Real Crisis In Congo: Rwanda, Uganda

Betsy Pisik writes in the Washington Times, "Congo’s mineral wealth lures exploiters," on 8 September 2009 --The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds a treasure trove of valuable minerals that are at once the country’s greatest blessing and most enduring curse.

Second only to South Africa in mineral wealth, Congo has attracted rapacious exploiters from 19th-century Belgian colonialists to foreign-backed rebel groups.

Minerals help fuel vicious fighting in eastern Congo that has killed more than five million people in the past decade — the bloodiest conflict since World War II.

In an effort to stem the fighting, nongovernmental organizations and Africa activists are campaigning for legislation against the sale of “conflict minerals,” modeling their efforts on those against the illegal diamond trade that funded civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone in the past decade.

At the Belgian Royal Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, about a thousand mineral varieties from Congo are represented, classified according to composition, color and radiance.

In 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold seized the vast territory — which if superimposed on a map of the United States, would stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River — as a personal fiefdom and private jewel box.

More recently, Congo’s small but powerful eastern neighbor, Rwanda, has become entangled in the mineral grab. Rwandan Hutus who fled their homeland in 1994 after committing genocide against Rwandan Tutsis have morphed into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, which finances itself by plundering Congo’s minerals.

Congo’s mineral resources are most plentiful in a north-south belt stretching from Katanga province in the southeast to Equateur and Orientale in the north and in North and South Kivu provinces in the east.

Minerals are extracted in part by forced labor. Trading houses based in the Kivus move the minerals through Rwanda and Burundi and on to Western or Asian buyers.

The mining takes place amid civilian bloodshed, pillage, rape and other cruelties.

Congo’s national army has become a partner in perfidy and cooperates in the illicit trade, according to John Prendergast, an Africa specialist and a co-founder of the Enough Project at the Center of American Progress, a Washington think tank.

Mr. Prendergast is focusing on minerals in high demand by the modern electronics industry. They include tin, tantalum and tungsten, which are used in cell phones, iPods and digital cameras.

The trade, he says, is worth more than $100 million annually. Congo also has gold mines that yield additional millions, he says.

Following the model of the “blood diamonds” campaign for Sierra Leone, Mr. Prendergast is encouraging Congress to take action on “conflict minerals” as a way to stem the bloodshed. (source: The Washington Times)

From the BBC -- The country's boasts huge reserves of gold, some 30% of the world's diamond reserves, more than 70% of the valuable coltan mineral - a vital ingredient in mobile phones - and vast deposits of cobalt, copper and bauxite.

But these huge riches have only attracted a series of looters - from Belgium's King Leopold, who declared the country his personal possession at the end of the 19th century, to long-time leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, and then a host of militias and armies from up to nine other African countries during the recent war.

With the Congolese people choosing their leader for the first time since independence in 1960, the hope is that all these riches will from now on be used for their benefit.

But after such an abysmal record of government, whoever wins the elections will not be overburdened by high expectations.

"If the next president has $5m, he should keep $1m for himself, give $1m to his ministers and use $3m to build this country," Erneste told me.

"But why not use all the money for the country?" I asked innocently.

"No, we have to be realistic, that is never going to happen." (source: BBC)

Cobalt

Welcome to Buenaventura, Colombia: Bienvenidos a Buenaventura, Colombia

For years, 25,000 Afro-Colombian refugees and migrants have lived in a town on stilts over the sea [Oliver Schmieg]

On May 22, 2007, the New York Times article, "Cocaine Wars Make Port Colombia’s Deadliest City," by  Simon Romero reported -- BUENAVENTURA, Colombia, May 15 — Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country’s most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia’s long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estación, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

“It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia,” said Lt. Nikolai Viviescas, 25, a police officer who was transferred from Bogotá six months ago. “It feels like another country.”

They are residents of Buenaventura on Colombia's Pacific Coast [Oliver Schmieg]

Although Bogotá, the capital, and other cities have become secure and prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this country’s four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year, to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation’s highest homicide rate at 144 per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogotá and four times that of Medellín. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city’s slums, acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura’s geography, crucial in connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic cachet for drug traffickers.

But now the Colombian government is attempting to relocate the entire community [Oliver Schmieg]

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Drug lords, rebels and resurgent paramilitary gangs all draw on Buenaventura’s slum dwellers as their foot soldiers.

