NIALL FERGUSON: ln the 1 9th century, Western civilization spread southwards
to secure control of a vast and mysterious continent.
This would be the West's biggest challenge...
...Africa.
To overcome its inhospitable terrain and climate,
its grinding poverty,
and in particular, its terrifying repertoire of tropical diseases...
...would require an unprecedented effort.
In this series, I'm identifying the six things,
I'm caIIing them kiIIer appIications, that ensured the West became
the worId's most powerfuI civiIization.
And I'm asking, if we Iose our monopoIy over these things,
couId the rest catch up with the West?
The first three - competition, science and the property-owning democracy -
put the West ahead of Asia, the MusIim worId and South America.
In this fiIm, I'm turning to kiIIer app number four,
and how it was imposed on Africa.
lt was here that key breakthroughs were made that helped develop
the West's most remarkable and unlikely killer app.
The one that, far from being a killer, had the power
to double human life expectancy.
Modern medicine.
But there was another, darker side
to the life-enhancing powers of medical science.
The pseudo-science of eugenics and racial biology.
This would lead not only to the wholesale slaughter of Africans,
it would lead ultimately to Hitler's gas chambers.
And it would come close to destroying the credibility
of Western civilization itself.
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By the beginning of the 20th century,
the conduct of the dominant Western powers from Asia to Africa
aroused increasingly bitter opposition
from nationalist and socialist critics of imperialism.
Asked what he thought of Western civilization,
the great lndian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi replied wittily
that he thought it wouId be a very good idea.
lt's a negative view shared by many people today.
Yet before we rush to condemn the Western empires
as eviI and expIoitative,
capabIe of behaviour that was the very opposite of civiIized,
we need to remember that there was more than a grain of truth
in their cIaim to be on a civiIizing mission.
In particuIar, they had high hopes of what they couId achieve here,
in what they caIIed the Dark Continent.
Gandhi's verdict that Western civilization
was a contradiction in terms was a bit hard on the French.
For surely no empire in history
has tried harder to make a reality of the phrase ''civilizing mission''
than the one run from Paris.
ln 1 848, a new republican government made a revolutionary decision,
one of the most extraordinary in African colonial history.
Like all the European empires in Africa,
the French empire had begun with slavery.
The sIave trade which had fIourished here on Goree
had aIready been aboIished, but the distinction between master and sIave
persisted throughout French Africa.
So the first thing the revoIutionary government in Paris did
was to aboIish sIavery itseIf.
From now on, everyone in the French empire wouId be free.
lt's not hard to imagine the French slave traders' reaction
here in Saint-Louis, the first capital of French West Africa,
when the news came through from Paris.
But what the French government did next was even more shocking.
From now on, the former sIaves wouId automaticaIIy become French citizens.
And that meant that they got the vote,
something that was never granted to Britain's African subjects.
The resuIt was that in November 1848, 2,000 of France's new African citizens
got to eIect Africa's first muItiraciaI assembIy.
And this was where it met, in this rather spIendid buiIding in Saint-Louis.
lt was a remarkable transformation.
First the end of slavery and then, overnight, democracy.
To the French government, it seemed self-evident that colonial subjects
should be transformed into Frenchmen with the maximum possible speed.
The revolutionary benefits of liberte, egalite and fraternite
were to be extended to everyone, regardless of colour.
In the jargon of the time, the Africans were to be ''assimiIated''.
This progressive imperialism was personified by Louis Faidherbe,
who became Governor of Senegal in 1 852.
Faidherbe himself married a 1 5-year-old local girl.
ln 1 857, he set up a Senegalese colonial army, Les Tirailleurs.
At a stroke, Faidherbe transformed the status of the African soIdier
from indentured miIitary Iabourer to fuIIy fIedged combat effective.
By the 1 860s,
former slave markets had become proud outposts of Gallic culture.
The erstwhile victims of imperialism had been transformed into citizens
with the right to vote and the duty to bear arms.
For one of the beneficiaries,
a young Senegalese called Blaise Diagne,
French citizenship opened the door for an extraordinary career.
It was thanks to the French ideaI of a ''mission civiIisatrice'',
civiIizing mission, that a man Iike BIaise Diagne,
born in this modest house in Goree in 1872,
couId join the CoIoniaI Customs Service and rise up through its ranks.
Such an ascent wouId have been a great deaI more difficuIt in British Africa.
ln 1 91 4, Diagne ended up as the first black African deputy
in the French National Assembly in Paris.
