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“A man’s life from birth to death, was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.”

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White Man's Burden: Evidence & POV Analysis

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In the late 1800s, English businessman Cecil Rhodes made a fortune claiming huge tracts of land in South Africa-places rich in gold and diamonds-and brutally exploiting the labor of the local population, who he considered to be members of an inferior race. Thousands died as a result of the labor practices his businesses used in Africa. In his later years, he wrote that "the world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach, I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far."

Rhodes was an imperialist, and to an imperialist, "expansion was everything." Imperialism is the policy of expanding the rule of a nation or empire over foreign countries by force. In the 1800s, European nations acquired great wealth and power from both the natural resources of the lands they conquered and the forced labor of the people from whom they took the land. Imperialists used ideas from eugenics and Social Darwinism to justify their conquests. To imperialists like Rhodes, the idea that there would soon be no opportunity for further expansion was unsettling.

The French held similar views. In a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1884, Jules Ferry, who twice served as prime minister of France, said:

Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races. . . . I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races. . . . In the history of earlier centuries these duties, gentlemen, have often been misunderstood, and certainly when the Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfill their duty as men of a higher race. . . . But in our time, I maintain that European nations acquit themselves with generosity, with grandeur, and with the sincerity of this superior civilizing duty.

A few months later, France took part in an international meeting known as the Congress of Berlin. It was called by Otto von Bismarck, then chancellor of Germany, and was attended by 15 nations. They came to establish rules for dividing up Africa-the only large landmass Europeans had not yet fully colonized. By agreeing to abide by those rules, the group hoped to avoid a war in Europe. They paid little or no attention to the effects of their decisions on Africans or the people of any other continent. The results of their efforts can be seen in the following map. The inset shows Africa just before the Congress of Berlin; the main map shows the continent in 1914.

At the Congress of Berlin in 1884, 15 European powers divided Africa among them. By 1914, these imperial powers had fully colonized the continent, exploiting its people and resources.

In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American scholar and activist, summed up the meeting held some 30 years earlier in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. In it, he revealed that the Congress of Berlin was having an impact on Africa nearly two weeks before the first group of delegates arrived in Germany.

The Berlin Conference to apportion the rising riches of Africa among the white peoples met on the fifteenth day of November, 1884. Eleven days earlier, three Germans left Zanzibar (whither they had gone secretly disguised as mechanics), and before the Berlin Conference had finished its deliberations they had annexed to Germany an area over half as large again as the whole German Empire in Europe. Only in its dramatic suddenness was this undisguised robbery of the land of seven million natives different from the methods by which Great Britain and France got four million square miles each, Portugal three quarters of a million, and Italy and Spain smaller but substantial areas.

The methods by which this continent has been stolen have been contemptible and dishonest beyond expression. Lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape, and torture have marked the progress of Englishman, German, Frenchman, and Belgian on the dark continent. The only way in which the world has been able to endure the horrible tale is by deliberately stopping its ears and changing the subject of conversation while the deviltry went on.

It all began, singularly enough . . . with Belgium. Many of us remember [Henry] Stanley's great solution of the puzzle of Central Africa, when he traced the mighty Congo sixteen hundred miles from Nyangwe to the sea. Suddenly the world knew that here lay the key to the riches of Central Africa. It stirred uneasily, but [King] Leopold of Belgium was first on his feet, and the result was the Congo Free State. . . . But the Congo Free State, with all its magniloquent heralding of Peace, Christianity, and Commerce, degenerating into murder, mutilation, and downright robbery, differed only in degree and concentration from the tale of all Africa in this rape of the continent already furiously mangled by the slave trade. That sinister traffic, on which the British Empire and the American Republic were largely built, cost black Africa no less than 100,000,000 souls, the wreckage of its political and social life, and left the continent in precisely that state of helplessness which invites aggression and exploitation. "Color" became in the world's thought synonymous with inferiority, "Negro" lost its capitalization, and Africa was another name for bestiality and barbarism.

Thus, the world began to invest in color prejudice. The "Color Line" began to pay dividends. For indeed, while the exploration of the valley of the Congo was the occasion of the scramble for Africa, the cause lay deeper. . . . Already England was in Africa, cleaning away the debris of the slave trade and half consciously groping toward the new Imperialism. France, humiliated and impoverished, looked toward a new northern African empire, sweeping from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. More slowly, Germany began to see the dawning of a new day, and, shut out from America by the Monroe Doctrine, looked to Asia and Africa for colonies. Portugal sought anew to make good her claim to her ancient African realm; and thus a continent where Europe claimed but a tenth of the land in 1875, was in twenty-five more years practically absorbed.

1. What motivated European nations to colonize Africa and Asia in the 1800s? How did they justify their conquest of other lands and people?

2. What do you think it meant to Jules Ferry to "civilize the inferior races" of Africa? What effect was this policy likely to have on the culture and way of life of indigenous Africans?

3. W. E. B. Du Bois writes: "Thus, the world began to invest in color prejudice. The 'Color Line' began to pay dividends." What does he mean by "invest"? In what sense was color prejudice an "investment" for imperialists?

4. How might the legacies of imperialism and this period's stereotypes about Africa influence the way people view the world today?

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In the late 1800s, English businessman Cecil Rhodes made a fortune claiming huge tracts of land in South Africa-places rich in gold and diamonds-and brutally exploiting the labor of the local population, who he considered to be members of an inferior race. Thousands died as a result of the labor practices his businesses used in Africa.

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In 1910, South Africa became a single country under white rule. Parliament immediately began enacting laws and policies with devastating impact on Africans. In 1912, Africans began to organize as a single people, forming the African National Congress (ANC), an organization that has endured until the present and played a major role in the country's evolution.