The police say that many of the combatants on the rebels’ side belong to the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front, a cell of the main rebel group FARC that is based in Cali and opposes the Autodefensas Campesinas del Pacífico, composed mostly of former paramilitary fighters.

It wants to move them to an island barrio [Oliver Schmieg]

“Nothing in this fight is about ideology,” said Antero Viveros, the head of a community group in Lleras, a large slum controlled by the guerrillas. “It is about drugs, with members of one ethnicity killing each other.”

Despite its emergence as Colombia’s most dangerous city, people displaced by fighting in the countryside still see Buenaventura as a refuge. About 42,000 refugees have arrived here since 1998, mostly Afro-Colombians from rural areas, according to the federal government. They swell the ranks of what may be Colombia’s poorest slums.

“If you’re hungry, you’ll do whatever imaginable to survive,” said Fernando Nuñez, 29, a Lleras resident who ekes out a living repairing old cellphones.

And to build a commerical port and tourist beaches in Buenaventura [Oliver Schmieg]

President Álvaro Uribe has forcefully criticized the violence here and sent new police and navy commanders to the city at the start of the year. About 2,000 soldiers and police officers, who also wear combat uniforms and carry semiautomatic weapons, patrol Buenaventura.

Still, critics say authorities have long neglected Buenaventura’s problems in part because Afro-Colombians receive scant federal attention. Nongovernmental groups say Afro-Colombians account for up to a quarter of the country’s population of 44 million, by some measures giving Colombia the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world. And more than 80 percent of Buenaventura’s residents are black.

Community leaders are trying to resist the eviction; Or at least fight for decent compensation [Oliver Schmieg]

This month, when the president chose Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata as culture minister, was the first time an Afro-Colombian ascended to a cabinet position in the country’s history. Yet political analysts and black advocacy groups said the appointment was largely to appease Democrats in Washington who complain of racial exclusion in Colombia as they weigh a trade agreement.

“The war in Buenaventura is not going to be ended by symbolic actions from Bogotá,” said Rosaliano Riascos, a Buenaventura native who fled the city after a wave of paramilitary-led killings several years ago. Mr. Riascos, who heads an independent black advocacy group in Bogotá, said it had been a year since he returned to Buenaventura to visit family. “Buenaventura is a no-man’s land,” he said.

As the move would not only rob residents of their homes but of their main livelihood - fishing [Oliver Schmieg]

The entrance to Lleras looks like that of any shantytown elsewhere in Colombia, with cinder-block shacks and a few paved streets. But deeper into the slum, the structures are made from discarded wood, with newcomers squeezing into lean-tos alongside older houses. Rusted barrels collect rain from zinc roofs, the only source of fresh water.

Sewage bubbles down trash-strewn dirt roads before flowing into the sea. Stereos blare vallenato and reggaetón music. And precariously built homes are hoisted above the water on spindly pieces of wood.

Many of the residents of these hovels hesitate to offer their names out of fear of retaliation over what they might say. One middle-aged man, offering a visitor a cup of rum from the steps of his house, said he had worked as a stevedore at the port years ago before losing that job. “Now,” he said, “I do nothing.”

The vast majority of the residents of the area are black and many see the eviction in race terms [Oliver Schmieg]

Some economists hold up Buenaventura as an example of the risks of exposing certain areas of developing economies to market forces. María del Pilar Castillo, an economist at Valle University in Cali, said many residents lost economic security when the city’s port was privatized more than a decade ago, cutting its work force and reducing benefits.

With taxes on the imports flowing through Buenaventura’s port largely going directly to the central government, the city reaps few benefits from international trade, even as Colombia’s economy grows more than 6 percent a year. So the poor in Buenaventura, with an unemployment rate of about 28 percent, resort to the drug trade.

Map of Colombia

“There is no other viable industry here, so there are no other viable jobs,” said Ana María Mercedes Cano, director of Buenaventura’s Chamber of Commerce. “So we live in a situation with violence all around us.”

Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire. Guerrillas were blamed for an attack earlier this year in which five people, including one police officer, were killed when a homemade mortar shell was fired at a police truck. Security officials here say laws that are lax on minors, who carry out many of the attacks, make it difficult to reduce the killings.

