Racism in Empire

By Charlotte Pettitt

Whilst Harrison, returning from the Congo to Britain with artefacts, treasures and even animals he had hunted to display in his collection, does not seem out of the ordinary today, transporting and exhibiting people is unthinkable in our society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, this would not have been a shocking affair as racial differences were much more prominent in British society. The British public found the six African ‘visitors’ to be fascinating and captivating, rather than outrageous or distasteful. This was largely due to the mystery of the Congo and the intrigue around those of an unfamiliar ethnicity.

Britain was permeated with the culture of its empire which, at its peak, spanned a quarter of the globe encompassing all colours, religions, creeds and cultures. Most Britons had frequent interaction with the fruits of the empire, whether this be in the form of tobacco from the Americas, silks from India or missionary hymns from Africa, sung in church [1]. There was, however, limited personable contact with non-whites, as it was commonplace within Britain to assume that members of other races were ‘rapidly approaching extinction due to their inferiority in the world’ [2]. This was despite there being an ever-present black population in Britain dating back to the Elizabethan period due to the slave trade [3]. Slavery began, but the empire reinforced, the superiority of the white British and by extension white Europeans, whose empires dominated the world.

In just over a decade, the whole of Africa, spanning 10 million square miles and over 100 million people [4], was ‘sliced up like a cake’ by different European powers [5], in what is now known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Germany, Italy, Portugal, France and Britain claimed the majority of states, whilst The Congo, in the very centre of the continent, was colonised by King Leopold II of Belgium, with this being his only colony. Across all European states, individually and collectively, there was a very strong feeling of European supremacy, which contributed to the feeling they not only had the right but rather the duty and responsibility to educate, civilise and westernise the countries they colonised. It was widely agreed that non-European societies were poor, un-educated, under-developed and even corrupt. The speed at which European technology and strength was developing exacerbated this view [6], and further encouraged Europeans' belief that they had an obligation to impart their higher levels of knowledge and understanding onto the African people they colonised.

There was a consensus across Europe, especially in Britain, of a racial hierarchy. This consisted of white Europeans at the top, followed by Asians, with Africans lower down and then Indigenous populations at the bottom. The position of Africans was due to their perceived inferiority in intelligence and lack of capacity for technology or civilisation [7]. This encouraged the obligation felt by Europeans to force their practices and cultures on African societies, which only increased with the ever-growing belief in Scientific Racism around the world, used to argue the superiority of certain races over others. Scientific Racism uses the idea of evolution from Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which discusses the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory amongst certain animal species, and applies it to different races and classes of people [8]. Darwin’s theory was developed further than he ever intended and was used to prove the existence of a racial hierarchy within humans, in which the white person takes the superiority over the black.

Unsurprisingly, this believed hierarchy received resentment and hostility from native populations and the Congolese were not an exception. There were endless experiences of forced labour and mistreatment of Congolese locals in which Leopold and his white associates wanted to “reap maximum profit” through “the spoils of efficient exploitation”[9]. In turn, this led to a great hatred of the white person by the Congolese. A British missionary reported back in 1888 hearing river carriers singing:

               “The white man has made us work,
               We were so happy before the white arrived,
               We would like to kill the white man who has made us work,
               But the whites have a more powerful fetish than ours,
               The white man is stronger than the black man,
               But the sun will kill the white man…”[10]

This racial superiority was present across the world. One of the first acts to be implemented in Australia in 1901 by the first Federal Parliament, was a ‘white Australia policy’ [11] to enforce the authority of white settlers over the indigenous Aboriginal Australian population. Furthermore, in October 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War and only 9 years after Harrison arrived in London with his Congolese companions, the Secretary of Defence rejected the offer for coloured troops from South Africa to join the fighting due to a desire to avoid the employment ‘native citizens in a warfare against whites’ [12]. This rejection of loyalty at a time in need shows how adverse the British Administration was to having black men of an equal standing to white men, demonstrating the strong imbalance between races within Britain and the Empire.

The Congo itself, although not part of the British Empire, was still a European colony and showed clear signs of this racial hierarchy. There was very limited movement either in or out of the country, with Congolese travel out of the country prohibited on ‘hygienic or moral’ grounds [13]. As a result, there was not much knowledge about the people, which may explain the fascination surrounding those Harrison put on display, as they were perceived as mysterious, unknown beings. This curiosity led to an increased interest in the items from the Congo and the collection as a whole, hence the enthusiasm for it. More sinisterly, it was a chance for Britain and the white person to extend their show of dominance over the black native of yet another nation.

About the author

Charlotte Pettitt - studied for her Undergraduate and Masters at the University of Hull focussing on the British Empire and its colonies around the beginning of the 20th Century. Her MA dissertation looked at the involvement and treatment of Aboriginal Australians in the First World War, which she continues to be interested in, hoping to one day be able to return to a role contributing to this research.

References

1. Hall, C. (2008) ‘Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 199-218: 201

2. Howe, S. (2008) ‘Empire and Ideology’ in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 157-176: 163

3. Hall, C (2008) ‘Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain’, 208-209

4. McKenzie, J.M. (1983) The Partition of Africa, Lancaster Pamphlets, Abingdon: Routledge,

5. Pakenham, T. (1992) The Scramble for Africa, London: Abacus, xxiii

6. Porter, A. (1994) European Imperialism 1860-1914, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994, 20

7. Howe, S. (2008) ‘Empire and Ideology’, 166

8. Dennis, R. M. (1995) ‘Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism and the Metaphysics of Race’, The Journal of Negro Education, 64, 3, 243-252: 243-244

9. Viaene, V. (2008) ‘King Leopold’s Imperialism and the Origins of the Belgian Colonial Party 1860-1905’, The Journal Of Modern History, 80, 4, 741-790: 741

10. Slade, R. (1962) King Leopold’s Congo, London: Oxford University Press, 72

11. Stanley, P. (2011) ‘’He was Black, He was a White Man, He was a Dinkum Aussie’: Race and Empire in Revisiting the

    Anzac Legend’, in S. Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing, New York: Cambridge University

    Press, 213-230: 221.

12. Plaatje, S. (1915) Native Life in South Africa, Cape Town: South African Native National Congress, 198

13. Stanard, M.G. (2014) ‘Belgium, the Congo, and Imperial Immobility: A singular Empire and the Historiography of the Single Analytic Field’, French Colonial History, 15, 87-110: 91-92