Imperialism and Racism across Africa

“The British don’t become slave traders and slavers because they are racist, they become racist because they used slaves for great profit in the Americas and devise a set of attitudes towards black people to justify what they’ve done. The real engine behind the slave system is economics”. This statement from Racism: A History is a root cause analysis of the ideology of white supremacy amongst people of color and fuels the European expansion and destabilization of the continent of Africa. Chapter 6 on the European expansion tends to look at several variables that support the exploitation of African, to include the term “atavism” (defined as the irrational but irresistible historical tendency by any state to conquer alien people and lands (pg. 109).
If the brutality of Europeans and other nations against other non-whites where limited to Africans, the argument would follow that economics was the sole reason for exploitation across the African nation. However, as the video shows, some brutality inflicted upon indigenous people was the direct result of a racist and superior stance (as in the elimination of the Tasmanian aborigines).
Economics may have begun the disconnection between Africans as humans, but time and science help to support their beliefs. As indicated in the video, Black Africans are viewed as closely related to chimps, even stating that they mated with them. As this schema is strongly held by those who benefited from slave labor, the evolution of this belief system becomes increasingly linked to scientific and social rational to support an imperialist system of exploitation by the likes of Robert Knox, who wrote in his book, “race is everything”. He believed that the superior races will naturally dominate the inferior ones. American scientist also studied skulls in an attempt to show them as a “separate species”. Some call for extermination of races. The nineteenth century “Origin of the Species”, by Charles Darwin. Natural selection supported the idea of the great British race.
One aspect of brutality and exploitation of Africans was indeed for the support of an increasingly industrial nation and the raw materials that Africa produced. The lack of attributing a human element to Africans by the colonialist however bordered on an evil that is not discussed in either the book or the video. As we see the cruel and inhumane treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold as he cut off the hands of laborers that did not meet quotes were even done to children.
The treaty of 1844 was the epitome of a long history in the destabilization of indigenous African people. The killing, mutilation and transatlantic slave trade are seldom spoken of as the long-term effects of African destabilization. The imperialist view even today shows Africans as incapable of governing themselves, violent and corrupt leaders without implicating the role that the imperialist had in changing the social strata, population and culture of many African nations.