Undeveloped Africa - History of the World
Africa was one of the least developed areas of the planet. But it was rich with natural resources. And it had remained almost untouched by the West. But in the late 19th century, the industrialised empires of Europe were on the hunt for new territories to explore and exploit.
In 1877, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, a bit of a rogue who’d fought on both sides during the American Civil War, became the first Westerner to chart the entire 3000-mile course of the Congo River. The journey took him 999 days and cost the lives of 242 men.
But it would change the way the West saw the continent.
“This river,” said Stanley, “is and will be the great highway of commerce to the heart of Africa”.
News of Stanley’s great discovery soon reached Europe. And nobody was more fascinated than Leopold II, King of the Belgians. The problem with Belgium, he grumbled, was that it was a small country with small people. Leopold II was in the market. He wanted to rise in the world. He wanted to be an emperor, so he needed a colony.
And he’d gone to almost everywhere trying to buy one - the Pacific, South America, the far East, China… the Faroe Islands!
Nothing doing. So, when he heard of the great wealth of central Africa, he could barely contain his excitement. “We mustn’t lose an opportunity,” he said, “to gain for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake”.
Leopold persuaded Stanley to work for him in the Congo. His job was to negotiate with the Africans and establish a network of trading stations along the length of the river. Leopold called the project the International Association of the Congo, and he sold it as a kind of benign crusade, bringing religion to the Africans and freeing them from the evil Arab slave traders.
He built this monstrous great museum in Brussels to sell his idea to the Belgian people. But Leopold was - how shall we put this? Lying. He was a cynical and slippery operator. All he wanted was money and power for himself. And he wrote to Stanley that these treaties with the Africans “must give us everything”. And they did.
African chiefs had no idea they were signing away their land in return for European clothing, jewellery and gin. By May 1885, Leopold was in control of an area 76 times larger than Belgium itself. His new land had vast natural resources, including ivory, rubber, timber and copper.
He began to strip them out and export them back to Europe. Leopold now ditched the pretence of a charity and declared himself King Sovereign of the Congo Free State.
“Free”? This was in fact the most extreme example of how industrial technology could allow small numbers of Europeans to seize other parts of the world. A truth which led to a general rush for African land. The main players were France, Germany and Britain. But Italy and Portugal were there, too.
This became known as “the scramble for Africa”. Leopold sat back and watched the money pour in, but his dirty little secret was about to be rumbled.
In 1901, a young shipping clerk at Antwerp noticed something odd. The ivory and the rubber and the profits were pouring in, but nothing was going back out again. Nothing except guns and ammunition.
The horrible truth began to emerge. Leopold’s Congo was a military regime of terror. Africans were forced at pain of death, to work on Leopold plantations. If a village refused, the military were sent in.
Africans who resisted - and many did - were systematically murdered. Women and children were taken as hostages, the men were used for rifle practice, hanged and sometimes beaten to death. The population of the Congo halved. It seems almost impossible to believe, but it is now thought that 10 million people died. The word is genocide.
Leopold denied everything. But in March 1908, the Belgian government finally intervened and forced him to hand over the Congo to them. By then, it had made him a billionaire in today’s money.
The worst excesses of the Belgian Congo ended after a campaign by Christian groups, by newspapers and outraged individuals, which was really the first ever international human rights campaign.
But the land grabbing went on. And the later Africa of failed states can be traced back, literally, to the lines drawn on the map by the Italians, Germans, French, British and other Europeans. Some of the worst things that happened in modern Africa, the use of amputation as a punishment, or child soldiers, also go back to this European scramble, this European frenzy.