The grandson of a slave had become a lawmaker for France itself.
And yet none of this progress counted for much to ordinary Africans
if the most basic right of all was missing - the right to live.
The whole French mission civilisatrice
was threatened with defeat by one lethal foe.
Disease.
Specifically, the kind of disease that condemned Africans
to brief and unproductive lives
and made large tracts of sub-Saharan Africa
almost uninhabitable for Europeans.
Africa was to be the ultimate testing ground
for the fourth killer application of Western civilization -
the power of modern medicine to prolong human life.
There's a great force for good at work in Africa today -
Western aid.
You can argue about the negative effects aid has
in propping up corrupt governments and stifling would-be entrepreneurs.
But it's hard to deny that vast sums of money are today being spent
to improve the health of Africans.
Modern medicine made in Western laboratories
has transformed the lives of all of us, not least
those of the people living here in Senegal.
Since 1960, the mortaIity rate for under-fives here in SenegaI
has gone down by two-thirds.
Average Iife expectancy at birth has risen has risen from 40 to 55.
AII over the worId, the benefits of modern medicine
are finding their way sIowIy down to the poorest peopIe on the pIanet.
Nothing iIIustrates the transformationaI power of Western civiIization better
than a cIinic Iike this, where doctors trained in Western medicine
confer the uItimate gift, a gift taken for granted by most peopIe in the West.
The gift of a heaIthy Iife.
What's not so well-known is that this process
of extending life expectancy in Africa began during the colonial period.
The great leap forward of Western medicine in the 1 9th century
was partly a product of the age of empire.
For ruling new lands meant conquering new diseases.
This monument in Goree commemorates the 21 doctors and pharmacists
who Iost their Iives in a yeIIow fever epidemic in 1878.
Not for nothing was West Africa known as the white man's grave.
The entire coIoniaI project threatened to be snuffed out at infancy by disease.
Take Britain. The six principal British expeditions to West Africa
between 1 805 and 1 841 suffered an average mortality rate of 50%.
lf death rates like these persisted,
the colonization of Africa by Europeans would plainly be unsustainable.
Like aII good coIoniaI administrators, the French kept impeccabIe records,
and here in the SenegaIese NationaI Archives,
you can find detaiIs of IiteraIIy every outbreak of tropicaI disease
to hit French West Africa,
from choIera in Cote d'Ivoire to yeIIow fever in SenegaI.
And in fact, this box here contains a comprehensive Iist
of aII the victims of the 1878 yeIIow fever outbreak.
HeaIth biIIs, heaIth commissions, heaIth Iaws -
it was as if the French were obsessed with heaIth.
And why not? As one British observer put it,
the European presence in Africa was a question of ''mosquito or man''.
The future of imperiaIism itseIf Iay with the microscope.
But the key advances of the late 1 9th century would not be made
in the squeaky clean laboratories
of Western universities and pharmaceutical companies.
It wasn't entireIy fancifuI
to imagine men of science trekking through the jungIe.
Researchers into tropicaI diseases estabIished Iaboratories
in the most far-fIung of African coIonies.
This one in Saint-Louis in SenegaI was set up in 1896.
It's actuaIIy the first microbioIogicaI Iaboratory in the whoIe of Africa.
This is where they conducted experiments on animaIs,
injecting triaI vaccines.
82 cats had injections of dysentery and 1 1 dogs injections of tetanus.
This reaIIy was science on the front Iine.
Other labs worked on cholera, rabies and smallpox.
Here was another kind of imperial hero, the bacteriologist,
often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions.
It was in this tiny Iaboratory in Saint-Louis
that the first yeIIow fever vaccine for French West Africa was deveIoped.
Breakthroughs Iike that kept Europeans,
and hence the whoIe coIoniaI project, aIive.
Africa itseIf had become a Iaboratory for Western medicine.
And the more successfuI the research,
the further the European empires couId expand.
Colonization in Africa was limited at first to coastal settlements.
But with the advent of another Western breakthrough,
mechanized transport, it could spread inland.
By 1 904,
a new federation of French West Africa, stretching beyond Timbuktu into Niger,
extended French rule to more than 1 0 million Africans.
At root, no doubt about it, empire was about conquest.
The first military use of the French-trained Tirailleurs
was against the rulers of the Senegalese interior.
And French citizenship was certainly not on offer
to these new subjects of the African hinterland.
