The role of European nations in the destruction of the African continent

 Sunday, January 19, 2025

Islamabad (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th January, 2025) Portugal was the first European country to conquer Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and other African countries and make them its colonies. Then, some people from Africa were enslaved and brought to Portugal. Seeing the hard work of these slaves, the Spaniards brought African slaves to Latin America and made them work in gold and silver mines.

At that time, in America, where the British citizens had taken away land from the locals and built their own large plantations and needed laborers for work. So people from Africa were also brought there to work.

Workers were also needed for sugar factories in the Caribbean islands. Therefore, merchants from Liverpool, Bristol and Manchester started the African slave trade.

This business also included tribal chiefs from Africa, who captured people and sold them to European merchants. When a large number of African slaves came to America, racial discrimination arose here on the basis of color. Whites became superior and Africans inferior.

When British traders started this business of buying and selling people by enslaving them, they made immense wealth from it.

Now the capitalists of Britain wanted to explore the African continent, which was an unknown world to them until now, and to increase their wealth by obtaining its natural resources.

On this subject, a Canadian author, H. Alan Cairns, in his book Prelude to Imperialism, mentioned the British operations in Central Africa from 1840 to 1890 and said that it described the stages of discovering Africa.

The first group was traders, hunters and adventurers, who brought cotton, sugar and ivory from Africa. They traveled in the form of caravans. Africans used to travel with their goods loaded on their heads and endured the severity of the weather. In those days, the journey was up to thirty miles. If a slave showed laziness and laziness or refused to work, he was flogged.

The white people believed that Africans had no emotions or feelings. Along with trading goods, they also had sexual relations with African women.

Richard Burton, who translated Alf Laili into English, when he went on a trip to Africa, it is said that he had sexual relations with African women at every destination. This group also included those who treated African chiefs and their families in case of illness and received benefits from them.

The second group was the missionaries. They included both Catholics and Protestants. They wanted to convert the African people to Christianity. Many young people from both sides came to Africa to preach the religion. A considerable number of them died early due to bad weather and malaria. But the number of missionaries did not decrease.

He believed that Africans did not have a strong religion, so they could be easily converted to Christianity. The hopes of the agencies that funded the missionaries were not fulfilled, but some people converted due to the preaching. There was no obstacle to the missionaries' preaching. But they had to learn the local languages ​​and translate the Bible.

Dr. David Livingstone, a Scottish man. He traveled alone to remote parts of Africa and collected information about them. Based on his experience, he made new suggestions about Britain and Africa. This was a time when there was a lot of poverty in Britain. Unemployed young people used to wander around, and they used to beg for a living.

Livingstone's suggestion was that the countries of Central Africa had a small population and the land was empty. Therefore, if the unemployed and poor of Britain were brought here and settled and given these lands, they would become prosperous through agriculture. At the same time, Africans would also learn Western civilization from them and eliminate their ignorance. In contrast, the other proposal was that Africans should first be civilized and then their religion should be changed.

But the British government, accepting Livingstone's proposal, sent a large number of white people to the countries of Central Africa, where they occupied the lands and enslaved the Africans and made them work as farmers. Due to which the whites became superior in African society, and the Africans became their slaves in their own homes. The white populations created racial prejudice and it was this prejudice that established the apartheid regime in South Africa.