Editors, 30 November 2022

(quote)
The 1890 Brussels Act provided Europeans with the legal and humanitarian
justification for the colonization of Africa. Why have so few heard of it?

The deceptive notion of "humanitarian intervention" as cover for Western
imperial theft and hubris has a long history. In fact, if there's anything that
European nations and its white dominions ("the West") are good for is looting
the resources of the world and telling us that it's for our own
good. "Humanitarianism," in the language of bringing Christianity to "savage"
Africans, was the reason given by Belgium's Leopold II, the unabashed "Monster
of the Congo," for the theft of Congo's resources and the genocide of its
peoples. Leopold's hold on the Congo was solidified via the 1885 Berlin
Conference, where European nations (along with the US) met to partition and
continue their conquest of the African continent, through the principle of
"effective occupation." The Berlin Conference was effectively an agreement among
thieves, and "effective occupation" gave European powers the right to claim
areas of the African continent.

But there is no honor among white thieves. In 1890, European powers got together
again - this time in Brussels - to settle their ongoing disputes over the
African continent, and importantly, to find ways to control the trades in
firearms and liquor, which they believed threatened their hold on parts of the
continent. Africans with access to firearms could potentially challenge the
European goal of "effective occupation," while African access to liquor,
Europeans believed, diminished their productivity as colonial laborers. At the
same time, Europeans needed to consolidate their control over African land,
people, and resources -and diminish the potential for more inter-European
disputes. While the Berlin conference had nominal humanitarian claims - the 1885
Berlin Act had a nonbiding aim of ending the slave trade in Africa - the
Brussels Conference Act loudly proclaimed itself as a primarily humanitarian
venture.

Many have heard of the 1885 Berlin Act, the decree partitioning the African
continent for European colonial rule. How many know of the 1890 Brussels
Conference Act? And how many are aware of its role in providing the Berlin Act
its "legal" and "humanitarian" justifications? Officially named the "Convention
to the Slave Trade and Importation into Africa of Firearms, Ammunition, and
Spiritous Liquors," the Brussels Conference Act both laid out in detail the
process of formal colonization of the African continent, and gave colonization
its moral argument by framing it through a discourse of humanitarianism. We are
supposed to believe that European nations who had begun, continued, and
massively benefited from the transatlantic commercial trade in Africans as well
as the industrialization brought about by the institution of slavery, were
suddenly concerned about African welfare.

In the Brussels Act, the colonial powers explained away the establishment of the
colonial administration apparatus, protecting its missionaries, while providing
its corporations and trading companies with African labor - in effect,
establishing theft of African land and the exploitation of African labor as an
antislavery measure. A quick review of the first article of the Act tells a
different story. The article calls for, among other things, the "construction of
roads, and in particular railways," "organization of administrative, judicial,
religious and military services in the African territories placed under
the... protectorate of civilized nations," and "the establishment of telegraphic
lines." We are asked to accept that only European colonial rule would end the
slave trade and slavery on the African continent.

We reprint the first fifteen articles of the one-hundred-article Brussels
Conference Act of 1890 below in part to show how systematic the European
colonization of the African continent was, and how European laws of conquest
were rebranded as "international law." Most importantly, the text of the Act
also demonstrates how devilish, self-serving, and hypocritical European powers
have been in covering their crimes under the veneer of humanitarianism. Readers
today should be able to see that the thieves have not changed their tactics.
(/quote)
-- Cont'd at https://blackagendareport.com/excerpt-brussels-conference-act-1890