Colonialism in 10 Minutes: The Scramble For Africa

An excerpt from the film Uganda Rising showing in a (very!) brief overview the utter decimation of Africa that took place via colonialism and the so-called "Scramble For Africa."

Despite the film's focus on Uganda, I think this excerpt sheds light on just how much of the violence that we see today actually has a colonial/European precedent rooted in exploitation and racism.

It's also an instructive lead in, I think, to Darfur in 10 Minutes: An Overview of the Conflict in Sudan.

Uganda Rising was produced by Alison Lawton.
It was directed by Jesse James Miller and Pete McCormack (me). Jesse also edited the film, and I wrote it.

For more about the film, visit www.ugandarising.com.

(male narrator)
The conflict officially began in 1986,

when the first northern rebel movement

took up arms against
the southern-based Museveni.

But the deeper roots of this north/south
divide can be traced back to the late 1800s

during what was called by the imperial
European powers, The Scramble for Africa.

Colonization was motivated by the European
hunger for African resources.

The subsequent exploitation
of the African people,

and the uprooting of their spiritual values
by Christian missionaries,

would leave a permanent European
stamp on the continent.

(different male voice)
The mindset is the barbarians are backward

and inferior, and for their own benefit

we have to uplift them and civilize them,
and educate them, and so on.

The psychology behind it is kind of transparent.

I mean when you've got your boot on someone's
neck, and you're crushing them,

you can't say to yourself, "I am a son of a
bitch and I am doing it for my own benefit."

So, what you have to do is figure out some way
of saying, "I'm doing it for their benefit."

And that's a very natural position to take when you're beating somebody with a club.

(narrator)
Britain cut the largest piece of African cake

-- from Cairo to Capetown, in addition to
Nigeria and a few West African regions.

It was also the British empire that in 1894,
imposed an arbitrary boundary around the many

diverse ethnic groups and kingdoms that would make up Uganda.

The southern Bantu-speaking people were given economic, political, and educational advantage.

The northern ethnic groups, two in particular,
the Acholi and the Langi,

were the main recruits
for military and police positions.

By exploiting linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences between the peoples

of the north and south, Britain's divide-and-rule
policies created a tension

between them that helped maintain British rule.

The French took an east-west slice of the continent as well as Madagascar.

The Belgians took Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo in what Joseph Conrad called,

"The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience."

Slave labor took over five million lives.

In Rwanda, Belgium entrenched the idea of the Hutu as a workforce

and the Tutsi as extenders of Belgian rule.

The politicization of these two cultures would profoundly contribute to the genocide of 1994.

In Sudan, the British ruled the Arabs in the north and the blacks in the south as separate colonies

only to combine the areas before independence in 1956.

The result has been relentless civil war,

the Darfur massacres being the latest tragedy.

The Portuguese decimated Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau well into the 1970s.

The Italians took Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia.

The Germans added Cameroon and Tanzania

and committed the first genocide of the 20th century against the Herero people.

(male voice)
No colonial power is going to succeed

unless it's going to play on
existing divisions

and sharpen them, increase them,
exacerbate them.

So one of the first questions after the end of colonialism is, who belongs and who doesn't?

Who was part of the colonial struggle?

And who betrayed?

And is it time to settle scores?

(narrator)
It was this colonial legacy that Uganda

carried forth into its independence in 1962.

Milton Obote, a northerner, was named Uganda's first prime minister.

In 1971, with the help of Israel and Britain, Obote was overthrown by his top military commander,

the notorious Idi Amin.

With the entire world looking on, Amin's regime descended Uganda into chaos.

For their assumed allegiance to Milton Obote,

Idi Amin had thousands of Acholi and Langi
soldiers slaughtered.

(male voice)
Right from independence,

the leaders did not do enough
to unite the people in this country.

Instead, exploited these differences
for their own personal gains.

Wanting to rid Uganda of Amin's tyranny,
Yoweri Museveni spent the 1970s

building resistance militias
both inside and outside Uganda.

The African decline does not begin until the '70s, well over a decade after independence.

It coincides with a particular twist
in the Cold War.

Increasing external pressure, the coming in of the international monetary fund,

The World Bank, structural adjustment programs.

The World Bank gets countries to borrow up to their necks, you know, usually third world dictators.

Then when they can't pay, then the IMF comes in and says, okay now you've got to pay for it with

structural adjustment programs and the poor people who suffer from structural adjustment,

they didn't borrow the money, they didn't get anything out of it and what happened

in Africa was happening all over the world.

Amin was overthrown in 1979, but it was
Milton Obote who returned to power

in what Museveni called a rigged election.

In opposition, Museveni disappeared
into the bush

and formed the rebel National
Resistance Army, or NRA.

The National Resistance Movement was fighting for the aims of the whole country and not for aims

of a section of the country.

Secondly, the National Resistance Movement is a democratic movement.

(narrator)
Museveni rebels took power in 1986.

Thousands of defeated Acholi
and Langi soldiers,

fearing retribution for atrocities
committed during the civil war, fled north.

The president did not like the Acholi people. War had dominated the army and the military.

(narrator)
Although several northern rebel groups

formed in opposition to Museveni,
only one had a spiritual component.

Before there was Joseph Kony and
the Lord's Resistance Army,

there was Alice Lakwena and
the Holy Spirit Movement.

Alice Lakwena's thing was that the Acholi people were very sinful and she came to correct that.

Again, it goes to spiritual.

Alice Lakwena will tell you exactly what time they are coming, to which area they're going to attack

and true to their word, you'll see them coming with branches of trees,

carrying AK-47s and singing hymns.

And Kony did exactly the same.

And this just terrified government troops.

(narrator)
In October of 1987, after a number of

surprising military successes,
Alice Lakwena's forces were demolished

by Museveni's National Resistance Army,
just north of Kampala.

Once shunned by Alice Lakwena, Joseph Kony's and the Lord's Resistance Army

soon became the main rebel force in northern Uganda with Kony recruiting some of Lakwena's

forces and even channeling her main spirit.

But Kony did not prove to be as popular
with the people as Lakwena,

and resorted to coercion, abduction, and terror to build his army.