Colonisation of Africa

• 1. Introduction

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  The colonisation of Africa did not begin with European flags planted in the 19th century. It began far earlier, when Phoenician traders established the city of Utica around 1100 BC, and when Greek merchants settled along the North African coast under the watchful eye of Egypt's Pharaoh Amasis. By the time European powers carved up the continent at a Berlin conference in 1885, they were following a template of conquest that was already ancient.

  What makes this story so vast and so contested is that it unfolded across thousands of years, dozens of peoples, and an entire continent. It produced cities, languages, legal systems, and catastrophic suffering. It ended slavery in some places while imposing forced labour in others. And its consequences, as scholars like Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe have argued, did not end when the colonial flags came down. In nearly all African countries today, the language used in government and media is the one introduced by a recent colonial power, even though most people in those countries still speak their native African languages.

  How did all of this begin? What drove European powers to seize nearly a fifth of the globe's land surface in less than half a century? And what intellectual frameworks have scholars used to make sense of the damage left behind? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Ancient Roots

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  Utica, founded by Phoenician traders around 1100 BC, is one of the oldest colonial footholds on African soil. Carthage followed, with a traditional founding date of 814 BC, planted in what is now Tunisia by settlers who named it, simply, "New City." By the 4th century BC, Carthage had grown into a major Mediterranean power, dispatching its own expeditions along Africa's Atlantic coast. The sailor Hanno left a surviving account of one such voyage, dating to around 425 BC.

  Greek expansion into North Africa ran parallel to Phoenician settlement. Under Egypt's Pharaoh Amasis, who ruled from 570 to 526 BC, a Greek mercantile colony took root at Naucratis, about 50 miles from the site where Alexandria would later rise. Greek settlers also colonised Cyrenaica around the same period. An attempt in 513 BC to plant a colony between Cyrene and Carthage ended in failure: a combined force of local people and Carthaginians expelled the Greek settlers two years after they arrived.

  Alexander the Great, born in 356 BC and dead by 323, founded Alexandria during his conquest of Egypt. The city became one of the defining urban centres of the ancient world, functioning simultaneously as a trading hub, a cultural capital, a military headquarters, and a communications node.

  Rome eventually absorbed or destroyed what the Greeks and Phoenicians had built. After the Third Punic War, which ran from 150 to 146 BC, Rome razed Carthage entirely. Yet Roman planners were not finished with the site. Figures including Gaius Gracchus in the late 2nd century BC, and later Julius Caesar and Augustus in the 1st century BC, proposed establishing a new Roman colony on the same ground. Under Augustus, that colony became the capital of Rome's African province. Gothic Vandals seized it briefly in the 5th century, the Byzantines retook it, and then the entire sweep of Roman and Byzantine North Africa fell to Arab forces in the 7th century. The oldest modern city founded by Europeans on the African continent came much later: Cape Town, established by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a resupply stop for ships sailing east.

• 3. The Scramble

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  By 1870, European powers controlled roughly one tenth of Africa, mostly along the Mediterranean coast and in the far south. What followed was one of the most dramatic territorial seizures in recorded history. Between 1870 and 1914, Europe added almost 23,000,000 square kilometres to its overseas colonial holdings, equivalent to about one fifth of the entire land surface of the globe.

  King Leopold II of Belgium was an early and particularly aggressive driver of inland expansion. He claimed the Congo Basin as his personal private domain, ruling it through methods that drew international condemnation for their brutality. He held it until 1908, when European pressure forced him to hand control to the Belgian Parliament.

  The 1885 Berlin Conference, initiated by Otto von Bismarck, created a framework for dividing the continent with fewer violent disputes among the colonisers themselves. It formalised what contemporaries called the New Imperialism, driven by the industrial and technological capacities of the Second Industrial Revolution. The only serious moment when inter-imperial violence looked likely came in the Fashoda Incident of 1898, a confrontation between Britain and France that was ultimately resolved without significant military conflict between the two powers.

  Administrative methods varied sharply. France, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium imposed what scholars describe as direct rule: a highly centralised system in which Paris or Lisbon or Brussels made decisions. France appointed officials outright, without regard for traditional authority structures, and required loyalty to France as the primary criterion. France also constructed two vast colonial federations, French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, governing them through laws passed in the metropole and approved before any colonial assembly could act on them.

  Britain took a different approach, identifying local power holders and using them to administer on behalf of the empire. This indirect rule worked by co-opting existing hierarchies rather than replacing them. It was cheaper and, in many cases, more stable, though no less exploitative in its underlying purpose.