The Scramble for Africa
has become a byword
for the ruthless exploitation of an entire continent by rapacious Europeans.
But it was also a scramble for scientific knowledge.
With the spread of railways went the spread of Western civilization
and its killer app, modern medicine.
This was the original Medecins Sans Frontieres - Doctors Without Borders.
lt's a point often overlooked by those, like Gandhi,
who maintained that the European empires had no redeeming feature.
All over the burgeoning French empire,
the overthrow of native power structures was followed
by an attempt to eradicate native superstitions about health.
Now, this is what's meant by traditionaI heaIing,
because this is actuaIIy a SenegaIese fertiIity cIinic.
Women who are having troubIe conceiving come here,
get their treatment, and if it's successfuI,
they hammer pestIes into the ground -
one for the wife and one for the husband - foIIowed by a quick shower.
For centuries, Africans have looked to traditional medicine to cure the sick.
ln the village of Jajak, that means a witch doctor called Han Diop.
(TRANSLATION)
Can she expIain what she means by ''having deviI''?
Can you show me some of the medicines that you give your patients?
I'd just Iike to see them.
Merci beaucoup. Tres, tres interessant.
What Han uses is a mixture of herbs and a IittIe bit of prophecy.
The troubIe is, of course, that herbs and prophecy aren't tremendousIy effective
against a whoIe range of IethaI bacteria and viruses,
which is one reason that Iife expectancy in Africa is stiII so Iow today.
It's aIso the reason why, in 1897, the French banned witch doctors.
Seven years later, they went further,
by drawing up plans for the first African national health service.
Not onIy wouId the French introduce their own system of pubIic heaIth to Africa,
in February 1905,
Governor GeneraI Roume issued an order
creating a free coIoniaI heaIth service for the Africans under his ruIe.
Not everybody Iikes to admit it, but here, as in many other respects,
there were concrete, measurabIe benefits to European empire.
Yet there were limits to what empires would spend
on medicine for the natives.
There were few resources
to send doctors and vaccines into the isolated villages of inland Senegal.
ln the battle against malaria, European residents of African cities
got more attention from the colonial health service.
Cholera and sleeping sickness, which were bigger killers of Africans,
had a lower priority.
When plague swept through Dakar,
the French authorities were ruthless in their response.
The homes of the infected were torched,
residents were forcibly removed and quarantined under armed guard.
Once, the French had aspired to racial assimilation.
The irony was that medical science now recommended
ever-stricter separation.
ln Dakar, there were mass protests, riots
and the first general strike in Senegalese history.
The imperatives of medicaI science required tough measures
to bring the epidemic under controI.
And yet the science of the day aIso provided a spurious rationaIe
for treating Africans harshIy.
According to the theory of eugenics,
Africans weren't just ignorant of medicaI science,
they were an inferior species.
This was a critical moment in the history of Western civilization,
as eugenics, the bastard offspring of medical science,
came to dominate European thinking about Africa and Africans.
As a result, the civilizing mission became corrupted,
with horrifying consequences.
ln the 1 850s, Charles Darwin's cousin,
an intrepid explorer called Francis Galton,
had travelled through the uncharted lands
of the Herero and Nama in South West Africa.
On returning to London,
Galton reported to the Royal Society that he'd seen...
''enough of savage races to give me material to think about
''all the rest of my life''.
lndeed, Galton's research would inform his later coining of the term
''eugenics'', the use of selective breeding
to improve the human gene pool.
Here was the ultimate solution to the problem of public health -
a master race of invulnerable superhumans.
The important point to note is that, 100 years ago,
work Iike GaIton's was at the cutting edge of scientific research.
Racism wasn't some backward-Iooking, reactionary ideoIogy,
it was the state of the art, and peopIe then beIieved in it
as readiIy as peopIe today buy the theory of man-made cIimate change.
Nowhere would the pseudo-science of eugenics have a more pernicious influence
than in the lands of the Herero and Nama,
now part of the rapidly growing German empire.
ln 1 900, Germany was at the cutting edge of Western civilization.
lt was German professors who won the lion's share
of Nobel science prizes.
lt was German universities that led the world in chemistry and biochemistry.
Yet there was a shadow side to this extraordinary scientific success.
Lurking within the reaI science was a pseudo-science which asserted
that man was not a singIe homogeneous species
but was subdivided and ranked, from an Aryan master race at the top
down to a bIack race that scarceIy quaIified as Homo sapiens.
And where better to test these theories
but in Germany's newIy acquired African coIonies?
