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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Africans

The Africans

Sir: Through some oversight, in a recent letter in which I enumerated the crimes against humanity perpetrated in this century, I omitted to mention the worst and largest – the massacre, for profit, of many million Africans in the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo. This, and other forms of exploitation by Europeans, including the recent establishing of a police state in Rhodesia, have made it impossible for any person of European descent, without absurdity, to describe any African nation as ‘uncivilised’. It is equally absurd to describe as ‘children’ people in adult life who work, rear children, and engage in complex communal activities. In mentioning these truisms, I am not protesting solely against the immature ramblings of a U.K. delegate most unfortunately present at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference in Wellington. I wish also to apologise, as a man of European descent and a writer resident in this country, to African visitors for insults they have had to endure in the town I live in.

1965 (372)