The triple causes of African underdevelopment : Colonial capitalism , state terrorism and racism

The paper attempts to inform Africans and the world at large of the triple evils of colonial capitalism, state terrorism, and racism and of different forms of African resistance in order to search for new ways of implementing universal human rights laws and the rights of indigenous people. Most indigenous Africans are immensely underdeveloped and have suffered for more than five centuries because of these triple evils that have been imposed on them by European colonial powers, successive global powers, and their African collaborators. The European colonial powers, namely Spain, Portugal, England, Holland, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy and their African collaborators terrorized, exterminated, abused, and misused indigenous Africans from the 16 to the first half of the 19 centuries, and consequently they have underdeveloped and impoverished the surviving African populations. The homelands and economic and natural resources of Africans were expropriated and transferred to European colonial settlers, their descendants and their African collaborators that have no interest to protect the political, economic, civil, and social rights of these people. Since most of these indigenous peoples are still not represented in government, academic, economic and media institutions of neo-colonial African states, their voices are muzzled and hidden and most people of the world are misinformed and know nothing or little about them. By degrading and erasing the cultures, histories, and humanity of indigenous Africans, the descendants of the settlers and their African collaborators have convinced themselves that they can continue to terrorize and dispossess the resources of these people without moral/ethical and political responsibilities with the help of powerful states of the West and that of China (Quan 2013) as well as global financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

of development that have resulted in further exploitation, underdevelopment and poverty in the Rest.At the same time, a few Africans who control or have open access to the state are getting richer and richer by serving as the intermediaries to the external powers and by looting the resources of the people.In addition, in this age of globalization, neoliberal capitalism through multinational corporations, states, and intergovernmental organizations is engaging in "savage developmentalism" (Quan, 2013) in Africa as in the other continents for accumulating more capital by attacking, dispossessing and repressing the working classes, indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups.Unfortunately, social movements and all forces for social justice, equality, human liberation and egalitarian democracy are fragmented, decentralized, disconnected as well as theoretically disoriented and lack clear and practical guidance and sophisticated knowledge and skills that can expose, discredit and delegitimize neoliberal globalizers, and their organizations and institutions.Practically, ordinary Africans are muzzled and mainstream scholars and other intellectuals are silent on their enormous problems.Specifically, the Euro-American hegemonic scholarship and its African collaborative wing have treated these powerless peoples as objects rather than subjects of history.The discourse of the mainstream Western scholarship and its nationalist African critics that have been articulated in African history, anthropology, philosophy, theology and other fields could not go beyond colonial and neocolonial intellectual paradigms (Mudimbe, 1988).Focusing on British social anthropology, Talal Asad (1979: 92) asserts that anthropologists "have also contributed, sometimes indirectly, toward maintaining the structure of power presented by the colonial system."The world hegemonic knowledge because of its rejection of multi-cultural forms of knowledge and wisdoms and its abyssal thinking tradition could not recognize the humanity of these indigenous peoples and their perspectives.More or less, realizing the shortcomings of the dominant intellectual paradigm and challenging its global mega narrative, critical and colonial and postcolonial studies are opening pathways for subaltern studies such as indigenous and feminist scholarship through their critical voices and struggles (Thomas, 1994;Mohanty, 2003).For example, critical feminism studies promote racial equality, economic and political freedom and transnationalism through engaging in critical pedagogy, anti-capitalist solidarity and decolonizing and reorienting feminism (Mohanty, 2003).
Of course, Africans of different backgrounds such as workers, farmers, women, students and indigenous peoples have been engaging in various forms of resistance to oppose and transform the systems of oppression and exploitation that have been externally and internally imposed on them for several centuries (Fields, 1985;Cooper, 1996;Mohanty, 2003;Mohanty, Russo and Torres, 1991).There is no question that these African actors need to develop the knowledge for liberation with the alliance of their organic intellectuals to form the unity of purpose for uniting their scattered social forces on country and continental levels and beyond to challenge the solidarity of African neocolonial states and their international supporters.The existing theories and knowledge are inadequate to mobilize, reorganize and unite social movements on local, regional and continental levels by going beyond ethno-racial, geo-cultural or geopolitical and gender barriers to empower ordinary Africans in general and their social movements in particular from below and to envision a new world system that is beyond exploitation and injustice.

Theoretical and methodological Insights
This study employs interdisciplinary, multidimensional, comparative, historical, and critical methods and approaches to examine the dynamic interplay among colonial capitalism, state terrorism, racism and underdevelopment in Africa.The data for this research include historical and anthropological sources, government records and published materials.While focusing on social history, this work also employs the French Annales School approach, which rejects the overspecialization of social science disciplines by combing idiographic and nomothetic modes of analyses to understand and explain collective human behavior in relation to social change and underdevelopment.Recognizing the significance of such an approach, Skocpol (1994: 333) notes that "convincing narratives of historical processes-at least narratives of those continuities and changes that are relevant to macroscopic social science-cannot be devised at all without the use of systematic comparative analyses to sort out causal hypotheses and discover new causal analogies.Without tough-minded, analytical comparisons-necessarily cutting through the webs of history for the duration of a given investigation-we can never get straight which structures matter, or which processes count." This critical and historical study looks at societal issues from the bottom up, and utilizes critical discourses and the particular world system approach that deals with longterm and large-scale social changes in relations to indigenous African peoples and their underdevelopment and suffering.As Kiernan (1982: 230) puts it, "There are, after all, good reasons for prying into the past with a historian's telescope and trying to see more clearly what happened, instead of being content with legend or fantasy."Without critically and thoroughly understanding the past, we cannot clearly comprehend the problem of the present such as African underdevelopment and poverty because the past exists in the present.Critical thinking and studies, such as subaltern studies, assist to confront and expose the false claims of universalism that attempts to hide colonial history and imperialist practices in Africa and other places (Mbembe, 2008).The problems global capitalism and its impacts on indigenous Africans are studied by using these theoretical and methodological approaches.Furthermore, the critical discourses of colonial and postcolonial studies help in demonstrating the connection between change in colonial policy and African dynamics that had been beyond the influence of colonial states (Cooper, 2002).For instance, as Cooper (1996) explains, African workers in French and British Africa challenged the colonial approached that tried to reduce them to voiceless colonial subjects, and resisted the colonial practices as human actors.Hence, understanding the dialectical relationship between colonial structure and human agency is very relevant in this study.

Global capitalism, indigenous Africans, and injustices
The European colonial powers used their superior weapons and military forces and collaborators to enslave and colonize directly pre-capitalist societies around the world between the 16 th and 19 th centuries in order to exploit their economic resources and labor power through looting, piracy, terrorism, genocide, expropriation, annexation, continued subjugation, and exploitation.As capitalism emerged and developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials, such as gold and silver, food, markets, and free or cheap labor expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of production and to increase the rate of profit to accumulate capital/wealth.These needs were fulfilled through colonialism, racial slavery, terrorism and genocide.The European capitalists originally looted economic resources of indigenous peoples around the world through war, murder, robbery or theft, enslavement and dispossession and sent them to their respective countries to convert into capital (Marx, 1967: 753-754).Consequently, the original accumulation of wealth/capital occurred in the West; this accumulated capital gradually facilitated the transformation of mercantilism into industrial capitalism and the expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the 18 th and 19th centuries and increased the demand for raw materials, free or cheap labor (mainly slaves), markets, and the intensification and consolidation of global capitalism in the world (Marx, 1967;Rodney, 1972).
With the development of global capitalism, further division of labor, the advancement of technology and organizational capacity in the form of state, military organization, the interstate system, and the transnational corporation, and with the limitless capacity to accumulate more capital in a globalized world, certain human groups have demonstrated their capabilities to impose their power on other human groups through political violence that has involved war, terrorism, and genocide to satisfy their individual and group interests at the cost of humani-ty.The colonizing nations of the West had justified "their scramble for foreign territories as fulfillment of a sacred duty to spread their form of civilization to the world" (Bodley, 1982: 12).These countries used the discourses of the superiority of their race, culture, civilization, and Christian religion to promote and justify destructive and exploitative policies, such as terrorism, genocide, and economic exploitation.The more the colonizers and their descendants advanced in technology and organizational capacity, the more they engaged in terrorism and genocide to continue the robbery of the resources of indigenous peoples around the world.European countries started capitalist colonial expansion to the Americans, Africa, Australia and Asia through engaging in terrorism, genocide, and gross human rights violations and at the same time claimed the superiority of their cultures, religion (Christianity), race, and civilization.
