[Music] the humiliation and violence inflicted on black americans was mirrored in africa at the end of the 19th century as europe's powers scrambled for control of the continent's riches the rights of the indigenous peoples were no impediment to their plans for conquest the attitude of white people or in all europe was tabularizer terra incognita here is a place which is a sort of no man's land in other words we can create our own states then we're going to bring order and civilize them always the word civilized was used whatever you actually doing whether you were
shooting them you were civilizing them the vast majority of people thought they would need at best a paternalistic treatment that they would need looking after like children [Music] after the conference of berlin in 1885 europeans embarked on a continent-wide land grab in less than 20 years 90 of african territory will be placed under european colonial rule one of the main beneficiaries was king leopold ii of belgium aware of a vast fortune to be made he persuaded europe's powers to recognize his sovereignty over one of africa's largest regions the congo here was this man who became
king of belgium in 1865 at the age of 30. enormously shrewd enormously greedy enormously ambitious and with an absolutely brilliant sense of public relations he hired the explorer henry morton stanley the man who found livingston to go to the congo and essentially stake out this huge territory for him leopold got first the united states and then all the major nations of western europe to ratify his seizure of this enormous territory in the center of the continent first leopold created a smoke screen claiming that he wished to educate a savage people they were all really fooled
by leopold because they took him at his word they thought he was a sort of a man who's going to lose all his money in this crazy philanthropic venture but they didn't realize what he was really after at all which was to make himself hugely rich by exploiting brown hands and broad backs who are going to carry the wealth of africa and loaded on ships for his own personal profit extreme violence was employed to impose leopold's dominion the right hands of those who failed to meet rubber quotas were severed even young children were not spared
in 1896 a german newspaper reported that 1 308 hands had been gathered in one day leopold created a 90 000 strong army to enforce his rule one of his lieutenants wrote only the whip can civilize the black they would go into village after village the army would seize the women of the village and hold them hostage in order to force the men of each village to go into the forest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber and they did this for about 20 years and you can just very easily imagine if you have a
village where the women are all being held hostage the men are all in the forest as forced laborers for several weeks out of each month there's nobody to plant and harvest food to go hunting to go fishing to do all the normal things through which a community feeds itself so from all of these causes starvation being worked to death and most of all from the disease that hit this famine-ridden population the best estimates are that between 1880 when king leopold first got his hands on the congo and 1920 that in that 40-year period the population
was slashed from about 20 million at the beginning of that period to around 10 million at the end so an enormous loss of human life [Music] huge building projects throughout belgium were funded by leopold's wealth to celebrate his reign leopold built himself a palace now called the museum of central africa to display his spoils for historian bambi koipins whose father is congolese the building embodies the myths created to justify belgium rule in the congo the central hall gives you the idea of what the museum is supposed to be about you have the central dome through
which the light falls on the heart of darkness underneath you can say simultaneously the dome also presents the sky god and then in the central hall underneath that representation of leopold ii are a statues of congolese so what you really see were the hierarchical relationships that structured the relations between the colonized and the colonizers as a human being i'm obviously shocked by that because it is very clear that africans the way that this museum was originally set up and the way that most of the exhibitions still work are really dehumanized because they were seen and
represented as savages who really needed the help of outsiders i.e europeans to transform them into fully civilized human beings [Music] from the late 19th century onwards human zoos exhibiting africans in their primitive state became popular around europe one of the first was housed in the grounds of leopold's museum the africans were put on display so people could go and see them in very much the same way that they could look at say caged animals in a zoo and their reactions were also very similar there were notices saying that people were not allowed to throw peanuts
at the africans because that was what they did [Music] this museum is also in a very real sense the only monument to belgian colonial history left in this country so if we dismantle the museum there is a very great danger that we also eradicate the public memory of that colonial heritage and once that happens of course one paves the way for all these people who say well it was not as bad as that was it and leopold ii really did do a great deal of good in 1908 the year before leopold died his crimes were
made public and he was forced to hand control of the congo over to the belgium government but the cruelty continued the forced labor system did not come to an end because it was so profitable the new belgian congo continued it more or less until the early 1920s at that point the belgian colonial officials realized that their population was shrinking so rapidly from the effects of the forced labor system that they had to modify it they had to make it less lethal or otherwise they would have no labor force left although 10 million people died the
congolese genocide has largely been forgotten in europe in the book the heart of darkness the author joseph conrad who witnessed the violence in the congo writes the conquest of the earth which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses in ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much [Music] it was only at the end of the second world war when newsreels documented the nazis extermination of six million jews that the words genocide holocaust and even racism passed into common usage [Music] whatever the
origins of the word racism that is when it was first coined there's no doubt that it was first used to think about nazi treatment of jewish people that was the case that gave the word racism its modern shape and meaning in fact brought it into use as a word and also therefore brought it into use in a context where it was unequivocally clear that it was a very bad thing even so brutal treatment of non-white non-europeans was tolerated by the western nations when the national party came to power in south africa in 1948 they passed
a series of laws that institutionalized white supremacy yet apartheid attracted little criticism from the west
