The Scramble for Africa

M. E. Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317862543
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In 1870 barely one tenth of Africa was under European control. By 1914 only about one tenth – Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia – was not. This book offers a clear and concise account of the 'scramble' or 'race' for Africa, the period of around 20 years during which European powers carved up the continent with little or no consultation of its inhabitants.

In her classic overview, M.E. Chamberlain:

• Contrasts the Victorian image of Africa with what we now know of African civilisation and history
• Examines in detail case histories from Egypt to Zimbabwe
• Argues that the history and background of Africa are as important as European politics and diplomacy in understanding the 'scramble'
• Considers the historiography of the topic, taking into account Marxist and anti-Marxist, financial, economic, political and strategic theories of European imperialism

This indispensible introduction, now in a fully updated third edition, provides the most accessible survey of the 'scramble for Africa' currently available. The new edition includes primary source material unpublished elsewhere, new illustrations and additional pedagogical features. It is the perfect starting point for any study of this period in African history.

Part 1THE PROBLEM

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315833668-6

In 1870 barely one tenth of Africa was under European control. By 1914 only about one tenth – Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia – was not. Most of the partition of Africa, colloquially but accurately described as the ‘scramble’ or ‘grab’ for Africa, had taken place during a period of only six years, between the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–5 and a series of ‘tidying up’ agreements in 1890.

To the twenty-first century it seems almost incredible that a whole continent could have been carved up between the European Powers (some of them not even ‘Great Powers’) in this way, with little or no consultation of the inhabitants. To the nineteenth century, it seemed not only natural but inevitable. One explanation is obvious. Europe had undergone an industrial revolution and Africa had not. For the first time in history there was an enormous gap, economic, technological and military, between the two continents with the balance entirely in Europe's favour. The second explanation is less obvious but equally important – the mindset of the Europeans. Europeans were at the forefront of progress and civilisation; Africans ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’. Naturally, the Europeans would take over. This was sometimes justified by a debased form of ‘Social Darwinism’, which had little to do with what Charles Darwin had really argued about ‘natural selection’ in the animal world.

This mindset persisted into the second half of the twentieth century. Reputable scholars could write ‘For countless centuries, while all the pageant of history swept by, Africa remained unmoved in primitive savagery’ (Davidson, 1970: 20). A distinguished British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, could say in 1963, ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness … and darkness is not a subject of history’ (Trevor-Roper, 1963:871). In this they were echoing the opinions of their Victorian predecessors. The explorer Sir Samuel Baker told a Victorian audience in 1874:

Central Africa … is without a history. In that savage country … we find no vestiges of the past – no ancient architecture, neither sculpture, nor even a chiselled stone to prove that the Negro savage of this day is inferior to a remote ancestor…. We must therefore conclude that the races of man which now inhabit [this region] are unchanged from the prehistoric tribes who were the original inhabitants. (Quoted in Cairns, 1965: 86)

Negro: A difficult term as many now see it as offensive and prefer ‘Black’. The problem is that ‘Black’ has no precise meaning. Many people of mixed race and even some Asians call themselves ‘Black’. When Victorian anthropologists spoke of Negroes they meant quite specific peoples living in Africa, and their descendants in the Americas. In some contexts it is impossible to avoid.

The distinguished colonial administrator Sir Bartle Frere, with a wide experience of India, as well as of Africa, did not disagree, believing:

If you read the history of any part of the Negro population of Africa, you will find nothing but a dreary recurrence of tribal wars, and an absence of anything which forms a stable government, and year after year, generation after generation, century after century, these tribes go on obeying no law but that of force, and consequently never emerging from the state of barbarism in which we find them at present, and in which they have lived, so far as we know, for a period long anterior to our own. (Ibid.)

It seemed not only inevitable that the ‘Dark’ continent would be conquered and opened up by the enlightened Europeans but that it would be a positive blessing for its benighted inhabitants.

Even at the height of nineteenth-century imperialism, most Europeans were aware that in Asia, in India or China, European control was an episode in the life of those countries. It came after centuries, even millennia, of their own civilisations and most accepted that it would in turn end. No such consciousness pervaded their attitudes to Africa.

2The African background

DOI: 10.4324/9781315833668-7

Only in the 1960s did both Africans and Europeans begin to radically reassess their relationship. It was underpinned by an increasing interest in and understanding of African history, connected with the establishment of new universities in Africa where most European colonies were about to become independent, and with a new interest in such studies in British and American universities. It percolated surprisingly fast to the general public, particularly through the works of Basil Davidson, whose pioneering studies Old Africa Rediscovered and Black Mother were first published in 1959 and 1961 respectively. People began to realise that relations between Africa and Europe in the late nineteenth century were not the norm, but a strange anomaly. It slowly became apparent that historically Africa had supported societies and civilisations as colourful and sophisticated as those of Europe.

