What Were The Effects Of African American Imperialism

History books like to paint the practice of colonization as a peaceful movement, but reality tells a different a tale. The colonization of America, for example, resulted in massive deaths, rapes, and pillages of Native American tribes and communities who had inhabited the land centuries before the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower. Much like the Native Americans, Africans were subject to this same type of abuse. Affluent European nations such as Britain, Germany, and Italy took it upon themselves to claim all the sovereign countries of Africa with a bogus claim of wanting to “civilize” the people of these nations. Missionaries came by the boatloads in an effort to rid Africans of their already established religious beliefs and convert them
What Europeans failed to understand was African nations already had a system in place of how they dealt with each other. This system might not have been logical to the colonizers, but it worked well enough for the continent to remain stable until the Europeans arrived. Africa had a proper bartering system between nations that included the selling of goods, raw materials, gold, and sometimes even slaves (Stock 302). Slaves in Africa were often treated with respect, and had the ability to work to earn their freedom unlike in America where slaves were treated like animals (Stock 303). Europeans were also keen to creating cultural divides among nations. Often times, they would favor those that had similar features that most resembled those of the white colonist (Palmberg 77). The effects of this favoritism can be seen today with the push to have straight sleek hair and other European features, such as fairer skin and a narrow nose, in order to be considered beautiful or worthy. These beauty standards that were forced on Africans divided them further by giving them a platform to base not only who is beautiful and who is not but also who is deemed worthy of proper humane treatment and who is
For instance, Robert Stock elaborates on the divide created in Belgium that lead to the infamous Rwandan genocide.
Europeans also created conflicts among ethnic groups that had not existed before. For example, the Belgian rulers of Rwanda-Burundi insisted that everyone carry identity cards saying whether they were Hutu, the ethnic majority, or Tutsi, the minority that had ruled the Hutu. Many people did not know which of these they were. The Belgians decided that anyone who owned more than ten cows was Tutsi. The Tutsi got the best education and jobs. Soon the Hutu were resentful, and a violent conflict began (Stock