Scramble for Africa
As late as the 1870s, Europeans controlled roughly 10 percent of the African continent, clinging to the coasts. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained outside European control. The Scramble for Africa was the invasion, conquest, and colonisation of most of Africa by seven Western European powers. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom were the contending powers. They were driven by the Second Industrial Revolution in an era called New Imperialism.
The transformation took only a few decades. How did a handful of coastal trading posts become a near-total partition of a continent. What turned military influence and economic dominance into direct rule. And once the powers had drawn their lines, why did the borders they imposed outlast the empires that drew them. The 1884 Berlin Conference, the brutality of one king's private realm, and a tense standoff at a remote fort all belong to this story. So does the question of what those borders meant long after the colonisers left.
Sub-Saharan Africa was one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by informal imperialism, and that made it attractive to business entrepreneurs. During the Long Depression, which ran from 1873 to 1896, Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit. Continental markets were shrinking and increasingly protectionist. Africa offered an open market that could yield a trade surplus, a market that bought more than it sold.
Surplus capital often earned a greater premium when invested overseas, where materials were cheap and competition was limited. The demand for raw materials pulled hardest of all, especially ivory, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin. Britain also wanted stopover ports along the southern and eastern coasts for its route to Asia and its empire in India.
Pro-imperialist lobbyists pressed the case loudly. The Alldeutscher Verband, Francesco Crispi, and Jules Ferry argued that sheltered overseas markets would cure low prices and overproduction. John A. Hobson made the shrinking of continental markets a centerpiece of his book Imperialism. Yet the economic logic had limits. Excluding the area that became the Union of South Africa in 1910, European nations invested relatively little capital in Africa. William Easterly even disputed the tie between capitalism and imperialism, arguing that colonialism mostly served state-led development. The deepest investment, it turned out, was not always money but ambition.
The vast interior between Egypt and the gold and diamond-rich south held strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain wanted to protect the Suez Canal, the key waterway between East and West, completed in 1869. Growing navies powered by steam needed coaling stations and ports for maintenance. Defence bases guarded sea routes and communication lines.
Colonies became counters in the balance of power, useful as items of exchange during international bargaining. Colonies with large native populations were also a source of military strength. Britain drew on British Indian soldiers, France on North African soldiers, in many of their colonial wars. In an age of nationalism, an empire became a status symbol, and greatness grew linked to the idea of the White Man's Burden.
The rivalry produced a flurry of moves in the early 1880s. France occupied Tunisia in May 1881, which may have pushed Italy into the German-Austrian Dual Alliance in 1882, forming the Triple Alliance. That same year Britain occupied Egypt, which ruled over Sudan and parts of Chad, Eritrea, and Somalia. In 1884, Germany declared Togoland, the Cameroons, and South West Africa under its protection, and France occupied Guinea. In one of the era's strangest footnotes, Terek Cossacks briefly proclaimed a short-lived Russian colony at the Egyptian fort of Sagallo in 1889.
Otto von Bismarck became Minister-President of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1862. Through wars with Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, he unified Germany under Prussian rule, and the German Empire was formally proclaimed on the 18th of January 1871. Bismarck disliked colonies at first but gave in to popular and elite pressure in the 1880s. He used private companies to set up small colonial operations in Africa and the Pacific.
Portugal's dispute with King Leopold II of Belgium over the Congo estuary helped prompt Bismarck to convene a gathering in Berlin. The 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference set the rules of effective control over African territories and reduced the risk of conflict between colonial powers. The primary concern of those in attendance was preventing war as they divided the continent among themselves. The area along the Congo River was to be a neutral zone where trade and navigation stayed free.
The conference turned colonisation from informal economic penetration into systematic political control through its effective occupation principle. No nation could stake a claim without notifying other powers, and no territory could be formally claimed before being effectively occupied. The competitors ignored the rules when convenient, and war was several times only narrowly avoided. Portugal saw its claims to the west bank of the Congo confirmed, though claims based on simple discovery and diplomatic relations with native powers were rejected.
From 1869 to 1874, Henry Morton Stanley was secretly sent by Leopold II to the Congo region, where he made treaties with African chiefs along the Congo River. By 1882 he had assembled enough territory to form the basis of the Congo Free State. Leopold had organised the International African Association in 1876, and he came to hold the Congo as his personal possession rather than a Belgian colony.
Katanga showed how far the king would go. There ruled Msiri of the Yeke Kingdom, the most militarily powerful ruler in the area, who traded copper, ivory, and slaves. Rhodes sent two expeditions in 1890, and both failed. Leopold sent four. The well-armed Stairs expedition carried orders to take Katanga with or without Msiri's consent. Msiri refused, was shot, and his head was cut off and stuck on a pole as a barbaric lesson. With Katanga absorbed, Leopold's African realm reached 2,300,000 square kilometres, about 75 times larger than Belgium.
The human cost was staggering. The Congo Free State imposed a terror regime of mass killings and forced labour. Up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908. According to the Irish diplomat Roger Casement, the depopulation had four main causes: indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births, and disease. Sleeping sickness and smallpox killed nearly half the population in areas around the lower Congo River. Under pressure from the Congo Reform Association, Belgium ended Leopold's rule and annexed the territory on the 20th of August 1908 as the Belgian Congo. A neighbouring horror went largely unpunished, when de Brazza's searingly critical 1905 report on abuses in the French Congo was neither released nor acted upon.
