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Austin Horner 09/15/2015
History 102 Essay
Cruelty in the Congo
Throughout the course of history, slavery has changed the world, not for the better, slavery existed everywhere, in America mostly learned about American slavery. American slavery was terrible but don’t compare to the horrible things that happened in Africa in the 1800’s. King Leopold II founded the Congo, and had his servant Stanley go and explore it, and built villages there. Stanley explored most of the Congo. The discovery of rubber created the rubber boom, and the Congo had a great source of sap to make the rubber. King Leopold would use slaves from Africa to make rubber, and those slaves were treated horribly they either worked or they were killed. In
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that time at the Congo, cruelty never ended, the slaves died either by getting murdered, starvation, exhaustion, exposure and disease. The cruelty that slaves endured was terrible, the way the slaves died and after what the whites did to the slaves after death was horrible. In the Congo, murder was a huge killer but not the factor that killed the most slaves in the Congo.
During the rubber boom, villages within the Congo had to make a certain amount of rubber each day and if they didn’t the slaves would be killed, or if the slaves attempted a rebellion, that rebellion would be shut down immediately. The slaves were worked so hard until they had nothing left, the second that the slaves couldn’t work anymore, the second that they killed that slave. “ In 1899 a state officer, perhaps not realizing that one of the people he was chatting with was an American missionary, bragged about the killing squads under his command… recorded the conversation in his diary: Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand!... informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6000 cartridges, which means that 6000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their gun.” Each time a person was unable to work, they were shot and killed, and in return for proof, the cartridges and the cut off right hand of each person they killed. Even children were killed due to the lack of work, except they were beaten to death with the butts of a white man’s gun. The cutting off of hands existed they would cut of the slaves hand dead or …show more content…
alive. The slaves were killed then just thrown into the lake, with their right hands cut off. A Swedish missionary E.V Sjoblom wrote and saw this, “I saw… dead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed. It was for the rubber… When I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches of the water. As I turned away my face at the horrible sight of the native corporals…” That missionary saw some horrible things in that stream, seeing all those dead slaves with only one hand. In that stream there were hundreds to thousands of bodies with only one hand and all of it was for rubber. Murder was huge factor in the deaths of thousands of slaves, and so was starvation along with exhaustion. Slaves in villages would flee, and in that case, soldiers would destroy any type of food source that was available within that village. “As news of the terror spread, hundreds of thousands or people fled their villages. In retaliation, soldiers often took their animals and burned their hut and crops, leaving them no food.” As result of fleeing they lost their food source, which will ultimately lead to starvation and then death. Even the people that didn’t flee had a hard time to feed themselves. “Hunger also struck villagers who did not flee into the forest, because if they were near a rubber post they had to give up much of their bananas, manioc, fish, and meat to feed the soldiers”. The people that fled had their food supply destroyed, those people that stayed and extracted and made rubber still had tough time feeding themselves, because of the fact that they had to give most of their food to the soldiers that were watching them. As the solders fled villages, they would leave children, due to the fact that they believed that they might give away their positions with their crying. “As they fled these expeditions, villager’s sometimes abandoned small children for fear that their cries would give away their hiding places. As a result many children starved.” Many people died due to malnutrition, starvation and poor sanitary conditions. 4“Soldiers kept them in dirty compounds, often in chains, feeding them little to nothing until the men of a village brought the demanded amount of rubber…. In one stockade in 1899, prisoners were found to be dying at the rate of three to ten a day.” People died at the rate of three to ten a day that was all due to starvation. Murder was the second cause of death, but the leading cause of death in the Congo was disease.
Just like the Native American’s in the new world, disease killed more people than did bullets. 4“Europeans and the Afro-Arab slave traders brought to the interior of the Congo many disease previously not known there.” The diseases that they brought to the Congo were diseases like, small pox, malaria was already known, sleeping sickness and different kinds of infections that killed millions of slaves or locals. 4“The most notorious killers were smallpox and sleeping sickness….” Most deaths were result of those two diseases, when they arrived, “the local people had no time to build up immunities.” The invaders would spread the disease throughout the interior of the village and by the time they left, the village was filled with dead bodies. The Africans called small pox, either 6“the sickness from above” or 6“the sickness from heaven”, because they didn’t know where it came from. The sleeping sickness killed hundreds of thousands of people and it spread like wildfire. “Sleeping sickness also spread lethally up the rivers. Half a million Congolese were estimated to have died of it in 1901 alone. The disease is caused by a parasite spread by the bite of the pink-striped tsetse fly, about the size of a horsefly… Once contracted by humans, sleeping sickness becomes highly
contagious…” Due to those two disease small pox and sleeping sickness, it killed thousands to millions within days. Those days in the Congo for the slaves were horrifying, the idea that if you didn’t do your work, then you would be killed by starvation, murdered by soldiers or get killed by disease brought by the invaders. Many people look at slavery in America and Europe but not many people are aware of what happened in the Congo within Africa. One can even compare the holocaust to the events that happened in the Congo. All of the deaths and labor, was all for greed, just for rubber that made a man rich. Greed will continue to kill more and more people till this day.
