"It 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." "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 Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi replied wittily that he thought it wouId be a very good idea." "It's a negative view shared by many people today." "Yet before we rush to condemn the Western empires as evil and exploitative, capable of behaviour that was the very opposite of civilized, we need to remember that there was more than a grain of truth in their claim to be on a civilizing mission." "In particular, they had high hopes of what they could achieve here, in what they called 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." "In 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 slave trade which had flourished here on Goree had already been abolished, but the distinction between master and slave persisted throughout French Africa." "So the first thing the revolutionary government in Paris did was to abolish slavery itself." "From now on, everyone in the French empire would be free." "It'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 slaves would automatically become French citizens." "And that meant that they got the vote, something that was never granted to Britain's African subjects." "The result was that in November 1848, 2,000 of France's new African citizens got to elect Africa's first multiracial assembly." "And this was where it met, in this rather splendid building in Saint-Louis." "It 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 "assimilated"." "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." "In 1 857, he set up a Senegalese colonial army, Les Tirailleurs." "At a stroke, Faidherbe transformed the status of the African soldier from indentured military Iabourer to fully fledged 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 ideal of a "mission civilisatrice", civiIizing mission, that a man like BIaise Diagne, born in this modest house in Goree in 1872, could join the colonial Customs Service and rise up through its ranks." "Such an ascent would have been a great deal more difficult in British Africa." "In 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 mortality rate for under-fives here in senegal has gone down by two-thirds." "Average life expectancy at birth has risen has risen from 40 to 55." "AII over the world, the benefits of modern medicine are finding their way slowly down to the poorest people on the planet." "Nothing illustrates the transformational power of Western civilization better than a clinic like this, where doctors trained in Western medicine confer the ultimate gift, a gift taken for granted by most people in the West." "The gift of a healthy life." "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 lost their lives in a yellow fever epidemic in 1878." "Not for nothing was West Africa known as the white man's grave." "The entire colonial 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%." "If death rates like these persisted, the colonization of Africa by Europeans would plainly be unsustainable." "Like all good colonial administrators, the French kept impeccable records, and here in the senegalese national Archives, you can find details of literally every outbreak of tropical disease to hit French West Africa, from cholera in Cote d'Ivoire to yellow fever in senegal." "And in fact, this box here contains a comprehensive list of all the victims of the 1878 yellow fever outbreak." "health bills, health commissions, health laws - it was as if the French were obsessed with health." "And why not?" "As one British observer put it, the European presence in Africa was a question of "mosquito or man"." "The future of imperialism itself lay 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 entirely fanciful to imagine men of science trekking through the jungle." "Researchers into tropical diseases established laboratories in the most far-fIung of African colonies." "This one in Saint-Louis in senegal was set up in 1896." "It's actually the first microbiological laboratory in the whole of Africa." "This is where they conducted experiments on animals, injecting trial vaccines." "82 cats had injections of dysentery and 1 1 dogs injections of tetanus." "This really was science on the front line." "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 laboratory in Saint-Louis that the first yellow fever vaccine for French West Africa was developed." "Breakthroughs like that kept Europeans, and hence the whole colonial project, alive." "Africa itself had become a laboratory for Western medicine." "And the more successful the research, the further the European empires could 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." "It'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 traditional healing, because this is actually a senegalese fertility clinic." "Women who are having trouble conceiving come here, get their treatment, and if it's successful, they hammer pestIes into the ground - one for the wife and one for the husband - followed by a quick shower." "For centuries, Africans have looked to traditional medicine to cure the sick." "In the village of Jajak, that means a witch doctor called Han Diop." "(TRANSLATION)" "Can she explain what she means by "having devil"?" "Can you show me some of the medicines that you give your patients?" "I'd just like to see them." "Merci beaucoup." "Tres, tres interessant." "What Han uses is a mixture of herbs and a little bit of prophecy." "The trouble is, of course, that herbs and prophecy aren't tremendously effective against a whole range of lethal bacteria and viruses, which is one reason that life expectancy in Africa is still so low today." "It's also 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 only would the French introduce their own system of public health to Africa, in February 1905," "Governor general Roume issued an order creating a free colonial health service for the Africans under his rule." "Not everybody likes to admit it, but here, as in many other respects, there were concrete, measurable 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." "In 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." "In Dakar, there were mass protests, riots and the first general strike in Senegalese history." "The imperatives of medical science required tough measures to bring the epidemic under control." "And yet the science of the day also provided a spurious rationale for treating Africans harshly." "According to the theory of eugenics," "Africans weren't just ignorant of medical 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." "In 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"." "Indeed, 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 like GaIton's was at the cutting edge of scientific research." "Racism wasn't some backward-Iooking, reactionary ideology, it was the state of the art, and people then believed in it as readily as people today buy the theory of man-made climate 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." "In 1 900, Germany was at the cutting edge of Western civilization." "It was German professors who won the lion's share of Nobel science prizes." "It 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 real science was a pseudo-science which asserted that man was not a single homogeneous