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In November 1884, representatives from a dozen European countries met in Berlin.
The reason for the meeting was audacious. They were going to carve up the continent of Africa between them.
No one from Africa was in attendance at the conference, and no one was even invited. The decisions they made at this conference, and in the decades that followed, can still be felt in the world today.
Learn more about the European Scramble for Africa and how the European powers carved up a continent on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The Scramble for Africa is a term used by historians to describe the period from 1881 to 1914 and the European quest to grab and colonize as much of the African continent as possible.
Before I get into the details of the Scramble for Africa, I need to provide some background on how things got to this point.
Europe and Africa were no strangers to each other. When humans first left Africa, Europe was an early stop. As civilization arose, there was a great deal of contact between North Africa and Southern Europe.
The Egyptians and the Greeks were very familiar with each other.
The Greeks knew of the land south of Egypt, which they called Aethiopia. Homer wrote of Aethiopians, who he described as coming from a faraway land. Aethiopia was everything to the south of Egypt and the Sahara Desert, and it was known that Aethiopians lived in the far east near the Red Sea and in the far west on the Atlantic Coast.
The Romans had provinces in North Africa, fought at least one battle with the Kingdom of Nubia in Sudan, and may have possibly sent an expedition to West Africa through the Sahara.
I bring all of this up to point out a fact that many people overlook: the ties between Africa and Europe were many and ancient. While there was much about each other they didn’t know, Europeans and Africans knew more about each other than they did about, say, China.
They especially knew more than they did about the Americas or Australia, neither of which was even known or hypothesized at the time.
In the 15th Century, after the Ottomans had obtained a monopoly on trade routes from Asia, Europeans began seeking alternate routes. This necessitated something no European had ever done: sailing around Africa.
The Portuguese originally began sailing around Africa. To support these trade routes, they set up trading posts along the coast. In 1482, a Portuguese trading settlement was established in Elmina, which is what is today Ghana. This was primarily for trade in gold.
They set up trading ports along the coast of Mozambique.
Soon after this began, the New World was discovered. There, the Spanish and Portuguese didn’t just set up trading ports. They stuck the flag in the ground and claimed enormous swaths of land. Their intent wasn’t to trade with the locals. They intended to control and rule the locals and take whatever resources they could.
Over the next several centuries, this became the norm. England and France began taking over large territories in North America.
India, much of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Australia, and many islands in between all became colonies of European powers. In particular, the Atlantic facing naval powers of England, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
However, by the 19th century, Africa had largely been ignored in terms of colonization. The big exception was South Africa, which had originally been colonized by the Dutch and then taken by the British, and Algeria which was controlled by the French.
As late a 1870, only ten percent of Africa was under European control.
So, why had Africa been ignored for so long? In terms of proximity, Africa could have been the first continent colonized.
There were several reasons why.
Europeans tended to stay close to the coasts because diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness were widespread in many parts of Africa and were deadly to Europeans who lacked immunity.
Africa didn’t have many navigable rivers, which meant that you couldn’t sail up a river to reach the continent’s interior.
Africa had powerful kingdoms and empires that fought back against European expansion. In addition to providing military resistance, they would have been able to cancel the trade deals they had negotiated, which was the primary European interest prior to the 19th century.
Until the 19th century, everything the Europeans wanted (slaves, gold, and spices) could be obtained from trade with local chiefs and kings without needing a large colonial administration.
So, what changed suddenly that caused Africa to become so attractive to Europeans in the late 19th century? The slave trade had been abolished. Spices were plentiful and relatively cheap due to other European colonies in Asia.
The answer that most historians give is twofold. One is the advent of industrialization. There was a change in the resources that European nations wanted. Minerals and rubber were suddenly in demand and Africa had them.
Industrialization also allowed for easy access to the African interior. Railroads and steamships made it possible to travel long distances and transport raw materials.
Weapons had also improved. Advanced artillery and weapons such as the Gatling gun gave the Europeans a significant advantage over native armies.
In 1820, Quinine was isolated from cinchona trees, which was a treatment for malaria, one of the biggest things that prevented Europeans from traveling in Africa.
While economics was very important, nationalism and national competition were perhaps more important.
European countries had been fighting with each other for centuries. After the Napoleonic Wars, European wars reduced dramatically. There was one major exception, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which resulted in the unification and creation of the new state of Germany.
Countries like Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France were considered powerful countries in no small part due to their colonies, and other countries in Europe wanted in on the action.
Each of the major European powers had their own addenda for establishing colonies in Africa.
The British Empire was one of the most significant players in the Scramble for Africa, seeking to control a continuous line of territory from Cairo to Cape Town, a vision famously associated with Cecil Rhodes. The British acquired vast territories, including Egypt in 1882, Sudan, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and more. Their control over Egypt was crucial for securing the Suez Canal, a vital route for maintaining their global empire, particularly in Asia.