They argue that the Afro-Colombians have managed to acquire prime real estate and now the white and mixed race elite want to take it for themselves [Oliver Schmieg]

“We have a justice system designed for Switzerland, yet we have no Swiss here,” said Col. Yamil Moreno, the chief of police in Buenaventura. In the same breath, Colonel Moreno, who was transferred here from the north, callously described Buenaventura’s dying combatants.

“These vagabonds,” he said, “are good only for drinking, dancing and killing.” (source: The New York Times, 2007)

Paris torture instruments auction suspended after protests

Hands crusher (Collection Fermand Meyssonnier/Etude Cornette de Saint Cyr)

According to the Lebanon Daily Star, "French torture device auction called off after outcry," 31 March 2012 -- PARIS: A French auction house Friday called off the planned sale of a collection of torture devices dating back three centuries, which had sparked outrage among rights groups and in Algeria.

Some 350 objects, from a hand-crusher to hanging ropes and written death sentences, collected by France's last executioner Fernand Meyssonnier until his death in 2008, had been slated to go on sale on Tuesday in Paris.

A former chief executioner in French-ruled Algeria, Meyssonnier carried out 198 executions between 1957 and the country's independence in 1962, devoting the rest of his life to retirement and his torture collection.

Tools used for torture and humiliation, part of a collection of some 250 items, are displayed at the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris March 31, 2012. (REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes)

French auction house Cornette de Saint Cyr was organizing the sale in Paris for the benefit of the Meyssonnier family. However, following the wave of protests, it said Friday it had cancelled the auction.

"Given the emotion aroused by this sale... we decided to suspend it so that all parties concerned can calmly examine the actual content of this collection," auctioneer Bertrand Cornette de Saint Cyr told AFP.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand had in a statement voiced his "strong disapproval" and urged a cancellation of the sale of objects that were morbid, reflected barbarism raised "painful historical questions".

The Algerian press had also voiced strong disapproval of the auction.

"The minister called me to inform me of the emotion aroused by the sale, particularly in Algeria. The sale is legal but we made the decision to suspend it," another auctioneer, Arnaud Cornette de Saint Cyr, told AFP.

Rights groups on Wednesday attacked the planned auction as "shocking and immoral", according to a joint statement by the ACAT-France Christian anti-torture group, Amnesty International France, the Human Rights League, the Movement Against Racism (MRAP) and the Primo Levi association.

Denouncing what they called the "commercialisation of torture", they called on the French state -- which abolished the death penalty in 1981 -- to remove the lots from sale, if necessary by buying them for museums.

"What shocks us is that torture is still practiced in half of all countries," said Eleonore Morel, director of the Primo Levi association, calling the sale "extremely degrading for all the victims of torture".

Henri Pouillot of the MRAP told AFP the planned auction was "perverse and macabre". Pouillot said he was particularly alarmed by Meyssonnier's connection to Algeria, where French forces are acknowledged to have practiced torture during the war of independence from 1956 to 1962. (source: The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

A chastity belt is displayed as part of a collection of some 250 items used for torture and humiliation at the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris March 31, 2012. (REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes)

Controversial French Torture Auction Cancelled Last Minute Amid Outcry

Haitian Soldiers Memorialized At The Siege of Savannah Monument

The Siege of Savannah--On Oct. 9, 1779, a Haitian regiment known as the Chasseurs Volontaires de Saint-Domingue served as a reserve unit to American and French forces fighting a British contingent. The unit was comprised of more than 500 free men of color from Haiti.

As battered American and French soldiers fell back, the Haitian troops moved in to provide a retreat. The battle resulted in the largest number of casualties the allies suffered in a single engagement.

Many of the Haitian soldiers later fought to win their country's own war of independence, crediting their military experience in Savannah. (Source: Haitian American Historical Society)

Haitians Want It Known That Haitian Heroes Aided American Revolution : Georgia: Display in museum depicts the 1779 Battle of Savannah and recalls the 'Chasseurs Volontaires'--infantry volunteers from Haiti. Placard salutes the bravest feat "ever performed by foreign troops in the American cause."(LA Times)

In the Los Angeles Times, Dan Sewell reported on 18 December 1994--SAVANNAH, Ga. — Among the Revolutionary War exhibits in this coastal city's history museum there stands a figure in 18th-Century dress, a figure much like the rest except for one major difference:

It is black.

