The Scramble of Africa

Chapter 2: The Scramble for Africa.

It was the conquest of Africa by the European powers that stands as the highpoint of the new imperialism. Africa represents about a quarter of the land area of the entire world, and as of the 1880s it had about one- fifth of the world's population. Europeans only controlled small territories on the coasts. The rest of the continent was almost completely free of European dominance.

That changed because of the technological changes discussed above. All the factors of the search for profits, of raw materials, of the ongoing power struggle between the great powers, and of the "civilizing mission," reached in Africa.

At the Congress, the representatives of the European states 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 Berlin Conference was the opening salvo of the Scramble for Africa itself, the explosion of European land-grabs in the African continent. In others colonization was equivalent to genocide.

Among the worst cases was that of Belgium. King Leopold II created a colony in the Congo in 1876 under the guise of exploration and philanthropy, claiming 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.

Leopold's real purpose was personal enrichment for himself, and his methods of African labour were atrocious: raids, floggings, hostages, destruction of villages and fields, and murder and mutilation. No attempt was made to develop the country in any way that did not bear directly on the business of extracting ivory and rubber. It took until 1908 for public outcry to prompt the Belgian Parliament to strip Leopold of the colony.

One comparable example was the treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples by the German army over the course of 1904-1905. When the Herero resisted, they were systematically rounded up and left in concentration camps to starve by the German army.

Effects

Almost without exception, the economics of imperialism can be described as "plunder economies." First, colonial regimes expropriated the land from the people who lived there. Second, colonial regimes expropriated raw materials like rubber, generally shipped back to Europe to be turned into finished products. Third, colonial regimes exploited native labour. In addition to the forms of labour exploitation, European powers imposed "borders" where none had existed, both splitting up existing kingdoms, tribes, and cultures. Sometimes European powers favoured certain local groups over others in order to better maintain control. Thus, the effects of imperialism lasted long after former colonies achieved their independence in the twentieth century, since almost all of them were left with the borders originally created by the imperialists.

Conclusion

It is easy to focus on the technologies behind the new imperialism, to marvel at its speed, and to consider the vast breadth of European empires while overlooking what lay behind it all: violence. The cases

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