Modern History Sourcebook:
Edward Morel:
The Black Man's Burden, 1903
Kiplings
poem The White Man's Burden
of 1899 presented one view of imperialism. Edward Morel, a British
journalist in the Belgian Congo, drew attention to the abuses
of imperialism in 1903. The Congo [for a period known in modern
times as Zaïre] was perhaps the most famously exploitative of
the European colonies.
It
is [the Africans] who carry the 'Black man's burden'. They have
not withered away before the white man's occupation. Indeed
... Africa has ultimately absorbed within itself every Caucasian
and, for that matter, every Semitic invader, too. In hewing
out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred
the African in heaps. The African has survived, and it is well
for the white settlers that he has....
What
the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed
to do; what the mapping out of European political 'spheres of
influence' has failed to do; what the Maxim and the rifle, the
slave gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash,
have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis
have failed to do; whatever the overseas slave trade failed
to do, the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted
by modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing.
For
from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and enforced,
there is no escape for the African. Its destructive effects
are not spasmodic: they are permanent. In its permanence resides
its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the
soul. It breaks the spirit. It attacks the African at every
turn, from every point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots
him from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural
pursuits and occupations, claims his whole time, enslaves him
in his own home....
.
. . In Africa, especially in tropical Africa, which a capitalistic
imperialism threatens and has, in part, already devastated,
man is incapable of reacting against unnatural conditions. In
those regions man is engaged in a perpetual struggle against
disease and an exhausting climate, which tells heavily upon
childbearing; and there is no scientific machinery for
salving the weaker members of the community. The African of
the tropics is capable of tremendous physical labours. But he
cannot accommodate himself to the European system of monotonous,
uninterrupted labour, with its long and regular hours, involving,
moreover, as it frequently does, severance from natural surroundings
and nostalgia, the condition of melancholy resulting from separation
from home, a malady to which the African is specially prone.
Climatic conditions forbid it. When the system is forced upon
him, the tropical African droops and dies.
Nor
is violent physical opposition to abuse and injustice henceforth
possible for the African in any part of Africa. His chances
of effective resistance have been steadily dwindling with the
increasing perfectibility in the killing power of modern armament....
Thus
the African is really helpless against the material gods of
the white man, as embodied in the trinity of imperialism, capitalistic
exploitation, and militarism....
To
reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimulating episodes
in savage life to a dull routine of endless toil for uncomprehended
ends, to dislocate social ties and disrupt social institutions;
to stifle nascent desires and crush mental development; to graft
upon primitive passions the annihilating evils of scientific
slavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilized man, unrestrained
by convention or law; in fine, to kill the soul in a people-this
is a crime which transcends physical murder.
From
E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden, in Louis L. Snyder,
The Imperialism Reader (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand,
1962), pp.l63l64. First published in 1920 in Great Britain.
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