According to Colson (1992: 278), "Economic systems have emerged that created massive conflicts of interests between classes and also nations.Technologies empower those who are able to seize control of the state apparatus and enhance the stakes for which people contend . . .[and] the further creation of technologies that enable humans to play with destructive emotions and habituate themselves to violence under conditions that give them the pleasure of terror without expectation that it will recoil upon them."The state and its agents originally monopolized various forms of political violence.Most social scientists of the 19 th century justified "a deliberate and violent political act carried out as national policy in order to gain access to the natural resources controlled by" indigenous peoples, and "espoused 'scientific' evolutionary theories that explained the destruction and suggested that it was inevitable" (Bodley, 1992: 38).Terrorism as an instrument of massive violence to terrorize indigenous peoples emerged with the racialized capitalist world system.It was practiced through colonialism, servitude, and racial slavery in order to transfer the resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonialists and their descendants and their regional and local collaborators.Most of those indigenous peoples that survived terrorism and genocide were reduced to the status of slavery or semi-slavery (see De Las Casas, 1992).Under the guise of "scientific" theories, most Western scholars and their collaborators in the Rest have justified the destruction of indigenous peoples; they have made "scientific" claims to justify the gross human rights violations and to promote the colonizers personal and group interests.
The further development of capitalism, the accumulation and concentration of capital or economic resources through the separation of the actual producers from their means of production, such as land, led to racialization/ethnicization and socialization of labor (Marx, 1967: 17).The processes of expropriation, racial slavery, and colonialism resulted in hierarchical organization of world populations through the creation of an elaborate discourse of race or racism or a racial project."A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation or explanation of racial dynamics', Winant (1994: 24) writes, "and an effort to organize and distribute resources along particular racial lines" (author's emphasis).Simply put, racism is an expression of institutionalized patterns of colonizing structural power and social control in order to transfer the value of labor and economic resources from the powerless to the powerful group. 1 The global process of racial/ethnonational inequality started through establishing settler colonialism, practicing terrorism and genocide, and intensifying two types of labor recruitment systems: wage labor for poor whites and coerced labor for enslaved non-whites (Roediger, 1991;Jalata 2001).The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant groups that initially dominated the world through the capitalist world system developed two major social stratification systems: classgender and racial caste systems (Du Bois 1977[1935]).While the class system and gender hierarchy were maintained to protect the power of rich white males in an emerging white societies, the racial caste (i.e., racial slavery and segregation) was invented to keep indigenous and enslaved peoples at the bottom of white societies so that they would provide their labor and other resources freely or cheaply.
As the ideology of whiteness was invented and used to exterminate Native Americans and to transfer their resources to white society, it was also used to explain and justify racial slavery and segregation The terrorist attacks on the life and liberty of indigenous peoples by European colonial powers and their collaborators also destroyed existing institutions and economies and exposed the conquered peoples to poverty and famineinduced "holocausts" (Davis, 2001).The destruction of indigenous cultures and institutions resulted in massive deaths (Polanyi, 1944: 159-160).Blakeley (2009: 55) notes that the European colonial powers used various forms of coercion including state terrorism in their acquisition of territories and establishing their colonial institutions; these powers terrorized the indigenous populations and forced them "into supplying [the] conquerors with food supplies, threatening them with death if they did not acquiescence, and the wiping out of whole [cultural groups] that were deemed of no use to the economic projects of the European settlers.Those that did survive were terrorized into forced labor, often as slaves."Generally speaking, mainstream scholars and institutions intentionally have distorted the humanity, cultures, and civilizations of the indigenous peoples to justify colonial violence, cultural destruction, and continued subjugation.Those few scholars, such as and 1 By inventing non-existent races, the racist ideology institutionalizes "the hierarchies involved in the worldwide division of labor" (Balibar &Wallerstein 1991: 6).Race and racism are socio-political constructs since all human groups are biologically and genetically more alike than different (Malik 1996).To justify racial slavery and colonialism, the ideology of racism was developed in scientific and religious clothing and matured during the last decades of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th centuries.Wolf (1981) who have tried to explain the impact of colonial violence on indigenous peoples did not go far enough to explain the essence and consequences of colonial terrorism and their far reaching consequences.Let us focus on the case of indigenous Africans and demonstrate how European colonial powers have laid the foundations of underdevelopment, poverty, continued subjugation, and suffering in the African continent.

The persistent causes of underdevelopment and poverty
For almost five centuries, European empire builders employed different strategies and tactics in Africa to make money through the ownership of human beings, exploration, evangelization, colonization, commercialization, terrorism, banditry, robbery, and theft.The processes of merchandizing some young Africans, dominating and controlling trade, destroying African institutions, cultures and religions, imposing Christianity, destroying African leadership and sovereignties through establishing colonial governments, dispossessing lands and other economic resources, and transforming Africans into slaves or coerced laborers for the purpose of advancing private profit caused public disasters for Africans and peoples of African origins (Lonsdale, 1985: 722).When various African peoples intensified their respective resistance to racial slavery, colonial expansion, domination, and exploitation and later engaged in national liberation struggles, some of these empire builders increased their levels of terrorism to prevent the reemergence of African sovereignties and to continue their theft and robbery of African resources.Ganiage (1985: 157) describes that European policy makers planned and acted "to crush African resistance by a ruthlessly systematic exploitation of the technological gap between European and African weaponry and military organization.''Indigenous Africans were exposed to two waves of terror: The first wave started in the late 16 th century with merchandising of some young Africans at gunpoint and colonizing some limited coastal islands or territories (about 10 percent of Africa).The second wave emerged in the first half of the 19 th century and consolidated with the partition and colonization of the whole continent in the same century.European countries and others that involved in Africa try to forget the deaths and sufferings caused by racial slavery, the blood spilled, mass murdered, the severed hands and heads, and the shattered families and other crimes committed in Africa to extract wealth/capital.As Adam (1998: 295) puts, "Forgetting one's participation in mass murder is not something passive; it is an active deed.In looking at the memories recorded by the early white conquistadors in Africa, we can sometimes catch the act of forgetting at the very moment it happens."The practices of attacking, raiding, capturing, and owning human beings, as well as the dispossessing of the coastal lands of African peoples involved the first wave of colonial terrorism.The slavers and colonizers also used various forms of violence to force people to forsake their individual and group sovereignties in order to use them as commodities and to exploit their labor and economic resources.
Enslaving some young Africans involved warfare, trickery, banditry, kidnapping, burning villages, raping, torturing, dividing and destroying families and communities, facilitating civil wars, and destroying existing leadership and institutions and cultures.Between 13 and 15 million young Africans were merchandized as commodities by European slave traders and their African collaborators and transported to the Americas and other places.There were also Africans who were enslaved by Arabs and their African collaborators and exported to Asia.Furthermore, millions of young Africans were also merchandized and worked on European plantations, farms, and mining in Africa; some of them worked as domestic workers and porters, too.The development of mercantilism in Western Europe in the late 15 th century enabled some European countries to have technological knowledge to build ships and cannons and to navigate seaways and gradually establish control overall the world's sea ways such as the North Sea, the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea.Consequently, some European powers started to own sea-going vessels and cannons and to finance the exploration of the unknown continents.Portugal started to stage racial slavery and colonial expansion in Africa to overcome the problem of food deficit and to seek overseas' wealth. 2  Slave merchants started to send expeditions to import more and more slaves to Europe and the Americas.The Portuguese through "a diplomatic mission of friendship and alliance" with the agreement of the leaders of the people built their first fort called Elmina ("the mine") on the Coast of Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1481 to get access to enslaved Africans and gold (Humbaraci and   2 The technology of ship building and the availability of guns enabled the Portuguese first to colonize the islands of Azores and Madeira to cultivate wheat by using the labor of European migrants driven by hunger and captured slaves raided from the African coast (Birmingham 1999: 2).The Portuguese colonialists also captured and settled the Canary Islands, the offshore islands of Morocco, and occupied the Morocco fortress of Ceuta in the 15 th century.After controlling the Atlantic Coast of Morocco, the Portuguese colonized some parts of African coast, established sugar plantations on the islands, and built trade factories on the beaches.Portuguese ambitions in Africa were diffuse between the 16 th and 17 th centuries: "One was to secure manpower to exploit in Brazil and the island colonies, but the Portuguese state and Portuguese merchants were equally interested in the spice trade, in precious metals, particularly gold, and in forging strategic alliance aimed against Mameluk Egypt and then the Ottoman Empire" (Freund 1984: 40).To satisfy the needs of labor and commerce and to collect information on Africa, raiding, capturing, and owing Africans became an important enterprise for the Portuguese (Davidson 1961: 33-34).Realizing the profitability of the slave trade, those merchants who were not convinced about the profitability of slavery changed their mind: "The outcome of their talking was financial support for a large expedition of six ships . . .and a small scale war on the western coast in which one hundred and sixty-five men, women, and children were taken captives 'besides those that perished and were killed'" (Davidson 1961: 37).