This was hidden from Europeans for a variety of reasons. Europeans were accustomed to study history through written records. For large parts of Africa no such records exist. Where they do exist, they are often in Arabic, and European scholars did not at first pay much attention to them. Only in recent years too have archaeological techniques, the use of oral traditions, and scientific anthropology became sufficiently developed to make possible the reconstruction of the history of societies which kept no written records. Another difficulty bedevilled the European understanding of Africa. Nineteenth-century Europe had become so used to seeing political power embodied in nation states that Europeans found it almost impossible to recognise any other form of political organisation, and came to regard the absence of identifiable states as proof of anarchy.

Even early explorers were impressed by some African art forms. African sculptures, carvings and textiles became known to Europeans at a time when the Romantic movement was taking the place of the eighteenth-century admiration for classical models, and from the beginning their strange and exotic forms attracted some interest. But the most important examples of African art became known to Europeans comparatively late. The beautiful bronzes and ivories of Benin were discovered in 1897 but they showed clear traces of Portuguese influence. The first of the magnificent bronzes of Ife, the earliest of which date from the thirteenth century and owe nothing to Europe, was not found until 1910 and the main collection did not come to light until 1938. Europeans stumbled upon the remains of Great Zimbabwe in 1868, but it was long supposed that they could not be the work of indigenous Africans and must be the relics of the Phoenicians who, it was surmised, had mined gold in what in colonial times was called Rhodesia. Radio-carbon tests have yielded dates between the fifth and fifteenth centuries and, combined with other archaeological evidence, leave no doubt that they were an African creation. The European reaction to the discovery of Zimbabwe was just one striking example of the generally held belief that the African had played a passive part in history, occasionally influenced by Phoenicians, Arabs or other outside peoples, but never himself creative.

Great Zimbabwe: Remarkable ruins in what became Southern Rhodesia. When they were discovered in 1868, Europeans could not believe that Africans could have built them and attributed them to the Phoenicians, but scientific archaeology has firmly attributed them to local African peoples. Post-independence Southern Rhodesia adopted the name, Zimbabwe.

This picture cannot be sustained in the face of later and more scientific investigations, but men act on the basis of what they believe to be true, and it is instructive to compare the Victorian ‘image of Africa’ with what painstaking, and still incomplete, enquiries have suggested is nearer to the truth. Archaeologists and palaeontologists in particular have centred much attention on Africa in recent years, for Africa may well have the longest human history of any of the continents. If Asia was the cradle of civilisation, as the word is commonly understood today, Africa was almost certainly the birthplace of man himself. In the words of one historian, ‘Africa was the mother of mankind’, the place where homo sapiens first emerged. In the Stone Age Africa was ‘not even relatively backward: it was in the lead’ (Oliver and Fage, 1990: 14).

Environmental Factors

The influence of climate on civilisations has fascinated both modern archaeologists and Victorian scientists. Modern archaeologists would accept that favourable climatic conditions helped the emergence of relatively advanced human groups in Africa. The continent did not suffer the ravages of the Ice Age as Europe and Asia did. Its history was influenced rather by alternating ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ periods during which the size of the Sahara desert varied greatly. In the nineteenth century it was fashionable in some quarters to suppose that climatic conditions were decisive in determining relative degrees of civilisation. Early anthropologists thought that all human society developed through three stages: savagery, characterised by hunting and food-gathering; barbarism, characterised by the emergence of settled agriculture; and civilisation, characterised by the development of commerce. To some Victorian observers Africa seemed to have got stuck in the second stage. They sought explanations for this and found it in the doctrine of ‘tropical abundance’. The very richness of Africa had helped the progression from the first stage to the second but then tended to stultify progress because a tolerable life could be obtained with comparatively little effort. Advanced civilisations only appeared in temperate regions where a high degree of organisation was necessary to ensure adequate food and shelter. The inhabitants of all tropical regions, not just Africa, were likely to remain in the stage of ‘barbarism’. This was often coupled with the stock charge that black people were naturally ‘lazy’ and always did the minimum of work. This seems to have arisen partly because the picture of the black man was drawn from the (often unfavourable) view that was held of the American slave, partly because of a failure on the part of early observers to appreciate the natural rhythms of work of any agrarian community.