The figure, part of displays depicting the 1779 Battle of Savannah, commemorates the "Chasseurs Volontaires"--infantry volunteers from Haiti who carried out what a placard calls "the most brilliant feat of the day, and one of the bravest ever performed by foreign troops in the American cause."

It is a rare American tribute to the heroism of Haitians who fought on U.S. soil for the independence of this nation, 215 years before U.S. troops landed in Haiti to help restore the elected president.

Little-known in this country, the battle is cited proudly by some Haitians in the aftermath of the U.S. intervention that ended three years of rule by an army junta.

"We, who stood side by side with you in the Battle of Savannah, Georgia, to fight for the independence of the United States, are happy that today you stand side by side with us to uphold democracy in Haiti," President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said in Washington shortly before his U.S.-enabled return to Haiti following three years in exile.

Most people probably didn't understand Aristide's reference, historians say.

"It's hardly known about at all," said John Kennington, a historian who works with the Coastal Heritage Society here.

For one thing, Kennington said, popular knowledge about the American Revolution usually centers around the Northeast and East--Paul Revere's midnight ride, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the climactic fighting at Yorktown--even though it was also waged in the South.

Another reason the Battle of Savannah isn't a focal point of American histories: We lost.

A combined American-French force had laid siege to Savannah and British officers and Georgia civilian authorities were discussing surrender when reinforcements arrived from a Beaufort, S.C., garrison.

On Oct. 9, the allies launched a bloody frontal assault that was repelled. The British pursued the dazed allies, who suffered more than 1,000 dead or wounded.

But the bulk of the force lived to fight another day mainly because their retreat was covered by a rear-guard stand made by the Haitians, historians say.

About 800 Haitians, including 80 slaves who were rewarded with their freedom, had voluntarily joined the French force. Accounts of Haitian casualties vary, although most historians agree they were heavy and included at least a dozen deaths.

Haitian historians say the battle had a major impact upon Haiti's future. The Haitian volunteers returned home with battle experience and a new view of their colonial status.

"The Haitians who participated in those battles came back with an ideal; an ideal of freedom and liberty was developed," said Gerard Laurent, a Port-au-Prince historian and author of 19 books on his homeland's history.

Among the volunteers was teen-ager Henri Christophe, a general in the Haitian revolt that in 1804 established the Western Hemisphere's second republic and its first black-majority one.

Yet there was no sign of U.S. gratitude for the Savannah heroism, Haitian historians say. Instead, they supported the French against the Haitians and have been hostile or, at best, indifferent to their Caribbean neighbors during most of their history.

Americans continued to own slaves six decades after Haitian independence, and obviously feared any contacts that might encourage American blacks to rebel. Haiti was isolated or exploited by larger nations as it fell into the cycle of dictatorships and internal strife it was hoped would end when Aristide became its first freely elected president.

When Haitians today cite the Battle of Savannah, they may do so in a sense of long-delayed Haitian-American kinship, or in bitterness.

"Those who were in favor of the intervention say that we are finally rewarded for Savannah," said George Michel, another historian in Port-au-Prince. "Others against the intervention say: 'Look how we are being treated after we helped them with their independence.' "

At any rate, because of the latest milestone in Haitian-American relations, historians say, the Battle of Savannah may take on new significance. Laurent noted there is talk in Savannah of creating a battlefield park as an attraction for its thriving tourist industry.

"Then maybe the Americans will remember things they seem to have conveniently forgotten," Laurent said.

The Rev. Thomas Wenski, head of the Haitian Catholic Center in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood, said such history is important for Haitian children struggling for acceptance as immigrants.

"It's something very important for Haitian kids growing up in the United States to know," Wenski said. "This is one of the ways for them to have pride in their heritage."

Wider knowledge of Savannah, Wenski suggested, would have led to a memorable landing cry in Haiti, just as World War I soldiers paid tribute to the French marquis who was a Revolutionary War hero.