species but was subdivided and ranked, from an Aryan master race at the top down to a black race that scarcely qualified as Homo sapiens." "And where better to test these theories but in Germany's newly acquired African colonies?" "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." "In 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." "In 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." "In the colony's rudimentary courts of law, the word of one German was worth the word of seven Africans." "But the crucial issue was land." "According to the theory of the time, the Herero and Nama were feckless, improvident nomads." "They had to be displaced 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 gratuitously arrogant behaviour of a young German lieutenant that finally lit the blue touchpaper here in Okahandja." "On January 12th 1904, led by samuel Maharero, the Herero rose up, killing all the abIe-bodied German men they could find but pointedly sparing the women and children." "More than 100 German settlers were killed." "In 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." "In 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." "It 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 battle of Hamakari, which took place here, near the Waterberg plateau, on November 1 1th 1904, wasn't really a battle at all." "It was more like 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 encircled them and rained down a lethal bombardment of mortar shells," "like this one later found on the battlefield." "Then, as the men, women and children tried to flee, 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 well understood, the survivors now had little option but to flee from the water holes on which they depended out into the arid Omaheke desert, to "their doom", as he put it." "The Herero, in other words, were being deliberately exterminated." "Now, we all know that violence is part and parcel of every empire, but this was surely different." "The more I think about this episode, the more I realize it really was the first genocide, long 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 Island, near Luderitz." "The camp was deliberately situated here at the far end of Shark island to maximize its exposure to the elements." "Denied adequate clothing, shelter and food, the prisoners were expected to work waist-deep in the ice-coId water, and those who faltered in their toll had to fear the sadistic sjambok-wieIding guards." "80% of the prisoners sent to the Shark island concentration camp didn't leave here alive." "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 cruelly, they were interred cruelly too - in mass graves like this one that's just been uncovered by the construction of a new railroad from Luderitz to Aus." "And yet the interesting thing is that not all the remains ended up in places like this." "skulls and even some pickled heads were sent back to Germany to satisfy the insatiable interests of the scientists in racial hygiene." "Incredibly, female prisoners were forced to scrape the skulls clean with glass shards before the specimens were sent off for examination." "In 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 published his findings." "Negro blood, he concluded, was fundamentally inferior to white blood, and any European people that mixed its blood with negro blood condemned itself to mental and cultural decline." "well, books like this and mass graves like this one raise a very profoundly disturbing question." "Was Namibia the seedbed for future, much bigger genocides?" "Was it, as the novelist Joseph Conrad suggested, a case of Africa turning Europeans into savages rather than Europeans civiIizing Africa?" "Where was the real heart of darkness?" "In 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 world War memorial in the heart of Saint-Louis in senegal tells you something important about the war." "It wasn't just a battle between European nation-states, it was a war of world empires, a war within Western civilization." "And for the first time, it revealed the possibility that the West might carry the seeds of its own destruction within itself, because more than in any previous war, in this one, the Western powers launched their killer applications against one another." "The industrial economy provided the mechanized means of mass murder." "And modern medicine, too, played its part in the bloody business of total 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 lost two out of three wars against Germany between 1870 and 1940." "In 191 7, it was close to losing the First world War, too." "Where could the French turn for help?" "well, 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 I 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." "In 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)" "charles Mangin had also bought into the prevailing pseudo-science of biological determinism." "Having conducted the full range of bogus tests, his survey team concluded that Africans, because of their supposedly underdeveloped nervous systems, felt less fear and suffered less pain than their European counterparts." "They could therefore be relied upon to be exceptionally 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 Imperial 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." "well, this is where Demba Mboup and his fellow SenegaIese soldiers ended up in april 191 7, down below the Chemin des Dames, the Ladies' Road, named after two daughters of Louis XV." "well, there weren't many ladies up there in 191 7." "There were Germans - to be precise, the 7th Army under general Hans von Bohm." "The SenegaIese were with charles Mangin's 6th Army." "And this was supposed to be it - the big push that would 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 april 16th, the senegalese advanced up this hill, which had been turned by rain and sleet into a mudslide." "Now, general Mangin had put them at the sharp end in the first wave of the attack." "officially, that was because he'd been so impressed by their comrades' performance the previous year at the battle of Verdun." "But Mangin had an ulterior motive, and that was to spare French lives." "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 individual 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." "If 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 principles 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 colonial soldiers who flocked to join the Nazi party and who, incidentally, gave the SA their first brown shirts, it seemed entirely natural that theories first put to the test in the concentration camps of Africa should be carried over" "to the German colonization of Eastern Europe, and the murderous racial policies that produced the holocaust, the euthanasia of the mentally ill, and the forced sterilization of so-caIIed racial mongreIs." "If 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 world wars were like a terrible nemesis following the hubris of the mission civilisatrice, as the European empires applied 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 civilization, is that out of this appalling age of destruction, there emerged a new model of civilization centred around consumption." "It 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."