Revisiting Kipling

Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem the White Man's Burden, once a rallying cry for British colonialism, today is often seen as a severely misguided notion of good intentions. I begin the lesson by asking students to analyze an advertisement for soap branded with an illusion to Kipling's poem. Students then study an excerpt from the poem along with one of several other poems that were written in response to Kipling's.

“The White Man’s Burden”

By Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send for the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captive’s need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child…

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to naught.

Take up the White Man’s Burden ---

No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper –

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go mark them with your living,

And mark them with your dead.

Response Questions:

1) What, according to Kipling, is the “White Man’s burden?

2) According to Kipling, what is impact of imperialism upon the people in European colonies?

3) According to Kipling, what role do the people native to Asia and African play in their countries’ improvement?

4) Using your answers to the above, compose a thesis statement from Kipling’s point of view about imperialism in Asia and Africa.

5) Using your knowledge of India before European imperialism, defend or refute the above thesis statement with a thesis of your own.

Activity 3:

Response to Kipling

Assign one of the following poem to each group of students. They should read the poem together analyzing and discussing it as they did with the previous poem. All students have the same assignment that must be completed for their assigned poem.

Assignment

Overview:

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.” In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the “burden” of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. African Americans, among many others, objected to the notion of the “white man’s burden.” 

Title: _________________________ Author: ________________ 

1. What is the message of this poem? 

2. What attitude toward imperialism, if any, does the poem take? Cite specific words or phrases. 

3. Who is the author more concerned about, the people ruled by whites or the white rulers? How do you know? 

4. Select 2-3 quotes/lines that stood out to you as powerful or meaningful and explain why. 

Reading 1:

“The Black Man’s Burden”: A Response to Kipling

 Among the dozens of replies to Kipling’s poem was “The Black Man’s Burden,” written by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson and published in April 1899. A “Black Man’s Burden Association” was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.

Pile on the Black Man’s Burden.

'Tis nearest at your door;

Why heed long bleeding Cuba,

or dark Hawaii’s shore?

Hail ye your fearless armies,

Which menace feeble folks

Who fight with clubs and arrows

and brook your rifle’s smoke.

Pile on the Black Man’s Burden

His wail with laughter drown

You’ve sealed the Red Man’s problem,

And will take up the Brown,

In vain ye seek to end it,

With bullets, blood or death

Better by far defend it

With honor’s holy breath.

Source: H.T. Johnson, “The Black Man’s Burden,” Voice of Missions, VII (Atlanta: April 1899), 1. Reprinted in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.,Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1975, 183–184.

Reading 2:

Edward Morel

The Black Man's Burden (1903)

Kiplings poem The White Man's Burden of 1899 presented one view of imperialism. Edward Morel, a British journalist in the Belgian Congo, drew attention to the abuses of imperialism in 1903. The Congo [for a period known in modern times as Zaïre] was perhaps the most famously exploitative of the European colonies.

It is [the Africans] who carry the 'Black man's burden'. They have not withered away before the white man's occupation. Indeed ... Africa has ultimately absorbed within itself every Caucasian and, for that matter, every Semitic invader, too. In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred the African in heaps. The African has survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has....

What the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the mapping out of European political 'spheres of influence' has failed to do; what the Maxim and the rifle, the slave gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; whatever the overseas slave trade failed to do, the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted by modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing.

For from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and enforced, there is no escape for the African. Its destructive effects are not spasmodic: they are permanent. In its permanence resides its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It breaks the spirit. It attacks the African at every turn, from every point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural pursuits and occupations, claims his whole time, enslaves him in his own home....

. . . In Africa, especially in tropical Africa, which a capitalistic imperialism threatens and has, in part, already devastated, man is incapable of reacting against unnatural conditions. In those regions man is engaged in a perpetual struggle against disease and an exhausting climate, which tells heavily upon child­bearing; and there is no scientific machinery for salving the weaker members of the community. The African of the tropics is capable of tremendous physical labours. But he cannot accommodate himself to the European system of monotonous, uninterrupted labour, with its long and regular hours, involving, moreover, as it frequently does, severance from natural surroundings and nostalgia, the condition of melancholy resulting from separation from home, a malady to which the African is specially prone. Climatic conditions forbid it. When the system is forced upon him, the tropical African droops and dies.

Nor is violent physical opposition to abuse and injustice henceforth possible for the African in any part of Africa. His chances of effective resistance have been steadily dwindling with the increasing perfectibility in the killing power of modern armament....

Thus the African is really helpless against the material gods of the white man, as embodied in the trinity of imperialism, capitalistic exploitation, and militarism....

To reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimulating episodes in savage life to a dull routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends, to dislocate social ties and disrupt social institutions; to stifle nascent desires and crush mental development; to graft upon primitive passions the annihilating evils of scientific slavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilized man, unrestrained by convention or law; in fine, to kill the soul in a people-this is a crime which transcends physical murder.

From E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden, in Louis L. Snyder, The Imperialism Reader (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962), pp.l63­l64. First published in 1920 in Great Britain. 

Reading 3:

The Black Man’s Burden

(A Reply to Rudyard Kipling) in When Africa Awakes (New York, 1920)

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

Send forth the worst ye breed,

And bind our sons in shackles

To serve your selfish greed;

To wait in heavy harness

Be-devilled and beguiled

Until the Fates remove you

From a world you have defiled.

Take up the black Man’s burden---

Your lies may still abide

To veil the threat of terror

And check our racial pride;

Your cannon, church and courthouse

May still our sons constrain

To seek the white man’s profit

And work the white man’s gain.

