What was Africa actually like under European rule

What was Africa actually like under European rule

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Railway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising#Kenya_before_the_Emergency
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference
youtube.com/watch?v=aS_TbWbqkSU
archive.org/stream/APreliminaryReportOnTheAtrocitiesCommittedByTheCongoleseArmyAgainst/Congo4_djvu.txt
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Tribe which kissed the most ass lorded over the other tribes

A few people educated enough to run low level administration

wide range of conditions based on the colonial power in the region and the tribal politics of that region

British: generally better run and more humane
French/Germany: less well run, less humane
Portugal/Belgian Shit shows. the worst thing you can imagine
Italy: general incompetence

Pro-tip: the existing independent nations share those characteristics of their former colonial masters.

No European control could be exercised without the cooperation of large numbers of Africans. This was secured in two ways. First, just as the Europeans had relied on Africans for the rank and file of their armies and police, so their administrations and economic enterprises could not function without a host of Africans employed as clerks, messengers, craftsmen of all kinds, and labourers. All of this employment offered new opportunities to Africans, and to ensure an efficient labour force all European administrations began to supplement and develop the schools begun by the missionaries.

Were the Portuguese always terrible or was just until the colonial wars in the 70's. What stuff did they do?

All Colonial lands were fucking terrible. Certain ones where more "humane" as user said. Not humane by our stands but for them. There are many accounts where they would cut the big toe of many of the African workers, keeps them from running away. They would still have the ability to work. Read some of the Congo books, shit was insane. Something to take note though, is that many people have this misconception that before the these European nations arrived that Africa was this peaceful continent. Africa was just as bad if not worse then some of this colonies.

>le French colonialism was less well run and less humane than British colonialism meme
TORIES GET OUT REEEEEEEEEEE

>All Colonial lands were fucking terrible

No.

Up to 1912 the inexperience and relative weakness of Liberia’s ruling elite meant that it achieved little except to run up a dangerous indebtedness to ingenuous and potentially rapacious European investors. In 1925–26, however, the tide began to turn for them when the American Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, worried lest its supplies of raw material should become a British colonial monopoly, secured a new American loan for Liberia and began to operate a one-million-acre plantation concession in the hinterland of Monrovia. The country was now supplied with a sure access to world trade, and its government with the means to achieve a stable revenue. Within 25 years Liberia’s foreign trade grew from less than $3 million a year to some $45 million, and government revenue from a mere $500,000 a year to nearly $10 million. The evident dangers that Liberia might become too dependent on a single export crop, and that it and its administration might become sole fiefs of the American company, began to disappear when during World War II U.S. strategic interests caused its government to begin to give aid to Liberia and to develop its first modern port, and when in the 1950s both American and European interests began to exploit Liberia’s large-scale deposits of high-grade iron ore. By the 1960s Liberia was on the way to becoming one of the richer western African countries, and the ruling elite began to feel sufficiently secure to share both some of its political power and some of its prosperity with the native peoples.

France was Belgium-tier.
>Oubangi-Shari formed part of a large area called at first French Congo and then, from 1910, French Equatorial Africa. To occupy this area inexpensively the French government, following the example of Leopold II in the Congo, allocated huge areas of it to concessionary companies in 1899.
>These companies were subject to French sovereignty, but in fact had almost unlimited control over the Africans in their areas, whom they were allowed to exploit ruthlessly to produce wild rubber and other goods. Rubber was the main product demanded in Oubangi-Shari as in the Congo Free State; Africans were forced to collect it by all sorts of means, including the taking of families as hostages until the rubber was brought in. The French administration and its troops helped enforce the regime of extortion, and officials supplemented the terror imposed by the company staff. One murder of an African by the officials Gaud and Toqué in 1903 led to a public outcry in France and to the dispatch of a commission of inquiry into French Congo under Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, the original colonizer of the area (1905). Little improvement resulted, and the companies lost only some of their territories and rights. Wild rubber collection was largely abandoned a few years later, but in the 1920s the government imposed forced cotton cultivation in Oubangi-Shari, while from 1921 to 1934 its men were conscripted in large numbers for work on building the railway from Pointe-Noire to Brazzaville (the Congo-Ocean Railway), which led to the death of thousands of workers.

N: Africans were savages.

C: Europeans were savages.

If you are triggered by statement N or C, chances are you are also a savage.

Germany had two pretty well-run colonies in Africa (Togoland and Kamerun). The other two were shit though.

It should be possible to report people on Veeky Forums and similar boards for not contributing to the discussion or trying to discourage it.

You say that like the UK didn't do the exact same shit.

far less well run than their british neighbors. the metric for this is pretty apparent as they often occupied lands inhabited by the same tribes.

If this is the case then why did they outperform their neighbors in the war? Also unlike any of Britains colonies, Togoland was actually self-sufficient.

