|
Books by W.E.B. Du Bois
The
Suppression of the African
Slave Trade (1896) /
The
Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899)
The
Souls of Black Folk:
Essays and Sketches
(1903) /
John
Brown.(1909) /
The
Quest of the Silver Fleece
(1911)
Darkwater:
Voices Within the Veil
(1920) /
Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making
of America (1924) /
Dark Princess: A Romance
(1928) /
Black Reconstruction in America
(1935) /
Black Folk, Then and Now
(1939)
Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace
(1945) /
The World and Africa: An Inquiry
(1947) /
In Battle for Peace
(1952) /
A Trilogy:
The Ordeal of Monsart
(1957)
Monsart Builds
a School (1959) nd
Worlds of Color (1961)
/
An ABC of Color:
Selections (1963)
The
Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing
My Life from the Last
Decade of Its First
Century
(1968)
* * *
* *
Shirley Graham Du Bois,
His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of
W.E. B. Du Bois (1971)
Leslie Alexander Lacy.
The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois:
Cheer the Lonesome Traveler (1970)
Du
Bois on Reform: Periodical-based
Leadership for African Americans.
Edited and Introduced
by Brian Johnson
* * * *
*
The White Masters of the
World
From The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
This is an attempt to show briefly what the
domination of Europe over the world has meant to mankind
and especially to Africans in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
What are the real causes back of
the collapse of Europe in the twentieth century? What
was the real European imperialism pictured in the Paris
Exposition of 1900? France did not stand purely for art.
There was much imitation, convention, suppression, and
sale of genius; and France wanted wealth and power at
any price. Germany did not stand solely for science. I
remember when a German professor at whose home I was
staying in 1890 expressed his contempt for the rising
businessmen. He had heard them conversing as he drank in
a Bierstube at Eisenach beneath the shade of
Luther’s Wartburg. Their conversation, he sneered, was
lauter Geschäft! He did not realize that a new
Germany was rising which wanted German science for one
main purposes—wealth and power. America wanted freedom,
but freedom to get rich by any method short of anarchy;
and freedom to get rid of the democracy which allowed
laborers to dictate to managers and investors.
All these centers of civilization
envied England the wealth and power built upon her
imperial colonial system. One looking at European
imperialism in 1900, therefore, should have looked first
at the depressed peoples. One would have found them also
among the laboring classes in Europe and America, living
in slums behind a façade of democracy, nourished on a
false education which lauded the triumphs of the
industrial undertaker, made the millionaire the hero of
modern life, and taught youth that success was wealth.
The slums of England emphasized class differences; slum
dwellers and British aristocracy spoke different
tongues, had different manners and ideals. The goal of
human life was illustrated in the nineteenth-century
English novel: the aristocrat of independent income
surrounded by a herd of obsequious and carefully trained
servants. Even today the British butler is a personage
in the literary world.
Out of this emerged the doctrine of
the Superior Race: the theory that a minority of the
people of Europe are by birth and natural gift the
rulers of mankind; rulers of their own suppressed labor
classes and, without doubt, heaven-sent rulers of
yellow, brown, and black people.
This thinking gave rise to
many paradoxes, and it was characteristic of the era
that men did not face paradoxes with any plan to solve
them. There was the religious paradox: the contradiction
between the Golden Rule and the use of force to keep
human beings in their appointed places; the doctrine of
the White Man’s Burden and the conversion of the
heathen, faced by the actuality of famine, pestilence,
and caste. There was the assumption of the absolute
necessity of poverty for the majority of men in order to
save civilization for the minority, for that aristocracy
of mankind which was at the same time the chief
beneficiary of culture.
There was the frustration of
democracy: lip service was paid to the idea of the rule
of the people; but at the same time the mass of people
were kept so poor, and through their poverty so diseased
and ignorant, that they could not carry on successfully
a modern state or modern industry. There was the paradox
of peace: I remember before World War I, stopping in at
the Hotel Astor to hear Andrew Carnegie talk to his
peace society. War had begun between Italy and Turkey,
but, said Mr. Carnegie blandly, we are not talking about
peace among unimportant people; we are talking about
peace among the great states of the world. I walked out.
Here I know lay tragedy, and the events proved it; for
the great states went to war jealousy over the ownership
of the little people.
The paradox of the peace movement
of the nineteenth century is a baffling comment on
European civilization. There was not a single year
during the nineteenth century when the world was not at
war. Chiefly, but not entirely, these wars were waged to
subjugate colonial peoples. They were carried on by
Europeans, and at least one hundred and fifty separate
wars can be counted during the heyday of the peace
movement. What the peace movement really meant was peace
in Europe and between Europeans, while for the conquest
of the world and because of the suspicion which they
held toward each other, every nation maintained a
standing army which steadily grew in cost and menace.
One of the chief causes which thus
distorted the development of Europe was the African
slave trade, and we have tried to rewrite its history
and meaning and to make it occupy a much less important
place in the world’s history than it deserves.
The result of the African slave
trade and slavery on the European mind and culture was
to degrade the position of labor and the respect for
humanity as such. Not, god knows, that the ancient world
honored labor. With exceptions here and there, it
despised, enslaved, and crucified human toil. But there
were counter currents, and with the Renaissance in
Europe—that new light with which Asia and Africa
illumined the Dark Ages of Europe—came new hope for
mankind. A new religion of personal sacrifice has been
building on five hundred years of the self-effacement of
Buddha before the birth of Christ, and the
equalitarianism of Mohammed which followed six hundred
years after Christ’s birth. A new world, seeking birth
in Europe, was also being discovered beyond the sunset.
With this new world came fatally
the African slave trade and Negro slavery in the
Americas. There were new cruelties, new hatred of human
beings, and new degradations of human labor. The
temptation to degrade human labor was made vaster and
deeper by the incredible accumulation of wealth based on
slave labor, by the boundless growth of greed, and by
world-wide organization for new agricultural crops, new
techniques in industry, and world-wide trade.
