Bruce Gilley- in a fatuous attempt to rehabilitate himself in an academia which never fucking accepted him in the first place- writes
King Leopold’s private fiefdom in the Congo was precisely the counterfactual to colonial rule and the best argument for colonialism.
How did Leo gain this fiefdom? Did he conquer it with his strong right arm? No. This 'Free State' was given to him by Congress of Berlin. Why? Leo was Queen Victoria's cousin. It was better that Leo get the Congo than France & Britain quarrel over it. The Queen's Advocate General- Sir Travers Twiss, who, like Leo, was generous to whores- provided the legal argument that a private association could form a colony which in turn could acquire sovereignty. This seems reasonable. India is what it is because of the East India Company- though, Muslim or Buddhist majority areas have gone their own way. Indonesia is what it is because of some Dutch Company. Zimbabwe is what it is because of Rhodes. One can multiply such instances. The fact is a Commercial venture is likely to carve up markets along their 'natural'- i.e. proto-national- joints.
The plain fact is, Congo was a de facto and de jure colony which, technically, was only linked to Belgium, which financed the venture, through a 'personal union' with regards to Leo the whoremonger. But only technically. Once the thing turned to shit- but coz it was 'too big to fail'- Belgium had to step up to the plate and take responsibility, otherwise the governance model of the Brits and French in that region would have been undermined. Why? The Slave Trade was what had always supplied the 'sinews of war' such that Independence- or at least State Formation, if not Muslim domination- could be maintained. Belgium had to lift up its skirts and wade into that sewer to keep darkest Africa safe for its two more powerful neighbors. This is not to say that non-Muslim Africans didn't traffic in slaves. It was just that they tended to turn Muslim in order to thrive by it. The paradox here is that in Islam- as in the Rome of the Caesars- enslavement was often the first step to not just enfranchisement but supreme power. By itself, the condition of being a slave denoted no soteriological or biological inferiority. Indeed, the reverse could be presumed for 'Black Gold'- i.e. Sub Saharan African slaves who were very costly when compared to 'Black Crows' from India who were a drug on the market in Abbasid Baghdad.
His inability to control his native rubber agents who continued their pre-colonial business of slave-trading and coercive rubber harvesting showed the problems that would arise if European freelancers allied with native warlords and slave-traders to establish regimes with no outside scrutiny. The idea that there was some feasible good governance model available to this region from indigenous sources is preposterous.
There was a 'good governance model' based on backing Black Monarchs- i.e. supplying them with guns and 'invisible' service exports so as to secure even better non-coercive gains from trade. It wasn't feasible coz, back then, Whitey was all like Niggers got huge dongs and will definitely bugger our brains out and make us swallow gallons of jizz. The Italians- who don't seem to get Racism at all- liked Ethiopians very much. Their upper Aristocracy loved Haille Sellaise- whose charisma had made him a global celebrity in 1924. The Brits actually returned the Imperial Crown they had stolen to this photogenic young Prince who would become the Messiah of a religious sect whose Music- Reggae- conquered the London of my teenage years.
I must tell you that even if some Sub-Saharan African origin men have enormous dicks, they genuinely don't want to shove them up your poop hole. These are just people who get married and delight in their kids moral and educational progress. It is quite true that Black Africans are distinguishable from Black South Indians. This does mean there is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' which can become the basis of price, wage or service provision discrimination by a monopolist or monopsonist such that scale and scope economies aren't lost. But the thing is fucking sub-optimal mate. We are all better off, if a Sovereign is similar to the people over whom she has sovereignty. Why? Because a 'bourgeois strategy' is available to the Sovereign such that concurrency deadlock or livelock or McKelvey chaos is avoided. That's actual Biology, mate. Not shit about how darkies are dim and have big dicks and are bound to bugger your brains out. That's also actual, genuine, Law & Econ type, folk theorem based, mechanism design.
Gilley doesn't get any of this. Still, the guy was born Canadian- i.e. a loyal subject of Queenji, Gor' Bless 'Er. Canada is considered the 'elder sister' (in Tamil, 'Akka') of the Commonwealth. For a low IQ, utterly worthless, Tambram, first generation British citizen, like myself, Gilley is, at least potentially (he may now hold an Amrikan passport) one of the good guys. His 'oikeiosis' with respect to a 'Commonwealth' identity is something he shares with Shahid Qadir- who wanted to publish his defence of colonialism for the same reason he definitely WOULD have published one by a Hindu like me (if I weren't as stupid as shit and had credentials of some sort). The fact is, all us guys get along well enough. Why pretend otherwise for the sake of virtue signaling or Socioproctology (defined as pointing at, but not further interfering with, academic and other such assholes) or engaging with BLM or LBM or whatever?
The Batambatamba Afro-Arab slave traders of the area?