Each European power evolved its own distinctive species of African colony.
The French, as we've seen, favoured railways and health centres.
The British didn't just dig for gold, they also built mission schools.
The Belgians turned the Congo into a vast and vile slave state.
The Germans were the latecomers to the African party.
Where Africa was a tropical disease lab for the French,
for the Germans, it was a testing ground for racial theory.
The German version of the civilizing mission
was to have vastly more hideous consequences,
but it, too, had its own apparently rigorous scientific rationale.
ln the brightly painted, new German settlements of South West Africa,
Africans were seen as biologically inferior,
an inconvenient obstacle to the development of Africa
by more advanced white Aryans.
ln German towns like this,
blacks were forbidden to ride horses, had to salute whites,
couldn't walk on the footpaths, couldn't own bicycles or go to libraries.
ln the colony's rudimentary courts of law,
the word of one German was worth the word of seven Africans.
But the cruciaI issue was Iand.
According to the theory of the time,
the Herero and Nama were feckIess, improvident nomads.
They had to be dispIaced by sturdy German farmers.
There was only one small problem for Germany's eugenicists -
these Africans were not the childlike creatures
of their racial theory.
After one provocation too many from their overbearing and aggressive settlers,
they resolved to resist.
It was the gratuitousIy arrogant behaviour of a young German Iieutenant
that finaIIy Iit the bIue touchpaper here in Okahandja.
On January 12th 1904, Ied by SamueI Maharero,
the Herero rose up, kiIIing aII the abIe-bodied German men they couId find
but pointedIy sparing the women and chiIdren.
More than 100 German settIers were kiIIed.
ln response, the German government sent this man,
General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha,
with instructions to put down the uprising ''by fair means or foul''.
He chose the foulest at his disposal.
ln a chilling decree addressed to the Herero, von Trotha spelled out
what German theories about race actually meant in practice.
''You Hereros must now leave this land. lt belongs to the Germans.
''A Herero person in German land shall be killed by the gun.
''These are my words to the Herero people.
''The great General of the mighty German Kaiser, Trotha. ''
The BattIe of Hamakari, which took pIace here,
near the Waterberg PIateau, on November 1 1th 1904,
wasn't reaIIy a battIe at aII.
It was more Iike a massacre.
The Herero were gathered here in a Iarge, concentrated encampment.
They'd just seen off one German force,
so they were expecting peace negotiations.
But instead, von Trotha encircIed them
and rained down a IethaI bombardment of mortar sheIIs,
Iike this one Iater found on the battIefieId.
Then, as the men, women and chiIdren tried to fIee,
they were mown down by Maxim guns.
As von Trotha told the hapless civilian governor whose authority he'd usurped,
''That nation must vanish from the face of the Earth. ''
Of course, as von Trotha weII understood,
the survivors now had IittIe option
but to fIee from the water hoIes on which they depended
out into the arid Omaheke desert, to ''their doom'', as he put it.
The Herero, in other words, were being deIiberateIy exterminated.
Now, we aII know that vioIence is part and parceI of every empire,
but this was sureIy different.
The more I think about this episode, the more I reaIize
it reaIIy was the first genocide, Iong before the word was even invented.
Those not shot, hanged or dead of thirst were herded
into five concentration camps.
The worst of them was here, on Shark lsland, near Luderitz.
The camp was deIiberateIy situated here at the far end of Shark IsIand
to maximize its exposure to the eIements.
Denied adequate cIothing, sheIter and food,
the prisoners were expected to work
waist-deep in the ice-coId water, and those who faItered in their toiI
had to fear the sadistic sjambok-wieIding guards.
80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark IsIand concentration camp
didn't Ieave here aIive.
Before the uprising, the Herero had numbered 80,000.
Afterwards, only 1 5,000 remained.
There had been 20,000 Nama.
By 1 91 1, fewer than 1 0,000 were left.
For the Germans, annihilating a race was only part of the objective.
The camps would also play a more constructive role.
They would justify the genocide
by advancing the cause of a corrupt medical science.
It wasn't just that the Herero and Nama were interned crueIIy,
they were interred crueIIy too - in mass graves Iike this one
that's just been uncovered
by the construction of a new raiIroad from Luderitz to Aus.
And yet the interesting thing is that not aII the remains
ended up in pIaces Iike this.
