Gates: For millennia, Africans have wrestled with each other for control of the continent's immense natural wealth... Wealth that could underpin the expansion of complex cultures and the rise of vibrant cities.

Great civilizations, kingdoms, and empires developed trade routes and industries that centered around natural and human resources.

The results were vast trade networks crisscrossing the continent, reaching every corner of Africa, Arabia and Asia, and eventually Europe and the Americas.

And in the 19th century, Africa's natural wealth became the focus of an intense and merciless scramble.

[Whistling] Gates: Bloodthirsty quests to own the continent's riches... A scramble that would transform not only the course of Africa's history, but the history of the world, as well.

[Clapping] [Gull squawking] 19th-century Africa witnessed radical transformation.

Roaring currents of global change and the forces of industrialization would touch every quarter of the continent.

[Car horns honk] For much of the century, the drivers of this dynamic metamorphosis would arise from within Africa itself, nowhere more so than in southern Africa, where one small chiefdom was about to revamp the history of the entire region and its leader would become perhaps the most famous warrior in all of African history.

His name was Shaka, and the chiefdom he transformed would grow to become an empire, the Zulu Empire, but before they commanded an empire, the Zulu had to rise above turbulent times.

Woman, voice-over: The Zulus basically are in between what is emerging as Portuguese Africa and then the Dutch colony of the cape, and so they basically were made in that pressure cooker.

The Zulus were a tiny, little clan, sort of, you know, in the middle, not very close to the coast, but not also very close to the interior, very small clan, and then Shaka Zulu comes along.

Gates: The illegitimate son of the Zulu king, Shaka was exiled and shunned since childhood.

He grew to become a formidable warrior with the intelligence and instinct for command.

In 1816, fuelled by revenge, Shaka had his own half-brother, the king, assassinated, then claimed the throne.

Shaka was now chief of a kingdom that stretched along the fertile east coast of South Africa.

Mokoena: So the Zulus had thousands of cattle.

The Zulu king would just ask for a parade, so all his cattle would have to be called from all over the kingdom, and they would walk around his crawl, his residence, and it would take several days for him to view all his cattle.

Gates: So the king parades his cattle like, uh, Russian leaders would parade their tanks and rockets on May Day?

It's exactly that.

It's exactly that, but for the king, the cattle was the wealth.

Gates, voice-over: For his reign to flourish, Shaka knew that the Zulu nation had to grow.

He invaded surrounding kingdoms, seizing land and forcing captives to accept him as king.

How important were the Zulu before Shaka?

He was working to create something new, which was a huge and expansive kingdom.

It was a moment in which power, in some ways, became more important than cattle.

Having people became more important than cattle, but really, it was almost like a power-hungry era of southern African history.

Gates, voice-over: As the power of the Zulu kingdom grew, Shaka built a military machine to expand the borders of his empire.

[Chanting] Man, voice-over: And what Shaka did brilliantly was understand how random terror produces power.

Before now, it's really a very limited exchange of violence, usually eventuating in some cattle capture.

What Shaka brought was a kind of military genius.

Man, voice-over: Shaka took the fighting tactics and the ideas, the discipline that had been used before, and he bought it to a new level.

Gates, voice-over: Shaka created fighting units called Amabutho.

Every aspect of the soldiers' lives was tightly regimented.

Segregated by age and by sex, each army regiment boasted its own song and its own battle cry... [Singing] Gates, voice-over: Creating extraordinarily tight bonds on the battlefield.

Comaroff, voice-over: His warriors didn't marry before they'd accomplished themselves as warriors, so, in effect, controlling youth meant controlling the capacities for violence in youth.

Mokoena: So that is what sort of almost sexualized the Amabutho system and--quote, unquote-- "explains" why they were so vicious, because, obviously, these were men who were not having sex, um, whose entire diet was war.

Gates, voice-over: Shaka revolutionized the nature and functioning of his army.

Redesigning the shape and the function of the spear, the assegai, and developing formidable battle techniques, Shaka created one of the most unified and effective fighting machines in history.

Shaka's shorter, heavier spear transformed warfare.

A short spear is very, very important because it was introduced by the King Shaka.

He says that the long spear's no good because you throw your-- your--your weapon.

You're trying to stab your enemy and nothing left in your hand, so, in other words, you lose your weapon, but when you got the short spear-- you got a short spear, it's very short, and you come close in to your enemy.