Just as Europe lurched forward to a
new realization of beauty, a new freedom of thought and
religious belief, a new demand by laborers to choose
their work and enjoy its fruit, uncurbed greed rose to
seize and monopolize the uncounted treasure of the fruit
of labor. Labor was degraded, humanity was despised, the
theory of “race” arose. There came a new doctrine of
universal labor: mankind were of two sorts—the superior
and the inferior; the inferior toiled for the superior;
and the superior were the real men, the inferior half
men or less. Among the white lords of creation there
were “lower classes” resembling the inferior darker
folk. Where possible they were to be raised to equality
with the master class. But no equality was possible or
desirable for “darkies.” In line with this conviction,
the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant, at first
damned the heathen blacks with the “curse of Canaan,”
then held out hope of freedom through “conversion,” and
finally acquiesced in a permanent status of human
slavery.
Despite the fact that the
nineteenth century saw an upsurge in the power of
laboring classes and a fight toward economic equality
and political democracy, this movement and battle was
made fiercer and less successful and lagged far behind
the accumulation of wealth, because in popular opinion
labor was fundamentally degrading and the just burden of
inferior peoples. Luxury and plenty for the few and
poverty for the many was looked upon as inevitable in
the course of nature. In addition to this, it went
without saying that the white people of Europe had a
right to live upon the labor and property of the colored
peoples of the world.
In order to establish the
righteousness of this point of view, science and
religion, government and industry, were wheeled into
line. The word “Negro” was used for the first time in
the world’s history to tie color to race and blackness
to slavery and degradation. The white race was pictured
as “pure” and superior; the black race as dirty, stupid,
and inevitably inferior; the yellow race as sharing, in
deception and cowardice, much of this color inferiority;
while mixture of races was considered the prime cause of
degradation and failure in civilization. Everything
great, everything fine, everything really successful in
human culture, was white.
In order to prove this, even black
people in India and Africa were labeled as “white” if
they showed any trace of progress; and, on the other
hand, any progress by colored people was attributed to
some intermixture, ancient or modern, of white blood, or
some influence of white civilization.
This logical contradiction
influenced and misled science. The same person declared
that mulattoes were inferior and warned against
miscegenation, and yet attributed the pre-eminence of a
Dumas, a Frederick Douglas, a Booker Washington, to
their white blood.
A system at first conscious and
then unconscious of lying about history and distorting
it to the disadvantage of the Negroids became so
widespread that the history of Africa ceased to be
taught, the color of Memnon was forgotten, and every
effort was made in archaeology, history, and biography,
in biology, psychology, and sociology, to prove the all
but universal assumption that the color line had a
scientific basis.
Without the winking of an eye,
printing, gunpowder, the smelting of iron, the
beginnings of social organization, not to mention
political life and democracy, were attributed
exclusively to the white race and to Nordic Europe.
Religion sighed with relief when it could base its
denial of the ethics of Christ and the brotherhood of
men upon the science of Darwin, Gobineau, and Reisner.
It was bad enough in all conscience
to have the consequences of this thought, these
scientific conclusions and ethical sanctions, fall upon
colored people the world over; but in the end it was
even worse when one considers what this attitude did to
the European worker. His aim and idea was distorted. He
did not wish to become efficient but rich. He began to
want not comfort for all men, but power over other men
for himself. He did not love humanity and he hated
“niggers.” When our High Commissioner after the Spanish
War appeal to America on behalf of “our little brown
brother,” the white workers replied,
|
He may
be a brother of William H. Taft,
But he
ain’t no brother of mine. |
Following the early Christian
communism and sense of human brotherhood which began to
grow in the Dark Ages and to blossom in the Renaissance,
there came to white workers in England, France, and
Germany the iron law of wages, the population doctrines
of Malthus, and the bitter fight against the early trade
unions. The first efforts at education, and particularly
the trend toward political democracy, aroused an
antagonism of which the French Revolution did not dream.
It was the bitter fight that exacerbated the class
struggle and resulted in the first furious expression of
Communism and the attempt at revolution. The unity of
apprentice and master, the Christian sympathy between
rich and poor, the communism of medieval charity, all
were thrust into the new strait jacket of thought:
poverty was the result of sloth and crime; wealth was
the reward of virtue and work. The degraded yellow and
black peoples were in the places which the world of
necessity assigned to the inferior; and toward these
lower ranks the working classes of all countries tended
to sink, save as they were raised and supported by the
rich, the investors, the captains of industry.
In some parts of the world, notably
in the Southern states of America, the argument went
further than this: frank slavery of black folk was a
better economic system than factory exploitation of
whites. It was the natural arrangement of industry. It
ought to be extended, certainly where colored people
were in the majority. For a half a century before 1861
the bolder minds of the South dreamed of a slave empire
embracing the American tropics and extending eventually
around the world. While their thought did not go to a
final appraisement of white laboring classes, they
certainly had in mind that these classes must rise or
fall; must be forced into the class of employers with
political power, or, like the poor whites of the South,
be pushed down beside or even below the working slaves.
This philosophy had sympathizers in
Europe. Without doubt, a large majority of influential
public opinion in England, and possibly in both France
and Germany, favored the South at the outbreak of the
Civil War and sternly set its face against allowing any
maudlin sympathy with “darkies,” half monkeys and half
men, in the stern fight for the extension of European
domination of the world. Widespread insensibility to
cruelty and suffering spread in the white world, and to
guard against too much emotional sympathy with the
distressed, every effort was made to keep women and
children and the more sensitive men deceived as to what
was going on, not only in the slums of white countries,
but also all over Asia, Africa, and the islands of the
sea. Elaborate writing, disguised as interpretation, and
the testimony of so-called “experts,” made it impossible
for charming people in Europe to realize what their
comforts and luxuries cost in sweat, blood, death, and
despair, not only in the remoter parts of the world, but
even on their own doorsteps.
