Guest
‘A Savage Legacy’ examines how these racist ideologies were carried forward into the twentieth century, paving the way for the atrocities and racial genocides perpetrated against Africans in the Congo under Belgian colonial rule. Mutilation and dismemberment were commonly employed as punishment against men, women and children who failed to meet their latex quotas on the vast rubber plantations there. Graphic images depict the horrific violence which sprang from racial stereotyping in this, the scene of one of the century’s greatest genocides in which an estimated 10 million Africans perished. The series concludes by bringing us up to the present day with an examination of endemic racism in America and South Africa, segregated by the Jim Crow system and Apartheid respectively, in Britain and, of course, under Nazi Germany where eugenics and the belief in a ‘master race’ resulted first in the enslavement of Jews in forced labour camps and ultimately to the systematic extermination of approximately 6 million people.