When you come close, you push with your shield and use the spear instead, but still you save the spear.

[Chanting] Nlekho, voice-over: First thing I notice from you as you step, you say, "Eeh!"

and you turn it.

When you pull it out, khhh!

[Singing] Gates, voice-over: Backed by his formidable fighting force, Shaka expanded his empire across a huge swath of southern Africa.

Shaka's expansion unfolded during a period of enormous instability in this region, a period known as the Mfecane.

Tell me about the Mfecane.

The Mfecane was really a series of conflicts that were about these ambitious leaders who were each really trying to carve out their own empire and kingdom.

So many things were moving on the checkerboard of southern Africa that it was a very volatile time and also a time of really ambitious men.

Prime time for the emergence of great, unique personalities.

Exactly.

If the Zulus had not had Shaka, then they would have been just swallowed up into the other ambitious groups that were emerging, um, in the region.

Gates, voice-over: Conquered peoples became Zulu.

Captive males swelled the numbers of Shaka's army tenfold to 20,000 warriors.

Shaka's ambitious empire building left many villages and kingdoms devastated across southern Africa.

Comaroff, voice-over: It was a period of real destabilization.

There was an enormous amount of exile, of refugees, of--of migrations, of impoverishment in the wake of--of the empire.

[Thunder] Ehret, voice-over: And in the next 10 years, he conquered the whole area of what's today the northern half of KwaZulu-Natal, a province of South Africa.

Gates, voice-over: Shaka's campaign of expansion had reshaped the political landscape of southern Africa.

His empire now covered over 11,000 square miles, and his subjects numbered a quarter of a million people, but after a decade of fighting, the Zulu people grew tired of war.

September 1828, two of Shaka's brothers returned with their regiments after months of fierce fighting.

Shaka insisted that they go out on yet more raids rather than take a break for the winter as was customary.

In an end as brutal and as tragic as that of Julius Caesar, his brothers and an accomplice knifed Shaka to death.

[Chanting] Gates, voice-over: His dying words, Shaka cursed his attackers, "Are you stabbing me, kings of the earth?

You will come to an end by killing one another."

Shaka had done more than ensure the survival of his imperiled people in a time of turmoil.

Comaroff, voice-over: Well, there was an extraordinary reconstruction of southern and Central Africa.

Um, populations that he, in fact, set in motion landed up in what is contemporary Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Gates, voice-over: Shaka, the uncompromising military leader, lives on as a formidable myth and metaphor, a hero to inspire courage and defiance throughout the African diaspora.

For the--for the--the capacity of an African warrior king to change a subcontinent and, in fact, to-- to, uh, induce terror, this is the work of gods.

The divine has the capacity to-- to wreak, uh, random violence, and Shaka had a--a deep vernacular understanding of that power, and so, ahem, even long after his fall, the--the--the terror and admiration and awe and numinousness of the image lives long after.

So that you could imagine, "If only we had Shaka, "we--we could expel the colonizer.

"If only had we had Shaka, we could reverse the ignominies of our later history."

[Singing] Gates, voice-over: While struggles to control the region's fertile lands were reshaping southern Africa, long-prized treasures would arouse the appetite of foreign powers for control of trade along the continent's Indian ocean coast and link kingdoms in the Central African interior, and at the heart of this frenzy was the island of Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is known the world over as the spice island.

I remember waking up the first time I visited here and being shocked to discover that all of the sidewalks were covered with cloves, cloves drying in the sun.

The whole island smelled like cloves.

Whenever I smell cloves, even to this day, I'm sent back to that first morning on this lovely island.

For almost 1,000 years, powerful city states along the East African coast had traded commodities such as spices, ivory, and gold across the Indian Ocean with Arabia, Persia, India, and China.

A rich, distinct, and highly literate civilization emerged here, still known today as the Swahili coast.

In the 19th century, the international market for its luxury commodities caused the scale of trade to rise exponentially.

Since the late 17th century, the Kingdom of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula had dominated much of Zanzibar's trade, but such was the potential for profit that in 1840, the Omani ruler, Sultan Seyyid Said, relocated his court some 2,000 miles from Muscat to Zanzibar's Stone Town, making it his new capital.

Ehret, voice-over: Omani period is the beginning of a-a real colonial establishment.

This was a colony that extended to the East African coast, not just to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba.

Once the Omani presence is there, then it becomes the focus of commerce, that's why you have the building of--of a really significant city of Zanzibar.

