African Testimony In The Movement For Congo Reform

The humanitarian movement against Leopold’s violent colonisation of the Congo emerged out of Europe, but it depended at every turn on African input. Individuals and groups from throughout the upper Congo River basin undertook journeys of daring and self-sacrifice to provide evidence of atrocities for the colonial authorities, missionaries, and international investigators. Combining archive research with attention to recent debates on the relation between imperialism and humanitarianism, on trauma, witnessing and postcolonial studies, and on the recovery of colonial archives, this book examines the conditions in which colonised peoples were able to speak about their subjection, and those in which attempts at testimony were thwarted. Robert Burroughs makes a major intervention by identifying African agency and input as a key factor in the Congo atrocities debate. This is an important and unique book in African history, imperial and colonial history, and humanitarian history.

The Congo Free State was under the personal rule of King Leopold II of the Belgians from 1885 to 1908. The accolades that attended its founding were soon contested by accusations of brutality, oppression, and murderous misrule, but the controversy, by itself, proved insufficient to prompt changes. Starting in 1896, concerned men and women used public opinion to influence government policy in Britain and the United States to create space for reforming forces in Belgium itself to pry the Congo from Leopold’s grasp and implement reforms. Examining key factors in the successes and failures of a pivotal movement that aided the colonized people of the Congo and broadened the idea of human rights, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement provides a valuable update to scholarship on the history of humanitarianism in Africa. The Congo Reform movement built on the institutional experience of overseas humanitarianism, the energy of evangelical political involvement, and innovations in racial, imperial, and nationalist discourse to create political energy. Often portrayed as the efforts of a few key people, especially E.D. Morel, this book demonstrates that the movement increasingly manifested itself as an institutionalized and transnational campaign with support from key government officials that ultimately made a material difference to the lives of the people of the Congo.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Yet this book argues that the continent has also been pivotal in helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices.

A prizewinning historian's epic account of the scramble to control equatorial Africa In just three decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the heart of Africa was utterly transformed. Virtually closed to outsiders for centuries, by the early 1900s the rainforest of the Congo River basin was one of the most brutally exploited places on earth. In Land of Tears, historian Robert Harms reconstructs the chaotic process by which this happened. Beginning in the 1870s, traders, explorers, and empire builders from Arabia, Europe, and America moved rapidly into the region, where they pioneered a deadly trade in ivory and rubber for Western markets and in enslaved labor for the Indian Ocean rim. Imperial conquest followed close behind. Ranging from remote African villages to European diplomatic meetings to Connecticut piano-key factories, Land of Tears reveals how equatorial Africa became fully, fatefully, and tragically enmeshed within our global world.

From the Occupy protests to the Black Lives Matter movement and school strikes for climate action, the twenty-first century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements has created alliances across borders, with activists stressing that their concerns are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that global efforts of this kind are not a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them. Activism Across Borders since 1870 explores how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and considers the impact of national and ideological boundaries on their efforts. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, the book acknowledges the importance of imperial and postcolonial settings for groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book approaches transnational activism with an emphasis on four features: connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalized at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts, and offers an alternative history of modern Europe through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns.

This collective volume provides the reader with an exploration of Latin America from an Irish perspective. The contributors have explored the multiple, and sometimes surprising, links that exist between Ireland and Latin America, touching on specific features of these links such as the political and cultural influence of the Irish diaspora and their political relations. These topics are examined through different media, including literature, films, history, poetry and sociology, and offer an opportunity to discover an aspect of Irish culture and history that has not been widely studied. The authors deal with these questions from different cultural perspectives within past and present contexts, exploring two cultures and histories which, at times, are linked through their shared destinies. They also provide the reader with different national perspectives. In presenting the long-lasting and multifaceted relationships between Ireland and Latin America, the contributors have helped to deepen our understanding of a part of Ireland’s historical heritage that deserves more focus.

This book caters for the demand in new black histories by rediscovering several little-known Black people’s experiences in late-Victorian Britain. It centres on The African Institute of Colwyn Bay, or ‘Congo House’, at which almost 90 children and young adults from Africa and its diaspora were enrolled to train as missionaries between 1889 and 1911. Burroughs finds that, though their encounters in Britain were shaped by the racism and paternalism of the late-nineteenth-century civilising mission, the students were not simply the objects of British charity. They were also agents in a culture of evangelical humanitarianism. Some were fully absorbed in the civilising mission, becoming leading missionaries. Others adapted their experiences to new ends, participating in networks of pan-Africanism that questioned race prejudice and colonialism. In their negotiations of the challenges and opportunities at the heart of the empire, the students of Congo House reveal how the global currents of black history shaped the localised cultures of Victorian philanthropy. From racism to pan-Africanism, this study sheds new light on key issues in black British history.