Alrighty.

Sharing screen.

Sharing screen. Okay. So, this one will be pretty quick.

Um, why is it not working.

There we go. I'm showing screen. Okay. So, this one will be fairly quick because you've got a couple of
great videos in here.

So we're looking at the magnificent cake what King Leopold, the second call the magnificent cake. And
we saw this slide before in the western encroachment in Asia.

But I just want to make mention I had just said that the motives were political, cultural, and economic
but let me explain. There. A little bit more detail.

Certainly political motives would include that national prestige also governors of course want to acquire
land and get promoted.

But this idea of national prestige kind of cracks me up in a tragic way, you know, it'd be funny if it wasn't
so tragic but when you watch Feisal Davidson's,Documentary on Africa, he will give you a couple of
examples, but the one that I love is in Gambia. Gambia is the western part of Africa.

It's a, it's a country today and it's a river. The Gambia River Brynn owns like I don't know maybe 30 miles
to the north 30 miles to the south to very narrow stretch of land.

And the crazy thing is that it's basically in the heart of French West Africa and would make perfect sense
for the French to have it. The French wanted,And Britain says no, and the reason Britain says no is
simply because they don't want the French to have it so that would be a good example of that national
prestige.

And the insanity of dividing up Africa, the cultural motives. One of the biggest cultural motive for
imperialism is a social Darwinism and and there's a huge Christian awakening in the 19th century.

And lots and lots and lots of missionary activity. So we see that certainly to this idea of superiority and
Social Darwinism. And we talked about that before. And then, of course, economic motives. I mean,
that's sort of the no brainer, right.

Of being able to dump finished goods in India and extract cotton out of India that I mentioned in the last
zoom lecture on the western encroachment of Asia. But certainly the Western powers were taking,An
awful lot of wealth from Africa as well. Now to this point when you watch basil Davin Davidson's know
why I have such a hard time with his name.

But basil Davidson's documentary, make sure you watch the whole thing. Watch it to the end and a
good question. Is he asks on your. Let me get it.

Specifically, and he finds the worksheet that I have for other classes on the question is what did he
identify as the central aim of the Europeans in Africa, I'll say that again.
What did he identify as the central aim of the Europeans in Africa. So make sure you can answer that
question. Okay. We've done these I cover all of these slides in the western encroachment in Asia. So
we're just going to,Go right by that the Berlin Conference. Of course, this is in your textbook, but I
shouldn't say a couple of things about it. One of the lunacy of it so,I don't know. I'm Bismarck is
spearheading this conference. And what I want you guys to think about is, it's a bunch of old white men
who have never in their life step foot on Africa and they're dividing it up.

dividing it up in such a way that by the turn of the century, there are only two pieces of land in Africa
that are not under European colonial control Liberia and Ethiopia. That's insane.

Africa is a huge continent. I mean, that goes without saying. And to think that just a handful of European
countries have control over this entire continent is absolutely mind boggling.

And so out the Berlin Conference Africa gets divided up and all of the countries buy into this idea so that
it's a lot cheaper to go to Berlin and draw out the map.

Than it is to actually wage war against one another. So this is why they agreed to do this, you know,
Germany doesn't want to wage war Britain doesn't want to wage war France doesn't want to wage war.
Interestingly enough, though. Let me just add here that at the turn of the century.

There's something called the Boer War far and that's actually to both sides are white Europeans, so the
British,Are fighting in South Africa against the Afrikaners and the Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch
settlers. So they are white Europeans as well. And we, they have a war.

Over South Africa. The Afrikaners will lose in South Africa will become part of the British Empire.

Now the lasting legacy. This is, this is what's really important here. This is what I want to draw your
attention to the lasting legacy is that the maps look the same.

So let's look at this partitioning of Africa. You can see in the gray independent Liberia on the left
Abyssinia on the right Abyssinia is Ethiopia, what you would know as Ethiopia.

And what we have here 123456 so seven countries control Africa. I know that they just blows my mind.
And you can see here that obviously the French and the British have the biggest slice of the pie.

Now the legacies. If you look at the map on the left which is a present a map of Africa. Um, I think it's
fair to say that a time,Of those nation states a ton of those boundaries are what the colonies were. I
mean, you can just see it plain as day the similarities. So there was a huge genocide. That happened
Rwanda in the 1990s mean Rwanda just,I mean, it just spun out of control.

And in the 1990s there was a wonderful interview with African Nobel Prize winning novelist.

lowly Soyinka,And he was being interviewed by the new perspectives quarterly. And the reporter asked
him.

You know, we've seen the Rwanda kind of unraveling before in Africa in Liberia. A couple years ago.
More recently, Somalia, now it threatens to engulf the entire horn of the continent, what's the
underlying connection in this trend.
So Swank answers 100 years ago at the Berlin Conference, the colonial powers that ruled Africa met,To
divvy up their interests in two states lumping various peoples and tribes together in some places or
slicing them apart and others.

Like a demented Taylor, who paid no attention to the fabric color or pattern of the quilt. He was
patching together.

And one of the biggest disappointments of the Organization of African Unity when it came into being
more than 20 years ago was a fail to address this issue.

Instead, one of its Cardinals Cardinal principles was non interference in the sack Prince saccharin Tricity
of the boundaries inherited from the colonial situation.

That was the foreboding failure political will and now we see in Rwanda at the absence of the African
self redefinition is rot.

If we fail to understand that all the stems from the colonial nation state map imposed upon us, there
will be little chance to correct the situation over the long term.

So then he's asked again are you proposing redesigning the spaces in Africa into a more harmonious
quilt or at least one less prone to try a tribal bloodletting.

And again, swaying QA says, yeah, we should sit down with a square rule and compass and redesign the
boundaries of African nations.

If we thought we could get away without this redefinition of boundaries, back when the AU au the
Organization of African Unity was formed.

Are surely the instance of Rwanda lets us know in a very brutal way that we cannot evade this historical
challenge any longer. So if you walk away with just one lesson from this unit, let it be that the problems
that Africa has faced,Air are in large part due to this colonial legacy,You have another video on a King
Leopold in the Congo and I just have you watching about 40 minutes, I think it is segments three through
something,That ends up being about 40 minutes certainly feel free to watch the entire thing if you'd like,
but that gets into the nitty gritty of just one of the colonies and that is the Belgian Congo.

Alright that's we're going to end up there.