A gracious culture was built up; a
delicately poised literature treated the little
intellectual problems of the rich and well-born,
discussed small matters of manners and convention, and
omitted the weightier ones of law, mercy, justice, and
truth. Even the evidence of the eyes and senses was
denied by the mere weight of reiteration. The race that
produced the ugly features of a Darwin or a Winston
Churchill was always “beautiful.” While a Toussaint and
Menelik were ugly because they were black.
The concept of the European
“gentleman” was evolved: a man well bred and of
meticulous grooming, of knightly sportsmanship and
invincible courage even in the face of death; but one
who did not hesitate to use machine guns against
assagais and to cheat “niggers”; an ideal of
sportsmanship which reflected the Golden Rule and yet
contradicted it—not only in business and in industry
within white countries, but all over Asia and Africa—by
indulging in lying, murder, theft, rape, deception, and
degradation, of the same sort and kind which has left
the world aghast at the accounts of what the Nazis did
in Poland and Russia.
There was no Nazi
atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and
murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of
childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had
not long been practicing against colored folk in all
parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of
a Superior Race born to rule the world.
Together with the idea of a
Superior Race there grew up in Europe and America an
astonishing ideal of wealth and luxury: the man of
“independent” income who did not have to “work for a
living,” who could indulge his whims and fantasies, who
was free from all compulsion either of ethics or hunger,
became the hero of novels, of drama and of fairy tale.
This wealth was built, in Africa especially, upon
diamonds and gold, copper and tin, ivory and mahogany,
palm oil and cocoa, seeds extracted and grown, beaten
out of the blood-stained bodies of the natives,
transported to Europe, processed by wage slaves who were
not receiving, and as Ricardo assured them they could
never receive, enough to become educated and healthy
human beings, and then distributed among prostitutes and
gamblers as well as among well-bred followers of art,
literature, and drama.
Cities were built, ugly and
horrible, with regions for the culture of crime,
disease, and suffering, but characterized in popular
myth and blindness by wide and beautiful avenues where
the rich and fortunate lived, laughed, and drank tea.
National heroes were created by lopping off their sins
and canonizing their virtues, so that Gladstone had no
connection with slavery, Chinese Gordon did not get
drunk, William Pitt was a great patriot and not an
international thief. Education was so arranged that the
young learned not necessarily the truth, but that aspect
and interpretation of the truth which the rulers of the
world wished them to know and follow.
In other words, we had progress by
poverty in the face of accumulating wealth, and that
poverty was not simply the poverty of the slaves of
Africa and the peons of Asia, but the poverty of the
mass workers in England, France, Germany, and the United
States. Art, in building, painting, and literature,
became cynical and decadent. Literature became realistic
and therefore pessimistic. Religion became organized in
social clubs where well-bred people met in luxurious
churches and gave alms to the poor. On Sunday they
listened to sermons—“Blessed are the meek”; “Do unto
others even as you would that others do unto you”; “If thine enemy smite thee, turn the other cheek”; “It is
more blessed to give than to receive”—listened and acted
as though they had read, as in very truth they ought to
read—“Might is right”; “Do others before they do you”;
“Kill your enemies or be killed”; “Make profits by any
methods and at any cost so long as you can escape the
lenient law.” This is a fair picture of the decadence of
that Europe which led human civilization during the
nineteenth century and looked unmoved on the writhing of
Asia and of Africa.
Nothing has been more puzzling than
the European attitude toward sex. With professed
reverence for female chastity, white folk have brought
paid prostitution to its highest development; their
lauding of motherhood has accompanied a lessening of
births through late marriage and contraception, and this
has stopped the growth of population in France and
threatened it in all Europe. Indeed, along with the
present rate of divorce, the future of the whole white
race is problematical. Finally, the treatment of colored
women by white men has been a worldwide disgrace.
American planters, including some of the highest
personages in the nation, left broods of colored
children who were sometimes sold into slavery.
William Howitt (1792–1879), an
English Quaker, visited Australia and the East early in
the nineteenth century and has left us a record of what
he saw. Of the treatment of women in India he wrote:
|
The treatment of females
could not be described Dragged from the
inmost recesses of their houses, which the
religion of the country had make so many
sanctuaries, they were exposed naked to
public view. The virgins were carried to the
Court of Justice, where they might naturally
have looked for protection, but they now
looked for it in vain; for in the face of
the ministers of justice, in the face of the
spectators, in the face of the sun, those
tender and modest virgins were brutally
violated. The only difference between their
treatment and that of the mothers was that
the former were dishonoured in the face of
the day, the latter in the gloomy recesses
of their dungeon. Other females had the
nipples of their breasts put in a cleft
bamboo and torn off. What follows is to
shocking and indecent to transcribe! It is
almost impossible, in reading of these
frightful and savage enormities, to believe
that we are reading of a country under the
British government, and that these unmanly
deeds were perpetrated by British agents,
and for the purpose of extorting the British
revenue.1 |
It would be unfair to paint the
total modern picture of Europe as decadent. There have
been souls, that revolted and voices that cried aloud.
Men arraigned poverty, ignorance, and disease as
unnecessary. The public school and the ballot fought for
uplift and freedom for the Negro were extended. But this
forward-looking vision had but partial and limited
success. Race tyranny, aristocratic pretense,
monopolized wealth, still continued to prevail and
triumphed widely. The Church fled uptown to escape the
poor and black. Jesus laughed—and wept.
The dawn of the twentieth century
found white Europe master of the world and white peoples
almost universally recognized as the rulers for whose
benefit the rest of the world existed. Never before in
the history of civilization had self-worship of a
people’s accomplishment attained the heights that the
worship of white Europe by Europeans reached.
Our poets in the “Foremost Ranks of
Time” became dithyrambic: “Better fifty years of Europe
than a cycle of Cathay!” In home and school the legend
grew of this strong, masterful giant with mighty
intellect, clear brain, and unrivaled moral stamina, who
was conducting the world to the last heights of human
culture. Yet within less than half a century this
magnificent self-worshiping structure had crashed to the
earth.
