The truth about the diamond trade

Terror and resistance

Ambitious to consolidate British imperialism in Southern Africa, Rhodes set out for Zimbabwe in 1886 where gold was thought to have been discovered. The Shona and Matabele people launched a fierce resistance to defend their lands from Rhodes’ invasion.

Rhodes recruited hundreds of British men into his army that he organized to defeat the Matabele and Shona. With the use of just four Maxim machine guns, Rhodes’s army slaughtered more than 5,000 African people in one engagement alone. As payment, each of Rhodes’ 672 solders were given 6,000 acres of land in what would be known as the colony of Rhodesia for the next hundred years.

A similar story was playing out all over Africa. African people were fighting desperately for their land, independence, culture and dignity. Europeans overpowered them with machine guns, cannons, concentration camps and the theft or destruction of the resources needed for life.

Today there are diamond mines in the Congo that are highly profitable for imperialism, but Belgium’s King Leopold did not know that in the 1890s when he was colonizing African people there. Leopold was interested in rubber, an increasingly significant commodity at the dawn of the automobile age.

Africans in Congo resisted the Belgian invasion fiercely. The Chokwe people, for instance, fought for 20 years, inflicting heavy casualties on the Belgians.

In order to force the Africans to harvest the rubber, the Belgians killed ten million people in the Congo. Women were rounded up, raped and held as hostages as an attempt to force men to work. Villages were burned. Children were kidnapped into concentration camps to be trained as soldiers for the Belgians. Men were chained at the neck and used as beasts of burden until they dropped dead.

The signature mark of Belgian conquest in the Congo was the massive cutting off of the people’s hands to force them to kneel down to the colonial power. Men, women and children were mutilated in this way, and huge mounds of hands piled up throughout the land.

One Belgian soldier wrote home that he had “killed 150 men, cut off 60 hands, crucified women and children, and hung the remains of mutilated men on the village fence.”

The profits were excellent however. The Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company reaped a profit of more than 700 percent as bicycles and automobiles in Europe and America were outfitted with rubber tires.

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