Asafa 79
Muchink , 1974: 85).The slave labor helped Portugal to experiment her colonial practices on the Atlantic and the Cape Verde islands, which became known for textile industry.Furthermore, the Portuguese merchants developed a colonial plantation economy on the Atlantic Coast of Africa and Brazil (Birmingham, 1999: 5).Later, other European powers learned from the experiment.Portugal also extended its imperialist and trade influence on the East African coast in the 16 th century and involved in what is today Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia (former Abyssinia) as part of its broader Indian Ocean strategy (Freund, 1984: 41).It forced the Swahili coastal towns to submit or form alliance.Portuguese expeditions also engaged in sacking and plundering African coastal cities.Furthermore, Portugal established her sphere of influence in the Zambezi valley, Zimbabwe, and the Congo.It also created permanent settlements in Angola and Mozambique.Gradually the Portuguese colonies included Angola, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde Islands, and Mozambique.Portugal founded Luanda, the capital city of Angola, in 1575; it was the oldest European colonial settlement in the south of the equator.Although salt, iron, copper, ivory, and gold attracted the Portuguese to Africa, enslaved Africans emerged as more important commodities (Birmingham, 1999: 17).After the Scramble for Africa, Portugal intensified its policies of effectivecontrol and pacification to prevent loses of its colonies to its rival imperial and internal resistance forces.Between 1870 and 1905, the Portuguese effectively colonized the interior of Angola and Mozambique through series of wars and terrorism 3 (Smith, 1985: 493-520).Gradually 3 According to Bruce Vandervort (1998: 146), "The Portuguese imperial renaissance of the 1890s, spurred on by national indignation at the country's humiliation at the hands of her imperial rivals, meant war for the peoples who inhabited the African lands over which Portugal claimed sovereignty.In Angola, beginning in the 1880s, Portuguese columns made increasingly vigorous efforts to break out of the coastal regions and on to the central plateau, to penetrate the northern rain forests and to bring the arid lands of the far south under effective control.In Guinea-Bissau . . .Portuguese military pressure on the interior increased . . .Mozambique, however, was the major arena of Portuguese colonial warfare."There were various peoples and independent kingdoms that refused to recognize the colonial power of Portugal and resisted to pay taxes and to work on colonial projects and plantations.The Portuguese army and African mercenaries used warfare and terrorism to break the will of these Africans (Vandervort 1998: 148).They engaged in what they called the wars of pacification, which caused thousands of deaths and exiles.With increased resistance in Angola and Mozambique, the Portuguese colonial forces terrorized the indigenous peoples, destroyed cultures, institutions, and communities, denied wells during drought, and killed or exiled leaders (Herbert 2003: 29-38).After the mid-1950s different nationalist groups that later formed nationalist movements emerged and demanded national independence.To respond to these conditions, the colonial government and its army intensified terrorism to prevent them from fighting for their rights."No child grew up in Angola without risking a daily encounter with violence," David Birmingham (1999: 133-134) writes, "police violence, gang violence, domestic violence, conscripted violence, exiled violence, the violence of permanent fear permeating a whole society and a whole generation."As soon as the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) started the Angolan liberation struggle in September 1962, thousands of refugees moved to neighboring countries (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974: 123).The condition in Mozambique was not different.The uprisings of the sugar-cane plantation workers and dock inter-European competition for slaves to man their mines and plantations of the Americas intensified racial slavery in Africa.England, France, Holland, and Spain also participated in the Atlantic slave trade for more than three centuries.These European powers with their African collaborators terrorized and dehumanized young Africans that they were enslaving."Where warfare and violence stimulated the initial capture," Miller (2002: 45) writes, "the victims would have begun their odysseys in exhausted, shaken, and perhaps wounded physical condition." Since raiding, capturing, merchandising human beings, and transporting them involved several lethal dangers, a great portion of the enslaved Africans perished.As Nevinson (1906: 113) expounds, "The path is strewn with dead men's [and women's] bones.You see the white thighbones lying in front of your feet, and at one side, among the undergrowth, you find the skull.These are the skeletons of slaves who have been unable to keep up with the march, and so were murdered or left to die."Those enslaved Africans who survived the danger of death were dehumanized and treated less than animals: "The great majority of the slaves went directly to the slave pens . . .These barracoons-a word also applied to farmyards for keeping animals-were usually barren enclosures . . .Large numbers of slaves accumulated within these pens, living for days and weeks surrounded by walls too high for a person to scale, squatting helplessly, naked, on the dirt and entirely exposed to the skies except for a few adjoining cells where they could be locked at night.They lived in a 'wormy morass' . . .and slept in their own excrement, without even a bonfire for warmth" (Miller 2002: 49)."All slaves trembled in terror at meeting the white cannibals of the cities, the first Europeans whom many of the slaves would have seen.They feared the whites' intention of converting African brains' into cheese or rendering the fat of African bodies into cooking oil, as well as burning their bones into gunpowder" (Miller, 2002: 49).The European powers used various forms of violence to acquire free or cheap labor and to invade and take over African lands and others resources while claiming that they were promoting Christianity, civilization, and modernity.As demonstrated above, in the Case of Portugal, the second phase of colonial terrorism was the continuation of the first one.
The first Dutch settlers arrived in the Cape peninsula in 1652.The Dutch East India Company occupied the Cape strike in 1963 met with bloody reprisals, arrests and deaths (Humbaraci and Muchnik 1974: 146-147).With the intensification of the national struggle under the leadership of FRELIMO (the Mozambican National Resistance), most nationalists were terrorized and brutalized by the Portuguese forces.Furthermore, Western European and American financial aid contributed to the suppression of these Africans.As Birmingham (1999: 234) explains, "The more the West [supported] the forces of minority white domination in Africa, the more Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique [would] be different from those countries who had their independences granted-sometimes virtually on a silver platters."peninsula under the leadership of Jan van Riebeeck (Thompson, 2001: 32).In 1662, the Cape of Good Hope emerged as a complex and racially stratified society.Although the Dutch settlers initially established fairly cordial relationship with the San people and acquired sheep and cattle in exchange for European goods, they gradually started to use violence to dispossess their lands and forcing them into slavery.The settlers began to have upper hand on the San and other indigenous peoples because of the superiority of their organization, weaponry, and the divisions among the indigenous peoples.The Dutch settlements expanded their colonial territories from generation to generation by gaining confidence by brutally defeating the indigenous peoples and tightly controlling (Thompson, 2001: 38).
The settlers first destroyed the sovereignty of the San by expropriating their economic resources and by destroying their leadership, institutions, and culture and reducing them into the status of slaves or coerced workers (Freund, 1984: 55-56).The Boers expropriated the land and other economic resources of the San and later other Africans in order to impoverish and force them into the service of the Boers (Den Berghe, 1970: 23).The Dutch East India Company also expropriated the economic resources of the San such as land and "livestock-their most valued possessions: the records of the company show that between 1662 and 1713 it received 14,363 cattle and 32,808 sheep from… Their fragile political system had collapsed, and the chiefs had become pathetic clients of the company.In the 1680s, individuals and families had begun to detach themselves from their society and serve burghers as shepherds and cattle-herders" (Thompson, 2001, 38).In addition, the European diseases such as smallpox finally annihilated the San pastoral society.Unfortunately, European colonial powers used colonial medical practices to claim that Africans were decimating because of their physical inability to adjust to European civilization; "colonial sciences" legitimated by the discourses of race, gender and cultural differences justified the annihilation of the San and other African ethnonational groups (Vaughan, 1992).The settlers also invaded, terrorized, destroyed, and used the remaining population of San, huntergathers society, as slaves or coerced workers.The Boers viewed the San as vermin; their commandos killed 503 and captured 239 in 1774, and killed 2503 and took as prisoners 669 between 1786 and 1795 (de Berghe, 1970: 24).Then they continued to attack, colonize, and destroy African farming communities.Although the Bantuspeaking Africans such as Xhosa and Zulu who were mixed farmers seriously resisted the incursion of Europeans into their homelands, they were also defeated and dominated after many centuries.
Because of the essence of their social formations, the occupationally differentiated Africans, namely the San and Bantu speaking Africans (such as the Zulu, Ndebele, and Sotho) had varied experiences with their European enemies.Relatively speaking, it was more difficult to attack, colonize, and destroy the African farming communities than the pastoral and hunting-gathering communities.The Dutch colony was expanded on different directions without any competition until 1795 (Theal, 1969(Theal, [1894]]: 96-111), when England captured the Cape from the Dutch.After 1795, both the Dutch and English colonial settlers continued the policy of terrorizing and annihilating the indigenous peoples of South Africa.Those indigenous Africans who lived in the eastern part of Southern Africa were terrorized and colonized during the early 19 th century: "In 1811 and 1812, in a campaign that set the precedent for the piecemeal conquest of all the black farming people of Southern Africa, British regular troops, assisted by colonial commandos and Khoikhoi units, ruthlessly expelled the Xhosa inhabitants from the land through to the Fish River, burning crops and villages and making off with thousands of head of cattle" (Thompson, 2001: 54-55).After occupying the Cape peninsula, like the Dutch, the British settlers started to terrorize and colonize the frontier political and farming communities.John Cradock, the British military governor of the Cape of Good Hope outlined his plan to annihilate the leadership and communities such as Xhosa; he explained that "the expediency of destroying the Kaffir [Bantu speakers] Kraals, laying waste their gardens and fields and in fact totally removing any object that could hold out their chiefs an inducement to revisit the regained territory" (quoted in Magubane, 1996: 45).