Why was this? It was from no lack
of power. The power of white Europe and North America
was unquestionable. Their science dominated the
scientific thought of the world. The only writing called
literature was that of English and French writers, of
Germans and Italians, with some recognition of writers
in Spain and the United States. The Christian religion,
as represented by the Catholic Church and the leading
Protestant denominations, was the only system of belief
recognized as real religion. Mohammedans, Buddhists,
Shintoists, and others were all considered heathen.
The most tremendous expression of
power was economic; the powerful industrial organization
and integration of modern industry in management and
work, in trade and manufacture, was concentrated in
England, France, Germany, and the United States. All
Asia and Eastern Europe was an appendage; all Africa,
China, India, and the islands of the sea, Central and
South America and the Caribbean area were dominated by
Europe, while Scandinavia, Holland, and Belgium were
silent copartners in this domination.
The domination showed itself in its
final form in political power either through direct
rulership, as in the case of colonies, or indirect
economic power backed by military pressure exercised
over the backward nations. It was rather definitely
assumed in the latter part of the nineteenth century
that this economic domination was but a passing phase
which in time would lead to colonial absorption.
Particularly was this true with
regard to Asia. India was already a part of the British
Empire, and Burma. Indonesia was Dutch and Indo-China,
French. The future of China depended upon how Europe
would divide the land among the British Empire and the
Germans, American trade, Italy, France, and Russia. It
was a matter simply of time and agreement. General
consent had long since decided that China should no
longer rule itself.
With regard to the South American
countries there was the determination that they must
obey the economic rule of the European and North
American system. The world looked forward to political
and economic domination by Europe and North America and
to a more or less complete approach to colonial status
for the rest of the earth. Africa of course must remain
in absolute thrall, save its white immigrants, who would
rule the blacks.
The reason for this world mastery
by Europe was rationalized as the natural and inborn
superiority of white peoples, showing itself not only in
the loftiest of religions, but in a technical mastery of
the forces of nature—all this in contrast to the low
mentality and natural immorality of the darker races
living in lovely lands, “Where every prospect pleases,
and only Man is vile!”—as the high-minded Christians
sang piously. But they forgot or never were told just
how white superiority wielded its power or accomplished
this dominion. There were exceptions, of course, but for
the most part they went unheard.
Howitt, for instance,
wrote from personal knowledge as well as research on the
colonial question and described some phrases of the
pressure of Europe on the rest of the world in the
centuries preceding the nineteenth. Speaking of the
Indians of America, Howitt said:
|
All the murders and
desolation of the most pitiless tyrants that
ever diverted themselves with the pangs and
convulsions of their fellow creatures, fall
infinitely short of the bloody enormities
committed by the Spanish nation in the
conquest of the New World, a conquest on a
low estimate, effected by the murder of ten
millions of the species! After reading these
accounts, who can help forming an indignant
wish that the hand of Heaven, by some
miraculous interposition, had swept these
European tyrants from the face of the earth,
who like so many beasts of prey, roamed
round the world only to desolate and
destroy; and more remorseless than the
fiercest savage, thirsted for human blood
without having the impulse of natural
appetite to plead in their defence!2 |
Howitt turned to the Portuguese in
India:
|
The celebrated Alphonso Albuquerque made the
most rapid strides, and extended the conquests of the
Portuguese there beyond any other commander. He narrowly
escaped with his life in endeavouring to sack and
plunder Calicut. He seized on Goa, which thenceforward
became the metropolis of all the Portuguese settlements
in India. He conquered Molucca, and gave it up to the
plunder of his soldiers. The fifth part of the wealth
thus thievishly acquired was reserved for the king, and
was purchased on the spot by the merchants for two
hundred thousand pieces of gold. Having established a
garrison in the conquered city, he made a traitor
Indian, who had deserted from the king of Molucca and
had been an instrument in the winning of a place,
supreme magistrate; but again finding Utimut, the
renegade, as faithless to himself, he had him and his
son put to death, even though a hundred thousand pieces
of gold, a bait that was not easily resisted by these
Christian marauders, was offered for their lives. He
then proceeded to Ormuz in the Persian Gulph, which was
a great harbour for the Arabian merchants; reduced it,
placed a garrison it, seized on fifteen princes of the
blood, and carried them off to Goa. Such were some of
the deeds of this celebrated general, whom the
historians in the same breath in which they record these
unwarrantable acts of violence, robbery, and treachery,
term an excellent and truly glorious commander! He made
a descent on the isle of Ceylon, and detached a fleet to
the Moluccas, which established a settlement in those
delightful regions of the cacao, the sago-tree, the
nutmeg, and the clove. The kings of Persia, of Siam,
Pegu, and others, alarmed at his triumphant progress, of
the Malabar coast. With less than forty thousand troops,
the Portuguese struck terror into the empire of Morocco,
the barbarous nations of Africa, the Mamelucs, the
Arabians, and all the eastern countries from the island
of Ormuz to China.3 |
Turning to the Dutch, Howitt
continued:
|
To secure the dominion of these, they
compelled the princess of Ternate and Tidore
to consent to the rooting up all the clove
and nutmeg trees in the islands not entirely
under the jealous safeguard of Dutch
keeping. For this they utterly exterminated
the inhabitants of Banda, because they would
not submit passively to their yoke. Their
lands were divided amongst the white people,
who got slaves from other islands to
cultivate them. For this Malacca was
besieged, its territory ravaged, and its
navigation interrupted by pirates; Negapatan
was twice attacked; Cochin was engaged in
resisting the kings of Calicut and
Travancore, and Ceylon and Java were made
scenes of perpetual disturbances. These
notorious dissensions have been followed by
as odious oppressions, which have been
practiced at Japan, China, Cambodia, Arracan
on the banks of the Ganges, at Achen,
Coromandel, Surat, in Persia, at Bassora,