  Resistance was constant and often violent. In German East Africa, local populations rose up against enforced labour and taxation in the Abushiri revolt of 1888, nearly pushing the Germans out entirely. By a decade later the colony appeared subdued, though German administrators acknowledged that inland control amounted to little more than a string of small military fortresses. Then in 1905 the Maji Maji Rebellion broke out, initially with significant success before German reinforcements equipped with machine guns suppressed it within a year. In German Southwest Africa, fierce resistance to colonial seizure led to the Herero and Namaqua Genocide. The scholar Vincent Khapoya notes the range of economic tools colonisers deployed: land seizure, enforced labour, the introduction of cash crops sometimes at the expense of food crops, the importation of labourers from India, and the systematic redirection of African economies toward supplying raw materials for European industry.

• 4. The Road to Independence

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  Africans who had served alongside imperial powers in both World Wars returned home having witnessed the promise and the hypocrisy of European governance. They had contributed labour and military service and received unequal gratitude in return. That imbalance was noted, and it shaped the independence movements that followed.

  Pro-independence Africans recognised early that European education gave them tools for negotiating with Europeans. Some communities established their own churches. Trade unions and civic associations that began with no explicitly political mandate gradually evolved into political movements. The social base of these movements was wide, drawing in lawyers, doctors, teachers, clerks, small merchants, urban workers, and farmers.

  The pathways to independence differed by colonial power. Britain generally sought gradual transfers of authority. France pursued a policy of cultural assimilation that produced its own tensions, particularly in North Africa. Morocco and Tunisia gained independence in March 1956, which concentrated French military and political effort on Algeria, where an armed struggle ran from 1954 to 1962. When President Charles de Gaulle put the question of independence to a referendum in 1958, only Guinea voted for outright separation. France then amended its constitution in 1959 to allow other colonies the same option.

  In East Africa, events took their own shape. Julius Nyerere built a broad coalition in Tanganyika, drawing together Africans united by a common Swahili language as well as some white leaders whose racially weighted constitutional voice gave them disproportionate influence. Nyerere became the leader of an independent Tanganyika in 1961. Kenya's path was sharper. White settlers had evicted African tenant farmers in the 1930s. Armed conflict intensified in 1952. Britain suppressed the revolt by 1955, then accepted the principle of African majority rule by 1960. Kenya achieved independence three years after that.

  The main wave of decolonisation came after World War II, accelerated by independence movements, indigenous political parties, and pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union. The majority of the continent had achieved independence by 1980. Today, the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla remain the only African territories governed by a European state on the mainland. Several island territories, including Réunion, Mayotte, Saint Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, the Canary Islands, and Madeira, remain under French, British, Spanish, or Portuguese control, though the latter two had no pre-colonial African political history and carry overwhelmingly European populations.

• 5. Scholars of the Aftermath

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  Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian and activist, published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a systematic argument that the continent was not simply left behind by modernity but was actively stripped of its capacity to develop. Drawing on Marxist analysis, Rodney traced the modes of resource extraction that structured African economies for European benefit. He argued that the shape of present-day Africa and Europe can both be traced, through comparative analysis, to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. His analysis also addressed gender, concluding that the rights of African women were further diminished under colonial rule.

  Mahmood Mamdani's 1996 book Citizen and Subject approached the same history through a different lens. His central argument was that the colonial state in Africa took the form of a bifurcated structure: two forms of power operating under a single authority. Urban areas, where colonial Europeans lived, were governed by elected institutions and came with the rights of citizenship. Rural areas, where the indigenous population was concentrated, were ruled through tribal authority, which colonisers presented as traditional and appropriate. In urban areas, native institutions were not recognised; natives were excluded from citizenship on the grounds that Europeans portrayed them as uncivilised. The result was a racial segregation between the European citizen and the African subject, built into the architecture of governance itself. Critics have noted that Mamdani's framework generalises across a continent colonised in very different ways by fundamentally different imperial ideologies.

  Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian historian and philosopher, published On the Postcolony in 2000. He argues that colonial powers demanded use of African bodies in specifically violent ways, both for labour and for the construction of submissive identities. European colonisers viewed African bodies as degenerate and in need of taming; violence was framed as necessary because it shaped the African into a productive worker. The colonised person's daily life became a performance of submission, expressed through compulsory participation in public works and military conscription. Mbembe contrasts this with postcolonial violence, which he characterises as cruder and oriented toward the demonstration of raw power, marked by excess and exaggeration rather than the labour-directed violence of the colonial period. Academics including Meredith Terreta have criticised On the Postcolony for drawing too heavily on specific nations, particularly Cameroon, at the expense of broader generalisability.

  Stephanie Terreni Brown's 2014 paper examined colonialism through the lens of sanitation and dirt, using Kampala as her case study. She describes a process she calls abjectification: one group others or dehumanises another by associating them with dirt, disorder, and contamination. Colonial authorities in Kampala constructed sewage infrastructure for the colonial population while ignoring the needs of Ugandan residents. Brown argues that the rhetoric of cleanliness as civilisation was not incidental but central to how the colonial project justified itself. The material legacy of that unequal infrastructure remains visible in Kampala and other African cities, and the underlying logic, she argues, persists in contemporary thought about Africa, with a shift from racial to economic division as the organising principle.