Did they? In Africa that is, I know how badly they fucked India.

you misunderstand. i'm not talking about functionality as a colony for use in trade and war, but living conditions and so on. this is what i assume OP meant although he left it pretty ambiguous.

I have absolutely no idea why you would expect them to behave more humanely in Africa rather than India, it seems obvious to assume the opposite.
But let's be more specific.

Rubber? The fact that the company exploiting rubber in Belgian congo was called the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company doesn't raise any questions? (To their credit, Britain did use their influence to protest against the extreme cruelty rather than simply going along with it.)

Railway construction? They provide the textbook example:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Railway
>The *official* approach, British and local, to both slavery and free porter labour included a genuine belief that the man doing the work had real interests which deserved concern and protection. No such concern was evident among parliamentarians, missionaries or administrators for those at work on the construction of the Uganda Railway. It was decided to build the railway as quickly as possible; its construction was viewed almost as a military attack—casualties were inevitable and might be large if the objective were to be attained and momentum not lost.
>Because of the wooden trestle bridges, enormous chasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men infected by the hundreds by diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night, the name "Lunatic Line" certainly seemed to fit.

You want a more comprehensive view? Check out the background of the Mau Mau uprising, it does an excellent job outlining the British colonial policy in East Africa. Then you can read Caroline Elkin's Imperial Reckoning to see how they handled the "rebellion" itself.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising#Kenya_before_the_Emergency

The Congo Ocean Railway was an earlier rebellion that was also pretty fucked.

Togoland was still a huge drain.

C is true but it was for the good of us all

>Togoland was still a huge drain
It wasn't, actually. You should read "A Historiography of German Togoland, or the Rise and Fall of a "Model Colony" by Dennis Laumann

In that case, it really depends on who you're talking about. Arabs in German East Africa had a far higher living standard than any blacks in any of Britain's colonies. German askaris were also treated far better than British ones and the Schutztruppen wasn't segregated, unlike the Kings African Rifles. It's really dependent on who, where and when you're talking about.

Also, I guess I need to mention this because of where we are, but I'm far from a German colonial apologist. German colonialism had it's awful points to it (see the Namaqua and Herero Genocides), but not all of it was awful when compared to other colonial powers and vice versa.

Under direct European rule?

It was like Africa down there I tell ya

Belgium did literally nothing wrong

How did a shit country like Belgium get so much african land?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference

>1884-1885
>The Congo Free State was confirmed as the private property of the Congo Society, which supported Leopold's promises to keep the country open to all European investment.
>The territory of today's Democratic Republic of the Congo, some two million square kilometers, was confirmed by the European powers as essentially the property of Léopold II (but later it was organized as a Belgian colony under state administration).

tl;dr:
>Congo Basin pretty unexplored
>Belgian King wants to be a big guy, but his government doesn't
>endorses several investments into the region anyway
>other nations have claims on the region as well
>Berlin-Congo Conference
>everyone accepts Belgian/Luipold's claims as buffer zone between the big players

>>The Congo Free State was confirmed as the private property of the Congo Society, which supported Leopold's promises to keep the country open to all European investment.

Leopold broke that promise pretty much ASAP.

Only Togoland and German Samoa became profitable and self-sufficient; the balance sheet for the colonies as a whole revealed a fiscal net loss for the empire.

Even then profitable can be a stretch.

Well shit. I was thinking more of Nigeria and Ghana, didn't realise how bad they were in East/Central Africa.

Absolutely none of that is contrary to what I've stated. Also Samoa wasn't self sufficient.

So did they just chop off hands indiscriminately?

Why are the Italian colonies the most cultured in the present day?

As somebody living in what is formerly a British colony, I doubt it.

Bull fucking shit.

Come on, Veeky Forums somebody has to have some horror stories from the Belgian Congo that they can greentext. I'm sick of not having much context when I see that thing tv characters do where their eye twitches involuntarily when they recall the fucked up shit they saw in the Belgian Congo.

I can recommend a doc. it's biased but I like it
youtube.com/watch?v=aS_TbWbqkSU

t. englishman

Well here's what the Congolese did to the whites after 100 years of brutal occupation....

archive.org/stream/APreliminaryReportOnTheAtrocitiesCommittedByTheCongoleseArmyAgainst/Congo4_djvu.txt

>herero genocide
>actually believing british propaganda

Self-sufficient can mean Australia tier to one bad day=everything goes to shit.

?
The Italian colonies are utter messes currently.

>Because of the wooden trestle bridges, enormous chasms, prohibitive cost, hostile tribes, men infected by the hundreds by diseases, and man-eating lions pulling railway workers out of carriages at night, the name "Lunatic Line" certainly seemed to fit.
>man-eating lions
Maybe my day job isn't as shitty as I think it is.

Workers rights didn't really exist as a thing in colonies. Like with the Kongo-Wara rebellion it pretty much forced France into ratifying the International Labour Organisation Forced Labour Convention of 1930, No. 29.

>some gangrape
Less horrible than anything on any front in WWII.
Check out what went on in Algeria during their independence wars.

Some of this is totally weaksauce too, I mean come on, shit like this is probably going on right now in South Asia or any Third World country with ethnic conflicts and not even being reported :

On the 6th of July, I960, at Inkisi, Mm was at home around 8-30 p.m. with three friends, when five or six soldiers entered the house. Two or three of them dragged one of the young women in a room. When she cried for help, Miss burst into the room where her friend was fighting the assaulters, but the soldiers grasped her and dragged her from one side to another of the room. They tried to rape her, tearing her clothes and hitting her. But they did not succeed, A black policeman put an end to the scene.
A few minutes later, a Congolese sergeant broke into the room and tried several times to rape one of the ladies in the presence of her four children. The lady fainted two or three times. The soldier thereupon attacked another young lady and dragged her into an adjoining room from which cries for help could be heard. The soldier remained about fifteen minutes with his victim.

On the 8th of July, at Matadi, the Swiss subject N., was arrested around ten o'clock by Congolese policemen. At the Damoi camp, he was hit in the back with rifle butts, while a policeman told him; literally: "that's independence". Later he was insulted, humiliated and hit with rifle butts.

The horror stories come from the Congo Free State, not the Belgian Congo. The Congo Free State was the private property of King Leopold, the Belgian government and parliament had no control over it. When Leopold's brutality was brought to light, the Belgian state took over control of the area from him in 1908, and were significantly less brutal (more on par with other colonial powers, so still brutal, but not like Leopold).

>Italy: general incompetence
Italy's Colonies were the most developed in all of Africa
I agree that countries that adopted British Institutions are far better off today though

>implying
Germany had other major fuckups. The Hehe revolt, the Maji Maji Rebellion, porter treatment before and during WWI, refusing to abolish slavery, and worker treatment in East Africa prior to the 1907 reforms.

Germany gave quite a few workers rights to East Africa in the wake of the Maji Maji Rebellion and the Hottentot election. I wrote my undergrad thesis on this.

All tales of brutality are post-colonial anti-imperialist "black legend" tier rhetoric spread by nazis, marxists, americans and all other opponents of European empires. Before and after colonialism was worse.

>segregated

Why would non-segregation be a good thing in the context of linguistically diverse colonial troops? Having a legion of all-Zulu soldiers is a lot more efficient than appeasing modern ideas of niceness by integrating Scottish, Xhosa and Zulu soldiers into one unit.

Well, in the case of the Germans, askaris were actually taught the language of the Empire. Afaik, the was never not the case in the colonial regiments of other states.

>Someone else read Imperial Reckoning
Good man.

Best part: The railway was a total shitshow and immediately fell into bankruptcy. They actually expected the africans to use it and pay for it.

Lol no. Eritrea was heavily underdeveloped until the fascist era and even then only restricted Asmara and Masawa and the natives couldn't really utilize it since the colonial policy started to go more into disenfranchise the natives for the incoming settlers.

are you completely forgetting French and Portuguese Africa?

French askaris could speak french...

Every single colonial military you had ot speak the language or at least pick up on it easily.

Yeah, I said that.

Double negatives are confusing.

Better

>the existing independent nations
>nations
they're not nations, just states

Some of them aren't even states

Who were the best to worst colonist during the second era of colonialism, not just in Africa but other parts of the world.

...

>Best
Denmark, probably. Maybe the Netherlands after 1900.

>Worst
Hard to say, really. Probably Russia.

Why do you say Denmark, they're empire was quite small. Greenland, Faroe and some countries in the Caribbean.

Yeah, and they also aren't failing states.

Denmark barely had an empire past it's national borders.

Good thing the question was "who was the best colonist" and not "who was the best empire?"

But Belgium helped Congo, look at all those hands-free activities they learned

t. Lindybeige

Depended on the particular colony and colonial power. Egyptians under British rule and Boers of Southern Africa lived much better on average than did a Namibian under German rule or Congolese under Belgian rule.

they are different races, espicially east to west and west to south, distance from west africa to south is same as poland to asia.

africa is just geography made by europeans, it is not a poltiical or ethnic geographical term.

nigeria to south africa is 2,886 miles China to sweden is 3,973 miles.

What you mean to say is Bantu west Africans.

relevant to the thread.

>All tales of brutality are post-colonial anti-imperialist "black legend" tier rhetoric spread by nazis, marxists, americans and all other opponents of European empires. Before and after colonialism was worse.
>*revisionism intensifies*

Funniest thing is that there' s local accounts and European accounts as well both on pen paper.