Short answers, pulled from the story.
The colonisation of Africa began in antiquity, with Phoenician traders founding Utica around 1100 BC and Carthage around 814 BC in what is now Tunisia. Greek colonisation of Cyrenaica occurred around the same time, and Alexander the Great founded Alexandria during his conquest of Egypt. The modern European phase of colonisation accelerated with the Scramble for Africa between 1884 and 1914.
The Scramble for Africa was the rapid European seizure of African territory between 1870 and 1914, during which European powers acquired almost 23,000,000 square kilometres of land, roughly one fifth of the globe's land surface. It was formalised by the 1885 Berlin Conference, initiated by Otto von Bismarck, which set international guidelines for dividing the continent among European powers.
The principal colonial powers in Africa were Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and Italy. Britain and France controlled the largest portions; France established two major colonial federations, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Belgium's King Leopold II initially held the Congo Basin as his private domain until 1908.
Walter Rodney argues in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that the continent was actively pillaged and plundered by Western economic exploitation rather than simply left behind. Using Marxist analysis, he traces the systematic underdevelopment of Africa to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, and he also argues that the rights of African women were further diminished during the colonial period.
In Citizen and Subject, published in 1996, Mahmood Mamdani argues that the colonial state in Africa operated as two forms of power under a single authority: one state for the European urban population, governed by elected institutions and citizenship rights, and a separate system for the indigenous rural population, ruled through tribal authority. This division created a racial segregation between the European citizen and the African subject embedded in the structure of governance.
Achille Mbembe, in his 2000 book On the Postcolony, argues that colonial violence was directed at African bodies primarily to extract labour and produce submissive identities, with colonisers framing violence as necessary to create a productive worker. He contrasts this with postcolonial violence, which he characterises as cruder and oriented toward demonstrating raw power through excess and exaggeration.