Gates, voice-over: By the late 19th century under Omani rule, Zanzibar became the most prosperous port on the east coast of Africa, with an annual trade equivalent today to $100 million.

The sultan's residence and the majestic ceremonial palace, the house of wonders, still stand today.

Behind beautifully crafted doors inspired by Arab and Indian designs sit lavish mansions built for the merchants growing rich from the international exchange of Africa's riches.

Cloves were exported in huge quantities, and they were of the highest quality, but another commodity contributed to the economic prosperity of this island, and that was ivory.

The lure of African ivory is millennia old.

The 19th century witnessed a dramatic increase in the demand for ivory.

Technological innovations meant ivory could now be worked almost like plastic.

Factories in Europe and America began mass-producing dozens of everyday items, like buttons and combs, piano keys and even billiard balls.

Demand threatened to outpace supply.

This once-palatial Stone Town mansion belonged to the notorious man who monopolized that trade.

He was called Tippu Tip, but his name was Hamad bin Muhammad al Murjebi, and at the height of his power, he controlled an empire totaling 250,000 square miles, an empire that he ruled on behalf of the sultan.

Born in Zanzibar in 1837, Tippu Tip displayed commercial acumen from an early age.

When still a young man, he led 100 men on an expedition into Central Africa to acquire ivory.

It was the first foray in what would become a campaign to build an enormous trading empire.

Man: And he Rose and became, uh, a trader and entrepreneur who went to the mainland to get goods, but he had a network of his core traders on the mainland.

Gates, voice-over: At the height of the 19th century ivory trade, it's estimated that every year, traders slaughtered some 17,000 elephants for their tusks.

Tippu Tip bought ivory from suppliers in the interior, then had to transport that ivory in an arduous journey to the coastal trade ports, where he sold it for a handsome profit.

Since the early 1600s, various African peoples had created extensive trade networks across the continent's vast expanses, enabling trade from one side of the continent to the other.

Kingdoms in Africa's interior, like the Luba and Lunda Empires, were at the heart of this trading world.

By 1750, the Lunda Empire had created a large and secure trading zone that stretched from the present-day borders of Angola to Zambia and the border of Tanzania.

Ehret: The Luba Empire were sort of professional merchants at transcontinental connections.

There had long been trade, uh, of products over considerable distance.

Goods like copper and raffia cloth were traded south to-- uh, as far as the Ovimbundu people of southern Angola.

Gates: The Ovimbundu specialized in, and profited from, the long-haul interior trade.

Because of disease, these traders couldn't rely on pack animals, so they conducted their trade on foot.

They were the ones who connected markets in Africa.

They bought out ivory.

Some of the caravans were 5,000 or more individuals.

This stimulated an exploitation of the elephants.

Gates: Tippu Tip drew upon this complex and long-established trading network to transport his huge stockpiles of ivory to traders along the coast.

He was not just an entrepreneur who traded.

He was also someone who made history in the sense that he would go and he would fight.

Gates: By the 1880s, Tippu Tip controlled a territory the size of California, and he used his growing wealth to form his own well-equipped army of mercenaries, numbering thousands.

While hunting elephants, Tippu Tip's men also waged war with townships and villages, pillaging them for supplies and people.

Tippu Tip's ivory empire was powered by the energy of enslaved human beings.

They benefited from the wars, unfortunate kind of benefit, by, uh, buying captive people and taking those back to the coast, and what Tippu Tip behaves like is, in a way, like a warlord.

Gates: The women and men Tippu Tip captured carried the enormous tusks to the coast and then by dhow to Zanzibar.

Once there, they were themselves sold as slaves.

Tippu Tip once mused that slaves cost nothing.

They only require to be gathered.

He was as notoriously brutal and evil as any white slave trader.

I have absolutely no doubt that if there's a hell, Tippu Tip is in it.

At the peak of the trade in the 19th century, as many as 70,000 slaves a year were bought to Zanzibar, many enslaved by Tippu Tip.

Today, Zanzibar's Anglican cathedral stands on the site of what was once the island's notorious slave market, built as a memorial to those who suffered here.

In the 19th century, 1.6 million slaves were shipped out of the east coast of Africa.

That's 4 times the total number of slaves shipped directly from Africa to the United States, 4 times, and many of those slaves were shipped here to Zanzibar.

In fact, that altar is built on the whipping post of the slave market.

