At the beginning of the 1880s, most of Africa was still independent.
European rule was still limited to the fringes
of the continent, and a few areas, such as Egypt, lower
Nigeria, Senegal, and Mozambique, were under various
forms of loose protectorate. But the trends were ominous,
as the pace of European penetration was accelerating and
the constraints that had limited European rapaciousness
were fast disappearing.
The scramble began in the mid-1880s, when several
European states engaged in what today would be called a
feeding frenzy to seize a piece of African territory before
the carcass had been picked clean. By 1900, virtually all
of the continent had been placed under one form or another
of European rule. The British had consolidated
their authority over the Nile valley and seized additional
territories in East Africa. The French retaliated by advancing
eastward from Senegal into the central Sahara,
where they eventually came eyeball to eyeball with the
British at Fashoda on the Nile. They also occupied the island
of Madagascar and other coastal territories in West
and Central Africa. In between, the Germans claimed
the hinterland opposite Zanzibar, as well as coastal strips
in West and Southwest Africa north of the Cape, and
King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the Congo.
What had happened to spark the sudden imperialist
hysteria that brought an end to African independence?
Economic interests in the narrow sense were not at stake
as they had been in South and Southeast Asia: the level
of trade between Europe and Africa was simply not
sufficient to justify the risks and the expense of conquest.
Clearly, one factor was the growing rivalry among imperialist
powers. European leaders might be provoked into
an imperialist takeover not by economic considerations
but by the fear that another state might do so, leaving
them at a disadvantage.
Another consideration might be called the “missionary
factor,” as European missionary interests lobbied with
their governments for a colonial takeover to facilitate
their efforts to convert the African population to Christianity.
In fact, considerable moral complacency was inherent
in the process. The concept of the “white man’s
burden” persuaded many that it was in the interests of the
African people to be introduced more rapidly to the
benefits of Western civilization. Even the highly respected
Scottish missionary David Livingstone had become
convinced that missionary work and economic development
had to go hand in hand, pleading to his fellow
Europeans to introduce the “three Cs” (Christianity,
commerce, and civilization) to the continent. How much
easier such a task would be if African peoples were under
benevolent European rule!
There were more prosaic reasons as well. Advances in
Western technology and European superiority in firearms
made it easier than ever for a small European force to defeat
superior numbers. Furthermore, life expectancy for
Europeans living in Africa had improved. With the discovery
that quinine (extracted from the bark of the cinchona
tree) could provide partial immunity from the ravages
of malaria, the mortality rate for Europeans living in
Africa dropped dramatically in the 1840s. By the end of
the century, European residents in tropical Africa faced
only slightly higher risks of death by disease than individuals
living in Europe.
As rivalry among competing powers heated up, a conference
was convened at Berlin in 1884 to avert war and
reduce tensions among European nations competing for
the spoils of Africa. It proved reasonably successful at
achieving the first objective but less so at the second.
During the next few years, African territories were annexed
without provoking a major confrontation between
Western powers, but in the late 1890s, Britain and France
reached the brink of conflict at Fashoda, a small town on
the Nile River in the Sudan. The French had been advancing
eastward across the Sahara with the transparent
objective of controlling the regions around the upper
Nile. In 1898, British and Egyptian troops seized the Sudan
and then marched southward to head off the French.
After a tense face-off between units of the two European
countries at Fashoda, the French government backed
down, and British authority over the area was secured.
Except for Djibouti, a tiny portion of the Somali coast,
the French were restricted to equatorial Africa.
World History
