Albany SA

            After watching both The Bible and the Gun and The Magnificent Cake, I have a better understanding of the European ascent into Africa. The Bible and the Gun is about European missionaries who came to Africa and try to convert the natives to Christianity. The missionaries believed the natives were uncivilized and needed to be converted to Christianity so they could become equal with the white Europeans. .
             By allowing the white men to settle on their land, the natives allowed the Europeans to take away their land, tax them, and start the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Slave trade more than anything created the worst form of racism, making Africans looked down upon by the Europeans. The only positive I can find for the Africans and the arrival of the Europeans was the introduction of commerce, something that was nonexistent beforehand.
             The Magnificent African Cake is about the Scramble for Africa and how the different European countries divided Africa among themselves, although they did not look for any input by the native Africans already living there. The Europeans actually believed that their colonization of Africa would be a good thing for the natives. In fact in 1901, the first railroad from the coast inland was finished. There were different beliefs among the European nations about the natives also. For example, the French thought that through civilization the natives would become black Frenchmen while the British just thought them to be uncivilized lower beings. Bliase Diague became the first black elected in Paris. By 1915, 4 millions acres of Kenya were British occupied. Because of different climates and soils the colonies were forced to specialize in what they grew best and in turn starved the land. And to produce these cash crops such as cotton and what not the Europeans "employed" the natives by using forced labor to maximize profits.
             Both of these movies speak of the European raping of Africa and its people in the late 1800's.