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The Bible and the Gun, in volume 3 of the four-video series
Africa: The Story of a Continent, describes the troubling link between European missions in Africa and the colonialism that eventually divided up the continent. In a well-balanced and thoroughly researched study, presenter Basil Davidson demonstrates the beneficial results of European missionaries in Africa, specifically in education and missionary schools that enabled young Africans to gain national perspectives. At the same time, Davidson does not shy away from the cold reality that most early missionaries, in David Livingston's words, viewed themselves "as members of a superior race." Willing converts were few, and many missionaries' contempt for Africans outweighed their belief in the brotherhood of man. Davidson studies the case of the Matabele tribe and Cecil Rhodes in great detail. In less than 30 years from the 1880s, all but two African countries had fallen under colonial rule.
This Magnificent African Cake traces the terrible course of Europe's colonial "passification" of Africa in grim detail, explaining the ramifications of substituting cash crops for food crops, taxation, humiliation, and forced labor. In only two hours, Davidson provides valuable and remarkably clear insights into the troubling period in Africa's history from European exploration to colonization.
--Tara Chace
Product Description
Program Five looks at how the slave trade decimated the African population and tore the fabric of society, as well as the impact of explorers, missionaries, and men like Cecil Rhodes. Program Six takes us back to the 30-year "scramble for Africa" that began in the 1880s and dramatically changed the continent. Nearly all of Africa became subject to colonial rule until World War II.