An exponential increase in the global demand for ivory and slaves reshaped East and Central Africa in the middle of the 19th century.

At the same time in southern Africa, a revolution was about to erupt that would radically and brutally transform the fortunes of the people of southern Africa.

According to popular myth, in 1869, a young boy walking along the banks of the Orange River picked up a shiny stone.

He'd found a diamond with an uncut weight of over 83 carats.

The gem was christened the Star of South Africa, and it would lead prospectors to unearth the richest deposits of diamonds ever discovered anywhere in the world.

Comaroff: The first diamonds were discovered at Kimberley, then Kimberley, which, of course, reproduces this huge explosion.

This changes things overnight.

For a start, Britain becomes immediately interested.

Gates, voice-over: Since the 17th century, Europeans had settled in southern Africa, first the Dutch, then the British.

Initially they settled at what would become Cape Town.

When the British took control of the Cape at the beginning of the 19th century, many of the Dutch began a trek inland, where they established farms in direct conflict with the Zulu, most notably at the Battle of Blood River in 1838, but the discovery of diamonds ignited the British desire to control this enormous source of wealth in the southern African interior.

Plans were quickly made to build a railway from Cape Town to Kimberley.

Prospectors, miners, geologists, and fortune hunters made their way inland.

Among them was a man who would become one of the most divisive figures in African history-- Cecil John Rhodes.

Rhodes would found one of the most successful mining companies in the world.

Within 20 years, all of the diamonds mined at Kimberley were under the banner of one single corporation-- De Beers Consolidated Mines, which controlled not only production in the mines, but, in effect, every other commercial enterprise connected to the mines.

By 1873, diamonds had turned Kimberley into the second largest city in South Africa, and Cecil Rhodes became fabulously rich and powerful, yet the fortunes he amassed weren't profiting Africans.

Man: In this period before 1900, the beneficiaries are mainly the--the big money houses and the banks, so it's--it's people like Cecil Rhodes.

The beneficiaries are almost all, uh, people who've come to South Africa as diamond merchants in the 1860s.

Mining was prosperous bec-- partly because you could persuade people in Paris and Berlin and New York and London to buy mining company shares.

Gates: How does someone like Cecil Rhodes symbolize the colonial and imperial moment of capitalism?

Of course, one has to start with, um, the-- the mining industry.

The exploitation of the minerals themselves, uh, the exploitation of labor, African communities, and they were supposed to provide, um, labor to the, uh-- to the mining industry.

How did the discovery of these valuable minerals change relationships between the European settlers and the--the people who lived here?

It changed, uh, the relationship in major ways.

In the first instance, uh, it, um, uh, created conditions for the expansion of British colonies.

The area where diamonds are discovered becomes a British colony.

If we found diamonds here and gold here, there must be more, so we want to exercise control over this and then, of course, the increase in white-- white settlement and more land taken over.

What are the effects of these dramatic changes on the African kingdoms that are here?

They become a stumbling block.

They could not remain as independent entities.

They had to be incorporated into the expanding colonial areas.

Gates, voice-over: The promise of untold riches brought profound change to the African kingdoms now involved in a struggle with powerful economic forces to preserve their cultural practices and their independence, both inextricably linked to the integrity of their borders.

People grazed animals on the land.

People cultivated land.

People settled the land.

The notion that the land was there to be dug up and owned and dividends generated from the extraction of minerals under the ground was a very new concept.

It was all about efficient production.

It was very competitive.

It was very materialistic, and it created all kinds of new dynamics between groups of people.

The social implications of the mineral revolution cannot be underestimated and exists right up until this moment.

Gates, voice-over: The large-scale mining of diamonds ignited an economic and social revolution, but an even more significant discovery would overshadow diamonds some 20 years later.

What could possibly be better than discovering diamonds on your land?

Discovering gold.

Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, built on top of a foundation of gold.

The pursuit of African gold has been a driving force of world history for millennia.

Its discovery here in South Africa in the year 1886 would reshape not only the economy, but the political face of this region forever.

The prospectors had found gold deposits stretching for nearly 60 miles.

Half of the world's gold ever extracted has come from here.

This discovery triggered the world's largest gold rush and gave rise to one of the world's great cities.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Johannesburg was like New York.

It is the site of a globally renowned, kind of famous boom, um, and it attracts scoundrels from all over the world.

So there's mass migration into this region, uh, people looking for work but also looking for, essentially, to get some of the wealth, the riches that have been produced by this industry.