Cradock started the frontier war and terrorism of 1811-12.According to Magubane (1996: 45), this "was total war because it did away with the distinction between military and civil categories.It was total war because it affected all levels of individual and community life: political, economic, psycho-social, and military."After they were removed from their homelands, the surviving Xhosas became coerced workers for the British settlers.With the discovery of diamonds and gold in 1867 and 1884 respectively in Kimberly and Witwatersrand, the British colonial government intensified colonial terrorism.Those Africans who survived were disarmed and settled on reservations; they were forced to be coerced laborers in mining and farming industries.Despite the fact that the southern African kingdoms and societies initially established friendly commercial relationship with Europeans, the Europeans wanted to own African lands by violating the norms of society: "White farmers . . .claimed to own the land they had been permitted to use, whereas the idea that a person could have property rights in land did not exist in African culture" (Thompson, 2001: 71).The Europeans settlers used the cleavage in African societies, firearms, and the Africans "lacked the equipment to capture fortified positions or laagers composed of circles of wagons, and when Africans resorted to guerrilla tactics the invaders forced them into submission by attacking their food supplies.Time after time, Afrikaner [Dutch settler] commandos and British regiment brought Africans Asafa 81 to their knees by systematically destroying their homes, crops, and grain reserves, seizing their livestock, and turning their women and children into refugees" (Thompson, 2001: 72).
Both the Dutch and the British contested to own African resources such as land, cattle, labor, and minerals.However, in 1870 "African kingdoms, Afrikaner republics and British colonies co-existed in a rough equilibrium of power, but pursuing widely differing social and economic goals" (Marks, 1985: 359).During the Scramble for South Africa, between 1877 and 1895, South Africa emerged as a "white man's country" (Schreuder, 1980: 4-9).According to Schreuder (1980: 9), "What mattered most of all was that the local balance of power had tilted … against the authority of the African political communities in favor of the Europeans; that the peculiar modern political-economy of the region had been formed; and that the settlement patterns -particularly those of territorial segregation and the 'right to the land' -were ultimately decided."How did all these happen?Particularly it was not easy for the Dutch and English settlers to terrorize and dominate the Zulus; "for most people in Europe and America, recognition of the valor of African fighting men begins and ends with the Zulus" (Vadervort, 1998: 102).Moving to the Zululand, the Afrikaners attacked the Zulus in December 1838.Despite the fact that the Zulus were well organized under their able king Dingaan, Shaka's successor, their invading enemies massacred them because they used elephant guns (Vadervort, 1998: 109).Consequently, the Boers colonized Natal and declared it a republic; however, the British took Natal from Boer in 1846.
The Boers left the republic and moved to the Boer republics in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.Now the British had to face the Zulus.Although the Zulus challenged the British at many war fronts, they finally lost "the war because their traditional military strategy of head-on engagement in the long run could not prevail against the breech-loading rifle" (Vadervort, 1998: 111).The British also used the divide and conquer strategy to destroy the power of the Zulus.More than the war with the British, the ensuing bloody civil war between Zulu factions destroyed the Zulu kingdom in the 1880s.With the Zulu rebellion of 1906, the British increased their violence; more than 3,380 people were murdered or hanged, thousands imprisoned; hundreds of leaders were annihilated (Herbert, 2003: 85-93).Although the Dutch and English colonialists defeated the Zulu and other African farming communities, expropriated their lands and livestock, and forced some of them into coerced labor, they could not disintegrate these communities because they were conditioned to the diseases brought from Europe and their numerical superiority to the settlers; another reason why the African farming communities did not disintegrate was that "their economy was more complex, their social networks were far more resilient, and their political systems were far more durable" than the hunter-gatherers and pastoral communities (Thompson, 2001: 72).
Despite the fact that "the white settlers were few in number, their polities were frail, and their pockets of settlement were bordered by autonomous African polities," "the white impact intensified dramatically as a result of the discovery of the world's greatest deposits of diamonds, soon to be followed by gold, in the heart of southern Africa" (Thompson, 2001: 72).According to Thompson (2001: 109), "Great Britain, unchallenged by European rivals, dominated the external trade of the region.In spite of the ambition of their creators, the Afrikaner states were inexorably part of the informal British empire."Both the British army and militia and Afrikaner commandos dominated Africans through colonial terrorism and transformed southern Africa in the last decades of the 19 th nineteenth.Finally, the British army defeated the Afrikaner republics between 1899 and 1902, and formed the Union of South Africa in 1910.At the end, all African groups were brought under white domination in Southern Africa for almost five centuries.The Dutch and English colonizers justified their colonial terrorism and the establishment of the racist political economy and structures in the discourses of racial superiority, Christianity, and European civilization.In these complex processes, the violent racist state and apartheid society were born in South Africa.Furthermore, the British forces colonized Lesotho in 1844, Botswana between 1885 and 1890, and Swaziland in 1906.Similarly, in 1890, the British expedition force consisting of 184 English and Afrikaners and 300 black mercenaries violently occupied Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1891 under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes and the company called the British South African Company; these forces settled there and confiscated the lands and cattle of the indigenous peoples (Turok and Maxey, 1985: 248-249).
Similarly, France colonized some African coastal areas in the 17 th century and Algeria in the early 19 th century.Although France formed the French West Africa in 1895, since the17 th century it controlled St. Louis, Rufisque, Gorée, and Dakar in Senegal, Grand Bassam and Assini in Côte d'Ivoire, and in a small coastal area in Dahomey (now Benin).Between 1830 and 1845 in Algeria, the French army engaged in terrorism, killing men, women, and children, and annihilating some clan families, beheading their leaders, setting fires, "smoking … men, women and children to death," and throwing hundreds of corpses in caves (Kiernan, 2007: 365).The French military leaders in Algeria manifested severe cruelty by ordering summary executions for possible or just suspicion of resistance (Kiernan, 1982: 73).Within the first three decades, the French military massacred between 500,000 and 1 million from approximately 3 million Algerian people (Kiernan, 2007: 364-365).
According to Kiernan (2007: 374), "By 1875, the French conquest was complete.The war had killed approximate-ly 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830.A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy them.'" The French burned the city of Constantine; 20,000 French troops "bombarded and attacked the town of 30,000, leaving corpses of the inhabitants strewn 'everywhere on the ground.''The threshold, the courtyard, the stairs, the apartments, all these places were covered with bodies so close together that it was difficult to take a step without treading on them.And what to say of this trail of bodies on the torturous contour of the precipice where the unfortunate women had tumbled with their children on being seized with fright at our entry into the town'" (Kiernan, 2007: 368-369).All these crimes against humanity were committed to cow the Algerian population.Some lands of Algerians were expropriated and given to the French settlers.The French settlers reached 4,000 families in 1882, and the colonial government established 197 settlements by granting lands freely totaling 347,000 hectares (Ganiage, 1985: 163).The more the French increased terrorism and repression, the more Algerians resisted colonial domination.During the night of November 1, 1954, a handful of armed nationalists confronted French soldiers.Considering this event as a dangerous condition and labeling the repressive measures of the colonial government as "the struggle against terrorism," the colonial government expanded the legal powers of the army and the police (Branche, 2004: 135).Consequently, the French army targeted both combatants and civilians and engaged in forcing them into concentration camps and summary executions (Branche 2004: 138).
"The execution of hostages owed its genesis to colonial law, which assigned collective responsibility in the case of certain infractions, and authorized collective punishments, including forced labor.This principle was enforced in the spring of 1955: if an attack took place, the nearest village was considered collectively responsible.The reprisals that ensued might include executing hostages" (Banche, 2004: 139).Tortures, beatings, and rapes were also used as forms of colonial terrorism: "Torture sessions began with the systematic stripping of the victim.One method of torture was rarely used alone.It was more often combined with one of five separate tactics: beatings, hanging by the feet or hands, water torture, torture by electric shock, and rape" (Branche, 2004: 140).Rape was a theatre of violence in Algeria; gang rapes were often common.Rape as an act of terrorism was intended to impose psychological destruction on Algerian society.As Branche (2004: 141) states, "This particular act of violence struck a well-aimed blow at one of Algerian society's foundations: the virginity or 'purity' of women.It also attacked the manhood of Algerian men, which relied upon their ability to defend their women."As the Algerian national struggle was intensified, the French colonial government increased colonial terrorism although it failed to crush the will of the Algerian people.Finally, Algeria achieved its political independence in 1962.
