Here are two charities worth supporting: ACE (Aiding Conservation Through Education) a Cornish charity working in Uganda and Congo Action a British charity working in Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are on Facebook too.
Here’s why………….
I re-read ‘King Leopold’s Ghost[1]’ the other month and, not unusually, had to revisit one or two assumptions. Leopold ‘owned’ the Belgium Congo through a ‘charitable’ company; the charity turned out to be called King Leopold too and the Congo turned out to have rubber trees as well as people – no contest then. It’s estimated that 10 million people died as recipients of Leopold’s charity and civilising influence. ‘Pesky Belgians’ is not a bad initial response and Leopold is a notorious baddie. Both responses are more or less right, if a tad narrow, because, eventually, Leopold was bought out by the Belgian government but the forced labour and deaths carried on.
It turns out though that it wasn’t just the Belgians. The population loss in rubber-rich equatorial rain forest ‘owned’ by France is estimated to be around 50%, just like the Congo. Refugees who fled the Congo to seek refuge in French territory ended up fleeing back again, just as they are doing today in North Africa – liberty, equality and fraternity unless you were black. 20, 000 forced labourers died building a railway in French territory. As (bad) luck would have it old King Leopold held lots of shares in French concession companies as well as in those operating in the Congo. Every top-dog nation needed an empire so that native populations could be ‘civilised’ and christianised…oh yes, and killed. In German imperial territory, of an estimated 80, 000 Hereros in 1903, only 20, 000 landless refugees made it to 1906. Around that time US troops killed 20000 ‘rebels’ in the Philippines and saw 200, 000 more die of war-related hunger and disease. Britain went hell-for-leather in Australia (and elsewhere of course) killing aborigines (see ‘Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples’ by Mark Cocker or ‘What a piece of work is man – the politics of greed’.
Winners write history not losers. A 1959 text for young Congolese soldiers studying to become NCOs “reveals how the Belgians by acts of heroism, managed to create this immense territory” Fighting the ‘Arab’ slavers – “in three years of sacrifice, perseverance and steadfast endurance, they brilliantly completed the most humanitarian campaign of the century, liberating the decimated and exploited peoples of this part of Africa.” After all, why should Arabs be allowed to decimate and exploit when Europeans could do it just as well.
What would be the impact of the scale of death, destruction and suffering wreaked on those ‘imperial territories’ be on a European country do you think? Well, the U.K. never recovered from the two twentieth century ‘world’ wars economically, materially, socially or culturally. Here’s the thing though: 10 million military personnel died in World War One, mainly a ‘lost’ generation of young men. For a measure of its impact on the survivors try reading ‘Testament of Youth‘, but only if you’re feeling particularly resilient. 6 million of those 10 million were on the Allied side (some victory then) of which 886, 939 were from the U.K. About 7 million civilians died too. In World War Two 383, 800 UK and colony military personnel died with total military and civilian deaths estimated at around 60 million. So it seems odd to expect that equatorial Africa could bounce back when we’d taken all the rubber we needed. Around 10 million died in the Congo so that Leopold could get rich supplying rubber to the world. It’s called ‘market forces’ – the drive to make money by adding value – whatever the cost. It’s not about freedom or enterprise – it’s about greed, theft and exploitation. One person’s free enterprise is another’s bounty for cutting off Congolese hands to prove death (1308 were delivered in one day to one District Commissioner).
Perhaps we should not therefore expect that those parts of the world which we:
- conquered
- annexed,
- governed,
- exploited
- more than decimated
- and………… eventually…………gave back to what was left of their native populations
will be stable, liberal and pro-western, especially when around half their populations died under our benign rule.
If ‘History is written by the victors’, as Churchill and others have claimed, perhaps we should remember that history isn’t over yet.
[1] King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild, Papermac, 2000, London.