SkuIIs and even some pickIed heads were sent back to Germany
to satisfy the insatiabIe interests of the scientists in raciaI hygiene.
lncredibly,
female prisoners were forced to scrape the skulls clean with glass shards
before the specimens were sent off for examination.
ln 1 906, a total of 77 8 autopsies were performed on prisoners
for so-called ''racial-biological'' research.
Dr Eugen Fischer
arrived in South West Africa just after the death camps opened.
Obsessed with the voguish new field of race, he saw the camps
as an ideal research opportunity.
For two months, he conducted medical experiments
on the mixed-race offspring of African women and European men,
which included measuring the heads of both the living and the dead.
In 1913, Fischer pubIished his findings.
Negro bIood, he concIuded, was fundamentaIIy inferior to white bIood,
and any European peopIe that mixed its bIood with negro bIood
condemned itseIf to mentaI and cuIturaI decIine.
WeII, books Iike this and mass graves Iike this one
raise a very profoundIy disturbing question.
Was Namibia the seedbed for future, much bigger genocides?
Was it, as the noveIist Joseph Conrad suggested,
a case of Africa turning Europeans into savages
rather than Europeans civiIizing Africa?
Where was the real heart of darkness?
ln Africa? Or in the Europeans who treated it as a laboratory
for the worst kind of racial pseudo-science?
But what goes around comes around.
Racial theory was too virulent an idea
to be confined to the colonial periphery.
The fact that there's a First WorId War memoriaI in the heart
of Saint-Louis in SenegaI teIIs you something important about the war.
It wasn't just a battIe between European nation-states,
it was a war of worId empires, a war within Western civiIization.
And for the first time, it reveaIed the possibiIity
that the West might carry the seeds of its own destruction within itseIf,
because more than in any previous war, in this one,
the Western powers Iaunched their kiIIer appIications against one another.
The industriaI economy provided the mechanized means of mass murder.
And modern medicine, too, pIayed its part
in the bIoody business of totaI war.
By the spring of 1 91 7, the outlook for the Allies in the war was bleak.
Already by the end of March, 1.3 million Frenchmen had been killed,
and the government was deeply concerned about the shortage of men.
It's easy to forget that France Iost two out of three wars against Germany
between 1870 and 1940.
In 191 7, it was cIose to Iosing the First WorId War, too.
Where couId the French turn for heIp?
WeII, the answer was to Africa.
Yet all over French Africa, from Senegal to the Congo,
Dahomey and the lvory Coast, instead of answering the call
of la patrie, Africans revolted.
There was only one man who seemed capable of dealing with the crisis -
Blaise Diagne, the first black African to have been elected
to the French National Assembly.
Diagne saw a chance to strike a bargain with the government in Paris.
He insisted that any African who came to fight
would be given French citizenship.
As an incentive to join up, it proved startlingly successful.
63,000 West Africans answered Diagne's call,
more than twice the number the French had asked for.
Demba Mboup was among those now eager to fight for France.
''l was very happy, because l didn't know what war was really like.
''l was going to discover new things and experiences.
''l didn't know what would happen to me. ''
He was to find out soon enough.
His commanding officer was General Charles Mangin.
ln 1 91 0, as a lieutenant colonel, Mangin and a group of scientists
had toured West Africa with orders to increase recruitment.
What he found there was an almost inexhaustible reservoir of men
who seemed to be designed by nature for the battlefield.
(DRILL COMMANDS SHOUTED AND REPEATED)
CharIes Mangin had aIso bought into the prevaiIing pseudo-science
of bioIogicaI determinism.
Having conducted the fuII range of bogus tests,
his survey team concIuded that Africans,
because of their supposedIy underdeveIoped nervous systems,
feIt Iess fear and suffered Iess pain than their European counterparts.
They couId therefore be reIied upon to be exceptionaIIy steadfast under fire.
(DRILL COMMANDS SHOUTED)
ln 1 91 7, Mangin was able to put his theory to the test.
Under his leadership, Mboup and his fellow Tirailleurs
were pitted against perhaps the best-trained soldiers the West
has ever produced, the fighting machine that was the lmperial German Army.
When the Senegalese Tirailleurs
recruited by Blaise Diagne first arrived in France during the First World War,
it seemed to the local population
that they were more a circus act than a supply of new manpower for the front line.
But the fun didn't last long.
Modern medicine might protect the Tirailleurs against disease,
but it would be of little use against the machine guns of the German army.
