Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

I can only assume that Hu felt comfortable sharing his perspectives on Africans because he assumed that like so many of the Indians in Africa, I too was a bigot. Indians have a long history on the continent dating back to the 1840s, when the British began shipping them to Africa to work as debt bondage slaves on railroads and plantations. The debts were manufactured through the imposition of exorbitant land taxes. If a peasant could not afford the taxes, he was told he could work it off by laying railroad in East Africa. Illiterate peasants were made to sign contracts they could not read, agreeing to discharge their debts as indentured workers. They often toiled for lifetimes, receiving little pay. In Africa, a hierarchy was soon established—Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top. Skin tone dictated the hierarchy back then, and it still does today—simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese.