African American Imperialism In The Late 1870's

In the late 1870's the major European powers look towards Imperialistic ideals as a way to strengthen their economy and gain the upper hand in the industrial revolution. This outlook stemmed towards creating new colonies and naturally Africa, the closest landmass to Europe was invaded first.

There has been Europeans holding in africa going back past the fall of Constantinople but it wasn't until the introduction of colonies as areas of monetary value and prestige that they really started to get out of control around the world. This leads to a wild annexation and claim of the major European nations on African soil.

Imperialism itself happens for many reasons to the European community. It is embraced as a way to boost nations economies
and as the areas are considerd new economies there are no laid out rules and tarifs compared to old trading partners. It also allows the mother nations to spread and usually force its culture upon the invaded people. All these negatives are attributed to Imperialsim with very few positives creating what is today the splintered countries and lost society of Africa.

These claims are settled at the Berlin conference of 1885. At the conference were all the European powers that had holdings in africa and also the United States. Unfortunately there were no representatives of the African native people. They were considered by the Europeans as inferior to them and that if anything their occupation of Africa was helping to civilize the indigenous population.

The Berlin conference went on to state a number of important acts. The divying up of Africa was written out and given terms and boundaries, splitting 90.4% of the entire continent between the major powers of: Great Britain, France, Belgium, Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Spain, Italy and Portugaul.

It also states a mission for the European powers to stop slavery in Africa. This starts with the British, By a man named Dr. Livingstone. Dr.Livingstone was a protestant missionary from Lanarkshire scotland who was raised in a devout protestant household and quickly became prominent in the exploration and preaching fields. With Dr. Livingstones anti-slavery rhetoric he was able to sway the British government into action and in 1775 Britain blockaded Zanzibars borders and forced zanzibar to make slavery illegal than in 1898 taking over the city of Khartoum the slave capital of Africa.

What this does for the African people is give them almost a fake freedom.
Although slavery has been made illegal in most African states it also pressures the freed people into welcoming the Europeans with open arms thus actually enslaving them again just under a different master.

With Africa's forced consent to European rule they start the drain of there resources and the creation of a stagnant economy that has to rely upon its ruling country for aid. The ruling country in turn has free reign to fully exploit the resources of the colony in a way that creates gigantic profit for them but leads to a declining rate of living by the African people and harsh working conditions. Because of this the African population began to become poverty stricken. Disease spread at a greater rate and yearly death rates began to rise.

Normally these things could be countered but the colonies faced to bad factors. One being either the neglect or plain not caring of the mother nations in their colonies efforts only in their profits and the African Tribes.

When Africa was split up by the Europeans in the Berlin Conference of 1885 they overlooked one major fact that has created an out of control continent to this very day. When creating these new boundaries they overlooked the fundamental fact of the placement of the pre-existing african tribes and
nations.

These tribes along with the new boundaries. Split up people with commonalities and forced other tribes who view themsleves as different and thinking they are all the same and that they must now live together with potential past enemies. This in western terms would be calling a englishman german because they both happen to be from Europe. This differing of tribes can be seen most clearly even today looking at all of south Africa's legally recognized languages: english, afrikaans, birwa, camtho, fanagalo, gail, hindi, kxoe, nama, ndbele, nu, oorlams, ronga, northern sotho, southern sotho, swahili, swati, tsonga, tsotsitaal, tswa, tswana, urdu, venda, xhosa, xiri, zulu and afrikan sign language. Not to mention the extinct languages of korana, seroa, xam and xegwi. If we assume that there is even only one separate identity and nationaility for each language then we are still looking at thirty separate ethnicities condensed into one colony by the Europeans.

Now we have to look at the realtions between these separate tribes and discern what negatives bringing them into close confines with each other might do.
That itself has been illustrated quite well numerous times, the conflict that springs quickest to my mind being the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. in April of 1994 the president of Rwanda Habyarimana was killed in a plane crash, this lead to the country having no leader and racial strife began to break out between the Tutsi peoples and the Hutus. This unfortunately led to a genocide of the Tutsi people. An estimated 500.000 tsutsi's were executed and a total of 800,000 to 1,000,000 people in total lost there lives to the
war.

This all started back in 1916 with the first colony set up in present day Rwanda by the Belgians, who seeing the two distinct tribal classes, the tsutsi's and the Hutu's treated one as the dominating ethnicity. This being the Tutsi's who where given by the Belgians better jobs and an education also widening the gap by introducing identity papers stating whether you where one or the other.

When the Belgians relinquished control of Rwanda in 1962 they left the government in the hands of the Tutsi's and for all problems afterwards it was them who where blamed and not a european state, creating a field rife for warfare. With a country in civil chaos at a point of genocide not seen since the holocaust the united nations peace force was called in unfortunately ten soldiers were murdered and the european powers decided to pull there troops off the battle field.

The problems of Africa's past are becoming a greater and greater hindrance on the continents vast potential and negligently the people and nations responsible for the waning of the african society are not willing to undo there mistakes. Africas hard ship is not a failing of there ancestors but of ours.