Mocha, and other places. For this they
encouraged and established in Celebes a
system of kidnapping the inhabitants for
slaves which converted that island into a
perfect hell.4 |
Howitt then turned to England in
India:
|
Unfortunately, we all know what human
nature is. Unfortunately, the power, the
wealth, and the patronage brought home to
them by the very violation of their own
wishes and maxims were of such an
overwhelming and seducing nature that it was
in van to resist them. Nay, in such colours
does the modern philosophy of conquest and
diplomacy disguise the worst transactions
between one state and other, that is not for
plain men very readily to penetrate to the
naked enormity beneath.5
* * * *
*
But if there ever was one system more
Machiavellian—more appropriative of the shew
of justice where the basest injustice was
attempted—more cold, cruel, haughty, and
unrelenting than another—it is the system by
which the government of the different states
of India has been wrested from the hands of
their respective princes and collected into
the grasp of the British power.6
* *
* * *
The first step in the
English friendship with the native princes,
has generally been to assist them against
their neighbours with troops, or to locate
troops with them to protect them from
aggression. For these services such enormous
recompense was stipulated for, that the
unwary princes, entrapped by their fears of
their native foes rather than of their
pretended friends, soon found that they were
utterly unable to discharge them. Dreadful
exactions were made on their subjects, but
in vain. Whole provinces, or the revenues of
them, were soon obliged to be made over to
their grasping friends; but they did
not suffice for their demands. In order to
pay them their debts or their interest, the
princes were obliged to borrow large sums at
an extravagant rate. These sums were eagerly
advanced by the English in their private and
individual capacities, and securities again
taken on lands or revenues. At every step
the unhappy princes became more and more
embarrassed, and as the embarrassment
increased, the claims of the Company became
proportionably pressing. In the technical
phraseology of moneylenders, ‘the screw was
then turned,’ till there was no longer any
enduring it.7 |
We may turn now to
the conquest of Africa. The Portuguese, Dutch, and
British decimated the West Coast with the slave trade.
The Arabs depopulated the East Coast. For centuries the
native Bantu, unable to penetrate the close-knit
city-states of the Gulf of Guinea, had slowly been
moving south, seeking pasture for their herds and
protecting their culture from the encroachment of the
empire-building in the black Sudan.
In the nineteenth
century black folk and white—Hottentot, Bushman and
Bantu, French, Dutch, and British—met at the Cape
miscalled “Good Hope.” There ensued a devil’s dance
seldom paralleled in human history. The Dutch murdered,
raped, and enslaved the Hottentots and Bushmen; the
French were driven away or died out; the British stole
the land of the Dutch and their slaves and the Dutch
fled inland. The incoming Bantu, led by Chaka, the
great Zulu chieftain, fell on both Dutch and English
with a military genius unique in history.
The black Bantu had
almost won the wars when a mulatto native discovered
diamonds. Then English and Dutch laid bare that cache of
gold, the largest in the world, which the ocean thrust
above the dark waters of the south five million years
ago. Enough; the greed of white Europe, backed by the
British Navy, fought with frenzied determination,
world-wide organization, and every trick or trade, until
the blacks were either dead or reduced to the most
degrading wage bondage in the modern world; and the
Dutch became vassals of England, to be repaid by the
land and labor of eight million blacks.
Frankel, the
complacent servant of capitalists and their defender,
has written: “The wealth accruing from the production of
diamonds in South Africa has probably been greater than
that which has ever been obtained from any other
commodity in the same time anywhere in the world.”8
This was but a side
enterprise of Britain. By means of its long leadership
in the African slave trade to America, Great Britain in
the nineteenth century began to seize control of land
and labor all over Africa. Slowly the British pushed
into the West and East coasts. They overthrew Benin and
Ashanti. A British governor of Ashanti later admitted:
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The earliest beginnings,
which had their inception in the dark days
of the slave trade, cannot but hold many
things that modern Englishmen must recall
with mingled shame and horror. The reader
will find much to deplore in the public and
private acts of many of the white men who,
in their time, made history on the Coast;
and some deeds were done which must forever
remain among the most bitter and humiliating
memories of every Britisher who loves his
country and is jealous of its fair name.9 |
The French
conquered Dahomey and the remains of the Mandingo,
Haussa, and other kingdoms. The British pitted
Christianity against Islam in East Africa and let them
fight it out until at last Uganda became a British
protectorate.
In Abyssinia the
natives drove back British, Egyptians, and Italians, and
the Mahdi with his black Mohammedan hordes came in from
the west and drove England and Egypt out of the Sudan.
The threat of the French and their possible alliance
with Abyssinia brought the British back with machine
guns.
It is said that
Kitchener’s warfare against the followers of the Mahdi
was so brutal that even the British Tories were
revolted. His own brother-in-law said of him: “Well, if
you do not bring down a curse on the British Empire for
what you have been doing there is no truth in
Christianity.” His desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb even
Winston Churchill called a “foul deed.” And when
Kitchener found that even the promoters of the
inexcusable war could not swallow this last, he tried to
put the blame of the desecration onto Gordon’s nephew by
making absolutely false accusation.10
Everywhere is the sordid tale of deception, force,
murder, and final subjection. We need hardly recall the
Opium War in China, which the British, followed by the
Americans and French, made excuse for further
aggression.
The singular thing
about this European movement of aggression and dominance
was the rationalization for it. Missionary effort during
the nineteenth and early twentieth century was
widespread. Millions of pounds and dollars went into the
“conversion of the heathen” to Christianity and the
education of the natives. Some few efforts, as in
Liberia and Sierra Leone, were made early in the
nineteenth century to establish independent Negro
countries, but this was before it was realized that
political domination was necessary to full exploitation.