French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps secured concessions from Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, between 1854 and 1856, to build the Suez Canal. The human toll was severe. Some sources put the workforce at 30,000, while others estimate that 120,000 workers died over the ten years of construction from malnutrition, fatigue, and disease, especially cholera. Facing financial difficulties by 1875, Isma'il sold his block of canal shares, which Britain snapped up under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Control of Egypt sharpened a wider obsession with the source of the Nile. France pushed inland from the West African coast, through the Sahel, aiming for an unbroken empire from the Niger River to the Nile. Britain wanted to link its possessions in Southern Africa with its territories in East Africa, and both with the Nile basin. Draw a line from Cape Town to Cairo, Rhodes's dream, and a line from Dakar to the Horn of Africa, the French ambition, and they intersect in eastern Sudan near Fashoda.
That intersection became a confrontation. A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the fort at Fashoda, soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British Army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff. The Fashoda Incident led to the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which guaranteed peace between the two countries and would shape the alliances of the war to come.
Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangier on the 31st of March 1905 and made a speech in favour of Moroccan independence, challenging French influence there. France's position had been reaffirmed by Britain and Spain in 1904. The Kaiser's speech instead bolstered French nationalism, and with British support, foreign minister Theophile Delcasse took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905 when Delcasse was forced out by the more conciliatory premier Maurice Rouvier.
The 1906 Algeciras Conference was called to settle the dispute. Of the thirteen nations present, Germany found its only supporter in Austria-Hungary, which had no interest in Africa. France had firm backing from Britain, the United States, Russia, Italy, and Spain. The Germans accepted an agreement signed on the 31st of May 1906, yielding certain domestic changes in Morocco while France retained control of key areas.
Five years later the Agadir Crisis flared. Germany deployed the gunboat Panther to the port of Agadir in July 1911. When the British heard of the Panther's arrival, they wrongly believed Germany meant to build an Atlantic naval base. In November 1911 a compromise gave Germany a slice of the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo in return for accepting France's position. France and Spain established a full protectorate over Morocco on the 30th of March 1912. British backing for France through both crises deepened Anglo-German estrangement, widening the divisions that culminated in the First World War.
The Dervish Movement waged armed resistance between 1899 and 1920, led by the Muslim poet and militant Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, also known as Sayyid Mohamed. It attracted around 25,000 youth from different clans, overran the Ethiopian garrison at Jigjiga, and repulsed the British Empire four times, forcing it to retreat to the coast. The Ottomans named Hassan Emir of the Somali nation. The movement was finally defeated in 1920 as a direct consequence of Britain's use of aircraft against the Taleh forts. The struggle killed nearly a third of Somaliland's population.
German rule produced atrocity in the southwest. Between 1904 and 1908, the Herero rebels were defeated at the Battle of Waterberg, and German efforts to clear the bush became a genocide. As many as 65,000 Herero, about 80 percent of that population, and 10,000 Nama, about half of theirs, starved, died of thirst, or were worked to death in camps such as Shark Island. An unknown number of San also died, many trapped in the Namib Desert.
By the end of the 19th century, Europe added almost 9,000,000 square miles, one-fifth of the land area of the globe, to its overseas possessions. Between 1885 and 1914, Britain took nearly 30 percent of Africa's population under its control, France 15 percent, Portugal 11 percent, Germany 9 percent, Belgium 7 percent, and Italy 1 percent. Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects. When the colonial empires declined after the two world wars, most African colonies gained independence during the Cold War. At the Organisation of African Unity conference of 1964, they chose to keep their colonial borders, fearing civil wars and regional instability, and placing their emphasis instead on pan-Africanism.
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Common questions
What was the Scramble for Africa?
The Scramble for Africa was the invasion, conquest, and colonisation of most of Africa by seven Western European powers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The contending powers were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, driven by the Second Industrial Revolution in the era of New Imperialism.
When did the Scramble for Africa take place?
The Scramble for Africa unfolded in the late 19th century and early 20th century. As late as the 1870s Europeans controlled roughly 10 percent of the continent, and by 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained outside European control.
Why was the 1884 Berlin Conference important to the Scramble for Africa?
The 1884 to 1885 Berlin Conference, convened by Otto von Bismarck, set the rules of effective control over African territories and is seen as emblematic of the scramble. Its effective occupation principle turned colonisation from informal economic penetration into systematic political control, requiring powers to notify others before claiming territory.
How many people died in the Congo Free State under Leopold II?
Up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants of the Congo Free State died between 1885 and 1908. Roger Casement attributed the depopulation to indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births, and disease, with sleeping sickness and smallpox killing nearly half the population around the lower Congo River.
What was the Fashoda Incident in the Scramble for Africa?
The Fashoda Incident was a standoff in eastern Sudan where a French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand reached the fort first, followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener. The French withdrew, and the confrontation led to the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which guaranteed peace between Britain and France.
Which African countries stayed independent during the Scramble for Africa?
By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained outside European control. Ethiopia was eventually occupied by Italy in 1936, while Liberia held strong connections with the United States and was Africa's oldest republic.
Why did African nations keep their colonial borders after independence?
At the Organisation of African Unity conference of 1964, newly independent African nations decided to keep their colonial borders. They feared civil wars and regional instability, and placed emphasis on pan-Africanism instead.
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