WeII, this is where Demba Mboup and his feIIow SenegaIese soIdiers
ended up in ApriI 191 7, down beIow the Chemin des Dames,
the Ladies' Road, named after two daughters of Louis XV.
WeII, there weren't many Iadies up there in 191 7. There were Germans -
to be precise, the 7th Army under GeneraI Hans von Bohm.
The SenegaIese were with CharIes Mangin's 6th Army.
And this was supposed to be it -
the big push that wouId break through the German defences
and end the war in 48 hours.
(GUNFIRE)
Altogether, more than a million men
with 872 train-loads of artillery shells
and 1 7 0 million rounds of rifle ammunition
were massed in readiness for the assault.
For days, intensive artillery barrages were supposed to soften up the Germans.
(BIRDSONG)
At 6am on ApriI 16th, the SenegaIese advanced up this hiII,
which had been turned by rain and sIeet into a mudsIide.
Now, GeneraI Mangin had put them at the sharp end
in the first wave of the attack.
OfficiaIIy, that was because he'd been so impressed
by their comrades' performance the previous year at the BattIe of Verdun.
But Mangin had an uIterior motive, and that was to spare French Iives.
From the German trenches, Captain Reinhold Eichacher watched in horror.
''The black Senegal negroes, France's cattle for the slaughter.
''Hundreds of fighting eyes, fixed, threatening, deadly.
''And they came, feeling their way like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.
'' 'Close rangel lndividual firingl Take careful aiml'
''My orders rang out sharp and clear.
''A wall of lead and iron suddenly hurled itself upon the attackers.
''The first blacks fell headlong,
''turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus.
''Whole groups melted away.
''Dismembered bodies, sticky earth,
''shattered rocks were mixed in wild disorder. ''
The Senegalese were cannon fodder.
On the first day of the assault, the Allied forces suffered 40,000 casualties.
For Demba Mboup, who was disabled by shrapnel,
it was a revelation of the distinctly uncivilized reality
of European life and death in time of total war.
As another Tirailleur put it, ''No rest, always make war,
''always kill blacks. ''
The supreme irony is that the world war provided a new laboratory
for the advance of the curative side of Western medical science.
The slaughterhouse of the Western Front was an opportunity
for significant advances in surgery, not to mention psychiatry.
The skin graft and antiseptic irrigation of wounds were invented.
The earliest blood transfusions were attempted.
For the first time, all British soldiers were vaccinated against typhoid.
Not that these advances helped the Tirailleurs much.
lf they weren't killed in the trenches,
they died in enormous numbers from pneumonia. Why?
According to French experts, they had a racial predisposition to the disease.
The war was also good for proponents of pseudo-science,
like Dr Eugen Fischer, the measurer of African skulls.
Though he ended up on the losing side,
for him, the First World War proved surprisingly fruitful.
As black troops found their way into German prisoner of war camps,
they formed another sample of humanity
for experiments designed to prove the superiority of the master race.
Fischer's The PrincipIes Of Human Heredity And Race Hygiene,
published in 1 921, became a standard work within race biology.
Hitler read it and even cited it in Mein Kampf.
One of Fischer's students was Josef Mengele,
later responsible for the notorious experiments on prisoners
at the Auschwitz death camp.
For the many former coIoniaI soIdiers who fIocked to join the Nazi party
and who, incidentaIIy, gave the SA their first brown shirts,
it seemed entireIy naturaI that theories first put to the test
in the concentration camps of Africa shouId be carried over
to the German coIonization of Eastern Europe, and the murderous raciaI poIicies
that produced the HoIocaust, the euthanasia of the mentaIIy iII,
and the forced steriIization of so-caIIed raciaI mongreIs.
lf Auschwitz marked the culmination of state violence
against racially defined alien populations,
then the war against the Herero and Nama
had surely been the first step in its direction.
The worId wars were Iike a terribIe nemesis foIIowing the hubris
of the mission civiIisatrice, as the European empires appIied
against one another those methods which they'd pioneered against Africans.
Medical science,
which had seemed like a universal saviour in the war against disease,
ended up being perverted by racial prejudice
and the mutant science of eugenics,
turning even some doctors into killers.
By 1 945, Western civilization did indeed seem
like a contradiction in terms, just as Gandhi had said.
The puzzle, as we'll see in the next episode of CiviIization,
is that out of this appalling age of destruction,
there emerged a new model of civilization centred around consumption.
lt was time for the West to lay down its arms
and pick up its shopping bags,
to take off its uniform and put on its blue jeans.
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