Slowly the Sudan
from the Atlantic to the Nile was conquered. Slowly
Egypt itself and the Egyptian Sudan passed under the
control of Europe. The resistance of Nubia and Ethiopia
was almost in vain down into the twentieth century. West
Africa fought brilliantly and continuously. But in all
this development the idea persisted in European minds
that no matter what the cost in cruelty, lying, and
blood, the triumph of Europe was to the glory of God and
the untrammeled power of the only people on earth who
deserved to rule; that the right and justice of their
rule was proved by their own success and particularly by
their great cities, their enormous technical mastery
over the power of nature, their gigantic manufacture of
goods and systems of transportation over the world.
Production for production’s sake, without inquiry as to
how the wealth and services were distributed, was the
watchword of the day.
For years the
British imperial government avoided direct
responsibility for colonial exploitation. It was all at
first “free enterprise” and “individual initiative.”
When the scandal of murder and loot could no longer be
ignored, exploitation became socialized with
imperialism. Thus, for a century or more the West India
Company, the Niger Company, the South and East Africa
Companies, robbed and murdered as they pleased with no
public accounting. At length, when these companies had
stolen, killed, and cheated to such an extent that the
facts could not be suppressed, governments themselves
came into control, curbing the more outrageous excesses
and rationalizing the whole system.
Science was called
to help. Students of Africa, especially since the
ivory-sugar-cotton-Negro complex of the nineteenth
century, became hag-ridden by the obsession that nothing
civilized is Negroid and every evidence of high culture
in Africa must be white or at least yellow. The very
vocabulary of civilization expressed this idea; the
Spanish word “Negro,” from being a descriptive
adjective, was raised to the substantive name of a race
and then deprived of its capital letter.
Then come efforts
to bring harmony and co-operation and unity—among the
exploiters. A newspaper correspondent who had received
world-wide publicity because of his travels in Africa
was hired by the shrewd and unscrupulous Leopold II of
Belgium to establish an international country in central
Africa “to peacefully conquer and subdue it, to remold
it in harmony with modern ideas into National States,
within whose limits the European merchant shall go hand
in hand with the dark African trader, and justice and
law and order shall prevail, and murder and lawlessness
and the cruel barter of slaves shall be overcome.”11
Thus arose the
Congo Free State, and by balancing the secret designs of
German, French, and British against each other, this
state became the worst center of African exploitation
and started the partition of Africa among European
powers. It was designed to form a pattern for similar
partition of Asia and the South Sea islands. The Berlin
Congress and Conference followed. The products of Africa
began to be shared and distributed around the world. The
dependence of civilized life upon products from the ends
of the world tied the everyday citizen more and more
firmly to the exploitation of each colonial area: tea
and coffee, diamonds and gold, ivory and copper,
vegetable oils, nuts and dates, pepper and spices,
olives and cocoa, rubber, hemp, silk, fibers of oil
sorts, rare metals, valuable lumber, fruit, sugar. All
these things and a hundred others became necessary to
modern life, and modern life thus was built around
colonial ownership and exploitation.
The cost of this
exploitation was enormous. The colonial system caused
ten times more deaths than actual war. In the first
twenty-five years of the nineteenth century famines in
India starved a million men, and famine was bound up
with exploitation. Widespread monopoly of land to
deprive all men of primary sources of support was
carried out either through direct ownership or indirect
mortgage and exorbitant interest. Disease could not be
checked: tuberculosis in the mines of South Africa,
syphilis in all colonial regions, cholera, leprosy,
malaria.
One of the worst
things that happened was the complete and deliberate
breaking-down of cultural patterns among the suppressed
peoples.
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Europe was staggered at
the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were
terrible indeed; but what we, who were
behind the scenes, felt most keenly was the
fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo
was desolation and murder in the larger
sense. The invasion of family life, the
ruthless destruction of every social
barrier, the shattering of every tribal law,
the introduction of criminal practices which
struck the chiefs of the people dumb with
horror—in a word, a veritable avalanche of
filth and immorality overwhelmed the Congo
tribes.12 |
The moral
humiliation forced on proud black people was illustrated
in the British conquest of Ashanti. The reigning
Asantahene had never been conquered. His armies had
repeatedly driven back the British, but the British
finally triumphed after five wars by breaking their word
and overwhelming him by numbers and superior weapons.
They promised him peace and honor, but they demanded a
public act of submission.
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This, of course, was a
terrible blow to Prempi’s pride. It was a
thing that no Ashanti king had ever done
before, except when Mensa voluntarily made
his submission by deputy in 1881; and was
the one thing above all others that he would
have avoided if he could. For a few moments
he sat irresolute, nervously toying with his
ornaments and looking almost ready to cry
with shame and annoyance; but Albert Ansa
came up and held a whispered conversation
with him, and he then slipped off his
sandals and, laying aside the golden circlet
he wore on his head, stood up with his
mother and walked reluctantly across the
square to where the Governor was sitting.
Then, halting before him, they prostrated
themselves and embraced his feet and those
of Sir Francis Scott and Colonel Kempster.
The scene was a most
striking one. The heavy masses of foliage,
that solid square of red coats and
glistening bayonets, the artillery drawn up
ready for any emergency, the black bodies of
the Native Levies, resting on their long
guns in the background, while inside the
square the Ashantis sat as if turned to
stone, as Mother and Son, whose word was a
matter of life and death, and whose
slightest move constituted a command which
all obeyed, were thus forced to humble
themselves in sight of the assembled
thousands.13 |
Perhaps the worst thing about the
colonial system was the contradiction which arose and
had to arise in Europe with regard to the whole
situation. Extreme poverty in colonies was a main cause
of wealth and luxury in Europe. The results of this
poverty were disease, ignorance, and crime. Yet these
had to be represented as natural characteristics of
backward peoples. Education for colonial must inevitably
mean unrest and revolt; education, therefore, had to be
limited and used to inculcate obedience and servility
lest the whole colonial system be overthrown.
