Woah! Does that capitalism paragraph belong in there? It seems oddly out of place. -- Zoe
Only part-way so far: that's taken us up to the establishment of the Congo Free State, which is a start. (A bit rough here and there. I'll work it over.) It will probaby work out better if we give some thought to exactly where all this stuff should go: there are entries under King Leopold, Stanley, Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which should be part of an intertwined story. I haven't given any thought as to which entry should be the "right" one to put which parts of the story, but I do think that it's imperative that it not be split up all over the place and hard to follow. I suspect that the text I just entered will end up in Congo Free State eventually, but for now I'll just worry about telling the story and figure out the best place to put it later. (Unless someone else gets there before me, of course.) Tannin 11:50 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)
An afterthought. That "settled at least 10,000 years ago" in the first para. Can that be right? Humanity evolved not much more than 1000 miles away from the Congo basin, is it possible that people took 2 million years (Homo erectus) or about 115,000 years (if we define "human" as H. sapiens) to travel one or two thousand miles, when we know that humans had travelled to China ~ 75,000 years ago, to Australia ~ 53,000 years ago, and to America at least 13,000 years ago? Tannin
1. At one point this article speaks of Leopold's father's opinion of the man -- yet this opinion is nowhere given. Was a sentence or two left out?
2. I agree with Zoe, that the paragraph about capitalism is out of place with the rest of the article, for several reasons. First, I was expecting a detailed account of the misrule of the Congo Free State. Second, my own political biasses which I won't detail here.
3. A last comment: the mention of the Arab slave trader (whose name escapes me here) is fascinating. The slave trade in Africa would be an interesting subject for a future article -- although it may be too politicaly sensitive for some people.
This is a fine start to a potentially valuable article. -- llywrch
- Thank you Llywrch. I agree that the parenthetical phrase about Leopold's father is a little confusing as it stands. It's part of a direct quote from Forbath and thus more or less uneditable. Perhaps I can dig out a direct quote from Leopold I somewhere, incorporate it elsewhere, and then simply leave Forbath's aside out.
- Detailed account of the misrule is in (slow and plodding) progress. Well, reasonably detailed: I don't have the stomach for too much of that stuff - it's the most gruesome story you could possibly imagine; worse, in a way, than the tale of the Holocast or of Pol Pot's butchery, as at least those two leaders had the threadbare excuse that they honestly believed they were trying to benefit the world in some way. In Leopold's case, he made no noticable effort whatever to improve the lot of his people in any way: he had no "racial purity" to preserve, no "glorious people's revoution" to protect, just pure, plain greed.
- Tippoo Tib deserves a lengthy article on his own. I wonder if anyone has done a good biography yet? A very quick Google search doesn't list one.
- PS: Forbath's The River Congo is excellent, by the way: it covers a great deal of other ground outside of the current subject and Forbath has a gift for writing clear, readable narrative without ever making you feel that he's simply telling a story and departing from the facts. Tannin
Genocide in the congo Ctrl+V by 172
- Please, please. A proper subversive Dirty Commie never uses CONTROL-V. That is a modern Microsoft corruption. Real commies use <SHIFT-INSERT>
Section from the start of Leopold's rule up to the end of the Free State added. Not proof-read, it's 4:30AM here and I'm going to bed. No proof-reading, no 'nuffin.
(If anyone wants to volunteer, I have no immediate plan to do the Belgian Congo section. I'm back to birds and native plants tommorow.) Tannin 17:31 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)
You people may dislike me, but a brief overview is necessary. The current article goes into micro detail, but gives little insight as to why these atrocities occurred. As a PhD historian, I can assure you that few scholars would seriously assess Leopold’s rule in the Congo without taking the two contrasting concepts of land and labor into consideration. Understanding the contrasting patters of production between the traditional Congolese tribal states and modern, industrial Belgium is essential.
You people don’t seem to understand the colossal leap from subsistence, seasonal patterns of agricultural production to the modern capitalist one, based on specialization/productivity and surplus value. Personally, I consider this a form of progress (though not in the Congo context!) and don’t understand why some readers deleted my contributions, feeling that I have an anti-modern bias.
Mass-production of rubber in a dense, tropical forest in one of the world’s most isolated regions was after all quite a massive endeavor. Other parts of Africa were not cultivating rubber (quite a harsh crop to cultivate); other parts of Africa had milder climates and topographies. So the whole rapid shift to mass-production of rubber might be considered more important than Leopold’s megalomania and insensitivity.
Indeed this was a change (and this change was the export of capitalism) that revolutionized every level of Congolese society forever. That must be noted, considering that this is an article on Congolese history.
Few people will remember the micro details of the article just minutes aftwer reading. So our duty is to give them a general overview, an understanding of not just what happened, but why.
- A brief summary: yes. Quite right. "You People don't understand ..." I don't know what people you are talking about chum, but don't accuse me of such almighty ignorance.
- Changes in the mode of production consequent to European settlement happened everywhere. So far, this is a history of the Congo Free State. (With a section on the modern DRC tacked on at the end.) The appropriate place to consider global changes in the MOP is in a more general article, which should be referenced from here, of course, and the appropriate place to consider mass production of (for e.g.) rubber is in the period when this mass production actually took place - which was, in the main, well after Leopold was dead.
- The forced transition to capitalisim is indeed a highly relevant matter to the Congo's history, but no more so than it was in every other part of Africa, and the Congo is a very poor place to chose to attempt to explain it, as the brutality of the regime, even after Leopold's demise, was exceptional. If you want to expound on the transition from hunting and gathering, subsistence agriculture and herding to wage labour, then there are much better places to do it: Portugese East Africa for one, South Africa for another. In fact, Leopold's regime had less in common those last mentioned than it did with Tippoo Tib's. Tannin 23:34 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)
"The bourgeois ethic wage of wage/labor productivity" Why is it bougeois it's occidental it's capitalist. [[User:Ericd]
Your point, Ericd?
Capitalism, an economic system in which capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital, ideologic and out of topic why not occidental productivism ? User:Ericd
" ploughed back into monumental buildings in Brussels " what the use of this sentence wasn't "None of the profits from rubber production was reinvested in the Congo region or returned to it in the form of improved infrastructures, education, or improved medical care" more explicit User:Ericd
Between 1880 and 1920 the population of Congo thus halved; over 10 million ‘indolent natives’ unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease.
‘indolent natives’ unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, indolent native is polemical for the rest it's redondand
And murder why ? It should be explained this not an obvious consequence of capitalist exploitation ? User:Ericd
I think it is possible to combine the two statements: "None of the profits from rubber production was reinvested in the Congo region or returned to it in the form of improved infrastructures, education, or improved medical care. Instead, profits were used to construct monumental buildings in Brussels" can satisfy both sides of the argument, if the facts are correct. As for infrastructures, these were created in the Congo, most notably the railroad from Leopoldville to the Atlantic, through slave labor and at a high human cost, in order to make transportation of the commodity more efficient. I do not know if any monumental buildings were, in fact, built in Brussels with proceeds from this slave labor. In both instances, these are facts that can be verified. Danny