"Like the Americans who said 'Lafayette, we are here!' They could have said when they landed in Haiti, 'Henri Christophe, we are here!' "

Franklin Square, City Market, Savannah, GA

Franklin Square was created in 1791 and was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin who was an agent for the Colony of Georgia from 1768 to 1775. In those days, the square was referred to as Water Tank Square, Water Tower Square and the Reservoir Square, because it was the site of the city’s water supply. The square is located at the Western End of City Market, where visitors can find distinctive shops, antiques and fabulous dining experiences. (source, Los Angeles Times, 1994)

Empire: From Conquest to Control

Empire: From Conquest to Control: Gresham College Professor Richard J Evans (24 January 2012)

In 1884, the Berlin Conference that set off the scramble for colonies in Africa and other parts of the world laid down the basic principle that in order to establish the formal right of rule over a colony, a European power had to establish ‘effective occupation’. This applied, however, only to coastal areas, which at the time were the main concern of most European powers in Africa. The hinterland of continental Africa, which was the subject of the main phase of the ‘scramble’, was a different matter. Here, European states drew straight lines across the map with complete disregard for geographical features, delimiting the territories they claimed from one another but leaving them still to be brought under real control. In many ways the story of colonization in the 1890s and 1900s is the story of how European empires tried to convert paper colonies into real colonies.

In my last lecture I noted how in some cases this attempt met with failure, most notably with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1896. Similarly, the Boxer rebellion in China deterred European powers from converting treaty ports into hubs of real colonization. But these were exceptions. In most of Africa, and many parts of the Pacific, European powers moved from the 1890s onwards to establish their control over the land they now claimed as their own.

What drove them to do so were two separate but ultimately intermeshing influences. The first was ideological. The 1880s ushered in the age of empire, the decades of imperialism – a word that first entered the English language in the 1870s and was, as J. A. Hobson noted in 1900, ‘on everybody’s lips…used to denote the most powerful movement in the current politics of the western world’. Imperialism was propagated by governments keen to gain popular support for the principle of maintaining, usually at some cost, overseas possessions. The cult of empire began in Britain already in the 1870s with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as empress of India. Within a few years, British royal ceremonies, including Queen Victoria’s golden and diamond jubilees and the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, were featuring maharajas and colonial troops. As the Daily Mail reported in 1897, the diamond jubilee procession displayed ‘new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazetteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children’. Huge publicity was given to the ceremonies – durbars – held in India in 1877 to proclaim Queen Victoria Empress of India, and in 1902 and 1911 to celebrate the coronation of her successors. 1902 saw the inauguration of ‘Empire Day’ in Britain, especially directed at schools, and imperial propaganda could be found everywhere, on railway bookstalls, in political meetings, in novels, magazines and history books and even in the ‘empire plate’ manufactured for the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The coronation of Edward VII in particular was given a strong imperial flavour, to celebrate, as a contemporary put it, ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’.

International expositions, a tradition inaugurated by Britain’s Great Exhibition of 1851, began to include ‘colonial pavilions’ – 18 of them at the Paris exposition of 1889, clustering around the Eiffel Tower that had been specially built for the occasion.Colonial museums opened in most European countries to display looted artifacts, and most remarkably perhaps, zoos began to include ‘native villages’ among their exhibits. Hagenbeck’s Tierpark in Hamburg for example showed a series of African and other indigenous groups to gawping crowds of visitors who – at a safe distance, to avoid the danger of physical contact - could observe the ‘primitive world’ that Germany had conquered in Africa.

In Belgium in the 1880s and 1890s exhibitions were held including a typical Congolese village, where imported Africans were told to do what they normally did at home, which was mostly not much, since at home they would have been out hunting or in the fields. A pool was provided and stocked with fish, and spectators threw coins in for the Congolese to dive for. Sometimes they threw in bottles of gin and brandy too, to make them drunk. Sometimes stages were set up for the men to re-enact battles with spears and shields. The Congolese had to go around half-naked in a display of ‘authenticity’ and in cold weather many of them became ill. Such displays were put on to underline European superiority, so there was no interest in, for example, getting the villagers to make or display artworks or put on musical events. In a similar way, Buffalo Bill’s enormously popular Wild West Show, which toured Europe at this time, demonstrated the inferiority of Native Americans, doomed to extinction in battle with the better armed forces of civilization.

European notions of superiority were caricatured but also reaffirmed in cartoons of the time: here for example is one portraying a new governor of German East Africa as a ‘new idol’ replacing or perhaps just adding to the ones already worshipped by the native heathens.All this served to enlist the middle classes and potentially too the working classes in patriotic enthusiasm for the ideals of empire, a tactic that was more successful in some countries, notably Britain, than others. The press followed colonial campaigns closely and whipped up jingoistic sentiment, expressed in events such as the triumph of the British over the Ashanti in the 1870s.Imperial enthusiasm reached new heights with the emergence of mass-circulation newspapers like the Daily Mail, fuelling events such as the popular celebrations in London of the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War.The age of high imperialism coincided with the coming of the age of mass communications and the popular press, and both fed off each other.

