, workmanship, craftsmanship, and art that African people had. This was first accounts of Africa that would eventually lead to Europeans conquering the land and claiming it as their own
Douglass uses paradox to demonstrate that slavery degragrates the slaverholder. When Douglass under Mr. Sever’s care he described that: “He was less cruel, less profane… He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. ”(Douglass 24). Most slaveholders are characterized to be cruel and inhuman because of the whipping and the way they treated the slaves.
The burden of the black man is the time in the lives of the Africans where they have to defend themselves from the colonizers, or to them, the white westerners. In the poem The Black Man’s Burden, by H.T. Johnson in 1899 as a reply to The White Man’s Burden, Johnson says “Pile on the Black Man’s Burden/ His wail with laughter drown/You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem/And will take up the Brown.” (Johnson 9-12) This excerpt shows readers exactly what the Africans were forced to go through.
He highlights his message to his audience by exampling a ship lost a see and whose sailors were dying of thirst. The only way they managed to survive was after they had listened to the advice of the skipper who told them to “cast down their bucket” into the sea and bring up the fresh water. This analogy exemplifies how blacks were also
In Equiano's personal slave narrative, "The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African", Equiano flips the idea that the African people are backwards and barbaric, thus ripe for slavery, by demonstrating his personal exceptionalism through his literacy to show that it is truly the white people who are backwards and barbaric through their own hypocrisy. This reversal that Equiano demonstrates in his slave narrative shows that the savagery of African people exists as a misconception and makes the reader fully grasp the need to abolish slavery and any inequality present. On page seventy-eight, Equiano uses first person pronouns like 'I', 'my', and 'me' to separate himself from the other African people and whites around him. This separation that Equiano creates demonstrates his exceptionalism as an African slave.
The idiosyncratic style Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass depicts the discriminatory actions of postcolonial slave owners in the southern United States, which reflects their greed for unpaid labor on their plantations. He employs the metaphor of the book that their masters prohibited them from owning by law throughout the memoir to demonstrate the avarice that drives white slave owners to turn a darker-skinned, intelligent being into a machine for personal benefit for centuries after the colonization of America. Also, the irony further displays the power of greed by expressing the slaveholder’s uncivilized method of forcing another human out of civilization. Furthermore, his use of a paradox of the use of pure religious beliefs to justify a slaveholder’s inhumane treatment reveals their rapacious actions that contradict the teachings of the church.
This chapter addresses the central argument that African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed. For example, the author underlines that approximately 50,000 African captives were taken to the Dutch Caribbean while 1,600,000 were sent to the French Caribbean. In addition, Painter provides excerpts from the memoirs of ex-slaves, Equiano and Ayuba in which they recount their personal experience as slaves. This is important because the author carefully presents the topic of slaves as not just numbers, but as individual people. In contrast, in my high school’s world history class, I can profoundly recall reading an excerpt from a European man in the early colonialism period which described his experience when he first encountered the African people.
In this article “African Dimensions Of The Stono Rebellion”, John Thornton a professor of history and African American studies, who wrote about the African slaves in the Americas, and specifically the servants in South Carolina during the early eighteenth century. In his writing, the author describes the personality of Africans and their desire to escape from slavery, going through obstacles on their path to freedom. John Thornton is primarily an Africanist, with a specialty in the history of West Central Africa before 1800. His work has also carried him into the study of the African Diaspora, and from there to the history of the Atlantic Basin as a whole, also in the period before the early nineteenth century. Thornton also serves as a consultant
When Belgium colonized Congo, the Congolese people’s world quickly changed from the past, influencing their lives heavily. Ten to twenty-three million people died during Leopold’s rule from 1885 to 1908 (Kenneth). The Congolese people weren’t treated fairly and faced many hardships. Most Congolese people died because of King Leopold’s treatment, including war, starvation, forced labor and disease(Bland). This goes to show how poorly King Leopold treated the people and how he didn’t care about the Congolese people, only the reward.
Men owned men because of the color of their skin. These ex-slaves were uneducated and were scared of any change in their lives. What could be theirs today, may not be theirs tomorrow. It’s a shame that people had to live in fear of the government taking something away from them and all they did was share part of their lives to be documented and the documentation was not even accurate. “Freedom had come to a nation of four million slaves, and it changed their lives in deep and important ways.
The line “They drove me out of the forest. They took away my jungles.” shows that the white men had taken them away from their comfort zone, their families, and their possessions. There was also the line. “Now I herd with many-
Africans were displayed as objects for buying and selling, which robbed them from their individuality and human dignity. Davidson states that the mutual respect that was once there between Africans and white people was forever changed. Boahen, in General History of Africa VII: Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880-1935, reports that there “…still stood an attitude of cultural and racial superiority, formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and regularly given expression in descriptions of the African as childlike or ‘non-adult’. This latter attitude in turn gave birth to widespread belief that European domination had to last for a very long time”
Frederick Douglass was a great writer, but he wasn’t always. He was an escaped slave who used that in his speeches as a topic to gain the attention of his audience. His audience was a seemingly sympathetic one and got to them through rhetorical questions. Douglass wanted to convey the message that there are many changes that need to be made.