Ability, self-assertion,
resentment, among colonial peoples must be represented
as irrational efforts of “agitators”—folk trying to
attain that for which they were not by nature fitted. To
prove the unfitness of most human beings for self-rule
and self-expression, every device of science was used:
evolution was made to prove that Negroes and Asiatics
were less developed human beings than whites; history
was so written as to make all civilization the
development of white people; economics was so taught as
to make all wealth due mainly to the technical
accomplishment of white folks supplemented only by the
brute toil of colored peoples; brain weights and
intelligence tests were used and distorted to prove the
superiority of white folk. The result was complete
domination of the world by Europe and North America and
a culmination and tempo of civilization singularly
satisfactory to the majority of writers and thinkers at
the beginning of the twentieth century. But it was a
result that was hollow, contradictory, and fatal, as the
next few year quickly showed.
The proof of this came first from
the colonial peoples themselves. Almost unnoticed,
certainly unlistened to, there came from the colonial
world reiterated protest, prayers, and appeals against
the exclusion of the majority of mankind from the
vaunted progress of the world. The world knows of such
protests from the National Congress of India, but little
has been written of the protests of Africa. For
instance, on the Gold Coast, British West Africa, in
1871, some of the kings and chiefs and a number of
educated natives met at Mankesim and drew up a
constitution for self-government. There members of the
Fanti tribe were alliance with England and had supported
the British against the Ashanti in the five long wars.
They now proposed an alliance with Britain to establish
self-government. This constitution, the Mfantsi Amanbuhu
Fekuw or Fanti Confederation, agitated in 1865,
organized in 1867, and adopted in 1871, consisted of
forty-seven articles, many of which were subdivided into
several sections. Some of the principal articles were as
follows:
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Article 8. That it be
the object of the Confederation
§ 1. To promote friendly intercourse between
all Kings and Chiefs of Fanti, and to unite
them for offensive and defensive purposes
against their common enemy.
§ 2. To direct the labours of the
Confederation towards the improvement of the
country at large.
§ 3. To make good and substantial roads
throughout all the interior districts
included in the Confederation.
§ 4. To erect school-houses and establish
schools for the education of all children
within the Confederation and to obtain the
service of efficient schoolmasters.
§ 5. To promote agricultural and industrial
pursuits, and to endeavour to introduce such
new plants as may hereafter become sources
of profitable commerce to the country.
§ 6. To develop and facilitate the working
of the mineral and other resources of this
country.
Article 12. That this Representative
Assembly shall have the power of preparing
laws, ordinances, bills, etc., of using
proper means for effectually carrying out
the resolutions, etc., of the Government, of
examining any questions laid before it by
the ministry, and by any of the Kings and
Chiefs, and, in fact, of exercising all the
functions of a legislative body.
Article 21 to 25 deal
with education.
Article 26. That main roads be made
connecting various provinces or districts
with one another and with the sea coast. …
Article 37. That in each province or
district provincial courts be established,
to be presided over by the provincial
assessors.
Article 43. That the officers of the
Confederation shall render assistance as
directed by the executive in carrying out
the wishes of the British Government.
Article 44. That it be competent to the
Representative Assembly, for the purpose of
carrying on the administration of the
Government, to pass laws, etc., for the
levying of such taxes as it may seem
necessary.14 |
This was the so-called Fanti
Federation, and in punishment for daring to propose such
a movement for the government of an African British
colony, the participants were promptly thrown in jail
and charged with treason.
This attitude toward native rights
and initiative has continued right down to our day. In
1945 the colored people of South Africa, speaking for
eight million Negroes, Indians, and mixed groups, sent
out this declaration to the proposed United Nations:
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The non-European is debarred from education.
He is denied access to the professions and
skilled trades; he is denied the right to
buy land and property; he is denied the
right to trade or to serve in the
army—except as a stretcher-bearer or
servant; he is prohibited from entering
places of entertainment and culture. But
still more, he is not allowed to live in the
towns. And if it was a crime in Nazi Germany
for an “Aryan” to mix with or marry a
non-Aryan, it is equally a criminal offence
in South Africa for a member of the
Herrenvolk to mix with or marry with the
slave race. … In the majority of instances
there is a separate law for Europeans and a
separate law for non-Europeans; in those
rare cases where one Act legislates for
both, there are separate clauses
discriminating against the non-Europeans.
While it is true that there are no
Buchenwald concentration camps in South
Africa, it is equally true that the prisons
of South Africa are full to overflowing with
non-Europeans whose criminality lies solely
in the fact that they are unable to pay the
poll-tax, a special, racial tax imposed upon
them. But this law does not apply to the
Aryan; for him there is a different law
which makes the nonpayment of taxes not a
criminal, but a civil, offence for which he
cannot be imprisoned.
But if there is no Buchenwald in South
Africa, the sadistic fury with which the
Herrenvolk policemen belabour the
non-European victim, guilty or not guilty,
is comparable only to the brutality of the
S.S. Guards. Moreover, the treatment meted
out to the non-European in the Law Courts is
comparable only to the fate of the non-Aryan
in the Nazi Law Courts. But the fundamental
difference in law and morality is not only
expressed in different paragraphs of the
Legal Statues, it lies in the fundamentally
different concept, of the value of the life
of a non-European as a compared with the
value placed upon the life of a European.
The life of a non-European is very cheap in
South Africa, as cheap as the life of a Jew
in Nazi Germany.
From the foregoing it is clear that the
non-Europeans of South Africa live and
suffer under a tyranny very little different
from Nazism. And if we accept the premise—as
we hope the Nations of the World do—that
peace is indivisible, if we accept that
there can be no peace is indivisible, if we
accept that there can be no peace as long as
the scourge of Nazism exists in any corner
of the globe, then it follows that the
defeat of German Nazism is not the final
chapter of the struggle against tyranny.
