The Scramble for Africa: Conquest, Resistance and the Congo Free State

A continent claimed in a generation

Around 1875, most of Africa was governed by African states and societies: kingdoms such as Asante, Buganda and Ethiopia, Islamic states such as the Sokoto Caliphate, and many smaller communities. European powers held mostly coastal trading posts, plus French Algeria (invaded from 1830) and colonies in the far south. Within about forty years, almost the whole continent was under European rule. Only Ethiopia and Liberia stayed independent. Historians call this the Scramble for Africa.

Why? Motives

• Economic: industrial Europe wanted raw materials such as rubber, palm oil, cotton, cocoa and copper; the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886) in southern Africa set off a rush; investors wanted profits and new markets.
• Political and strategic: rivalry among the powers. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Britain saw Egypt as vital to its route to India and occupied it in 1882. A newly united Germany and Italy wanted colonies as signs of great-power status.
• Ideological: many Europeans believed in a "civilizing mission", the claim that they had a duty to bring Christianity, "commerce and civilization" to Africa. This rested on racism, including Social Darwinism. Ironically, Europeans also claimed to be fighting the slave trade inside Africa, decades after profiting from the Atlantic slave trade.

How? Means

Earlier, disease and African military strength had kept Europeans on the coasts. By the 1870s, quinine reduced deaths from malaria, steamboats went up rivers, railways and the telegraph moved troops and orders, and new weapons, from breech-loading rifles to the Maxim machine gun, gave colonial armies huge firepower. The British writer Hilaire Belloc captured the attitude in a satirical poem of 1898: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not."

The Berlin Conference (1884–1885)

German Chancellor Bismarck hosted a conference in Berlin to manage rivalry. Delegates from European states, the United States and the Ottoman Empire attended. No Africans were invited. The conference agreed that a power claiming African coastline had to notify the others and show "effective occupation", and it called for free trade on the Congo and Niger rivers. It also recognized King Leopold II of Belgium's claim to a huge area of the Congo basin.

The conference did not draw most of Africa's borders by itself, but it set rules that sped up the race. Over the next years, borders were drawn in European capitals, often with straight lines that cut through African societies and joined rivals together.

Forms of colonial rule

• Direct rule (often French): European officials ran the colony, with the goal of assimilation for a small educated elite.
• Indirect rule (often British, as in Northern Nigeria): rule through chiefs and emirs who kept some authority but served colonial interests.
• Company rule: private companies, such as Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, governed territory for profit.
• Settler colonies: in Algeria and southern Africa, Europeans took the best land and pushed Africans into labour or reserves.

Across all of them, Africans paid new taxes (often to force them into wage work), lost land, and were made to grow cash crops for export.

African resistance

Africans resisted in many ways: diplomacy, war, flight, religious movements and everyday non-cooperation.

• Ethiopia: Emperor Menelik II bought modern rifles, built a strong army and, at the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896, crushed an Italian invasion. Ethiopia stayed independent, and Adwa became a symbol of African pride.
• Zulu kingdom: at Isandlwana in January 1879, Zulu forces defeated a British column, one of the worst defeats of a British army by an Indigenous force. Britain still conquered the kingdom later that year.
• Samori Touré built a powerful state in West Africa and fought the French for well over a decade, using modern rifles and a moving army, until his capture in 1898.
• Sudan: the Islamic movement of the Mahdi drove out the Anglo-Egyptian government and took Khartoum in 1885. In 1898, at Omdurman, a British-led army with machine guns killed thousands of Sudanese fighters while losing only dozens of its own men.
• Asante fought several wars with Britain; in 1900, the queen mother Yaa Asantewaa led a major uprising.

Most armed resistance was eventually defeated by superior weapons, but it shaped how colonial rule worked and inspired later independence movements.

The Congo Free State (1885–1908)

The Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony at first. It was the personal possession of King Leopold II, who claimed he would bring humanitarian aid and end the slave trade. Instead he turned it into a system of forced extraction, first of ivory and then of wild rubber, in high demand for bicycle and car tyres.

Agents and concession companies set quotas for rubber. The state's army, the Force Publique, enforced them by taking hostages, burning villages, and brutal punishments, including mutilation. Combined with famine, disease and people fleeing, the system caused a catastrophic loss of life. Historians agree that millions of people died, but because no reliable census was taken, estimates vary widely, from a few million to as many as ten million.

The crimes were exposed by many people: the African American historian George Washington Williams, who wrote an open letter to Leopold in 1890; African American missionary William Sheppard; the British journalist E. D. Morel, who noticed that ships brought rubber from the Congo to Belgium but carried back mainly guns and ammunition rather than trade goods; and British consul Roger Casement, whose 1904 report documented abuses. The international Congo Reform Association campaigned until the Belgian state took over the colony in 1908. Forced labour continued under Belgian rule. The Congo Free State is a key case in the history of human rights campaigns.