By Dr Michelina Andreucci

SINCE the Middle Ages, the prevailing Christian view in Europe was that all non-Europeans were inferior creatures.
Indeed, for a long time, the Roman Catholic Church debated whether newly ‘discovered’ people around the world were even human since they had no way to establish whether or not they possessed souls.
The Curse of Ham was frequently cited as the Biblical justification for imposing eternal slavery upon indigenous black people.
The belief that other races were inferior led to colonisation and large-scale abuses by West European powers who believed colonisation was a God-given opportunity for their Christian missionaries to spread the gospel to the heathens; both Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches encouraged colonialism.
Churches were often guilty of complicity in the massacres and atrocities that resulted from colonial policies.
Two centuries of trade with Asia, the Americas and Africa that included the Atlantic Slave Trade, fetched vast profits to European merchants, providing the necessary capital to finance the Industrial Revolution.
With the growth and spread of industrialisation throughout Europe, competition for raw materials increased.
Consequently, some Western governments were encouraged to colonise African countries by their industrialists as a way of guaranteeing sources of raw materials.
The Berlin Conference organised by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Austria in 1884-85 was explicitly for European powers to agree on the political division of the African Continent according to their geo-political spheres of interest, that still exist in Africa today.
At the Berlin Conference, King Leopold of Belgium was granted control of the vast and rich Kingdom of Kongo (Congo) explicitly to bring Christianity to the ‘benighted heathen’.
King Leopold ruled the Belgian Congo as his own private estate.
Among the atrocities perpetrated by the king and his Government was the widespread use of slave labour (though slavery had been outlawed), assorted murderous practices including skinning people alive, or having hands cut off, even of children, for failing to work hard enough for their new masters.
Today, the West feigns surprise and distaste and accuses many African leaders of not respecting human rights.
Under King Leopold’s control, the population of the Belgian Congo was reduced to roughly half from around 20 000 000 to about 10 000 000.
At first the atrocities were concealed, and then minimised by the Roman Catholic Church.
The Congo River was the entry point for many colonists; the tropical conditions made their elephant population bigger with better and richer ivory.
A rare elephant task was a status symbol; probably equivalent to a private jet today.
During the 19th Century, exhibitions of ‘exotic’ populations, as examples of non-Christians, became popular in various Western countries where captured people were kept in human zoos, with little or no food and without protection from frost or heat, to demonstrate the inferiority and barbarism of the African people.
Human zoos were established in Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York and Warsaw.
Even an Australian aborigine was held in the London Zoo.
In 1906, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga, shared a cage with an orang-utan in the Bronx Zoo, New York; in 1958, at the Brussels World Fair in Belgium an entire Congolese village was displayed in a human zoo.
Let us not forget Saartjie Baartman, the 20-year old indigenous South African woman, who became a freak-show victim when she was exhibited in Freak Shows at the famous Piccadilly Circus in London. Crowds were invited to view her as an animal in a zoo.
Wealthy customers, who could afford to pay for private demonstrations in their homes with invited guests, were allowed to jab and feel her all over.
In 1814 Saartjie Baartman was moved to Paris where a cast of her body was made and was said to be ‘an instant hit’.
After her death in 1815, aged 26-years, her body was dissected.
Her skeleton was pickled and preserved by the French, who then placed her brain and genitals in jars to be displayed at the Museum of Man in Paris, where they remained on display until 1974.
Almost two centuries later, in 2002, the late South African President, Nelson Mandela, requested for her body parts, together with the plaster cast, to be finally repatriated to her land of birth.
The Musée d’Histoire Naturelle du Paris, in Paris, France, still houses 18 000 human heads of African people killed by French colonising troops and missionaries; together with displays of animal skulls to show the bio-diversity and evolution.
Today, Belgium is the controlling citadel of all the EU member-countries; lauding and pontificating human rights, equal rights, the rights of this and the rights of that.
But have they the right to appoint themselves judges of all humanity and its morality?
We must not forget our own Mbuya Nehanda.
She was callously hanged in April 1898 for defending the ‘human rights’ of indigenous people.
Her head was severed from her body and who knows were it is to date?
Dr Michelina Rudo Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant, lecturer and specialist hospitality interior decorator. She is a published author in her field.
For views and comments, email: linamanucci@gmail.com