African Imperialism Essay, Research Paper

The European colonization of the continent of Africa was horrible for the African people, and led the way for their race to be discriminated against for many years to come. Each country in Europe wanted to be part of the imperialistic race, and this led to the decimation of many African cultures. No good came from the imperialistic race, even though arguments have been made that the Europeans brought with them to Africa such things as road, transportation, and communications, what they destroyed outweighs these ten to one.

European powers, such as Britain, France and Germany were the main imperialist powers in Africa during the late 1800s. All of these countries were in a constant struggle to become the most powerful and to have the most riches, and the high abundance of natural resources of Africa were what each country wanted. Africa was at the time inhabited by many different groups of natives, and only small portions of these groups were large or powerful. This profusion of small and weak tribes made conquering the land easy for the more advanced Europeans, which then led to the Europeans taking over the natural resource, and eventually controlling much of the land.

This takeover of the land led to many wars fought by the tribes and Europeans, which then showed the way for the slaughter of thousands of African natives. Many tribes were destroyed completely by these wars, and even more were just weakened and forced to give their land to Europeans. These Europeans then stripped the land of its natural resources, and shipped them back to their home country just to add more money to their already outstanding treasuries.

Not only did these Europeans cause great destruction to the Africans of that time, they also shattered the freedom of Africans to come later. This first imperialism led the way for a form of government known as Apartheid. The apartheid rule cataloged the people of Africa according to three racial groups. These groups, in order descending from most powerful to least were the whites, black Africans, and the people of mixed decent. These laws controlled every aspect of life in Africa, and gave a small group of white almost total power of the majority of Africans. This started from the imperialistic roots, and was in control until very recently.

All of these aspects of imperialism show how much malevolence the Europeans showed in controlling the Africans. There is no excuse for what they did, but it is past, and there is no way to change the wrongs committed by the ancestors of those who now rule over these countries. Even though the Europeans did bring in ideas such as communications and transportation, they murdered thousands of Africans, and set others up for total control in the future, imperialism was undoubtedly a horrible thing for Africa.