Bad Deal congolese
In the book King Leopold’s Ghost, the author, Adam Hochschild, commenting on two chiefs that sold their land to Stanley for a few pieces of cloth per month and signed themselves up for any labor that had to be done in the area, he says, “It was an even worse trade than the Indian’s in Manhattan. (72)” I would have to totally agree with him.One reason that I think Hochschild is right in saying that the Native American’s got a longer piece of the stick from the white man than the Congolese is because the treaties actually had very different impacts on the two groups of people’s. In the case of the Native Americans, they signed their land over to the Dutch, and eventually had to rel . . .
More evidence that the Congolese people were getting a worse deal than the Native Americans can be found by looking at the economics of the two treaties. Even if we ignore the fact that the value of the land had the potential to go up in price and instead take into consideration how much the land was worth to the colonists in that day, we will still see that the Native Americans were paid far less than the actual value of the land. Thus, displacement was the only real physical effect that was felt from selling the land. This caused tons of physical pain among the villagers--- not just by having to do labor but also by punishments issued by their taskmasters for simple, if not trivial, rule infractions. For example, the Native Americans sold their land to the Dutch for a measly 24 dollars. From these examples it is clear that people in the Congo agreed to the worst treaty. However, in the Congolese’s case, the two chiefs signed their people up for doing forced labor of any kind in the area that needed to be done. It’s mind boggling to imagine people signing such an agreement but they were probably deceived by the people getting them to sign the treaty. This is probably they had no experience in trading with the Europeans and probably didn’t know what they were doing when they placed an X under their name on a document that was in a language that they could not read or write in at all. Instead, they were given some cloth each month in exchange for the agreement. Indians on the other hand had some experience trading with the white man and would have been able to read the documents their signing because many of the tribes had translators. They were, however, still paid something for the land. In the case of the Congolese, though, they weren’t paid money or given anything valuable to in return for their land and their labor.
Common topics in this essay:
Native Americans, Adam Hochschild, Indians Manhattan, native americans, Leopolds Ghost, Deal Congo, value land, sold land, cloth month, land dutch, experience trading, people getting, |
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