The Scramble for Africa, c. 1870-1914

Okay. I'm professor Hakimadi.

I'm professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora

at the University of Chichester in West Sussex.

And I've been asked to say something

about Africa

and decolonization or so called decolonization.

Maybe I'll say a little bit more about that term decolonization

later.

But I thought, first of all,

it's important to explain

how and when Africa was colonized.

You're probably aware that most of the African continent was

divided between the major European colonial powers at the

end of the nineteenth century

in a period that's normally referred to as the scramble for

Africa.

And that's quite an important

phrase or concept and one that's often reused today to

explain to what many think is happening to Africa again in

the twenty first century.

But the scramble for African colonists

was largely driven by

economic developments in Europe,

the industrialization of these Western European countries,

which meant that they were increasingly looking for new

sources of raw materials, new markets for their goods.

Before the the scramble itself took place in the last quarter

of the nineteenth century, there was an increasing

penetration of the African continent.

Clearly, some European countries such as Portugal established colonies,

many centuries before the the nineteenth century.

Britain's first colony is usually considered to be Sierra Leone,

which was established at the the beginning of the nineteenth century.

But throughout that throughout that century,

we see increasing penetration of the

continent by explorers, people like David Livingstone

missionary interests and societies,

I suppose a development of what later became seen as a kind

of civilizing mission,

an aim of Europeans to civilize what they consider to be a a

dark continent and an unchristian continent even

though Christianity had spread in Africa even before it

had spread to England.

And, of course, there was an increasing demand for European for African

products, things like,

palm oil, which is used for for soap and lubricants in Europe's factories,

ivory,

cocoa for things like chocolate.

So all of these factors drove

the major European powers headed by Britain and France to increasingly

wish to occupy parts of the of the African continent and

to to map it, to work out what was there, and so on.

An additional factor was the abolition

of human trafficking of slavery,

which took place in many European countries at the

beginning of the nineteenth century

and kind of paradoxically led to

more European intervention.

The British government, for example,

established an antislavery squadron,

which had one of its main ports in Sierra Leone and

which patrolled the entire Atlantic.

So there there are a number of factors which contributed towards

European greater European awareness about Africa,

greater penetration of the continent,

greater demand for the resources of the African

continent, and,

eventually, contention between the European powers to each grab their piece

of what one of them called this magnificent African cake.

And those rivalries, that contention what the contention

was, we could say, resolved or mediated by a

famous conference, which was held in Berlin

between eighteen eighty four and eighteen eighty five,

sometimes called the Berlin West African Conference,

where the major European powers were invited by the German

chancellor Bismarck to really establish

kind of rules as to how they were gonna divide up the

African continent. No Africans were invited, of course.

The European powers decided that

they had to have what they called effective occupation,

which essentially meant military occupation of the

continent in order to demonstrate that they possessed

this colony or that colony.

So those are the the kind of conditions, if we like, that

led to this partition.

Of course, the partition itself or the scrambler,

so it was a violent one.

Colonial rule was something which was imposed on Africa

by the major European powers through violence.

There are very few instances of Africans agreeing to be

occupied by European troops or European states.

It was a a violent imposition.

Sometimes African rulers were encouraged to sign treaties

so that European powers could establish what they called protectorate.

These are rather like the protection rackets that we see

in films about the the mafia and others.

The gangsters go to a a shopkeeper and say, right.

We're gonna come and protect you,

and you will pay us so much and so on.

In other words, it's purely in the interests of

those who are doing the protecting.

So the protectorate, which Britain, France, and others

imposed on Africa were of that type,

and they often forced

various rulers to sign completely bogus treaties,

usually in European languages,

which they didn't understand and so on.

However, this

invasion, this occupation of the African continent was always resisted.

It used to be written that,

there wasn't much opposition and all this kind of thing,

but it's now well established that there was,

major resistance,

armed resistance throughout the continent.

Some of that resistance,

if we think of examples that are more well known in Britain,

has become almost celebrated.

The resistance of the Zulu, for example, Zulu nation in South

Africa, of the the Mahdi, so called in

Sudan.

But there are many other examples that can one can give

of opposition of African states to military,

conquest.

The most notable of these were that of the Ethiopian

kingdom, which led by its emperor, Menelik,

inflicted a famous defeat on the invasion invading Italian

forces in eighteen ninety six at the Battle of Adore.

But there were numerous other,

battles and conflicts throughout the continent.

Some of them, in fact,

lasted even into the the twentieth century.

There was resistance in what became Libya into the nineteen

thirties, for example.

But generally speaking,

this African resistance to violent conquest was defeated.

There there are many reasons for that.

Very often, African states were

unable to to to unite against the invading European powers.

There were sometimes, or very often,

large African empires that had divisions within them,

which the European powers managed to,

to use for their own advantage.

Probably the major advantage which the European powers had

were were economic and technical or technological advances.

They had machine guns, the Gatling gun, the Maxim gun,

which, generally speaking, African

kingdoms, African states didn't have.

So that military superiority,

especially machine guns,

meant that the European powers were nearly always victorious,

in one way or another despite widespread African resistance.

So this is the

the nature of the scramble,

the partition of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century.

It's has a kind of global significance in the sense that

it contributed to the onset of the

first World War in nineteen fourteen.

It also gave rise to sort of new forms of racism,

the idea that Africa was a dark continent,

that it was being civilized by Europeans invading it,

that they were taking on what came to be called the white

man's burden, the idea they were doing

doing these things to bring,

civilization and commerce or to to train Africans for self

government by invading them and establishing colonial rule and so on.

Various ideas and justifications which were used

for this violent conquest,

but one which was clearly against the interests of

Africans and for the benefit of the European powers.