Although populations in ancient societies suffered attacks, invasions, starvation, and persecution, there was a more efficient killer that exterminated countless people. The most dreaded killers in the ancient world were disease, infections and epidemics. In many major wars the main peril was not gunfire, nor assault, but the easily communicable diseases that rapidly wiped out whole divisions of closely quartered soldiers. Until the time of Hippocrates, in the struggle between life and death, it was, more often than not, death that prevailed when a malady was involved. In the modern world, although illness is still a concern, advances in thought and technique have led to the highest birth rates in recorded history. No longer is a fever a cause for distress; a quick trip to the store and a few days of rest is the current cure. An infection considered easily treatable today could have meant disablement, even death to an ancient Greek citizen.
Human mobility, in terms of European transcontinental exploration and colonization, began to truly flourish after the 1400s. This travel, inspired by financial motives and justified by religious goals, resulted in the European dominance and decimation of countless cultures in both the Americas and Eurasia. While at first glance it seems as though this dominance was achieved through mainly military means - European militias, like Spanish conquistadors, rolling over native tribes with their technologically advanced weapons - the reality is significantly more complex. The Europeans, most likely unknowingly, employed another, equally deadly weapon during their exploits. With their travel, they brought with them the infectious diseases of their homelands, exposing the defenseless natives to foreign malady that their bodies had no hope of developing immunities against. Because of the nature of disease and their limited knowledge about its modes of infection, the Europeans were able to dispense highly contagious and mortal illnesses while limiting their contraction of any native ones to the new territories. In short, they were able to kill without being killed. In this way, the travel of disease in conjunction with the travel of humans in a search for exotic commodities was able to limit or even halt the development of some cultures while allowing others to flourish at exponential rates.
The absence of humanitarian concerns influences the treatment of slaves during the slave trade tremendously. At first glance, one can simply pick up the fact that Africans were treated as subhuman. This did not begin as a result of difference in appearance to those in settling in America, the inhumane torture actually started back in their homeland. There were always slaves in Africa, however, due to the constant need of non-Christian slaves in America the slave trade became a booming business in Africa. Any person, any day had the likelihood of being kidnapped and taken to a faraway land to be treated as mere possessions. The lack of civilized concerns towards the Africans during the times of the Slave Trade resulted in the callous behavior
Slavery has been entwined with American history ever since Dutch traders brought twenty captive Africans to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Slavery in America is a subject with minimal truths and stories rarely told. The public school system excludes the fact that eight of the first twelve American presidents were major slaveholders. Emancipation brought freedom, but not approximation. The civil rights movement killed Jim Crow, but shadows remained. Affirmative Action created opportunities, but racism continues.
With no treatment half of patients who enter the second phase die within ten to fourteen days. Similar to yellow fever, malaria was transmitted to humans through mosquito bites, causing symptoms such as fever, fatigue, and vomiting. Difficult to recognize at first malaria continues to cause yellowing of the skin, seizures, and even death; these symptoms normally begin after ten to fifteen days after being contracted. Malaria was brought over to early America through slavery and killed millions of people between the seventeenth and twentieth century. Throughout the growth and expansion of America there was been several disease outbreaks both endemic and epidemic such as small pox, measles, yellow fever, and malaria. Starting with the Colombian exchange and slavery these diseases were brought to the new world and spread like wildfires that devastated populations both native and nonnative. Most commonly known for the death toll on the native Americans these diseases were so costly due to low resistance, poor sanitation, and inadequate
The United States used slavery in a way that makes a lot of people around the world hate us. We made people work for us because we are too lazy to do it ourselves, why do we have to have slaves? Slaves do not have a decision to where they decide if they work or not. This document let us gain a lot of respect from other countries. Across the world the United States is known for our slave trades in the 1800’s. If we would not have ended slavery there is no telling where the country would be. Abraham Lincoln was a major part of the ratification process and on February 1, 1865 he approved the joint resolution of congress. If slavery would not have ended would we have more wars where the slaves rebel against the slave owners and their masters and start a joint military. Now that we do not worry about slavery we do not have to worry about the slaves rebelling. If African Americans had a choice to be a slave and be told what to do would they do it? People do not unde...
The world changed because of slavery and is the way it is because of the history of America. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future. Thank God the world is not the way it was. I cannot imagine what painful lives the slaves had to endure. But we can become knowledgeable about the history of slavery and America and learn from it in many different ways.
“Leopold had to recruit not just Belgians like Leon Rom, but young white men from throughout Europe, attracting them by such get-rich-quick incentives [...]” Much of the torture that Africans faced was due to either not producing enough rubber, killing the vine, or not being productive and efficient enough. “Although some whites in the Congo enjoyed wielding the chicotte, most put a similar symbolic distance between themselves and the dreaded instrument.” Hochschild used first-hand accounts from the very people who committed these atrocities in order to illustrate how desensitized they became, and how they saw it as nothing more than their obligation, that it was needed in order to be successful and prosperous.
Plagues and Peoples. By William H. McNeill. (New York: Anchor Books: A division of Random House, Inc., 1976 and Preface 1998. Pp. 7 + 365. Acknowledgements, preface, map, appendix, notes, index.)
Mosquitoes carried the diseases and when a person got bit he would give a disease to the mosquito and the mosquito would pass it on to the next victim ("Historical Overview").
Slavery was created in pre-revolutionary America at the start of the seventeenth century. By the time of the Revolution, slavery had undergone drastic changes and was nothing at all what it was like when it was started. In fact the beginning of slavery did not even start with the enslavement of African Americans. Not only did the people who were enslaved change, but the treatment of slaves and the culture that each generation lived in, changed as well.
Over the course of human history, many believe that the “Congo Free State”, which lasted from the 1880s to the early 1900s, was one of the worst colonial states in the age of Imperialism and was one of the worst humanitarian disasters over time. Brutal methods of collecting rubber, which led to the deaths of countless Africans along with Europeans, as well as a lack of concern from the Belgian government aside from the King, combined to create the most potent example of the evils of colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. The Congo colonial experience, first as the Congo Free State then later as Belgian Congo, was harmful to that region of Africa both then and now because of the lack of Belgian and International attention on the colony except for short times, the widespread economic exploitation of the rubber resources of the region, and the brutal mistreatment and near-genocide of the Congolese by those in charge of rubber collecting.
Slavery, like many ill-fated and evil inventions reached epidemic levels in early Europe and the American colonies. The history of slavery is documented most acutely during the period when slaves first arrived to the new land and when the colonies had first developed into the fledging United States of America. This would lead us to believe that slavery had not existed before this period or that the consequences and relevance of it had little historical, social, or economical importance. While some of this might be true, the act of enslaving other human being has existed for hundreds of before the Europeans ever reached and explored the continent of Africa. Proponents of slavery could argue that it is just a natural step in the evolution and development of civilized man. Historic data revealed that the African people form of enslavement on one another was drastically different then European and American way. Although slavery as we know it has been abolished, the consequences have had and will surely have everlasting effects on you, me and the future of every child
African slavery started at the 16th century and ended in the 19th century. Slave life was the most brutal and disrespected period of America. When Africans first stepped foot on the slave ships coming to America things were bad. The white man beat, raped, and treated the black men like animals. Life on the plantation wasn’t any better. The slaves didn’t work for a paycheck, they worked for their lives. The black man had difficulties adapting to the environment, learning another language, and being a monogamous.
This project contains material from a variety of sources. Two of these sources include a newspaper article from the New York Times and a document found on the database ELibrary. The newspaper article, titled Congo’s War Turns to Brutal Killings on City’s Streets, is a primary source that was created by Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times newspaper with the intention of informing people about the wars in the DRC. It was published August 28, 1998, the day after the events written about occurred. This document exists to inform the readers of the New York Times about the events happening in the DRC at the time of publication. The author thought that men and women over the age of about 25 would be reading this. In general, most people do not have the interest in