In the 1880s, everybody comes here.

Mark Twain is in Johannesburg for a very short while.

For a decade, it's the center of the universe.

Gates: The City of Gold.

Given all the wealth that was discovered here, it's not an accident that a system would be invented to monopolize it.

Monopolizing this wealth required control over the gold deposits, but also control over the people and their land.

Of course, anybody whose land, who--whose--whose inhabited landscape happened to contain minerals was all of a sudden in a different situation than they had been before.

Gates, voice-over: These massive industries were labor-intensive and needed a cheap and readily available workforce.

African kingdoms weren't keen.

Black South Africans didn't want to go down the gold mines the first instance, um, which meant making them get there.

Social engineering was about establishing a proletariat, and that meant forcing Black South Africans off the land, which meant, in effect, taxing them and, uh, imposing that tax in cash, so taxation was one of the instruments that forced Black South Africans into the--the mineral economy.

Gates, voice-over: Some, such as the Pedi and the Hlubi, readily sent their young men to work in the mines for cash to buy firearms, better to defend their territories.

The working conditions endured by the migrant laborers inside this mineral economy were a bleak foreboding of the future of this part of Africa.

Breckenridge: There are clear institutional foundations that exist already in the 1860s, and the most important of these are the closed compound, which comes from Kimberley, and the Pass law, which is used basically to control workers who are working in what we call a labor district, anywhere near a mine.

The Pass law was used to basically bind those workers to the contracts that they'd signed in order to take up work.

[Brakes squealing] Gates, voice-over: By and large, Black people didn't enjoy the profits of the gold mines of South Africa, but merchant princes in key areas of West Africa grew rich cultivating a much humbler resource, and that resource was palm oil.

Man, voice-over: Africans had been producing palm oil for a very long time.

It was used locally in--in-- in food preparation, it was used locally in--in--in lighting and houses.

It was used locally in, um-- in all kinds of things.

Gates, voice-over: The trade in palm oil would undergo enormous change throughout the 19th century because palm oil would grease the wheels of a fast, industrializing world, and the production, cultivation, and exploitation of palm oil would become a predominantly African enterprise after the abolition of the slave trade by Britain and the United States in the early 19th century.

One of the important transitions in the abolishing of the slave trade was that it recentered agriculture, and it meant that everyone who had access to land could potentially be a producer of wealth.

Gates, voice-over: Farmers and entrepreneurs were eager to exploit the commercial opportunities that palm oil presented.

Many of the entrepreneurs were indigenous, and--and this is fascinating because it involved credit creation, large amounts of money.

It involved rotating credit.

It involved pricing.

It involved, uh, market exchanges, and Africans were moving these commodities from point "A" to point "B," employing people to work, and using people to exchange these commodities, uh, right across ecological boundaries, right across different ecological zones.

Gates, voice-over: Through abundant palm oil plantations clustered around the Niger Delta and the river Volta, African entrepreneurs built vibrant empires trading this extremely valuable resource.

Palm oil would soon be exported to every corner of the industrial world.

Abaca, voice-over: Palm oil became an important ingredient for lubrication of machines.

It became very important in the production of candles, of--of soap, of margarine, and, therefore, because it was needed in these industrial processes in Europe and in the period after the slave trade, that became one of the major economic exchanges between West Africa and--and England.

Gates, voice-over: Affluent African palm oil traders began to deal directly on an equal footing with European businesses.

Akyeampong, voice-over: From the 19th century, so there's a sense in which power becomes one of the most important crop exports for West Africa.

Gates: The traders' success was further boosted by a revolution in transport-- the steamship.

Akyeampong: Once steamships become available, everybody could put their freight on the steamship, and it would lead to an expansion of traders within West Africa.

Gates, voice-over: The international palm oil trade was changing the nature of the market in West Africa.

Where once chiefs controlled the trade with foreigners, now a new breed of entrepreneurs dealt directly with the Europeans, making huge fortunes in the process.

Abaca, voice-over: In Ghana, you know, a group of people would become known as the merchant princes.

Between, say, 1860, '65 all the way through 1900, these people were very, very prominent in--in Ghana.

There were about 25 or 30 of such merchant princes.

Gates, voice-over: One of the most prosperous of those merchant princes was William Ocansey.

His business, Ocansey & Sons, was a huge and successful commercial enterprise.

Ocansey had about 12 trading stations.

It's like having 12 malls today.