The French Federation of West Africa consisted of Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Benin, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea, Mauritania, and Tog after WW II.France also established its colony in East Africa; it colonized Obock, an important commercial center on the Red Sea in 1862.In addition, it occupied the Ambado and Djibouti areas between 1885 and 1892; Djibouti became the capital of French Somaliland in 1896.France also occupied Tunisia in 1881 and part of Morocco in the late 19 th century.After establishing their first foothold for about two hundred years at a trading post called St. Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, "French traders had seen the Senegal as a highway into the interior of West Africa, to exotic place like Timbuktu, which they believed to be the source of a rich trade in ivory, gems and gold.But disease and powerful African opponents made expansion into the interior an extremely difficult process, and for a long time French commerce in West Africa was largely confined to the trade in human beings" (Vandervort, 1998: 70).The French merchants used St. Louis and the island of Gorée in the19 th and 18 th centuries for slave trade and for sending slaves to the French sugar plantations in the West Indies.After the 1850s, France started to expand its colonial expansion into the interior of Senegal.It intensified the war of colonial expansion and terrorism between 1870and 1905(Person 1985: 208-256): 208-256).The French army raided villages, burned homes, destroyed crops, and driven off herds.Despite the fact that the Tukolors who were related to the Fulani tried their best to resist French colonialism under the leadership al-Hajji Umar, they were defeated because of the firepower and the greater mobility of the French army (Vandervolt,1998, 79).
Ahmadu Seku, the eldest son and chosen successor of al-Hajji Umar, tried to prevent the destruction of the Tukolor Empire.However, in 1889, Segu, the capital city of Ahmadou was captured; then the conquest of fabled Timbuktu followed.Then France turned to fight against Samori Touré4 (1830-1900), one of the greatest leaders in West Africa.France also colonized Wadai (now the Republic of Chad) between 1909 and 1912.Wadai was suffering from the destruction of slavery during the arrival of the French.The French installed their puppet chiefs such as Acyl and others, destroyed those leaders that opposed to French colonialism, and ruled Chad until the mid-1960s.In French West Africa, the Tuareg revolted in Southern Sahara from 1916 to 1917.In Niger, they were terrorized, killed, and ruthlessly repressed (Herbert 2003(Herbert : 1201)).Similarly, the pacification of the Ivory Coast involved war, terrorism, and the destruction of leadership and society.When in the homeland of Baoulé, guerrilla warfare continued between 1898 and 1900 the French increased terrorism and repression (Suret-Canale, 1964: 96).The French colonial government gave full power to its police to collect taxes from people who were resisting colonial rules: "tax . . .gathered at the cost of villages burnt down, chiefs and natives killed in large numbers, heads of chiefs put up on poles, the imposition of fines" (quoted in Suret-Canale, 1964, 99).In North Africa, France expanded its colonial occupation from Algeria to Tunisia in 1881 and Morocco in 1906 (Ganiage, 1985, 159-207).The last Moroccan guerrilla fighters resisted French colonialism until 1934.The 'pacification' of the fierce Berber fighters of Morocco by the French started between 1903 and 1904.In 1912, France established its protectorate on Morocco.
In 1904 the French and Spanish colonial governments decided bilaterally that the northern coastal region would be regarded as a Spanish zone of influence, and the eastern Morocco would be under French influence.Furthermore, France colonized Madagascar in 1896 through ruthlessly terrorizing various indigenous peoples in the island (Deschamps, 1985: 521-538).During the turn of the 20 th century, France used five measures to eliminate the possibility of resistance.It completely disarmed the people, arrested and deported leaders, imposed payment of retroactive taxes and war fine, imposed coerced labor and annual tax payment, and destroyed camps and settlements in villages (Suret-Canale, 1964: 100-102).Since the people revolted against these measures, the French forces used terrorism and systematic repression (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1985: 298-315).The police toured the villages, attacked communities, and ravaged their crops to force them to pay taxes.As Hochschild (1998: 280) expounds, "In France's equatorial African territories . . . the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled… Almost all-exploitable land was divided among concession companies.Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary companies 'sentries,' and the chicotte [whipping] were the order of the day."In the French Congo to celebrate Bastille Day two white men "had exploded a stick of dynamite in a black prisoner's rectum" (Hochschild, 1998: 280-281).
As mentioned above, the European colonial powers used commerce, religion, and terrorism to acquire what they wanted from Africans.There were few African leaders who initially "misunderstood the objectives of the colonial enterprise" (Falola, 2002: 182) and signed the so-called treaties with the European powers; these "African leaders signed documents to show that they surrendered their power and agreed to promote trade and accept other conditions.There is no evidence that many African chiefs understood the contents of the treaties" (Falolam 2002: 179).Of course, most African leaders and societies did not sign treaties with the European powers and resisted European colonialism to retain their sovereignties and protect their lands and other economic resources, institutions, and cultures.Some of those African leaders who signed treaties also resisted European colonialism after they realized the intentions of the European powers.Of course, the Europeans had the power of technology, organizational capacity, and resources to build and use professional armies devoted to full-time war and terrorism; they had the ability to recruit large armies of African mercenaries who were ready to fight on their behalf in Africa and beyond and to provide information on Africa.According to Falola (2002: 183), "The Europeans relied on improved firearms.Africans used bows, arrows, and muzzle-loading guns (such as Dane guns), which had to be loaded slowly.The European armies in the area of the partition relied on breech-loaders, rifles that could fire at the rate of about ten rounds per minute.Whereas the European armies had adequate modern guns (the Maxim and Gatling), their African rivals lacked access to them." Using professional armies and modern guns (different technology), the Europeans intensified ruthless wars and terrorism on resisting African societies and forced them to accept European colonialism by the threat of violence.Social destruction and colonialism were expanding in Africa in all directions.When the Turko-Egyptian forces were weakened and abandoned garrison towns on the Somali coast, Harar, and eastern Oromia (the Oromo country), "European imperialism became more active, and the three western powers already involved in the Horn of Africa strove to fill the vacuum.The British occupied the ports of Zeila and Berbera, the French made treaties with the sultans of Tadjoura and Gobaad for cession of their territory, and Italians asserted claims to the Assab area" (Thompson and Adloff, 1968: 7).Italy occupied Libya 1911 and Massawa in 1885.Britain's colonialism of Somaliland was not limited to the coast but extended to the hinterland later called British Somaliland.Somalia was partitioned among four countries, France taking the north, Britain the middle, Italy the south, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) the west."It was the British who came in for most of the rough work," Kiernan (1982: 81) notes, "having to take on the celebrated 'Mad Mullah,' another of those enigmatic personalities -he was a gifted writer as well as partisan -who led … the old Islamic world against European intrusion, but were at the same time harbingers of something new, national unification."The resistance of Somalis to British colonialism under the leadership of Mohammed Ibn Abdullah Hassan who the British called the "Mad Mullah" brought terrorism and war on Somalis. 5 After colonizing Egypt in 1882, Britain 5 The warrior Mullah attacked those who collaborated with the enemy, collected arms, organized men into military, and preached a holy war against the colonial occupying forces (Herbert 2003: 57).The British sent several expeditionary forces against this "political and military leader of the highest caliber" and his followers, terrorized and killed thousands of people, burned villages, raped women, and looted resources (Herbert 2003: 57-67).
The British also mobilized 5000 Abyssinian/Ethiopian soldiers against the Somalis.Their attack occupied the areas now called Kenya 1896, Uganda, the island of Zanzibar, and Sudan in 1899.By declaring protectorate over present-day Kenya, Uganda, and island of Zanzibar, Britain established British East Africa.The indigenous peoples of these areas resisted British colonialism; when the colonial office intensified land expropriation, taxation, and recruitment of coerced labor, they attacked white officials, settlers, and traders (Herbert, 2003: 78).To crush this resistance, the British started to raid and terrorize these peoples. 6British colonialism was expanding to other parts of Africa.When Britain was sending its colonial army from Egypt to occupy Sudan, there was a politico-religious movement known as Mahdia that was struggling against Turko-Egyptian colonial domination in Sudan.The religious leader who called himself the Mahdi led this movement.One of the Mahdi's best generals, Abu Anja, defeated the Anglo-Egyptian army of 8,500 men at the battle Shaykan in November 1883 (Vandervort, 1998, 168).When Britain sent her famous general, Charles George Gordon in 1884 to extricate some of her men from Sudan, the Mahdi army captured and beheaded him.
