Respond To This Statement: The Scramble for Africa Was the Only Way to ‘Deal’ With the African Continent and the African People
In a way the European countries were trying to help the African continent by trying to abolish slavery in the 1880’s but for the most part, the Europeans perspective of ‘dealing’ with Africa meant changing and exploiting it’s cultures, land, resources, and it’s people. If they wanted the resources, violence and exploitation wasn’t the only way to go. What they did was immoral.
The word deal was used here as if Africa and its people were considered a problem that needed to be solved, but it didn’t. To the Africans, their continent was what they thrived off of and they were fine with the way it was. In the eyes of the Europeans, the African standard of living wasn’t dependent on technology, therefore it wasn’t civil, so they felt the need to change it and make it the same as their home country. In truth, their main motives were not to improve Africa, but to exploit its markets and resources in order to benefit their own. Overwhelmed by the amount of raw materials available, the Europeans separated Africa into several parts to avoid conflict amongst themselves. They paid no attention to kingdoms, local cultures, tribes, and ethnic groups, and in the process of doing so, they left people from the same communities on separate sides of the European made borders. This created civil wars, which were easily suppressed by the army’s of the colonizers, but set back development. Once they divided up the land, they began to collect resources to make a profit from. Soon enough, European labor forces weren’t enough for them, so they enslaved Africans and shipped them off to different colonies to work under gruesome conditions.
Instead of barging into the lives of Africans by dividing communities and families, the Europeans should have come to a treaty with as many tribes as they could, to see if they could take raw materials in exchange for technology. This would have worked out well as they both would benefit from what each other have. If one community agreed to the deal, they would benefit from it and soon enough other tribes would notice the tribes’ advancement and want in on it too.
Instead of enslaving people because they needed a larger labor force to extract resources, they should have thought of the moral implications and hired locals instead. That way the locals in tribes would profit and they could have invested in technology that the Europeans provided. It would have created a fair and equal society where both parties would benefit once again.
The Europeans felt that they were the better race and that Africa needed help because it was full of savages, but this is not true. It wasn’t the duty of Europe to change Africa, they didn’t have the right to exploit innocent people and resources. Africa was never a problem that needed to be dealt with. It was just Europe’s wrong perspective on Africa and it’s belief that they were better and more civilized that needed to be changed. There are so many other ways that the Europeans could have approached this situation, but they put their greedy and selfish motives first.
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