by Larry Lounsbury

Created on: June 20, 2009   Last Updated: June 22, 2009

History and the Congo

History is one ongoing universal theme of war, brutal massacres and conquest of different people. Europe's plunder and conquest of Africa and the Congo followed the same brutal theme of that of other continents such as in North America or in Europe by the Romans.

In America there was the native Indians, some peaceful, welcoming, while other Indians were more warlike. Then the Europeans came, Spanish, English, French and Dutch all were vying for the fur trade along; along with all the Gold on the north and South American Continents. Individuals, some naively, wished to bring light, to Christianize, and colonize with the Indians, but the Imperialist governments had their own personal business plans in mind. It became the eternal conflict of good versus evil, men of good conscience struggling against those who had no conscience at all.

The same philosophical theme was extended to the European cultures by the conquering armies of Rome. War and carnage was the rule of the day. Survival of the fittest was the motivating philosophy, a philosophy instilled in them by Epicurus, a Greek born in 341 B.C., and later recorded in the writing of Lucretius, a Epicurean philosopher of Rome outlining Epicurus Philosophy in his poem "On The Nature Of Things". A similar Philosophy was later introduced to the world by Charles Darwin thousands of years later known today as the Theory of Evolution.

The Epicurean philosophy along with Plato's "Republic" molded the thoughts of ancient Rome and later that of Leopold's Congo State. All the conquerors had that one prevailing theme of money, greed, and power. It seems the only way to curtail these imperialist was to balance democracy with theology and philosophy, as it was done In the United States through John Locke, Blackstone and others.

Conrad's character , Marlow ponders at one point in the story, "Heart of Darkness, " concerning how "the conquest of earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion is not a pretty thing when you look at it to much" (p. 146). Men can have contradicting beliefs, as Conrad shows, for he felt Liberty...can only be found under the English flag all over the world". And at the very same time he was denouncing the European lust for African riches in his novel, he was an investor in a gold mine near Johannesburg (p146).

Hochschild points out in chapter 15 that the conquest of the Congo resulted in: "The killing of people equal to those of genocides, it was not the goal of the Congo state to eradicate one particular ethnic group. Rather they like the slave traders of centuries before, were looking for labor, if people died while finding and using the labor, that to them was just incidental" ( p. 226).

Interestingly enough, the moral foundation on which the European imperialist based their beliefs, as contained in its Holy writings, taught in context that nations were not to remove the boundaries of nations that the King of Kings, "God " himself, had set up for them. Therefore, nations should have Sovereign rights, now if they would only listen.

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