He was very enterprising.

He was exporting palm oil to England and to Europe, and in return, he imported, uh, textiles.

He imported liquor, uh, which he distributed through, uh, uh, his networks.

Gates, voice-over: By the 1880s, plantations in the Niger Delta were exporting nearly 20,000 tons of palm oil a year.

Heywood, voice-over: This is the period of entrepreneurship for Africa.

Then it's the period of commodity trade or free trade, stimulating social and an economic transformation.

Gates, voice-over: In the late 19th century, African kingdoms were keen to embrace industrialization.

Egypt was second only to Britain in having its own rail network.

In West Africa, the ruler of the powerful Asante Kingdom, Prempeh I, wanted to kick-start his own industrial revolution.

Woman: He wanted to modernize the Asante by engaging European expertise, you know, to construct a railway line, to build a mining industry, and so on.

Gates, voice-over: The Asante Empire reached its height in the 19th century.

At its capital, Kumasi, the Asante rulers lived in palaces, and a system of great roads linked the capital city to every territory under its control.

The empire covered most of modern-day Ghana.

Before the finds in South Africa, Asante was the greatest gold producer on the continent and was extremely well-prepared to defend its sovereignty.

Akyeampong, voice-over: Asante based its military power on firearms.

The firearms came from the coast, the firearms that are needed to consolidate and maintain its military power.

Gates, voice-over: In the first half of the 19th century, Asante forces twice defeated the encroachments of the British army.

The British, who had long before established a coastal presence, were wary both of the power of the Asante and their possible alliance with a rival European power.

How did things fall apart between the British and the Asante?

With the British emerging as the most dominant European power, Asante claims on the coastal areas was a major source of the conflicts that were going on.

And the British wanted to control the coasts.

Yes.

Ha ha ha!

So I always say that the--both Asante and the British were very much alike because they all wanted the same thing-- control of resources, of trade, of access, power.

They both wanted that.

Gates: But the determination of African rulers like Prempeh to protect their independence was about to come up against a ruthless and seemingly unstoppable force.

1884, Berlin, Germany, the leaders of 14 European countries and the United States met at a conference.

The aim of the conference was for western countries to avoid warring amongst themselves over Africa.

The superpowers wanted to ensure maximum control over Africa's resources by establishing rules by which to divide the spoils at the expense of the African's who rightly owned them.

No European nation state could be great without a colony.

That made many European states compete with each other, vie with each other to accumulate colonies in order to make them great.

Gates: The Berlin conference would lay down terms for an orderly carve-up of Africa.

Biney, voice-over: So they sat around a table amicably-- without the presence of any African, it must be pointed out-- and they consulted amongst themselves in order to decide on the rules for occupation.

Gates, voice-over: They agreed that no African territory could be formerly claimed until it had been effectively occupied.

The British crown offered Asante a deal.

When the Kingdom of Asante was offered protectorate status by the British in 1891, their king, Prempeh I, flatly refused.

"My Kingdom of Asante will never commit itself to any such policy," he said.

"Asante must remain independent as of old but at the same time remain frie with all white men."

Despite his defiance, Prempeh's kingdom would be wrenched away from him.

In 1895, the British sent an invasion force inland armed with the latest maxim machine guns and field artillery.

King Prempeh knew he was outgunned.

He fled without a single shot being fired.

Prempeh's dream of modernizing and industrializing his empire abruptly came to an end.

The British took the Asante-- his close relatives, father, mother, uh, brother, chief advisers, and everybody--away.

So they captured the Asante and sent them into exile.

Yes.

Yes.

Gates: Across the continent, African peoples waged fierce wars in defense of their kingdoms against European encroachment.

Diplomats, troops, and opportunists roamed the continent, offering truces and often illegal treaties to rulers of kingdoms whom they could intimidate or persuade to relinquish their control.

Violence should be seen on a spectrum, on a continuum of plunder, pillage, and rape that all the European powers engaged in, but they engaged in at varying degrees and at varying levels, and the most horrific exemplar of the--the violence of colonialism is Congo.

Gates: The huge basin of the Congo River in Central Africa is extraordinarily endowed with vast resources.

This land, 2.5 million square kilometers crisscrossed by navigable waterways, was extraordinarily rich in natural resources, brimming with coveted commodities like ivory, palm oil, timber, and copper.

This region was also blessed with huge quantities of another highly valuable substance--rubber.

