Edward Morel (1873-1924) was a French-born
British journalist and socialist who drew
attention to imperial abuses and led
a campaign against slavery in the Belgian Congo.
While working for a Liverpool shipping firm
in Brussels, Morel noticed that the ships
leaving Belgium for the Congo carried only guns,
chains, and ammunition, but no commercial goods,
and that ships arriving from the colony came back
full of valuable products such as rubber and ivory,
which led him to surmise that Belgian King
Leopold II's colony was exploitative and relied on
slave labor. Morel wrote
The Black Man’s Burden (1920), from
which the following excerpt is
taken,as a response to Rudyard Kipling’
s poem, “The White Man’s Burden.”
It is [the Africans] who carry the “Black man’s
burden.” They have not withered away before the
white man’s occupation. Indeed... Africa has ultima
tely absorbed within itself every Caucasian...
In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Afri
ca, the white man has massacred the African in
heaps. The African has survived, and it is well
for the white settlers that he has.
In the process of imposing his political
dominion over the African, the white man has
carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Af
rica to the other. The African has resisted,
and persisted.
For three centuries the white man seized
and enslaved millions of Africans and
transported them, with every circumstance of fero
cious cruelty, across the seas. Still the African
survived and, in his land of exile, multiplied exceedingly.
But what the partial occupation of his soil
by the white man has failed to do; what the
mapping out of European political “spheres of
influence” has failed to do; what the Maxim
[machine gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, labor
in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have
failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox a
nd syphilis have failed to do; what even the
oversea slave trade failed to do,
the power of modern
capitalistic exploi
tation, assisted by
modern engines of destruction, may
yet succeed in accomplishing.
For from the evils of the latter,
scientifically applied and enforced,
there is no escape for the African.
Its destructive effects are not spas
modic: they are permanent. In its permanence
resides its fatal consequences. It
kills not the body merely, but th
e soul. It breaks the spirit. It
attacks the African at every turn, from every point
of vantage. It wrecks
his polity, uproots him
from the land, invades his family life, destroys
his natural pursuits and
occupations, claims his
whole time, enslaves him in his own home...
In Africa, especially in tropi
cal Africa, which a capitalistic
imperialism threatens and has,
in part, already devastated, man is incapable
of reacting against unnatural conditions. In those
regions man is engaged in a perpetual struggle
against disease and an exhausting climate, which
tells heavily upon child-bearing; a
nd there is no scientific mach
inery for salving the weaker
members of the community. The African of the tr
opics is capable of tremendous physical labors.
But he cannot accommodate himself to the European
system of monotonous, uninterrupted labor,
with its long and regular hours,
involving, moreover, as it frequently does,
severance from natural surroundings and nostalgia
, the condition of melancholy resulting from
separation from home,
a malady to which the African is especially
prone. Climatic conditions forbid it. When the
system is forced upon him,
the tropical African droops and dies.
Nor is violent physical opposition to abuse
and injustice henceforth possible for the
African in any part of Africa.
His chances of effective
resistance have been steadily dwindling
with the increasing perfectibility in th
e killing power of modern armament...
Thus the African is really helpless agai
nst the material gods of the white man, as
embodied in the trinity of imperialism,
capitalistic-exploitation,
and militarism. If the white man
retains these gods and if he insi
sts upon making the African worshi
p them as assiduously as he
has done himself, the African will go the way of
the... Amerindian, ...the
aboriginal Australian,
and many more. And this would be at once a
crime of enormous magnitude, and a world
disaster...
To reduce all the varied and picturesque and
stimulating episodes in
savage life to a dull
routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends,
to dislocate social ti
es and disrupt social
institutions; to stifle nascen
t desires and crush mental de
velopment; to graft upon primate
passions the annihilating evils of
scientific slavery, and the bestia
l imaginings of civilized man,
unrestrained by convention or law;
...to kill the soul in a peop
le – this is a crime which
transcends physical murder...
It is often argued that th
e agricultural... methods of
the African are capable of
improvement. The statement is
undoubtedly true. Itapplies with equal
force to the land of
Britain...Why, it is only since the
beginning of the 18th century th
at the rotation of crops has
been practiced in England! But the Kano farmer
s in Northern Nigeria have understood rotation
of crops and grass manuring for at
least five hundred years.
To advance such truisms as an
excuse for robbing the native comm
unities of their land, degrading
farmers in their own right to
the level of hired laborers urged
on by the lash,and conferring monopolistic
rights over the land
and its fruits to private cor
porations, is to make truth th
e stalking horse
of oppression and
injustice. The statement of fact
may be accurate. The claim put
forward on the strength of it is
purely predatory.
Those who urge this and kindred arguments onl
y do so to assist the realization of their
purpose. That purpose is clear. It is to make of
Africans all over Africa a
servile race; to exploit
African labor, and through African labor, the so
il of Africa for their
own exclusive benefit...
For a time it may be possible for the white
man to maintain a white civilization in the
colonizable, or partly colonizable
, areas of the African Continent
based on servile or semi-servile
labor: to build up a servile State.
But even there the attempt can
be no more than fleeting.
The days of Roman imperialism are done with forever.
Education sooner or later breaks all chains,
and knowledge cannot be kept from the African...
[When] he becomes alive to his power the
whole fabric of European domination will fall to
pieces in shame and ruin. From these failures
the people of Europe will suffer moral
and material damage of a far-reaching kind...
Why cannot the white imperial peoples,
acknowledging in some measure the injuries they
have inflicted upon the African, turn
a new leaf in their treatment of him? For nearly two
thousand years they have professed to be governed
by the teachings of Christ. Can they not begin
in the closing century of that era,
to practice what they profess –
and what their missionaries of
religion teach the African? Can they not
cease to regard the African
as a producer of dividends
for a selected few among their number, and begin
to regard him as a human being with human
rights? Have they made such a success of their
own civilization that they
can contemplate with
equanimity the forcing of all
its social failures upon Africa –
its hideous and devastating
inequalities, its pauperisms,
its senseless and destructive egoisms,
its vulgar and soulless
materialism? It is in their pow
er to work such good to Africa
– and such incalculable harm! Can
they not make up their minds that
their strength shall be used
for noble ends? Africa demands at
their hands, justice, and
understanding sympathy-not ill-informed sentiment.
And when these are dealt out to her she
repays a thousandfold...