there's no way around the importance of the modern nation-state in all this, if only because it centralized tax gathering which enabled expansions of military forces (creation of standing armies, technological developments--all that)...you also can't get around the development of capitalist-style industry and it's requirements for raw materials (the primary driver of the real horror in the congo was rubber and the expanding requirements for it that attended technological developments---sorry to be so abstract about it, but we're talking general processes and there we are).
a professionalized heavily armed european style military operates on a different rationality than most of what they encountered as they plowed through africa. which isn't to say that the european militaries had an easy time of it. they didn't: but they really weren't concerned with such nicities as playing by any rules of war. this is one area where the equation of civilization and europe really does end up being a matter of who has the larger metal toys and--more importantly--which story your thinking in terms of when you make judgments like who is and is not civilized.
if i have some time, i'll hunt up a pretty big collection of stories gathered from the congo in the late 19th-early 20th century about the arrival of the belgians as understood from various viewpoints (which are in general congolese because of the result of this...but the groups were themselves quite different one from the other). these make the last point i'm making pretty obvious: the europeans were not playing by the same rules as were assumed to be in place amongst the people they encountered and massacred in very significant numbers. limits on conduct for example that were assumed the europeans didn't know about and did not adhere to, particularly not in the earlier periods (its more complicated than this, really...for example missionaries were not of one mind, colonial administrators were not of one mind, etc etc etc) this is an area where racism and christianity converged with military organization and technology in order to make wholesale massacre not particularly a problem.
[[[edit, a bit later on...i found the collection of statements i was looking for, but i forgot along the way that the text is in french and not translated so far as i know. but if you read french, this is really interesting stuff:
http://www.aequatoria.be/archives_pr...h/EGindex.html
the only english bits that i found translate the title on the opening page. i could be wrong about the extent of it though, but i don't think i am.]]]
anyway, it makes little sense to try to separate these processes from the history of the 19th century.
and i remain a bit mystified by what powerclown is actually asking about, but it's getting clearer. maybe.