France sought to build an empire in Africa that would rival its former dominance in the Americas and Asia. The French focused on West and Central Africa, acquiring territories such as Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Chad. In North Africa, they established control over Algeria (1830), Tunisia (1881), and later Morocco (1912). The French vision was to create an empire stretching across the Sahara from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.
Germany was a latecomer to the colonial game due to its late unification but pursued colonies under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s leadership. Germany established control over territories in Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Togo, and Cameroon.
Portugal, one of the earliest European powers to explore Africa, maintained and expanded its holdings during the Scramble. The Portuguese controlled Angola and Mozambique, territories they had claimed centuries earlier. However, Portugal’s ambitions to connect these colonies by expanding inland were thwarted by the British, particularly in the famous 1890 British Ultimatum, which prevented Portugal from establishing a transcontinental empire.
Italy, another latecomer to the colonial race, focused its efforts on North and East Africa. Italy acquired Eritrea and parts of Somalia and attempted to conquer Ethiopia, leading to the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Italy eventually established control over Libya in 1912.
Spain, with a declining empire, played a relatively minor role in the Scramble. They controlled small territories in North Africa, such as Spanish Morocco and Spanish Sahara, as well as Equatorial Guinea and parts of Western Sahara. Spain’s colonial ambitions were limited compared to those of the other European powers.
King Leopold II of Belgium was one of the most notorious figures in the Scramble for Africa. He personally controlled the Congo Free State (modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo), which was not initially a Belgian colony but rather a private venture by the king. Under Leopold’s rule, the Congo was exploited ruthlessly, leading to widespread atrocities and the deaths of millions of Congolese. The international outcry eventually led to the Belgian government taking control of the Congo in 1908.
With all of the European claims to Africa, all of which took place in a relatively short period of time, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called for a conference in November 1884 for all the great powers who were interested in Africa.
The goal of the conference was to regulate European colonization and trade in Africa and prevent conflict among European powers.
In addition to the countries I’ve just listed, also in attendance were the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States.
Belgium was not represented, but King Leopold was in the form of the International Association of the Congo, an organization that he controlled.
Perhaps most importantly, no one from Africa was invited, was consulted, or was in attendance.
The conference spent over three months arguing, negotiating, and drawing lines on a map to divide up the African continent.
They ended up drawing borders between their colonies, which were often made without any respect for the cultural, linguistic, or even geographic realities on the ground. They were mostly just straight lines made by people who had no clue what they were drawing the lines through.
One of the principles that the conference established was known as effective occupation. That meant that European powers had to demonstrate actual control over a territory to claim it as a colony.
This was different from what happened in the New World centuries earlier, where countries like Spain and Portugal claimed land they never saw.
The only countries spared in the Scramble for Africa were Ethiopia and Liberia. Ethiopia was spared because it defeated Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, and Liberia was spared because of its historical relationship with the United States.
The Berlin Conference of 1884 wasn’t the end of the partitioning of Africa, but it did carve up most of the continent. There were some land swaps between countries after the conference, and the First World War saw Germany lose all of its African colonies to the British.
When German East Africa was captured, it gave the British a single contiguous tract of land that extended from Cairo to Cape Town.
There are many stories that are lumped into this period in African history, which I plan on covering in future episodes.
The barbarism in the Belgian Congo was one of the most horrific episodes in all history. The genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia in 1904 is considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century and laid the foundation for the Holocaust.
The Anglo-Zulu War and the Battle of Isandlwana, where an army of 20,000 Zulu warriors with spears managed to defeat a technically superior British force.
The legacy of the decisions made in Berlin almost 150 years ago is still with us today.
The borders of the European colonies became the borders of newly independent nations during the decolonization movement after the Second World War.
Almost every border in Africa today was created by Europeans. The only exceptions are the borders between Sudan and South Sudan and the border of Eritrea, both of which were determined via bloody conflicts.
If you look at an ethnic or linguistic map of Africa, you’ll notice that it looks nothing like the map of Africa that you are familiar with. When I was in West Africa, I’d meet people, and they would identify themselves by both their tribal group and nationality. For example, they would say they are Mandinka from Mali or Mandinka from Senegal.
Many of the problems that African countries have faced since independence can be directly attributed to the borders drawn in 1884. Countries that were divided without respect to ethnic groups often saw one group take power at the expense of other ethnic groups.
Many of the civil wars that have ravaged the African continent have been ethnic-based wars, which can be traced back to the ill-created borders.
Since decolonization, despite the fact that borders made no sense, there has been resistance to changing the borders of countries in Africa. The fear is that once the process is legitimized, it will continue at a great cost of human life. That is why countries like Somaliland are defacto-independent in almost every way, yet they can’t get recognition.
The Scramble for Africa and the 1884 Berlin Conference have had a legacy that has lasted long beyond the period of colonization. So much of the current geopolitical state of Africa today is a direct result of decisions made almost 150 years ago without any input from the people who were most affected.