Advances in the vulcanization of rubber made it more durable and less brittle, facilitating the invention of the pneumatic tire.

Soon, rubber would become one of the most sought-after resources on the planet.

The ancient rubber vines that grew wild over the equatorial rainforests of Congo had long been exploited by the custodians of this land, but now outsiders were intent on plundering them.

Following the Berlin conference, the Congo Basin was recognized as the possession of its sole owner-- the king of the Belgians, Leopold II.

Renaming it the Congo Free State, Leopold now personally controlled a territory 76 times the size of his home country.

Since childhood, one of the things he had craved was a colony, and so he created one for himself, and he did it by convincing other European, uh, leaders that he was going to spread Christianity and bring in--quote, unquote-- "civilization to the people."

Biney, voice-over: King Leopold II's, um, interests in the Congo were largely underpinned by enormous greed, um, and, as a result of that greed, the Belgian Congo became the personal private property of the king of Belgium, and the discovery of rubber, uh, became a godsend to King Leopold II.

Gates, voice-over: Leopold ordered the rubber to be collected as fast as possible.

Soon, vast areas were stripped of every single rubber vine.

The mindless plundering of the land for its resources was repeated all across Congo Free State, the profits going into the pockets of one man-- Leopold II.

The environmental damage was only a tiny part of the story, and it pales into insignificance against the wider picture of corruption, crime, and inhumanity.

In 1890 after touring the Congo Free State, the African-American journalist, lawyer, and historian George Washington Williams wrote an open letter to King Leopold.

Published in newspapers throughout the world, it highlighted the horrors practiced against the Black people there.

Abaca: A large demand for the raw materials would necessitate changing the--the method of producing it because the Europeans needed these, uh, commodities in large quantities.

In the case of, um--of Leopold, he would enforce a very brutal way of--of extracting the rubber.

Gates: Villagers were given strict targets for the amount of rubber they were forced to collect.

Punishment for failure was brutal and drastic.

Abaca: Quotas would be established for the-- the Africans to--to provide, and if they couldn't provide the quotas, you know, limbs were amputated.

People's hands and legs were chopped off.

Um, wives were seized, for example, to force men to provide more and more of the rubber.

Gates: Leopold's private army of mercenaries, comprised of Congolese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers, policed the operation.

Anyone who resisted was shot.

Because ammunition was so expensive, severed hands served as proof that a corpse had been harvested for every bullet.

When soldiers had fired more bullets than corpses, they severed the hands of the living-- men, women, even children.

Visual evidence of the brutality was captured by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris.

Her photographs appeared in antislavery pamphlets around the world.

Despite Leopold's claims that the punishments were part of Congolese culture or that limbs had been severed by wild animals, the photographic evidence was undeniable.

Public outrage shamed the Belgian government into forcing Leopold to relinquish personal control of the colony in 1908.

It's estimated that 10 million people, half of Congo's population, perished during Leopold's inhumane rule.

Belgian brutalities disrupted much of the established social order in Central Africa.

A direct response was the emergence of important religious figures whose power could help restore balance.

Called Nkisi Mangaaka, only 20 are thought to remain in the world.

Alisa, what was the function of the Mangaaka?

Alisa: Mangaaka is a force of law and order.

It's an abstract metaphysical force that regional Congo leaders called upon to reinforce their authority.

Gates, voice-over: These sculptures contained spaces for cylinders in which priests would have inserted medicines and consecrated plant and animal matter to invoke and house the presence of Mangaaka, the pre-eminent force of jurisprudence.

This is a literalization of the power of the state.

Yes, it is, and the-- the very dense forest of metalware, of hardware that covers the torso of this Mangaaka sculpture is a record of all of the conflicts that have been resolved in his presence.

Gates, voice-over: These figures helped buttress the ailing authority of the Loango Kingdom in the face of colonial onslaught, so it's not surprising that they were seen by Europeans as vital to extinguish.

Lagamma: The Portuguese targeted and destroyed them to eliminate them as a threat to their authority.

They removed the symbols of authority so they could substitute their own.

In 1870, only 10% of the African continent was under European colonial control, but as the 19th century drew to a close-- despite the valiant attempts of kingdoms such as Asante, King Behanzin of Dahomey, Samori Toure's Mandinka Empire, and the Mahdi in Sudan-- almost 90% of the continent had fallen under foreign rule, but one kingdom stood firm in the face of foreign onslaught.

