In the Forest of No Joy - The Congo-Ocean Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism
In the Forest of No Joy - The Congo-Ocean Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism The Congo-Ocan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of…
Specifikacia In the Forest of No Joy - The Congo-Ocean Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism
In the Forest of No Joy - The Congo-Ocean Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism
The Congo-Ocan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state.African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage--a "forest of no joy"; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history.
In the process, they suffered disease,