After a decade, Britain attempted to occupy Sudan under the leadership of Major-General Horatio Herbert Kitchener.Madhi died in 1885 and replaced by his chosen successor and his second-in command, the KhalifaAbdullahi.Using superior weapons such as gunboats, Kitchener defeated the Madhist army at Firket on June 7, 1896.At the battle of Omduruman in 1898, the British army using their superior weapons mowed down the followers of the Mahdi, killed the Khalifa in 1899 and ended the Mahdia Movement.As Vandervort (1998: 177) notes, "The many thousands of Mahdists dying and wounded on the battlefield received no aid from the British, who simply turned their backs and marched away.This gives an indication of the depth of feeling in the ranks about the death of Gordon."Of course, the that started in 1901 against the Somali resistance forces ended in 1921, when the British and the Abyssinian armies defeated the followers of the Mullah. 6One of the indigenous peoples that defied the Pax Britannica was the Nandi who lived in the hills northeast of Lake Victoria.The British colonial office established the Nandi Field Force in 1905 to terrorize, defeat and destroy the Nandi community.The force killed 1,117 Nandis, looted 16,000 cattle, 36,000 sheep and goat, burned 5000 huts and grain stores, and forcefully moved the surviving population to reservations (Herbert 2003: 80).In 1900 one official expressed that "the England of today, intoxicated with militarism, blinded by arrogance, indifferent to truth and justice" (quoted in V.G.Kiernan 1982: 178).Like the Nandi, the Embu and Kikuyu peoples revolted in Kenya because their economic resources particularly their lands were given to white settlers.The Kikuyu formed the Land and Freedom Guerrilla Army that the British called Mau-Mau; in 1963, when Kenya achieved its independence 11,500 Kikuyu were murdered when only 32 white settlers were killed (Herbert 2003: 85).Similarly, refusing to pay taxes, providing labor and forced relocation, the Giriama rebelled in 1914 against British colonialism in Kenya: "The colonial administration had attempted to introduce taxes and to relocate people according to the requirements of the labor market, in order to boost economic conditions along the coast" (Herbert 2003, 219).The British forces destroyed the fort of Kaya Fungo and raped women that sparked the fire of rebellion.At the end of the year, the Giriama were terrorized and cowed by the British expeditionary forces and 150 of them killed, 5,000 of their huts burned, and 3,000 of their goats confiscated (Herbert 2003, 220).
pacification of different parts of Sudan continued through war and terrorism.For example, when the leader of Darfur in Western Sudan refused to pay taxes, the Anglo-Egyptian government sent its expeditionary forces and killed 261 and seriously wounded 96 peoples and disbanded about 4,000 soldiers (Herbert, 2003, 188-195).The British had already started to establish their colonies in West Africa and in the early 19th century.The Ashanti kingdom between 1823 and 1824 and between 1873 and 1874 challenged this colonial expansion.As Vandervort (1998: 84) asserts, "Britain found herself locked in a dispute on the Gold Coast of West Africa with the kingdom of Ashanti, one of the great empires of precolonial Africa.The subsequent Anglo-Ashanti war was Britain's first major conflict in the rain forests of tropical Africa." The founding of European trading posts on the shores of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) contributed to the wealth and power of the Ashanti kingdom.This African kingdom was involved in the criminal trade of slavery.According to Vandervort (1998: 85), "By the 1680s … slaves accounted for some 75 percent of regional exports.Ashanti military activity during this period was geared closely to seizing slaves for sale to the Europeans, who had begun setting up trading posts like Cape Coast Castle or Accra along the Gold Coast."Despite the fact that the British claimed to own Cape Coast Castle, Ashanti asserted sovereignty on the coastal area.Since the British did not want to recognize Ashanti sovereignty, the relationship between the kingdom and the British officials was broken in 1823.In 1824, an Ashanti army killed General Sir Charles McCarthy and beheaded him; the defeat of the British army led to "the greatest failure in the history of the British occupation of the Gold Coast" (quoted in Vandervort, 1998:85).In 1871, when the British purchased the littoral of the Gold Coast from the Netherlands, the Ashanti kingdom claimed it as part of its empire.Vandervort (1998: 87) notes that the Dutch recognized Ashanti's sovereignty over its enclave of Elmina "whose African inhabitants were loyal subjects of Kumasi, was a vital Ashanti outlet to the sea, where Ashanti merchants could trade directly with foreign suppliers of guns, gunpowder and iron rods (which were cut up to make bullets).In order to preserve the status quo in the former Dutch ports, King Kofi had demanded British recognition of Ashanti sovereignty over the coastal enclaves and payment of annual rent." The refusal to accept the demand of the Ashanti Kingdom led to war between 1873 and 1874.This time mainly because of its artillery and breech-loaders, the British force defeated the Ashanti army and left "Heaps of dead and wounded."The British army had continued to terrorize the Ashantis since they continued to resist British occupation."Invaded by an army composed largely of African troops from Nigeria and Central Africa," Vandervort (1998: 101) writes, "with a sprinkling of Sikhs, the Ashanti gave the British 'their last as well as the Asafa 85 hardest battle the latter had ever fought in their longstanding attempts to control and finally subjugate Ashanti.'"The British also gradually established their colonial administration in southern Nigeria and expanded to the north.Lugard declared war on Northern Nigeria known as Hausaland particularly on Kano and Sokoto kingdoms.As the people resisted British colonialism in Hausaland, the British force increased its brutality and terrorism.For example, when Dan Makafo, a religious leader, rebelled in March 1906 in Sokoto, the British mowed down 2,000 men and tried the rebel leader; "some other prisoners were killed and their heads cut off and placed on spikes; the village of Satiru was razed to the ground" (Herbert 2003: 52)."The continuing legacy of colonial occupation is an artificial amalgam of some 250 [ethnonational groups] in 30 states," Herbert (2003, 56) writes, "Speaking some 400 languages, under a military government dominated by the northern Fulani-Hausa favored by the British civilian and military authorities." The impacts of colonial terrorism were more devastating in the colonial territories of Germany and Belgium.In 1884, Germany proclaimed a protectorate and started its conquest of Southwest Africa (now Namibia) in 1885 with the arrival of imperial commissioner, Heinrich Göring.Southwest Africa belonged to the Herero, the Nama, and the Damara peoples.In 1893, 200 German troops staged a surprise attack on the Nama town of Hornkranz because Hendrick Witbooi, the leader of Nama refused to recognize German authority.But Witbooi submitted after 18 months of resistance after some of his people was murdered.The German colonial governor, Theodor Leutwein, had a plan for the indigenous peoples; his prediction was that "15 years from now, there will not be much left for the natives" (quoted in Kiernan, 2007: 381).Herbert (2003: 117) describes that "from 1904 to 1907 first the Herero and later the Nama fought an outstandingly brave, initially vicarious, but ultimately tragic battle against their German overlords.The spark that ignited the fire was the action of the Germans in desecrating the old burial place of the Herero chiefs at Okahandja by cutting down the sacred trees and turning the place into a vegetable garden."The Germans saw the indigenous peoples as inferior human beings, drove them from their lands, and destroyed their leadership and their way of life (Vandervort, 1998: 197).General Lothar von Trotha, the commander the German forces, proclaimed the following: "no war may be conducted humanely against nonhuman . . .It was and is my policy to use force with terrorism and even brutality.I shall annihilate the revolting [ethnonations] with rivers of blood and rivers of gold.Only after a complete uprooting will something emerge" (quoted in Kiernan 2007: 382).The German troops poisoned water holes to kill the indigenous peoples and their cattle; they also pushed the Hereo into the Omaheke Desert so that they would die of thirst.On August 11, 1904, the German troops "began 'indiscriminate killing of the wounded, male prisoners, women and children.' Herero causalities quickly reached 5,000 killed and 20,000 wounded . . .German units seized the water holes, forcing the surviving 50,000 Herero to head into the Omaheke Desert.The pursuing German troops massacred almost everyone they found, including women and children, and poisoned the water holes in the desert . . .By the end of September, the Germans had 'effectively destroyed most of the Herero people'" (Kiernan, 2007: 383).Gewald (2004: 59-60) expounds that "The German settlers and soldiers carried out a shoot-to-kill policy, conducted extrajudicial killings, established concentration camps, employed forced labor, and in at least two cases established death camps."While resisting German colonialism, the Herero were exposed to "a typhus outbreak, a locust plague, and drought killed 10,000 Herero, and a rinderpest epidemic wiped out 80 percent of their cattle herds" (Kiernan, 2007, 381).General Trotha issued an 'Extermination Order" on October 2, 1904 by proclaiming the following: "The Herero people must leave this land.If it does not, I will force it to do so by using the great gun [artillery].Within the German border every male Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death.I shall no longer receive women or children, but will drive them back to their people or have them shot at.These are my words to the Herero people" (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, 383).The Germans annihilated the indigenous peoples, destroyed their institutions, and took over their homelands.According to Kiernan (2007: 386), "The destruction of the Herero proved to be the opening genocide of the twentieth century.Among the three main Southwest African ethnic groups, totaling 125,000 people before 1904, German repression took approximately 80,000 lives in three years, at a cost of 676 German dead, 907 wounded, and 97 missing."The German soldiers and settlers engaged in "extreme acts of violence and cruelty, and they sought, shot, beat, hanged, starved, and raped Herero men, women, and children . . .no fewer than 80 percent of the Herero had lost their lives.Those who remained in Namibia, primarily women and children, survived in concentration camps as forced laborers employed on state, military, and civilian projects" (Gewald, 2004: 60).