For almost 2,000 years in what is today Ethiopia, there had never been foreign rule.

This part of Africa had defended itself from the forces of Islam in the early 16th century and from the Portuguese in the 17th century.

At the end of the 19th century, it faced a seemingly irresistible force of European Colonialism.

In 1889, Ethiopia had a new emperor--Menelik II.

Menelik II was a member of the Solomonic Dynasty that had ruled Ethiopia since the 13th century, claiming direct linage from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

Despite this claim of a direct link to the Bible's Old Testament, Menelik was a remarkably modern monarch.

In 1884, he had commissioned a railway that would link his now-landlocked kingdom to the Red Sea.

He had also entered into an informal alliance with Russia, but now his ambitions to protect and modernize his empire squared off against his most pressing threat-- the colonizing desires of the Italians.

Following the Berlin conference, Italy had been allocated, according to areas within certain lines of latitude and longitude, the territories of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

On March 1, 1896, Ethiopians faced an Italian army near the town of Adwa on their northern border.

To give himself the best chance of defeating the Italians, a strategic battle of wits, bluff, and counterbluff commenced.

To keep the--the Italians-- to keep talking to the Italians, he knew that it would be some time before they would be able to mobilize, uh, you know, uh, these resources to, uh, what might eventuate into a confrontation.

He's buying time.

He was mobilizing not only resources, but also politically.

Because he needed support that support.

Against the common enemy.

Indeed.

Gates, voice-over: Menelik appealed to his feudal lords to unite against this common enemy.

With their support, the Ethiopian army swelled to 100,000 well-armed troops, but even though the army was 5 times the size of Italy's, the invaders' fortified strongholds gave them the upper hand.

The core elements of Ethiopian strategy was not to attack the Italians in their forts because that would be suicidal, yeah.

Right.

And so th--they had to lure the-- the enemy out into the open, uh, where they would, of course, uh, have the advantage of, uh, superior numbers, and the Italians also knew that that was-- that was dangerous and, therefore, um, would-- would want to-- to wait out the enemy.

It was a responsible strategy on the Italians' part.

Yes.

To break this, it was necessary for--for the--the Ethiopians to conduct not only espionage about Italian plans and their movements and the like, but also, uh, have double agents planted among the Italians.

Gates, voice-over: Spies set out to trick the Italians into believing that the Ethiopian army had run out of provisions.

Menelik asked his men to pretend to be decamping.

So the Italians think that Menelik is weak, and they say, "Well, we could attack.

Right.

We can leave the fortress."

Correct.

The Italians have put themselves into a trap.

Gates: With the Italians drawn into the open, the Ethiopian army launched its attack.

This time, it wasn't just the Europeans whose troops possessed the Maxim gun.

The Italians were soundly defeated and any hope they had of settling Ethiopia crushed.

Over 4,000 Italian soldiers were dead or missing.

Another 2,000 had been taken prisoner by Menelik.

The tattered remains of the Italian forces fled back north, never to return.

Is this the greatest victory of Black Africa against Europe, in-- in your opinion?

What makes Adwa significant is the fact that, not--besides its-- its--its volume and then its, uh-- its brilliance, uh, its decisiveness, is the fact that it was probably the most successful and unreversed... Mm-hmm.

Unreversed.

Unreversed military victories of Africans resisting European Colonialism.

Because Ethiopia remained independent.

Yes.

Menelik had fired the shot heard around the continent.

He and the Kingdom of Ethiopia became symbols of hope for Africans everywhere, proof that valor and resistance could triumph against colonial subjugation, and it wasn't just Africans who would find inspiration in the achievement of the Ethiopians.

Throughout the African diaspora, Ethiopia acquired mythic status.

It was a call to arms to begin a new fight, a fight for true independence against the subjugation of European colonialism.

For the vast majority of their history, African kingdoms and empires have been independent and powerful in their own right.

In addition, the African contribution to art and architecture, music and dance, philosophy and religion cannot be gainsaid.

From the 1950s onwards, new African nations born from resistance and struggle against European Colonialism would bring independence to the African continent once more.

Today these nations, new countries on the continent where human beings were born, are striving to overcome the legacy of colonial occupation and their own internal divisions and conflicts.

As new democracies take root throughout the continent and look to the future, perhaps Africa's true majesty and its proud and noble history will once again be valued by the world.

"Africa's Great Civilizations" is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

To order visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-Play-PBS.

This series is also available for download from iTunes.