Sankofa Files: The History They Tried to Erase

They told us Europe brought civilization.
But what they really brought was fire, chains, and death.

While textbooks praise “explorers” and “enlightenment,” they bury the bodies of millions under euphemisms like “colonial expansion” and “civilizing missions.”
Let’s pull back the curtain. These weren’t isolated massacres. They were calculated genocides—committed in the name of empire, greed, and white supremacy.

It’s time to tell the truth about the blood price of Europe’s so-called greatness.

1. The Congo Free State – Belgium’s Genocide Under King Leopold II

🩸 From 1885 to 1908, King Leopold’s private colony in the Congo murdered over 10 million Africans.
✅ Villages were burned, hands were cut off as punishment, and children were enslaved to meet rubber quotas.
💥 This wasn’t a hidden crime—it was photographed, documented, and ignored.

2. The Herero and Nama Genocide – Germany’s Forgotten Holocaust

⚰️ In 1904–1908, German forces in present-day Namibia committed the first genocide of the 20th century.
✅ Over 80% of the Herero and Nama people were exterminated through forced starvation, desert concentration camps, and medical experiments.
💥 Before Hitler, there was German Africa.

3. The Atlantic Slave Trade – A Slow-Motion Genocide

⚓ Over 12 million Africans were stolen—millions died in chains, on ships, or in brutal plantations.
✅ Europeans built vast economies on Black death, trauma, and unpaid labor.
💥 This wasn’t “commerce.” It was mass murder on a global scale.

4. The Haitian Revolution – Punished for Fighting Back

🇭🇹 After Black Haitians freed themselves from slavery, France forced them to pay reparations to their former enslavers.
✅ Over $20 billion in today’s dollars was extorted from Haiti—crippling its economy for generations.
💥 This wasn’t just economic warfare. It was genocidal retaliation.

5. The Tasmanian Genocide – British Colonial Extermination

🏴 In Australia’s island of Tasmania, British settlers killed every single Indigenous Tasmanian within 75 years.
✅ Hunting parties. Bounty killings. Poisoned food.
💥 Textbooks call it “settlement.” We call it genocide.

6. Apartheid South Africa – A Century of Racial Terror

⛓️ From 1910 to 1994, South Africa was a racial prison camp under European settler rule.
✅ Black South Africans were stripped of citizenship, forced into homelands, denied education, tortured, and killed.
✅ The Sharpeville Massacre, Soweto Uprising, and decades of state-sanctioned violence killed thousands and traumatized millions.
💥 Apartheid wasn’t just segregation—it was slow, systematic genocide.

7. The Belgian Rubber Regime – Genocide for Profit

📉 Leopold wasn’t alone. Other European nations mimicked his methods across Africa.
✅ Forced labor, hostage-taking, and mutilation became common.
💥 The Industrial Revolution ran on blood—and Black bodies paid the toll.

8. The Mau Mau Rebellion – Britain’s Torture Camps in Kenya

⛓️ In the 1950s, Kenyans rose up against British colonial rule.
✅ Britain responded with concentration camps, mass rape, and torture.
💥 “Democracy” and “civilization” were built on terror.

9. The Portuguese Colonial Wars – 1960s Genocide in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau

🔫 While civil rights movements exploded in the U.S., Portugal waged bloody wars to hold its African colonies.
✅ Napalm, forced labor, and mass killings were common.
💥 “Old Europe” didn’t retire colonialism. It just rebranded it.

10. Colonial Famines in India – Britain’s Weapon of Starvation

🌾 Over 60 million Indians died in preventable famines during British rule.
✅ Food was exported to Britain as Indians starved.
💥 This wasn’t mismanagement—it was cold policy.

🧨 Let’s Be Clear:

Europe’s wealth is not ancient.
It was built on genocide.
The museums, cathedrals, banks, and boulevards of Paris, London, and Lisbon? Paid for in African, Asian, and Indigenous blood.

They told us they brought light to the world.
But they brought slaughter—and called it progress.