In 1913, the new government of the Union of South Africa passed the Natives Land Act, prohibiting Africans-67% of the population-from buying or leasing land in 93% of the country. This 93% was set aside for whites. This law was one of several pieces of legislation in the early twentieth century that formalized the racial ideology at the heart of colonialism.

The ANC immediately began organizing, writing, and speaking in opposition. They also met with a few world leaders, though never South African ones. Sol Plaatje [PLAH-key] was the president of the ANC, a man of extraordinary intellect, a journalist who wrote in eight languages and was sufficiently prominent to meet with leaders like the British prime minister. Adelaide Dube [DOO-bay], who was also a part of the ANC, came to the US for college. After her return home home, she became a teacher and a published poet. Both Plaatje and Dube found an important audience for the expression of their opposition to the new law-a first step toward encouraging people to take action against the law.

In 1921, Sol Plaatje was invited to speak at the 1921 gathering of the Pan-African Congress, an international meeting of black leaders to oppose colonialism and racial injustice. Plaatje himself was unable to attend, as he was on a US speaking tour to expose South African race rule to Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois, who chaired the congress, announced Plaatje's paper as coming from a South African who needed "to remain anonymous for the present." The following is an excerpt from this speech.

Mr. President and members of the Pan-African Congress,

I bring to you the greetings of six million British [South African] subjects . . .
The Union Parliament [The] new parliament [established in 1909] became notorious for the most barbarous legislation that ever characterized white man's rule in South Africa; the effect of it being that the South African Native today finds himself an exile and a helot [slave] in the land of his ancestors. . . .Fresh Restrictions & Discriminations
. . . In 1912, citizens of colour were by law debarred from participating in the citizen's defence force; and a new enactment debarred them from doing skilled work in the industrial centres. God almighty, maker of Eeaven and Earth has decreed that "in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,", that (if the labourer's skin be black) is unlawful in British South Africa.

All that the native is allowed to do is the ill-requited [ill paid] "unskilled" work. Occupations that call for the highest skill and which are too hard for the snow-white hands or the cultured brains of the aristocratic whites (such as, for instance, scientific cooking by women, expert mining by men, and the spelling and deciphering of the difficult African names of the Native labourers) are classed as "unskilled" and remunerated at half-a-dollar per day, or less. . . .
Draconian Prohibitions
By far the most outrageous of the monstrous crimes that characterised the South African Parliament's crusade against law-abiding Natives was the passage and enforcement of Law No. 27 of 1913. Under this enactment the Native is not only ostracised but outlawed from the land of his fathers. . . .

Since Europeans took possession of the subcontinent Native peasants made a living by renting portions of farms and sharing the produce with the landowner. Since 1913 when the act came into operation, thousands of these unfortunates have been evicted from their farms. Many of them flocked to the slums of the cities where amid appalling squalor they eke out a painful existence in congested quarters under new and unknown urban restrictions. Many more travelled from farm to farm seeking vainly for a place to abide and, having lost all, they had perforce to return to the farms and settle down to the peonage proscribed for them by law. . . .

The homes that once were a heaven to the families of Native peasants are now monuments of shattered hopes, leaving them perplexed by the relentless vicissitudes of a civilized tyranny. . . .

And what have we done to deserve this rude unsettlement and persecution? We have faithfully borne more than our share in the spread of British dominion in South Africa; for a mere pittance, we have built the beautiful railroads and magnificent cities and towns of the subcontinent; in return for a scant subsistence allowance and at frightful loss of life we have during the past quarter of a century produced for our masters more gold and diamonds than the rest of the world; we have paid all the government's taxes both fair and unfair, in addition to which we have given our sons and daughters in service to the most thankless taskmasters that ever controlled forced labour.

While Plaatje used his position as the head of a civil rights organization, Adelaide Dube used her poetry to speak out against the Natives Land Act, as with the following poem.

Africa: My Native Land
Adelaide Charles Dube

How beautiful are thy hills and thy dales!
I love thy very atmosphere so sweet,
Thy trees adorn the landscape rough and steep
No other country in the whole world
could with thee compare.

It is here where our noble ancestors,
Experienced joys of dear ones and of home;
Where great and glorious kingdoms rose and fell
Where blood was shed to save thee, thou
dearest Land ever known;

But, Alas! their efforts, were all in vain,
For to-day others claim thee as their own;
No longer can their off-spring cherish thee
No land to call their own-but outcasts
in their own country!

Despair of thee I never, never will,
Struggle I must for freedom-God's great gift-
Till every drop of blood within my veins
Shall dry upon my troubled bones, oh
thou Dearest Native Land!

1. What specific restrictions did the new laws place on Africans? What aspects of their lives were most severely affected?

2. Plaatje and Dube both describe Africans as cruelly victimized by Europeans. What is the difference between being a victim and being a victim who speaks or writes about it?

3. Both Plaatje and Dube write about the importance of land for black South Africans. Who are they writing for and why? Compare the tone of each text and the focus. What is similar about each of their approaches? What differences stand out? What does Dube promise at the end?

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In 1910, South Africa became a single country under white rule. Parliament immediately began enacting laws and policies with devastating impact on Africans. In 1912, Africans began to organize as a single people, forming the African National Congress (ANC), an organization that has endured until the present and played a major role in the country's evolution.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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"In a moonlight it would be different then you would hear the noises of happy children playing"

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" My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family." I think this is a good quote because it shows how much a single story can affect your perception about something.

03:35

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.

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When Kipling describes the Natives as - "Half-devil Half-child".

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THINGS FALL APART:  "his fame rested on solid achievements"