No. Their customers who should have had the power of mechanism design such that outcomes were improved by this heteroclite class- whose collective name is similar to an onomatopoeic word used by some Indian tribals for fat non-tribal traders whose buttocks and thighs make a squishy sound just as 'batambatmba' means 'heavy tread'. But this true of any type of Governance. Compliance costs have to be imposed on market makers in a manner which is less and less 'coercive' and more and more 'normative'. But we are simply speaking of the burgeoning of Civil Society as grounding Civilization.
This happened for White peeps in Canada & Oregon or whatever. It didn't happen for most Black peeps. It's not that 'Colonialism' is necessarily bad, but Racism is. The trouble is, we don't need historians to tell us this. We can see this for ourselves. Kids want to play with other kids- not get buggered by Priests or bored to death by pedagogues like me- and Color and Gender and Sexuality and 'posh Accents' and shite are ir-fucking-relevant. We want kids to trust us and talk to us and let us participate in their expanding epistemic universes of peer-related oikeiosis. Of course, it doesn't matter very much- at least in my case- if this does not happen coz I iz as stupid as shit. But Gilley and Shahid Qadir and so on ought not to waste time fighting amongst themselves while their kids and grandkids have 'depassed' their collective or artificially simulated identitarian traumas.
The African warlord Msiri whose compound decorated with human remains was the inspiration, along with a similar compound of the king of Benin, for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (transposed onto a white trader to elicit the predictable outrage from white readers)?
Gilley doesn't get that Msiri wasn't fucking over peeps coz they dun be bleck and had big dicks which posed a clear and present danger to tender white assholes. He was doing 'State formation'. Backing him for economic reasons, and then helping him to do productivity enhancing 'Civil Society' mechanism design- would have been better than backing Leo who didn't know shit about Africa and who squandered his ill gotten gelt on some whore or the other.
I have the greatest respect for the House of Saud- for the simple reason that many Indians have worked hard and done well in their realm. They are 100 per cent loyal- more particularly if Hindu. One could easily distort the historical record to depict Ibn Saud as a Msiri. But, who in their right mind, would do anything so mischievous?
Let me be very clear. Even before Mahatma Gandhi set foot on African soil, Hindu India knew that the Religion and Ethics and Philosophy of all Sub-Saharan people was based on the highest type of 'Ubuntu' or 'Oikeioisis' or 'Vasudhaiva kutumbakam'- i.e. widening circles of kinship type reciprocity encompassing the entire globe.
We know Leo was worse than Msiri. A properly backed Msiri may have yielded a much better economic and moral equilibrium. The trouble was, Msiri was too fucking bleck and probably had one of those enormous dongs Sir Richard Burton kept measuring so assiduously that it was the American Stanley, not Livingston or Burton, who made a profit on one of the dirtiest transactions in history.
Gilley is probably a much nicer guy than me. But he has fucked up here. Why? It's a Canadian thing. Those good people have to put their foot in their mouth and then chew through it to recover from the 'cabin fever' associated with being bright but not Canadian level nice and hence being part of a Commonwealth in a but solipsistic manner.
Gilley was a journalist- a good one, so I have heard. He must know that Msiri was killed so crazy, sadistic, uneconomic, shite could go down. Why write worthless nonsense which anyone with access to Wikipedia or the ability to post a Quora or Stock Exchange question can quickly see is a HATEFUL RACIST lie?
Msiri's skin and physiognomy looked more like mine than it did Gilley. Is that going to be the basis of the 'uncorrelated asymmetry' foundational to his argument? Does he not get that young Canadians think some dark skinned peeps be cool but some white peeps be shite?
The feared Arab slavers Tippo Tip or al-Zubayr?
I went to school for 4 years in Kenya. Then, at the LSE, I met descendants of all concerned. I know the complex, ideographic, truth. Gilley is advertising his ignorance. Why? Is it some sort of Jordan Peterson type shtick? Or is it just Canadian-too-Canadian cabin fever resulting in outre solipsistic behavior?
Belgian colonization of the Congo in 1908 put an end to “independence” for the Congo and thank goodness for that. In making this small mistake, my critics open us to the wider world of their misunderstanding of colonial history
There is no misunderstanding. Congo is rich in resources. We should have backed their equivalents of Ibn Saud so Nation States were properly carved up according to geo-ethnic 'joints' . Instead we got stuck with stupid Belgians who were dragged into this coz they had invested their savings in a scheme of a whoremonger King.
Gilley writes ignorant shite about a period and a part of the world about which he has no emic knowledge. Nor do I. But I played with kids that did. Later we all could meet up through the magic of Social Media. None had studied Gilley level stupid shite though some of us were educators. Why? Our countries were poor. We had to study useful stuff or do business of some sort. But, after the abject failure of Idi Amin's, essentially economic, policy of expelling the smaller schlong type of bleck, us guys reknit our sense of an anti Racist oikumene. Gilley could have been part of it. He chose to go in the other direction. Sad.
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