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

Reach out and hog the earth,

And leave your workers hungry

In the country of their birth;

Then, when your goal is nearest,

The end for which you fought

Watch other’s trained efficiency

Bring all your hope to naught.

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

Reduce their chiefs and kings

To toil of serf and sweeper

The lot of common things:

Sodden their soil with slaughter,

Ravish their lands with lead;

Go, sign them with your living

And seal them with your dead.

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

And reap your old reward;

The curse of those ye cozen,

The hate of those ye barred

From your Canadian cities

And your Australian ports;

And when they ask for meat and drink

Go, girdle them with forts.

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

Ye cannot stoop to less.

Will not your fraud of "freedom"

Still cloak your greediness?

But, by the gods ye worship,

And by the deeds ye do,

These silent, sullen peoples

Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the Black Man’s burden---

Until the tail is told,

Until the balances of hate

Bear down the beam of gold.

And while ye wait remember

The justice, though delayed

Will hold you as her debtor

Till the Black Man’s debt is paid

Reading 4:

The Black Man’s Burden

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

  The Black Man’s Burden 

Take up the white man’s burden,

The yoke ye sought to spurn;

And spurn your father’s customs;

Your father’s temples burn.

O learn to love and honor

The white God’s favored sons.

Forget the white-haired fathers

Fast lashed to mouths of guns

Take up the white man’s burden,

Your own was not enough;

He’ll burden you with taxes;

But though the road be rough,

“To him who waits,” remember,

“All things in time shall come;”

The white man’s culture brings you

The white man’s God, and rum.

Take up the white man’s burden;

‘Tis called “protectorate,”

And lift your voice in thanks to

The God ye well might hate.

Forget your exiled brothers;

Forget your boundless lands;

In acres that they gave for

The blood upon their hands.

Take up the white man’s burden;

Poor simple folk and free;

Abandon nature’s freedom,

Embrace his “Liberty;”

The goddess of the white man

Who makes you free in name;

But in her heart your color

Will brand you “slave” the same.

Take up the white man’s burden;

‘And learn by what you’ve lost

That white men called as counsel

Means black mean pays the cost.

Your right to fertile acres

Their priests will teach you well

Have gained your fathers only

A desert claim in hell.

Take up the white man’s burden;

Take it because you must;

Burden of making money;

Burden of greed and lust;

Burden of points strategic,

Burden of harbors deep,

Burden of greatest burdens;

Burden, these burdens to keep

Take up the white man’s burden;

His papers take, and read;

‘Tis all for your salvation;

The white man knows not greed.

For you he’s spending millions –

To him, more than his God –

To make you learned, and happy,

Enlightened, cultured, broad.

Take up the white man’s burden

While he makes laws for you,

That show your fathers taught you

The things you should not do.

Cast off your foolish feathers,

Your necklace, beads, and paint;

Buy raiment for your mother,

Lest fairer sisters faint.

Take up the white man’s burden;

Go learn to wear his clothes;

You may look like the devil;

But nobody cares who knows.

Peruse a work of Darwin –

Thank gods that you’re alive –

And learn the reason clearly: –

The fittest alone survive.

Reading 5:

The Brown Man’s Burden

Henry Labouchère written in 1899

Pile on the brown man’s burden

To gratify your greed;

Go, clear away the "niggers"

Who progress would impede;

Be very stern, for truly

‘Tis useless to be mild

With new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Pile on the brown man’s burden;

And, if ye rouse his hate,

Meet his old-fashioned reasons

With Maxims up to date.

With shells and dumdum bullets

A hundred times made plain

The brown man’s loss must ever

Imply the white man’s gain.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,

compel him to be free;

Let all your manifestoes

Reek with philanthropy.

And if with heathen folly

He dares your will dispute,

Then, in the name of freedom,

Don’t hesitate to shoot.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,

And if his cry be sore,

That surely need not irk you–

Ye’ve driven slaves before.

Seize on his ports and pastures,

The fields his people tread;

Go make from them your living,

And mark them with his dead.

Pile on the brown man’s burden,

And through the world proclaim

That ye are Freedom’s agent–

There’s no more paying game!

And, should your own past history

Straight in your teeth be thrown,

Retort that independence

Is good for whites alone.

Reading 6:

"The Black Man's Burden"

This poem by Lulu Baxter Guy turns the tables on Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden," suggesting that the real "burden" was borne by African-Americans under the weight of racial oppression. Making an impassioned plea for racial equality, Guy implores readers to "think of the brave deeds [African-Americans] have done," such as those of the black soldiers who took part in the charge of San Juan Hill during the recent Spanish-American War. 

The Black Man's Burden

Take off the black man's burden,

This boon we humbly crave.

Have we not served ye long enough?

Been long enough your slave?

Cut loose the bands that bind us,

Bid us like men be strong.

Think of the brave deeds we have done;

Look not for all the wrong.

Take off the black man's burden,

'Tis this that we demand;

Think not of all the crimes you've heard

But that march up San Juan.

Oh, South, can't you remember

When you fought to hold our lives?

How loyal was the black man

To your daughters and your wives?

Take off the black man's burden,

Ye men of power and might.

Wait not one for another

But dare to do the right.

The blood, the smoke, the ashes,

Of martyred men that's slain;

Comes wafted to you from the south

But for another's gain.

Take off the black man's burden,

His mind can then expand.

He'll prove your equal in the race,

Stand every whit a man.

We'll wait till the burden's lifted,

And to those who crush us down,

Will come the words of God to Cain,

"Thy brother's blood crieth from the ground."