Essay
HSY2601 ASSIGNMENT 2 2023
- Institution
- University Of South Africa (Unisa)
HSY2601 ASSIGNMENT 2 2023
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In your own words, explain how the 19th-century paternalistic views ofAfricans' supposed inferiority became connected to Africa's economic
exploitation.
This essay explores the relationship between the exploitation of Africa's economy
and 19th-century paternalistic ideas about Africa's alleged inferiority. Between the
1880s and the outbreak of World War I, there were numerous competing European
claims to land in Africa, known as the Scramble for Africa (or the Race for Africa).
The majority of enslaved men and women in the early 19th century laboured as
housemaids and farm labourers on sizable agricultural plantations. Africans were
seen by Westerners as being in need of parental direction because of their
paternalistic outlook on life. There were many ways to express the superior attitudes
of whites toward non-white people. As was previously said, racism was moulded by
a variety of Eurocentric notions of culture, civilisation, and physical characteristics,
which resulted in unequal treatment of colonial subjects. However, the way that the
connection between the colonizers and the colonized developed economically and
politically as well as a complicated mixture of preconceived conceptions about
indigenous culture also had a significant impact on European perceptions of
indigenous people. Despite the abundance of natural resources on the African
continent, many of its countries are still among the world's poorest.
Africans have not been able to escape poverty through the exploitation and selling of
their natural riches to western multinationals. Many African farmers were forced off
their land as a result of European imperial expansion into the interior of Africa, and
they were then employed as agricultural labourers on white-owned plantations,
where they frequently endured terrible treatment. By providing them with farmland,
European countries encouraged their subjects to establish themselves permanently
in their colonies in Africa. Africans felt forced to cultivate commercial crops like
cotton, tobacco, coffee, and sugar rather than their traditional staple foods, which
caused discontent among them. Class divisions, according to 19th-century critics,
were more significant than national identity, and moral outrage over slavery was
frequently the driving force behind European exploration of and expansion into the
African continent.
But, once the trade in humans was outlawed by Western powers, African economies
needed to find viable economic alternatives. David Livingstone asserted that he
carried out his vast excursions in southern and central Africa in the 1850s and 1860s
in order to promote trade as well as the spread of Christianity. For many British
people, Christianity and British business came to represent civilization, and
paternalistic ideas about the presumed inferiority of Africans came to be associated
with the continent's economic exploitation.
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