Bad Deal congolese essays

Bad Deal congolese essays In the book King Leopolds Ghost, the author, Adam Hochschild, commenting on two chiefs that sold their land to Stanley for a few pieces of cloth per month and signed themselves up for any labor that had to be done in the area, he says, It was an even worse trade than the Indians in Manhattan. (72) I would have to totally agree with him. One reason that I think Hochschild is right in saying that the Native Americans got a longer piece of the stick from the white man than the Congolese is because the treaties actually had very different impacts on the two groups of peoples. In the case of the Native Americans, they signed their land over to the Dutch, and eventually had to relocate and move out into the plains. Thus, displacement was the only real physical effect that was felt from selling the land. However, in the Congoleses case, the two chiefs signed their people up for doing forced labor of any kind in the area that needed to be done. This caused tons of physical pain among the villagers- not just by having to do labor but also by punishments issued by their taskmasters for simple, if not trivial, rule infractions. More evidence that the Congolese people were getting a worse deal than the Native Americans can be found by looking at the economics of the two treaties. For example, the Native Americans sold their land to the Dutch for a measly 24 dollars. Even if we ignore the fact that the value of the land had the potential to go up in price and instead take into consideration how much the land was worth to the colonists in that day, we will still see that the Native Americans were paid far less than the actual value of the land. They were, however, still paid something for the land. In the case of the Congolese, though, they werent paid money or given anything valuable to in return for their land and their labor. Instead, they were given some cloth each month i ...