Personally, I'd advise against making snarky comments about countries in Africa that were enslaved colonies for a few hundred years. For example, you might read up on the Belgian Congo. I venture to guess you could check out "King Leopold's Ghost" from your local library.
amazon.com
Or read up on the system of apartheid in South Africa, and the treatment of people who were dragooned into working in the diamond mines.
And so forth.
You're still emotionally traumatized by 3000 Americans killed on 9/11, how about 8 million killed as slaves in the Belgian Congo (independence 1960)?
Edit: some estimates as high as 22 million.
>>Leopold's rule
Clearing tropical forests ate away at profit margins. However, ample plots of cleared land were already available. Above, a Congolese farming village (Baringa, Equateur) is emptied and leveled to make way for a rubber plantation.
Meanwhile, the quest for income was unrelenting. District officials' salaries were reduced to a bare minimum, and made up with a commission payment based on the profit that their area returned to Leopold. After widespread criticism, this "primes system" was substituted for the allocation de retraite: in which a large part of the payment was granted, at the end of the service, only to those territorial agents and magistrates whose conduct was judged "satisfying" by their superiors. This meant in practice that nothing changed. Native communities in the Domaine Privé were not merely forbidden by law to sell items to anyone but the State: they were required to provide State officials with set quotas of rubber and ivory at a fixed, government-mandated price, to provide food to the local post, and to provide 10% of their number as full-time forced laborers — slaves in all but name — and another 25% part-time.
To enforce the rubber quotas, the Force Publique (FP) was called in. The FP was an army, but its aim was not to defend the country, but to terrorize the local population. The officers were white agents of the State. Of the black soldiers, many were cannibals from the most fierce tribes from upper Congo while others had been kidnapped during the raids on villages in their childhood and brought to Catholic missions, when they received a military training in conditions close to slavery. Armed with modern weapons and the chicotte — a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide — the Force Publique routinely took and tortured hostages (mostly women), flogged, and raped the natives. They also burned recalcitrant villages, and above all, took human hands as trophies on the orders of white officers to show that bullets hadn't been wasted.
One junior white officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The white officer in command: "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross." After seeing a native killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote: "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'" In Forbath's words again:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
In theory, each right hand proved a judicial murder. In practice, soldiers sometimes "cheated" by simply cutting off the hand and leaving the victim to live or die. More than a few survivors later said that they had lived through a massacre by acting dead, not moving even when their hand was severed, and waiting till the soldiers left before seeking help.
Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. The massive reduction of the population of the Congo was noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of the colonial rule and the beginning of the 20th century . Estimates of observers of the time, as well as modern scholars (most authoritatively Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Winsconsin), show that the population halved during this period. According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: indiscriminate "war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases. Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and was used by the regime to justify demographic decrease. Opponents of King Leopold's rule stated, however, that the administration itself was to be considered responsible for the spreading of this dreadful epidemic. One of the greatest specialists of sleeping sickness, P.G.Janssens, Professeur émérite de l’Université de Gand, wrote:
It seems raisonable to admit the existence on the territories of the Congo Free State, of French Congo and Angola of a certain number of permanent sources that have been put again in activity by the brutal changement of ancestral conditions and ways of life that has accompanied the accelered occupation of the territories.
In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it's even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. British diplomat Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years Leopold's regime lasted; Forbath, at least 5 million; Adam Hochschild, 10 million; the Encyclopædia Britannica gives a total population decline of 8 million to 30 million.
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