The events of the Boer War pointed to the other major force apart from imperialist ideology driving forward European powers’ establishment of control over their colonies, and that was, the actions and policies of men on the ground, in the colonies themselves. For most of the nineteenth century it was missionaries, traders and explorers who brought in the colonizing state to further their interests or, more frequently, to rescue them when they got into trouble with indigenous peoples. In some colonies, however, in the age of high imperialism, European settlers began arriving in ever increasing numbers and, with or without the approval of the colonial state, seizing land for cattle farming or rubber or palm oil plantations. The clashes such actions sparked were among the most violent in the history of European empire. And nowhere were they more dramatic than in the German colony of South-west Africa, today’s Namibia.

South-west Africa had begun as a protectorate run by a limited company, but as early as 1888 the company failed and the state was obliged to take over. Much of the land was desert or semi-arid and was inhabited by nomadic cattle herders of the Herero and Nama tribes. During the 1890s German settlers moved in and began setting up cattle ranches, fencing off the land from the nomads, whose livelihood was also being undermined by an outbreak of a fatal cattle disease, Rinderpest, at the end of the 1890s. The rapidly mounting pace of land seizures by the colonial government in the early 1900s led eventually to attacks on German farmers, resulting in around 150 settler deaths by 1904, when the attacks reached a peak. Kaiser Wilhelm II took this as a provocation, even a personal insult. Germany was not going to be humiliated as Italy had been in Ethiopia in 1896.

14,000 German troops were dispatched from Berlin under General Lothar von Trotha, a hard-line Prussian army officer with previous colonial experience. ‘I know’ he said, ‘that African tribes yield only to violence. To exercise this violence with crass terrorism and even with gruesomeness was and is my policy.’ After defeating a Herero force at Waterberg, Trotha announced: ‘Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed.’ Herero cattle-herders caught in the action were shot or hanged on the spot, while the remaining men, along with Herero women and children, were driven into the desert and left to starve. The few who emerged alive were little more than skeletons, as this contemporary photograph shows (see powerpoint).The Chief of the General Staff in Berlin, Alfred von Schlieffen, in thrall, like all Prussian officers, to the supposedly Clausewitzian doctrine that the aim of a war must be the total annihilation of the enemy force, praised von Trotha’s campaign as ‘brilliant’, especially his use of the desert to complete what he called approvingly ‘the extermination of the Herero nation’. Popular commemorative books were printed celebrating the triumph of German arms in the war. (source: Gresham College, UK)

Empire: From Conquest to Control - Professor Richard J Evans FBA

Slavery and Indentured Servants

Before the Civil War, slaves and indentured servants were considered personal property, and they or their descendants could be sold or inherited like any other personalty. Like other property, human chattel was governed largely by laws of individual states. Generally, these laws concerning indentured servants and slaves did not differentiate between the sexes. Some, however, addressed only women. Regardless of their country of origin, many early immigrants were indentured servants, people who sold their labor in exchange for passage to the New World and housing on their arrival. Initially, most laws passed concerned indentured servants, but around the middle of the seventeenth century, colonial laws began to reflect differences between indentured servants and slaves. More important, the laws began to differentiate between races: the association of “servitude for natural life” with people of African descent became common. Re Negro John Punch (1640) was one of the early cases that made a racial distinction among indentured servants.35

Virginia was one of the first states to acknowledge slavery in its laws, initially enacting such a law in 1661.36 The following year, Virginia passed two laws that pertained solely to women who were slaves or indentured servants and to their illegitimate children. Women servants who produced children by their masters could be punished by having to do two years of servitude with the churchwardens after the expiration of the term with their masters. The law reads, “that each woman servant gott with child by her master shall after her time by indenture or custome is expired be by the churchwardens of the parish where she lived when she was brought to bed of such bastard, sold for two years. . . .”37

The second law, which concerned the birthright of children born of “Negro” or mulatto women, would have a profound effect on the continuance of slavery, especially after the slave trade was abolished—and on the future descendants of these women. Great Britain had a very structured primogeniture system, under which children always claimed lineage through the father, even those born without the legitimacy of marriage. Virginia was one of the first colonies to legislate a change:

Act XII

Negro womens children to serve according to the condition of the mother.