Using terrorism and genocide, German imperialism crushed these indigenous peoples: "When a census was taken in 1911, only half of the Nama estimated a decade before (9,800 out of 20,000) and less than a quarter of the Herero (15,000 out 80,000) were found to have survived the war.Those that did had little choice but to become laborers on European-owned farms" (Herbert, 2003: 129).In 1898, the Germans established their East African colony (now Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi).The movement known as the Maji Maji Rebellion emerged in Tanzania between 1905 and 1906.This rebellion was initiated by the Ngion, a branch of Zulu nation, in the west and the Mattumbi in the east.According to Herbert (2003: 130), "The Ngion had a particular grudge against the Germans due to the execution of some of their chiefs, and the Matumbi had suffered constant demands for forced labor in the cotton fields, which had badly affected their own subsistence farming."The Germans reacted excessively and brutally as in Southwest Africa; their "starvation policy resulted in the death of an estimated 100,000 Africans and the south of the colony became a vast smoking ash heap" (Herbert, 2003: 132).Three German columns went to the rebellious areas in 1905 and burned villages, destroyed crops, and caught and hanged rebellious leaders (Vadervort, 1998: 203).The Germans annihilated thousands of indigenous people through war, terrorism, disease, and famine.Some areas "once densely inhabited, reverted to their natural state and in due course became the largest game park in the world" (Herbert, 2003: 135).From 250, 000 to 300, 000 people were decimated by starvation as a result of the Maji Maji Rebellion (Vadervort, 1998: 203).Similarly, in West Africa, Germany occupied Togo and Cameroon and practiced similar policies.Two Cameroon kings, King Bell of Douala and King Akwa "agreed to give up their sovereignty [their lands at the mouth of the Cameroon River] under a treaty signed on July 1884 with the German Imperial Consul-General for the west coast Africa" (Herbert 2003: 136).
However, the Germans started to carry out the occupation of the entire country moving into the north and interior between 1895 and 1907.Since the indigenous peoples of Cameroon did not make any concession with the Germans, they opposed colonialism and fiercely resisted.Leaders such as Zubeiru organized militia, but his force was defeated and slaughtered (Herbert, 2003: 138).Consequently, the Fulani power in north Cameroon was defeated and their leaders were executed or jailed or exiled, and the Germans established their rigid control (Herbert, 2003: 138).The Germans executed King Manga Bell and King Joja and others accusing them for inciting rebellions.Through terrorism, brutality, and harshness, the German army reduced the remaining population into coerced workers for German traders and planters.German terrorism was similar to that of Belgium in the Congo.Between 1890 and 1910, the worst of bloodshed occurred in the Congo under the Belgium colonial administration.The Belgium colonial terrorism caused "one of the great mass killings of recent history;" it was also "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience" (quoted in Hochschild, 1998: 3-4).King Leopold II initiated his colonization of the Congo calling it "the magnificent African cake" through his agent Henry Stanley, an American explorer, between 1880 and 1884.According to Vandervort (1998: 137), in 1885 "A makeshift administration was established at Boma, near the mouth of the Congo, and an army, called the force Publique created in 1886 to assist in the 'effective occupation' of the king's vast domain."The Force Publique secured food and labor force, such as porters, through terrorism and other forms of violence to exploit and make the Congo profitable.First of all, the colonial state wanted porters "to collect ivory, set up new posts, put down a rebellion . . . to carry everything from machine-gun ammunition to all that red wine and pâté.These tens of thousands of porters were usually paid for their work, if only sometimes the food necessary to keep them going, but most of them were conscripts.Even children were put to work: one observer noted seven-to nine-year olds each carrying a load of twenty-two pounds" (Hochschild, 1998: 119).
As Vandervort (1998: 145) notes, "The biggest problem faced by the companies and state officials involved in developing the Congo was the securing of labor.Since the Africans did not seem eager to volunteer their services, the king's administrators in Boma stepped in to help.They instituted a system of forced labor, under which Africans were rounded up by the Force Publique and turned over to special African overseers called sentilles who enforced work quotas with shotguns and rhinoceros-hide whips."Another way of recruiting labor was by imposing heavy taxes in cash, and when the Africans failed to pay in cash demanding them to pay in kind such as natural rubber, palm nuts, or ivory.According to Vandervort (1998: 145), "If the Africans resisted, as some did, they received a visit from the Force Publique, which often burned the villages, killed women and children, and took away the men as slaves.Africans who failed to meet their quotas-and the quotas were often set unrealistically high-were whipped or, in some highly-publicized cases, had their hands lopped off."Leopold made a number of royal decrees7 from Brussels; the first decree was made in 1885 declaring the existence of the Conge Free State and "that all 'vacant land' was the property of the state.There was no definition of what made land vacant" (Hochschild, 1998: 117).His forces terrorized and coerced the Africans to gather ivory and wild rubber while claiming that he "was not to make a profit, but to rescue these benighted people from their indolence" (Hochschild, 1998: 118).
In the early 1890s, Leopold made ivory gathering and seizing his main goal.In addition to ivory, wild rubber became the main source of revenue after the late 1890s from the Congo.As the need for more labor increased to collect rubber, the labor recruitment system was more militarized.8Missionaries, members of the Force publique and other witnesses documented about cutting of hands and private parts of men, killing of children and women, hanging of people, mass murder, cutting of heads.Starvation, exhaustion, and exposure decimated hundreds of thousands of people.Hunger, starvation and diseases killed more than did bullets; Europeans brought diseases for which Africans did not build up immunities.All these factors resulted in the decrease of the birth rate.Several sources testify that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath, the Congo Free State lost almost half of its population, which was approximately ten million.The death of King Leopold in 1910 brought change and continuity in the Belgium colonial system.The king died a billionaire.Belgium wanted to continue to extract more wealth form the Conge Free State.It took over the Congo and replaced wild rubber with cultivated rubber and introduced a new method of forcing people through taxes: "The imposition of a heavy head tax forced people to go to work on the plantations or in harvesting cotton, palm oil, and other products-and proved an effective means of continuing to collect some wild rubber as well" (Hochschild, 1998: 278).
The Africans also mined copper, gold, and tin.Because of the lack safety conditions, several thousands of mineworkers died; for instance, "in the copper mines and smelters of Katanga, five thousand workers died between 1911 and 1918" (Hochschild, 1998: 279).The demand for uranium and rubber increased the suffering of Africans: "With the start of the Second World War, the legal maximum for forced labor in the Congo was increased to 120 days per man per year.More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe.The Allies also wanted ever more rubber for the tires of hundreds of thousands of military trucks, Jeeps, and war planes."Some of the rubber came from the Congo's new plantations of cultivated rubber trees.But in the villages, Africans were forced to go into the rain forest, sometimes for weeks at a time, to search for wild vines once again (Hochschild, 1998: 279).In 1960, the Congo achieved its flag independence.Generally speaking, there was no any part of Africa that did not face colonial terrorism.Even the peoples who were brought under the neo-colonial states of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Liberia had suffered from colonial terrorism like other Africans.With the support of England, France, Italy, Abyssinia/Ethiopia created its own empire by colonizing and terrorizing peoples such as Oromos, Somalis, and Sidamas (Holcomb and Ibssa, 1990).The Ethiopian colonial terrorism and genocide that started during the last decades of the 19 th century still continue in the 21st century. 9The colonization of Oromia among the conquered, like the kapos in the Nazi concentration camps and the predurki, or trusties, in the Soviet gulag" (Hochschild 1998: 122-123).Force Publique soldiers or Rubber Company "sentries" often killed thousands of Africans. 9During Ethiopian colonial expansion, Oromia (the Oromo country), "the charming Oromo land, [would] be ploughed by the iron and the fire; flooded with blood and the orgy of pillage" (De Salviac 2005: 349).Calling this event involved human tragedy and destruction: "The Abyssinian, in bloody raids, operated by surprise, mowed down without pity, in the country of the Oromo population, a mournful harvest of slaves for which the Muslims were thirsty and whom they bought at very high price" (De Salviac, 2005: p. 28).The Ethiopian forces reduced the Oromo population from 10 to 5 million (Bulatovich, 2000).Currently, China also supports the authoritarian-terrorist regime of Ethiopia.
Similarly, with the help of the United States, American-Liberians colonized and terrorized the indigenous Liberians (Sundiata, 2003).The first African Americans settled in what is today called Liberia in 1822; they settled in Cape Mesurado where local peoples did not yet form a strong political organization to defend themselves (Gershoni, 1985: 5).The American Colonization Society (ACS) that was mainly organized by powerful whites to remove freed Blacks from the United States planned, organized, and settled these Black immigrants (Tyler-McGaw, 2007).In 1824, with the help of the United States the ACS developed an administrative framework for a colony named Liberia, its capital Monrovia.This political structure emerged as the Republic of Liberia in June 1847.Liberia "operated more or less as an American protectorate" (Sundiata, 2003: 10).Unfortunately, American-Liberians brought with them racist beliefs and practices that they learned in the United States; they propagated the idea of spreading Christianity and Western civilization (Beyan, 2005): "Imbued with feelings of superiority, they treated the indigenous population with contempt, even those Africans who did convert to Christianity" (Gershoni, 1985, 22).American-Liberians established a colonial administrative system on the Liberian hinterland, and imposed their authority through war and terrorism: "The reign of terror, exploitation, and humiliation which characterized the rule of two of Liberia's more notorious commissioners . . .eventually pushed the northern chiefdoms into an all-out revolt" (Gershoni, 1985: 88).The Liberian government imposed taxes and introduced coerced labor.It agreed in 1914 with the Spanish colonial government in Spanish Guinea to export coerced laborers by receiving £5 per as "the theatre of a great massacre," Martial De Salviac (2005: 349) states, "The conduct of Abyssinian armies invading a land is simply barbaric.They contrive a sudden irruption, more often at night.At daybreak, the fire begins; surprised men in the huts or in the fields are three quarter massacred and horribly mutilated; the women and the children and many men are reduced to captivity; the soldiers lead the frightened herds toward the camp, take away the grain and the flour which they load on the shoulders of their prisoners spurred on by blows of the whip, destroy the harvest, then, glutted with booty and intoxicated with blood, go to walk a bit further from the devastation.That is what they call 'civilizing a land.'"The surviving Oromos who used to enjoy an egalitarian democracy known as the gadaa system (Oromo democracy) were forced to face state terrorism, political repression, and an impoverished life.Alexander Bulatovich (2005: 21) applied to Oromia the phrase "flowing in milk and honey" to indicate its abundant wealth in cattle and honey.As France, England, and Italy helped Ethiopia to colonize Oromia and other peoples, successive hegemonic powers, namely England, former USSR and the US have supported and maintained successive Ethiopian governments.
head (Sundiata, 2003: 80-81).The violent of overthrow the government dominated by American-Liberians did not bring peace to this troubled country, and war and terrorism continued until the early twenty first century (Moran, 2006).