There must be many more chapters before the
peoples of the world will be able to make a
new beginning. To us in South Africa it is
indisputable that there can be no peace as
long as this system of tyranny remains. To
us it is ludicrous that this same South
African Herrenvolk should speak abroad of a
new beginning, of shaping a new world order,
whereas in actuality all they wish is the
retention of the present tyranny in South
Africa, and its extension to new
territories. Already they speak of new
mandates and new trusteeships, which can
only mean the extension of their Nazi-like
domination over still wider terrain. It is
impossible to make a new start as long as
the representatives of this Herrenvolk take
any part in the shaping of it. For of what
value can it be when the very same people
who speak so grandiosely abroad of the
inviolability of human rights at home
trample ruthlessly underfoot those same
inalienable rights? It is the grossest of
insults not only to the eight million
non-Europeans of South Africa, but to all
those who are honestly striving to shape a
world on new foundations, when the highest
representative of the Herrenvolk of South
Africa, Field-Marshall Smuts, who has
devoted his whole life to the entrenchment
of this Nazi-like domination, brazenly
speaks to the Nations of the World of the
“sanctity and ultimate value of human
personality” and “the equal rights of men
and women.”15 |
This does not say that all European
civilization is oppression, theft, and hypocrisy; there
has been evidence of selfless religious faith; of
philanthropic effort for social uplift; of individual
honesty and sacrifice. But this, far from answering the
indictment I have made, shows even more clearly the
moral plight of present European culture and what
capitalistic investment and imperialism have done to it.
Because of the stretch in time and
space between the deed and the result, between the work
and the product, it is not only usually impossible for
the worker to know the consumer; or the investor, the
source of his profit, but also it is often made
impossible by law to inquire into the facts. Moral
judgment of the industrial process is therefore
difficult, and the crime is more often a matter of
ignorance rather than a deliberate murder and theft; but
ignorance is a colossal crime in itself. When a culture
consents to any economic result, no matter how monstrous
its cause, rather than demand the facts concerning work,
wages, and the conditions of life whose results make the
life of the consumer comfortable, pleasant, and even
luxurious, it is an indication of a collapsing
civilization.
Here for instance is a lovely
British home, with green lawns, appropriate furnishings
and a retinue of well-trained servants. Within is a
young woman, well trained and well dressed, intelligent
and high-minded. She is fingering the ivory keys of a
grand piano and pondering the problem of her summer
vacation, whether in Switzerland or among the Italian
lakes; her family is not wealth, but it has a sufficient
“independent” income from investments to enjoy life
without hard work. How far is such a person responsible
for the crimes of colonialism?
It will in all probability not
occur to her that she has any responsibility whatsoever,
and that may well be true. Equally, it may be true that
her income is the result of starvation, theft, and
murder; that it involves ignorance, disease, and crime
on the part of thousands; that the system which sustains
the security, leisure, and comfort she enjoys is based
on the suppression, exploitation, and slavery of the
majority of mankind. Yet just because she does not know
this, just because she could get the facts only after
research and investigation—made difficult by laws that
forbid the revealing of ownership of property, source of
income, and methods of business—she is content to remain
in ignorance of the source of her wealth and its cost in
human toil and suffering.
The frightful paradox that is the
indictment of modern civilization and the cause of its
moral collapse is that a blameless, cultured, beautiful
young woman in a London suburb may be the foundation on
which is built the poverty and degradation of the world.
For this someone is guilty as hell. Who?
This is the modern paradox of Sin
before which the Puritan stands open-mouthed and mute. A
group, a nation, or a race commits murder and rape,
steals and destroys, yet no individual is guilty, no one
is to blame, no one can be punished!
The black world squirms beneath the
feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate:
|
I hate them, O I hate them well!
I hate them, Christ, as I hate hell!
If I were God, I’d sound their knell,
This day!
|
The whole world emerges into the
Syllogism of the Satisfied: “This cannot be true. This
is not true. If it were true I would not believe it. If
it is true I do not believe it. Therefore it is false!”
Only an Emerson could see the paradox:
|
O all you virtues, methods, mights;
Means, appliances, delights;
Reputed wrongs, and braggart rights;
Smug routine, and things allowed;
Minorities, things under cloud,
Hither take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me.
|
In 1945 Jan Smuts, Prime Minister
of South Africa, who had once declared that every white
man in South Africa believes in the suppression of the
Negro except those who are “mad, quite mad,” stood
before the assembled peoples of the world and pleaded
for an article on “human rights” in the United Nations
Charter. Nothing so vividly illustrates the twisted
contradiction of thought in the minds of white men. What
brought it about? What caused this paradox? I believe
that the trade in human beings between Africa and
America, which flourished between the Renaissance and
the American Civil War, is the prime and effective cause
of the contradictions in European civilization and the
illogic in modern thought and the collapse of human
culture. For this reason I am turning to a history of
the African slave trade in support of this thesis.
Endnotes
1 William Howitt,
Colonization and Christianity (London: Longman, Orme,
Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838), pp. 280–81.
2 Ibid, p. 61.
3 Ibid, pp.
176–77.
4 Ibid, p. 194.
5 Ibid, p. 209.
6 Ibid, p. 210.
7 Ibid, pp.
213–14.
8 S. Herbert Frankel,
Capital Investment in Africa (London: Oxford
University Press, 1938), p. 52.
9 W. Walton Claridge,
A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti (London:
John Murray, 1915), Vol. I, p. ix.
10 Cf. Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt, My Diaries (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1921), Vo. I, pp. 311, 313, 317, 319, 322,
323–24. The brother-in-law was Sir William Butler.
11 J. Scott Keltie,
The Partition of Africa (London: Edward Stanford,
1895,), p. 132.
12 Harris, Dawn In
Africa, p. 66.
13 Claridge, op. cit.,
Vol. I, p. 413.
14 Ibid., Vol. I,
pp. 617–18.
15 A Declaration to the
Nations of the World issued by the Non-European United
Committee, Cape Town, South Africa, 1945.
Edited by John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris •
Amistad 2: Writings on Black History and Culture •
Copyright © 1971 by John A. Williams, et al. • Vintage
Books Edition, February 1971 • New York, NY
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posted 26 April 2009
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