WHEREAS some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ ffornication with a Negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.38

Most slave colonies or states enacted similar laws. After the slave trade officially ended, many slave owners tried to ensure that sufficient numbers of slaves were available to work their plantations. Slave women of childbearing age became more valuable. There are a number of court cases concerning slave women who either killed their masters who forced them to have sexual relations or killed the children rather than have the children enslaved.39

Miscegenation laws, forbidding marriage between races, were prevalent in the South and the West. Because English masters had had little regard for indentured servants of non-Anglo ethnic groups, they allowed and sometimes encouraged commingling of their servants. Being seen in public or bringing legitimacy to these relations, however, was not lawful. This is evinced by a court decision from 1630, the first court decision in which a Negro woman and a white man figured prominently. Re Davis (1630) concerned sexual relations between them, the decision stating, “Hugh Davis to be soundly whipt . . . for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a Negro, which fault he is to actk. next sabbath day.”40

Virginia passed its first miscegenation law in 1691 as part of “An act for suppressing outlying Slaves.”

And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawfull accompanying with one another, Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever. . . .41

Another section of the law closed the loophole created by the 1662 birthright law, which mandated that children born of a free white mother and Negro father were technically free. This amendment stated that a free white woman who had a bastard child by a Negro or mulatto man had to pay fifteen pounds sterling within one month of the birth. If she could not pay, she would become an indentured servant for five years. Whether or not the fine was paid, however, the child would be bound in service for thirty years.

The laws that restricted slaves or indentured servants generally addressed the owners and penalized them for breaking the law. Laws governing slaves allowed masters to beat or kill them under certain circumstances. Nor could they go to court to seek redress. A person of color was not permitted to testify against a white Christian, as illustrated by the 1717 Maryland law:

II. Be it Therefore Enacted, by the right honourable the Lord Proprietary, by and with the advice and consent of his Lordship's Governor, and the Upper and Lower Houses of Assembly, and by the authority of the same, That from and after the end of this present session of assembly, no Negro or mulatto slave, free Negro, or mulatto born of a white woman, during his time of servitude by law, or any Indian slave, or free Indian natives, of this or the neighbouring provinces, be admitted and received as good and valid evidence in law, in any matter or thing whatsoever depending before any court of record, or before any magistrate within this province, wherein any christian white person is concerned.42

Against these overwhelming restrictions, there were a number of court cases in which slaves filed suit seeking their freedom or freed Negroes claimed property that had been inherited from their former owners. Elizabeth Freeman (1732/ 34-1829), a slave, presented her case for freedom in a Massachusetts court pro se in 1783 and won.43 In addition there were cases where the slave or freed person was the defendant; Celia, a Slave is a narrative account of such a trial in Missouri in 1855.44

White women were often involved in litigation concerning slaves through the workings of the dower laws. In some states women could inherit personalty but could only receive a life estate in real property.45 This situation created many problems, particularly if slaves were needed to make profits from the land. For example, if a woman chose to free her inherited personalty at death, her descendants would have no one to work the land unless they farmed it with paid workers or purchased new slaves. Frequently, wills or contracts that granted freedom or conveyed realty or personalty as dower were contested in court.

The laws and resulting court cases that involved slavery and indentured servants have had a major impact on America, its men and women alike, in both the past and the present. Through the years, the laws that the states passed became steadily more restrictive toward slaves, mulattoes, and freed Negroes. In 1850, the federal government's involvement deepened with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, responding to strong lobbying efforts by slaveholders wanting to counteract abolitionist forces.46 In the face of these all-encompassing laws, women with extraordinary courage fought for a better life. For example, Harriet Tubman (ca. 1821-1913) returned to the South nineteen times to bring more than three hundred fugitives to freedom, and Charlotte Forten (1837-1914), a free black woman from Philadelphia, went to South Carolina during the early Civil War to teach “the contrabands of war” (slaves who had escaped to Union lines).47

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended slavery and involuntary servitude. Nevertheless, many laws and judicial precedents that had been established before that date would not be changed until the mid- or late-twentieth century.

(source: Library of Congress)