Ghost pgs. 1-32

Discussion Questions:

1. Why was Henry Morton Stanley's back story so important and how does it emphasize where the book is going?
 The introduction and prologue both mentioned the fact that the quest in Africa was one sided which veered all the further documentation to be only partial information. Because of this fact, Stanley's back story was so important because he was proven to be a liar. His overall goal was to achieve fame, not gain the facts from both parties. If David Livingston lived to make his return to England I would argue that he would have had a different story to tell about Africa than that of which Stanley told.  Furthermore, looking at the prologue Affonso, the only African voice, had an entirely different outlook on life in Africa than the Europeans when they came and conducted the slave trade. This alone shows that the books objective is to give two sides of the story while the world has only seen one view. This will give people a better perspective of what actually happened. It is pure ignorance to only be educated on one side of a story. Therefore, in this book the African's story will be told and compared to the Europeans to determine what actually went on during these times.


2. As seen in the book so far, how have human choices, specifically regarding the Congo and Africa in the beginning, impacted the world?
Both of these events, the Congo and the first exploration of Africa resulting in the slave trade, lasted for multiple decades because the issue was never resolved until a much later point in time.  They both were not only very historical events, but they set up historical events to come far off in the future. The slave trade for example, set up the civil rights movement in the 1960s. These events both are linked to the same roots being that of Europeans trying to better their own countries through materialism and that of trying to change the basic ways of African civilizations into their own making. These human choices to go into these perfectly adequate civilizations for their own needs, to only benefit themselves, were not positive at all for anyone. These human choices set up the world for their future issues at hand and caused a lot of immoral practices among these civilizations in which harmed them. Exploration is a curiosity and should be respected, however, these groups of people disregarded that respect and caused brutal death. They not only caused death, but unnecessary new issues to be dealt with in order to maintain some sense of world peace, if it is at all obtainable. Their specific choices set the world up for racism, what are moral values, and countries working together or against each other on different issues. The one simple choice of exploring Africa resulted in a magnitude of repercussions for the rest of the world in much later years to come.