Reflection: group discussion

Towards the end of our discussion, we touched on the whole idea of the chapter "Where there aren't no ten commandments". I made a comment responding to the discussion question we chose to answer: How did King Leopold manipulate the war in the Congo? And i said that he used their ignorance and lack of education to initiate the war in the Congo. Shabbi fed off of that saying that he also shipped children to special schools designed to breed soldiers for the Congo. Ideas like these are still lingering in Africa today. One of the questions that i have from the discussion is that this has been going on in Africa for over 100 years now and it seems like no one as been effective in fixing the problem. If Williams hadn't died would he have been the one to stop this? It seems that Williams was the only one that knew what he was doing but he had no support from other people.
As a group, i believe we developed a concise discussion that effectively raised ideas and synthesized the reading well. We could improve on being more focused in our discussions to avoid awkward silences. But some people had really good points and I could tell that everyone understood the reading very well.

Response to King Leopold

I thought it was interesting that Arabic countries were able to have African slaves. The Arab countries were of the poorer countries but Africans were still below them in a sense. It is a shame that Africans were stooped down to the lowest of the low that they could even be owned by people who were perceived to be lower class before African slaves began to be traded. Was it almost a trend or fad to have African slaves now? Who were considered "slaves" before the Africans?

Reflection 9/2 class

Initially, I thought that Imperialism was worse than colonizing but at the end of class I realized i was wrong. Colonization is actually a lot more controlling and coercive than imperialism even though "Imperialism" sounds worse. i was also surprised to realize how many countries have been colonized before and also that the U.S is colonizing right now in Iraq. I never looked at it like that. I just looked at it as a war in Iraq. I also learned a more organized way of understanding history: S.P.I.C.E.R.