The Scramble for Africa

For most of the nineteenth century, Europeans knew the coasts of Africa but little of the vast interior. They traded along the shore — in gold, ivory and, for centuries, in human beings — yet the great rivers, forests and grasslands inland remained, to them, a blank space on the map. Then, in a single generation, that changed with astonishing speed. From around 1881 to 1914, in a rush historians later called "the Scramble for Africa," a handful of European powers seized almost the entire continent. By 1914, of all the lands of Africa, only two — Ethiopia and Liberia — remained independent.

Several things made it possible at once. New medicines such as quinine let Europeans survive deep inland, where disease had once killed them. The railway and the steamship could carry soldiers and goods across enormous distances. And one invention above all tilted the balance: the machine gun, which could cut down a charge in seconds and gave small European forces a terrible advantage over far larger armies. What they wanted was not only land but also wealth — the raw materials their factories craved, new markets for their goods, strategic ports, and the simple prestige of painting more of the map in their nation's colour than a rival did.

As rival flags spread across Africa, the European powers grew nervous that their competition might lead to war among themselves. So in the winter of 1884 to 1885 they met around a table in Berlin, the German capital, at a conference hosted by the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. There, representatives of Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy and others agreed on rules — not for the African peoples, but for one another: how a power could claim a region, and how it should notify its rivals so that the carve-up stayed orderly and peaceful between Europeans.

One detail tells the whole story. Among all the maps and the careful talk in Berlin, not a single African was present. The borders that would shape the lives of millions were drawn by strangers who had often never seen the land they were dividing. Lines were ruled straight across deserts and rivers with no regard for the peoples who lived there — splitting a single community between two empires, or forcing rival groups together inside one. The same conference handed an enormous region around the Congo River not to a nation at all, but to one man: King Leopold II of Belgium, who would rule it as his private possession.

Behind the tidy lines on the map lay a heavy human price. The European powers came to exploit Africa's wealth — its rubber, ivory, gold and diamonds — and the demand for labour fell on the people of the continent. Nowhere was the cruelty plainer than in the Congo Free State, the vast land Leopold ruled in person. There, men, women and children were forced to gather wild rubber to fill the king's quotas. Those who failed faced savage punishment, and the suffering was on a scale that horrified even other Europeans once the truth began to reach the wider world. Leopold, who never set foot in the Congo, grew immensely rich from it.

Yet it would be wrong to picture the peoples of Africa only as victims. Across the continent, many societies fought back hard. There was resistance everywhere — in long wars, in raids, in the quiet refusal to obey. Some kingdoms held the newcomers off for years. The Africans whose lands were being signed away were neither asked nor consulted; a local ruler faced with a treaty he barely understood could either sign it or face the guns. Many chose to fight rather than submit, and their resistance is as much a part of this story as the conquest itself.

One resistance stands above the rest. In 1896, Italy invaded Ethiopia, expecting an easy conquest. Instead, the Ethiopian emperor Menelik II raised a huge, well-armed army and met the invaders at the Battle of Adwa. There the Ethiopians did not merely resist — they defeated a European power decisively, in open battle. Italy was forced to recognise Ethiopia's independence, and Adwa became a symbol across Africa and beyond: proof that the partition was neither natural nor inevitable, and that a European empire could be beaten. Ethiopia kept its freedom, and together with Liberia it remained one of the only two African lands never colonised in this period.

By 1914 the map of Africa was almost entirely coloured in European shades. The Scramble was over, but its legacy was only beginning. When African nations finally won their independence in the decades after the Second World War, most inherited the very borders the Europeans had drawn — those straight lines through deserts and across peoples. Many of the national boundaries on the map of Africa today come directly from those European pencils. The men in Berlin have long since died, but the lines they ruled across a continent they did not know still shape the lives of hundreds of millions of people.