Colonial Violence in the Congo (p.803)

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9) Chapter 18 contains some powerful images.


Why do you suppose Strayer chose to include these specific images?
Strayer uses these images because they represent Europe in Chapter 18. Every time you see a powerful image it causes a strong feeling. That is what Strayer wanted to demonstrate, the reality and the feeling of the people in each historical event. 


How do they illustrate concepts introduced in this chapter?

Each image illustrates each event that made history. 

The concepts are varied. But each illustration managed to demonstrate how society began to be different. We see people at a high economic level and at the same time we manage to perceive who was affected, the lower class. Among the images we can also see middle class people, the students. In summary Strayer managed to teach us the reality that was perceived at that time.

   Colonial Violence in the Congo (p.803)


https://images.app.goo.gl/VFSbiRWeYQG3mWbP6

    These young boys with severed hands were among the victims of a brutal regime of forced labor undertaken during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Congo. Such mutilations have been punishment because of the inability of their village to provide the required amount of wild rubber (Strayer, p, 803). 

The image illustrates the concept of the chapter demonstrating reality. Cruelties of forced labor occurred during the early twentieth century in the Congo Free state, then governed personally by Kind Leopold II of Belgium. This photo was a reality that people lived, in this case children. Unable to get rubber for they were killed, their ears or hands were cut off. With image we see the other side of industrialization. On this side we do not see improvements, we only see people suffering, being tortured and subjected to work that made industrialization possible.

Sadness! It is what I can see. Vulnerable people who could have worked without experiencing so much damage. The worst thing was that being in their own territory they were treated so badly. The reason? A mind so full of ambition and need for power. Those ideas are summarized in progress. But progress for whom? These poor human beings were worse off than they were before being invaded. Why is it always the same? The vulnerable people are those who end up working and suffering the most.
















Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 28, 2020 at 4:48 PM

    To be honest I wanted to chose this image to write in my number 9 question but it made me sad reading about it, I chose another image.

    The Congo Free State did not become known for anything but for a much darker reason. The extreme brutality which the people were treated by Leopold’s henchmen, was something that has been described by some historians as Africa’s “forgotten Holocaust”. I learned than the king focused his economic powers on exporting latex, while using his people to cater his interests. His expectation was far beyond what was realistic and so they were never or rarely reached. The Congo Free State little by little acquired such infamy that it eventually was denounced by other colonial powers. The mutilation of the population as a form of punishment for not fulfilling the quotas – and living conditions so precarious that they provoked a mortality rate comparable to a genocide.

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