Wewe jamaa una akili sana, na watu wengi humu hawawezi kukuelewa kwa sababu ya kukaririshwa mambo toka shuleni na vyuoni. Kila siku MZUNGU, MZUNGU kama vile sisi hatuna akili! umesema maneno mazito na ya maana sana. Tunatakiwa kujitazama maana tunatia aibu.
Mkuu sijui kama unasoma history na kujua wazungu wamefanya ushenzi kiasi gani kwenye hii dunia naona una mahaba tu na wazungu soma hii kituduchu.
Only 90 years ago, the agents of King Leopold II of Belgium massacred 10 million Africans in the Congo. Cutting off hands as we see in Sierra Leone today, was very much part of Leopold's repertoire. Today, Leopold's "rubber terror" has all been swept under the carpet. Adam Hochschild calls it "the great forgetting" in his brilliant new book, King Leopold's Ghost, recently published by Macmillan. This is a story of greed, exploitation and brutality that Africa and the world must not forget.This story is actually best understood when told in reverse order. Leopold never set foot in "his" Congo Free State - for all the 23 years (1885-1908) he ruled what Hochschild calls "the world's only colony claimed by one man".It was a vast territory which "if superimposed on the map of Europe", says Hochschild, "would stretch from Zurich to Moscow to central Turkey. It was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Although mostly rainforest and savannah, it also embraced volcanic hills and mountains covered by snow and glaciers, some of whose peaks reached higher than the Alps."Leopold's "rubber terror" raised a lot of hairs in Britain, America and continental Europe (particularly between the years 1900-1908). But while they were condemning Leopold's barbarity, his accusers were committing much the same atrocities against Africans elsewhere on the continent.Hochschild tells it better: "True, with a population loss estimated at 10 million people, what happened in the Congo could reasonably be called the most murderous part of the European Scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries."With a decade of [Leopold's] head start [in the Congo], similar forced labour systems for extracting rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroon under the Germans."In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape was just as brutal. Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies. Forced labour, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company 'sentries', and the chicotte were the order of the day. [The chicotte was a vicous whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged cork-screw strip. It was applied to bare buttocks, and left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of it sent victims into unconsciousness; and a 100 or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used by both Leopold's men and the French]."Thousands of refugees who had fled across the Congo River to escape Leopold's regime eventually fled back to escape the French [in Congo-Brazzaville]. The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rainforest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, at roughly 50%."Hochschild cannot fathom how the reform movement in Europe focused exclusively on Leopold's Congo when "if you reckon [the] mass murder by the percentage of the population killed", the Germans did as much in Namibia, if not worse, than Leopold in Congo."By these standards", Hochschild argues, "the toll was even worse among the Hereros in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance."After losing much of their land to the Germans, the Hereros rebelled in 1904. In response, Germany sent in a heavily armed force under Lt-Gen Lothar von Trotha, who issued an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl):'Within the German boundaries every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot... Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha.'"In case everything was not clear, an addendum specified: 'No male prisoners will be taken."By the time von Trotha's murderous hordes had finished their job in 1906, fewer than 20,000 of the 80,000 Herreros who lived in Namibia in 1903 remained."The others [more than 60,000 of them]", writes Hochschild, "had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or - to economise on bullets - bayoneted or clubbed to death with rifle stocks."Hochschild tries to be fair here by pointing to what the Americans and the British were doing, or had done, elsewhere."Around the time the Germans were slaughtering the Hereros," he writes, "the world was largely ignoring America's brutal counter-guerrilla war in the Phillipines, in which US troops tortured prisoners, burned villages, killed 20,000 rebels, and saw 200,000 more Filipinos die of war-related hunger or disease."Britain [too] came in for no international criticism for its killings of Aborigines in Australia, in accordance with extermination orders as ruthless as Von Trotha's. And, of course, in neither Europe nor the United States was there major protest against the decimation of the American Indians."Hochschild then poses the controversial question: "When these other mass murders went largely unnoticed except by their victims, why, in England and the United States, was there such a storm of righteous protest about the Congo?"He answers the question himself: "What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best [in his book, Heart of Darkness, based on the brutalities in the Congo]: 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz'."Kurtz is Joseph Conrad's lead character in Heart of Darkness. He is "both a murderous head collector and an intellectual, an emissary of science and progress, a painter, a poet and a journalist, and an author of a 17-page report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, at the end of which he scrawls in shaky hand: 'Exterminate all the brutes'."Hochshild believes that Kurtz was Leon Rom in real life. Rom was born in Mons in Belgium. Poorly educated, he joined the Belgian army aged 16. Nine years later, aged 25 in 1886, he found himself in the Congo in search of adventure. He became district commissioner at Matadi and was later put in charge of the African troops in Leopold's murderous Force Publique army in the Congo.Rom's brutality knew no bounds. It was such that even the white people working with him were shocked to their boots."When Rom was station chief at Stanley Falls," Hochshild reveals, "the governor general sent a report back to Brussels about some agents who 'have the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons'. He mentions Rom's notorious flower bed rigged with human heads, and then adds: 'He kept a gallows permanently erected in front of the station'."Conrad had himself gone to Congo in 1890 at the time Rom was committing his atrocities. "The moral landscape of Heart of Darkness", writes Hochshild, "and the shadowy figure at its centre are the creations not just of a novelist but of an open-eyed observer who caught the spirit of a time and place with piercing accuracy."So, how did Leopold come to own such a vast territory, exploited it, killed its people, took away its riches and never set foot in it?Three things stand out in this sad story - the naivety of the African kings and people; the misfits of Europe sent to subdue the Africans; and the superior weapons of war that the Europeans possessed which the Africans lacked.When the first Europeans (the Portuguese) arrived in Congo in 1482, they met a thriving African kingdom. "Despite the contempt for Kongo culture," says Hochschild, "the Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state - the leading one on the west coast of central Africa. It was an imperial federation, of two or three million people, covering an area roughly 3,000 sq miles, some of which lie today in several countries after the Europeans had drawn arbitrary border lines across Africa in 1886."