Overall, the cumulative consequences of colonial capitalism, state terrorism, and racism have been underdevelopment and poverty in Africa, despite the fact that most of African peoples achieved "flag" independence since the mid-20 th century.Most African peoples still lack freedom to determine their destiny because they are still controlled by neocolonial African state elites that are supported by Western powers and their financial institutions as well as China.Most African states mainly depend on external legitimacy rather than internal one because of the absence of genuine democracy.The destruction of African cultures and institutions is still going on because Africans have still dependent leadership that cannot use African resources for sustainable development.Furthermore, the African wealth is still siphoned of mainly by powerful countries through unequal trade and dispossession and exploitation.In addition, African intermediaries are not investing the wealth they have siphoned through different state mechanisms in productive economic activities and they hoard their money in the developed world and use the remaining wealth in luxurious consumptions and military build up to protect their illegal power.Consequently, most African peoples are still suffering from underdevelopment that is characterized by poverty, illiteracy, powerlessness, brain drain, dictatorship or lack of democracy, social and cultural crises, etc.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The descendants of the colonizers and powerful Euro-American nations and their African collaborators of today should realize that originally the lands, labor and other resources of the indigenous African peoples mightily contributed to their processes of wealth/capital accumulation, power, and knowledge and start to rethink ways of recognizing the crimes committed against humanity and to compensate the surviving indigenous peoples one way of the other.Unfortunately, as Chomsky (1993: 32) says, "One of the great advantages of being rich and powerful is that you never have to say: 'I am sorry.'It is here that the moral and cultural challenge arises, at the end of the first 500 years."The majority of European descendants in Europe and in Africa-and their African collaborators have difficulties in recognizing the crimes their ancestors committed and they are still committing on indigenous African peoples.
Scholars from both right and left have yet to establish a single practical moral, legal, and scholarly standard that enable them to go beyond the discourses of money, culture, religion, and civilization to critically understand the root causes for the violations of the human rights of the indigenous peoples in order to provide an appropriate policy suggestion.The life and liberty of all human groups should be recognized and defended on an equal level: morally, politically, and intellectually.The-African communities deserve apologies and reparations.By taking such actions, Euro-American governments, corporations, dominant societies, international organizations, and neocolonial African states recognize that there is always price to be paid for the crimes committed against humanity and to stop such inhumane acts now.Successive Euro-American governments and their collaborators in Africa have not only exterminated indigenous Africans, but they have also refused to recognize the crimes they have been committing against them.These forces still commit ethnocide/genocide on the survivors of African indigenous peoples by denying them the rights to self-determination, democracy, and human development while falsely claiming that they are promoting these principles.
Some modern ideologies have justified the degrading of the values of sharing and caring for others regardless of religious beliefs, skin colors, and ethnicity while glorifying oppressive cultures and values such as racism, classism, sexism as well as cruelty, robbery, terrorism, and genocide in the name of cultural and religious superiority.Had the European the colonialists and their descendants have shared their knowledge and technology and cared for indigenous peoples as the latter initially cared for them, the world would be built on human-centered values and social justice that could have promoted multicultural lifestyles rather than Euro-centric and racist values.In addition, by attacking indigenous cultures and lifestyles, the peoples of Euro-American backgrounds and their African collaborators have intentionally dismissed some aspects of their own history and cultures that existed prior to the emergence of mercantilist capitalism in which peoples shared and cared for one another.The Euro-Americans and their descendants and African collaborators have acted as they always had modern knowledge and technology to claim racial and cultural superiority by suppressing their precapitalist histories and cultures that existed before the sixteenth century.
The crimes that have been committed against indigenous Africans for making money and acquiring lands should be recognized by the present generations of the previous European colonialists and their current African collaborators to understand the historical roots of modern human rights violations and to seek a just political solution for existing socio-economic, cultural and political problems of indigenous peoples.All powerful individuals and groups should critically interrogate themselves morally, culturally, socially, and politically in order to develop their humanness fully rather than hiding their inhumane behaviors and actions under the discourses of modernity, civilization, religion, race or culture and Asafa 89 continue to commit similar crimes by engaging or supporting unjust and corrupt political and ideological practices and systems.Engaging in or supporting a system that annihilates societies is morally, ethically, and intellectually wrong because of the ideological and cultural blindness and/or to satisfy the appetite for power and money.By understanding the devastating effects of racism, colonial terrorism and genocide on indigenous Africans, the present generations of Euro-Americans and their current collaborators in Africa should start to uplift the surviving ones by making restitution and by promoting and supporting their struggles for self-determination, social justice, and multicultural democracy.As one of the powerful countries in the world today, China also should not engage in neocolonialism by allying with intermediary African state elites that are violating the human rights of ordinary Africans through dispossessing and exploiting them by practicing state terrorism and political represssion.All governments and other institutions, particularly universities, in the West and the Rest need to stop repeating lies and misinformation about indigenous African peoples by recognizing and incorporating their authentic histories, cultures, and humanity in school and college education.Celebrating the contributions of the indigenous African peoples, recognizing the crimes committed and compensating them, and accepting the diversity of all African countries will fully develop the humanity and the diverse cultural and ethnonational backgrounds of these countries by resurrecting the damaged humanity of the executioners and the victims.Without critically and thoroughly understanding the processes of capitalist broadening and deepening through incorporation or the intensification of globalization in the form of neoliberalism and without adequately learning about the crimes of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism or neoliberalism and continued subjugation, we cannot confront the moral, philosophical, and political contradictions in the capitalist world system in order to move toward establishing a just and truly egalitarian democratic world order.
It is urgent that serious scholars establish a single moral, intellectual, legal, and political position in the study and understanding of the problems of humanity and suggest pragmatic policies to eliminate or reduce racial/ethnonational inequality, underdevelopment, poverty, and ignorance in the modern world system.Universities should be the center in which these issues should be addressed, debated, and resolved if they are truly interested in promoting and practicing social justice and genuine democracy.In the turn of 21 st century when global capitalism is facing deep structural crises, environmental catastrophes are emerging, valuable resources are depleting, and the few is getting and richer and richer and the majority is getting poorer and poorer on global level, progressive and egalitarian democratic scholars must broaden and deepen their liberation knowledge in order to support and advance social movements and develop their grassroots transnationalism that can challenge capitalist internationalism and its state, regional, and global structures.Above all, without critically and thoroughly exposing and challenging the fallacies of the mainstream theories, knowledge for domination, and the ruling ideas of the capitalist class and its collaborators, social movements in general and that of Africa in particular cannot fully play a positive role in promoting genuine democracy from below and in imagining and creating a better world in which exploitation and domination will be drastically reduced or totally eliminated on local, country, regional, and global levels.
Because of their immense intellectual and materials resources and geo-political positions, if they can overcome their Euro-American-centric paradigms, critical and progressive intellectuals from the West can contribute significantly to promote and advance social movements on country, continental and global levels.They have also more opportunity to participate in the struggle for social justice because of the opportunities of official democracy.Similarly, progressive scholars from Africa, despite their meager material resources and their hostile political conditions, can contribute a lot through their comparative theoretical and empirical research and through participating in the struggle for social justice on different levels.Both progressive scholars from the West and Africa need to have critical, deep, and broad understanding of large-scale and long-term social changes by rejecting the modernist and evolutionary approaches and by studying non-capitalist societies both in the West and Africa to learn more about humanity and imagine beyond global capitalism.People have constructed societies, and they can also remake them on egalitarian democratic principles by enabling individuals and groups to enjoy the fruit of their labor without being dominated, alienated, exploited, and dehumanized.Supported by progressive scholars and activists and by overcoming their narrow interests through developing the knowledge of liberation, African social movements can ally with other indigenous movements and other social forces that struggle for egalitarian democracy and an alternative world order in which domination and exploitation are reduced or totally eliminated.