14.5: Africa

While India was the most important and lucrative part of the British Empire, the conquest of Africa by the European powers stands as the highpoint of the new imperialism as a whole. Africa represents about a quarter of the land area of the entire world. In the 1880s, it had about one-fifth of the world’s population, with over 700 distinct societies and peoples. Europeans knew so little about the African interior that maps generally displayed huge blank spots until well into the 1880s. Likewise, as of 1850, Europeans only controlled small territories on the coasts. The most substantial European holdings consisted of Algeria, seized by France in the 1830s, and South Africa, split between British control and two territories held by the descendants of the first Dutch settlers, the Boers. The rest of the continent was almost completely free of European dominance (although the Portuguese did maintain sparsely populated colonies in two areas).

Towards the end of the 19th century, that all changed. In 1876, roughly 10% of Africa was under European control. By 1900, the figure was roughly 90%. The search for profits, raw materials, the ongoing power struggle between the great powers, and the "civilizing mission," reached their collective zenith in Africa. The sheer speed of the conquest is summed up in the phrase “the Scramble for Africa.”

In 1884, Otto Von Bismarck organized the Berlin Conference to determine what was to be done with a huge territory in central Africa called the Congo, which had fallen under the domination of Belgium. Representatives of the European states, joined by the United States and the Ottoman Empire, divided up Africa into spheres of influence and conquest. No Africans were present at the meeting. Instead, the Europeans agreed on trade between their respective territories and stipulated which (European) country was to get which piece of Africa. The impetus behind the seizure of Africa had much more to do with international tension than practical economics – there were certainly profits to be had in Africa, but no European knew for sure what those resources were or where they were to be found. Thus, in a collective land grab, European states emerged from the Conference intent on taking over an entire continent.

The Berlin Conference was the opening of the Scramble for Africa itself, the explosion of European land-grabs in the African continent. In some territories, notably French North Africa and parts of British West Africa, while colonial administrations were both racist and enormously secure in their own cultural dominance, they usually did embark on building at least some modern infrastructure and establishing educational institutions open to the “natives”. However, as in the Raj, Europeans jealously guarded their own authority. In other regions, however, colonization was equivalent to genocide.

An example of human devastation occurred in the Congo. In 1876, Belgium King Leopold II created a colony under the guise of exploration and philanthropy. He claimed that his purpose was to protect the people of the region from the ravages of the slave trade. His acquisition was larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined; it was eighty times larger than Belgium itself. The Berlin Conference’s official purpose was authorizing Leopold’s already-existing control of the Congo. At the Conference, the European powers declared the territory to be the “Congo Free State,” essentially a royal fiefdom ruled, and owned, by Leopold directly, not by the government of Belgium.

Leopold's real purpose was personal enrichment for himself and a handful of cronies. His methods of coercing African labor were atrocious: raids, floggings, hostages, destruction of villages and fields, and murder and mutilation. Belgian agents would enter a village and take women and children hostage, ordering men to go into the jungle and harvest a certain amount of rubber. If they failed to reach the rubber quota in time, or sometimes even if they did, the agents would retaliate against the children and women of the village. Sometimes, the entire village would be killed. The development of infrastructure was limited to the business of extracting ivory and rubber. In a period of 25 years, the population of the region was cut in half. In 1908, after public outcry and decades of dangerous and incredibly brave work by a few journalists, the Belgian Parliament stripped Leopold of the colony – it then took over direct administration.

Figure 6.4.1: Map of Africa during the "Scramble" era. (Click here for a large image.)

One comparable example was the treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples of southwest Africa by the German army from 1904 - 1905. When the Herero resisted the German takeover, they were systematically rounded up and left in concentration camps to starve. When survivors were stalked across the desert by the German army, the Germans poisoned or sealed wells and water holes. Shortly afterward, when the Nama rose up, they too were exterminated. In the end, over two-thirds of the Herero and Nama were murdered.