How can "The White Man's Burden" be used to explain a primary cause of European imperialism in Africa?

Many of the same justifications used for imperialism in the Philippines (the full title of Kipling's poem was in fact "The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands") were also applicable to European colonization of Africa, which was virtually complete by 1899. Writing in 1877, British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes expressed these arguments more explicitly than Kipling:

Africa is...lying ready for us [and] it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory, and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes: that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.

The unquestioning belief in white supremacy was thus a time-honored justification for imperialism by the time Kipling's poem was published. Rhodes would go on to supervise the British conquest of Africa from Cape Town in South Africa to Sudan.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/

https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Rhodes-Confession.htm


In "The White Man's Burden," British poet Rudyard Kipling writes to urge the United States to annex the Philippines, which had recently emerged from the Spanish Empire after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Kipling says that it is the duty of the United States to send its finest young men to bring "civilization" to people that he regarded as essentially savages. This would involve struggle and sacrifice and would ultimately bring the nation the respect of the European powers. Kipling's notion that presumptively "superior" whites had the obligation to bring their "civilization" to peoples around the world was a very common justification and even a motive for imperialism. It was very often tied to missionary attempts to bring (usually Protestant) Christianity to these people, and was based, in the final analysis, on a belief in European superiority. While Europeans did build infrastructure and combat diseases (many of which, it must be said, were of European origin), imperialism was carried out without the consent of colonial peoples themselves and not, as Kipling would have it, because they were not capable of understanding or appreciating European "civilization."

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