(Adapted from: Molefi Kete Asante)
One shakes a dog and one will shake a dog's owner.
African proverb
When the European slave trade ended in the nineteenth-century, after being initiated by Portugal in 1500, Europe was not finished with the exploitation of Africa. What energy was left in Africa after the denuding of its younger population would now be drained by the political and economic vultures of the European and north American continents.
Between 1807, when Great Britain banned the slave trade, to 1957, the date the Gold Coast became independent and chose the name of the ancient empire of Ghana, a long, bitter, continental war was fought over the wealth of Africa.
Africa had not declared war on of Europe - Europe had declared war on Africa: It would not be a conventional war. White Europeans would fight with intrigue, guile, avarice, betrayal and massacre. Black Africans would fight with guerilla tactics, sabotage, non-cooperation with European settlers and the destruction of crops and business. When it was over, Africa had regained its political independence. However, suspicion in the relationship between Africans and Europeans is now as endemic as the struggle to relinquish the psychological grip on the continent resulting from having been oppressed by Whites for so long.
By the beginning of the nineteenth-century, Britain stood alone in Europe as both the master of the seas and the possessor of the largest slave-running operation. Slave ships sailed into the Atlantic, heading south for the west coast of Africa loaded with trinkets, beads, blankets and bangles. These, the slave traders would barter with various African communities in order to gain access to African villages - and their populaces. Once they had loaded their ships with Black Africans, the slavers turned toward the Americas with their human cargo. They would then sell the kidnappees to other Whites in return for loading their vessels with rum and cotton for the markets of Europe. This was the triangular slave trade: To Africa; the Middle passage to the Americas; and then, back to Britain.
the stage is set
Between 1492 and 1885, Europe's continental powers were unchallenged by any other area of the world. The theft of hundreds of tons of precious metals and minerals from the Americas enriched Europe. The uprooting of millions of Black Africans during the same period resulted in their exploitation as slaves. The unrelenting hundred-year low-intensity assaults of the Moroccan armies on the powerful Songhay Empire (successor to the Ghana & Mali Empires) served to offer up the prize of Africa to the quickest and most cynical European players. Overthrowing that Empire in 1594 meant disintegration of Africa's western flank; allowing the cutting-up of Africa between competing European nations. Because of the maritime nature of the exploitation, Europe's reach was global and White Europeans acted in concert in the rape of Africa.
the Berlin conference
At the request of German chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, came the leading figures of Europe and some United States delegates in 1885 to a conference on Africa. This was the first European conference to decide the fate of an entire continent. The European nations had already robbed Africa of much of its youthful vigor and labor in the slave period. Now Whites could indulge in Current forms of exploitation: Settlerism, colonization and expropriation of the material bounty of the continent. Europe would simply declare its stakes over Africa without consulting African leaders' political, ethical and legal rights: Africans had no rights White nations believed they were required to heed. This kind of agreement among White Europeans had not happened in the case of Asia or the Americas. However, the immense size of Africa and the multiplicity of European interests involved, made it sensible to avoid internecine conflict between Whites since such conflict would lower profits. The slave trade taught White Europeans that it was futile to fight each other to control their interests: Asiento became the norm. (The Asiento [Spanish: asiento] in the history of slavery refers to the permission given by the Spanish government to other countries to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies, between the years 1543 and 1834. In British history, it usually refers to the contract between Spain and Great Britain created in 1713 that dealt with the supply of African slaves for the Spanish territories in the Americas. The British government passed its rights to the South Sea Company.) Now that Black slavery was about to end, White colonization could begin in earnest. This had been a land-grabbing free-for-all that achieved formal recognition using one-sided treaties.
African nations and kingdoms reacted defiantly and indignantly throughout the continent in thousands of incidents of resistance to the imposition of foreign influences. These were the continuation of the resistance to slavery itself, since they considered the White supremacist arrangement as neither natural, necessary nor permanent. The Black agitation for Whites to leave Africa and the arbitrary boundaries established by Whites plague Africa into the twenty-first century. They did this by dividing already-existing nations and ethnic groups into separate governments; while bringing groups that may have had enmity between them under the same government. Given the intensification of the industrial revolution in Europe, the Berlin Conference ensured Whites continued their commercial advantage in the labor and raw materials' markets.
The "Public Force" or Force Publique (FP) was the official armed force for what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1885, (when the territory was known as the Congo Free State), through the period of direct Belgian rule (1908 to 1960). Immediately following independence, the FP was retitled as the Congo National Army (ANC).[1]
The FP was initially conceived in 1885 when King Léopold II of Belgium, who held the Congo Free State as his private property, ordered his Secretary of the Interior to create military and police forces for the State. Soon afterwards, in 1886, Leopold dispatched a number of Belgian officers and non- commissioned officers to the territory to create this military force. The officer corps of the Force Publique consisted entirely of whites. They comprised a mixture of Belgian regular soldiers and mercenaries from other countries who were drawn by the prospect of wealth or simply attracted to the adventure of service in Africa.
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Under the Congo Free State
Serving under these European officers were an ethnically-mixed African soldiery. Many were recruited from warrior tribes in the Upper Congo. Others were drawn from Zanzibar and West Africa. The role required of the Force Publique was to defend Free State territory and combat Arab slavers. Under Leopold however a major purpose of the force was to enforce the rubber quotas, and other forms of forced labor. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — soldiers of the FP often took and mistreated hostages (sometimes women, who were held captive in order to force their husbands to meet rubber quotas). Reports from foreign missionaries and consular officials detail a number of instances where Congolese men and women were flogged or raped by soldiers of the Force Publique, permitted to run amok by their officers and NCOs. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and there is photographic evidence that the FP soldiers took human hands as trophies, reportedly on the orders of Leopold to show that bullets had not been wasted. During the Free State period, the Force Publique suffered from institutional problems. During the early years of the force, mutinies of black soldiers occurred several times. By the early 1890s, much of the eastern portion of the Free State was under the control of Arab slave traders (though the Government was able to re-establish control over the east by the mid-1890s). Organizational problems were also quite prevalent during the Free State era. With many Force Publique detachments being stationed in remote areas of the territory, some officers took to using soldiers under their control to further private economic agendas rather than focusing on military concerns.[2]
The Force Publique fought in the 1892–1894 war in the Eastern Congo against Tippu Tip.)
Reeling from the onslaught of European Black slavery, colonization and resource exploitation, African leaders and their nations were in a persistent war. Rebellions in Central Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Nyasaland, Ethiopia, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), Nigeria, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Somalia, Tucolor Empire, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Nyasaland (Malawi), South West Africa (Namibia), Tanganyika, Madagascar (Malagasy), Ghana, Dahomey and the Congo up until 1914. Under leaders such as Queen Yaa ASANTEWA, Mapondera, Kinjikitile Ngwale, Bambala, Mulama, Mensah SARBAH, Onyango DANDE, John CHILEMBWE, Sayyid Muhammad, Samori TURE, Ahmadu SEKU, King BEHANZIN, King IJEBU, Emperor MENELIK II (the most successful rebellion - in Ethiopia – at the battle of Adwa [Aduwa or Adowa]). What became clear in these struggles was that the White forces did not have more courageous soldiers nor any better generals but were in command of far greater firepower.
