Civilization: Is the West History? (2011) s01e04 Episode Script
Medicine
1
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.
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.
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.
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.