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FREEDOMWAYS         FOURTH QUARTER 1966

The rapid advance of science and technology, which we call the Industrial Revolution, in Europe and America, had reached a pinnacle of development in the latter half of the 19th century.  Industrial capitalism, triumphant and victorious over both feudalism and mercantile capitalism, was now stridently moving on to become international finance capital.  One of the by-products of this was a mad scramble among the leading industrial nations of Europe for the partition and settlement of Africa. Of course the African people were not consulted in this matter since their "place" was that of the colonized.  Slavery and the slave trade having been abolished (at least formally) new ways of exploiting the African continent and its people were now being sought.

So the partition and colonization of Africa proceeded. An International Geographical Congress called in Paris in 1875 "talked over the techniques of tropical colonization."  The following year, Leopold of Belgium called his own Geographical Congress in Brussels and used it to stage his takeover of the Congo with its rich mineral resources.  The French colonialists later captured Algeria from the Turks and used it as a base, along with Senegal, to spread their colonial domination across North and West Africa.  Bismarck called a conference in Berlin (1885) of European powers, allegedly for the purpose of getting them to come to some agreement among themselves with regard to the African continent.  The end result was that the German colonialists were "awarded" Southwest Africa (the land of the Herrero people), the Cameroons, and an area of East Africa renamed "Tanganyika."  The British marched into Egypt to:protect" the Egyptians and from there into  the Sudan and gave Kitchener 20,000 troops with which to block further expansion by the French; while at the other end of the continent, Cecil Rhodes, with the help of Christian missionaries, bribed his wasy into control of a large part of Central Africa which later renamed the Rhodesias, and placed under British rule.  British and Boer rivals in South Africa poured into Kenya as "white settlers" taking over the fertile highlands from the Masai and Kikuyu people.  Everywhere, organized resistance by the African people were ruthlessly put down.  The defeat of the Mahdi in the Sudan; the series of Ashant wars in Ghana; the crushing of Samory Toure's guerrilla army in Guinea, are only a few examples.  

The new industrial hierarchy in the United States decided upon its own program of action.  It knew the American people were in no mood to support amy such foreign policy of annexations. The 

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Transcription Notes:
See line 2 from bottom of second paragraph, specifically Samory Toure's... I was unable to create the special character for Tour[e]'s ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 13:37:34