Despite the gratuitous charge of laziness, it should be remembered that those who argued this way were essentially environmentalists, not racialists; that is to say, they contended that a particular combination of geographical and climatic factors had produced a particular, rather backward, society, not that the genetic endowment of the inhabitants would have caused them to fall behind the rest of mankind no matter how favourable their environment had been. Many modern commentators are perhaps not so far removed from this thesis as might appear at first. Few modern anthropologists or archaeologists would care to use the crude classification of ‘savagery, barbarism and civilisation’. ‘Barbarism’ is a loaded word (and a relative one: the great art historian Bernard Berenson could refer to Italian paintings of the thirteenth century as ‘barbaric’); it is plainly better avoided. But Victorian observers were attempting to describe what modern writers would prefer to call a ‘high’ or ‘mature’ Iron Age civilisation. For those who approached it from an environmental point of view, the outlook for the African was necessarily much more favourable than for the racialist. With Victorian confidence in the mastery of man over nature, they believed that the environment could be drastically changed.

Environment obviously did play a crucial role in the development of Africa. The Sahara desert was the great divide. The North African littoral looked towards Europe and the Near East. Despite links through the valley of the Nile and the routes across the Sahara itself, in historic times its development has been very different from that of Africa south of the Sahara. The savanna belt immediately south of the Sahara, or the highlands of East Africa, provided a quite different environment from that of the rain forests of West Africa or the Congo. In the extreme south of the continent were temperate lands which demanded a quite different form of economy from the tropical regions further north. Deserts and forests formed natural barriers to free communications in some parts of Africa. Africa was also unfortunate in having few easily navigable rivers. The presence of the tsetse fly over large areas of the continent precluded the use of draught animals and meant that goods had to be carried by human porters. All these factors were a severe check to rapid developments.

Geographical factors affected the very complex distribution of races in modern Africa. North of the Sahara the earliest known peoples were the ancestors of modern Berbers but, in historic times, there has been a considerable admixture of Arab blood. South of the Sahara the San and the Khoikhoi (who used to be called the Bushmen and the Hottentots respectively) are probably derived from the aboriginal stock – so far as that can be guessed at. The origin of the peoples who are today the most numerous race in Africa, whom the Victorians would have called the ‘Negro’, is not known with certainty, although it may well have been in the equatorial forests of West Africa. The term ‘Negro’ has fallen out of favour because it has been used in a derogatory sense, especially in America. But the preferred modern term ‘Black’ is not very satisfactory in this context because it is used much more widely than the Victorian anthropologists’ definition of the ‘true Negro’ in Africa. In northern and eastern Africa there was some immigration of other peoples from western Asia whom the Victorians referred to as ‘Hamitic’. The Victorians believed that these people were ‘white’ and so, by definition, superior to the ‘Negro’, which led to the theory that wherever a more advanced culture appeared in black Africa, it must be due to some infusion of ‘Hamitic’ blood. Modern anthropologists would dismiss the idea of the existence of any group which could be defined as ‘Hamitic’.

San: Modern term used to denote people known in the nineteenth century as the Bushmen.

Khoikhoi: (sometimes simply Khoi) Modern name for people previously called the Hottentots.

Hamitic peoples: Nineteenth-century anthropologists posited a race, lighter-skinned and more advanced than the African ‘Negro’, who were probably responsible for any signs of higher civilisation in Black Africa. Modern anthropologists do not believe any such race ever existed.

Linguistic divisions are sometimes more useful, and meaningful, than racial ones. The most widespread family of languages in Africa are the Bantu ones. Unfortunately, because of misuse, the term ‘Bantu’ is also offensive to many, but it is in origin a purely linguistic term. These languages are not always mutually intelligible but they clearly derive from some common original, as Spanish and Italian derive from Latin. Their original heartland has been variously placed in the Great Lakes region and in the Congo but as those who spoke them migrated southwards, they became dominant over most of Africa south of the Sahara. The most likely explanation of the beginning of this expansion is an improvement in food supplies consequent on the arrival of new crops – different kinds of bananas and yams – from Asia, about the beginning of the Christian era. Numbers increased rapidly and extensive movements of population followed. These movements, arising from developments within African societies, were to have significant consequences for Europeans when they first began to venture into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century, but the Europeans themselves were almost totally ignorant of them.

Bantu: In origins a linguistic term, denoting a related family of African languages. It fell into disrepute because of the derogatory way in which it was applied to those who spoke them during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Egypt

Nineteenth-century Europe knew that Africa had produced one of the great civilisations of the ancient world, that of Egypt, the longest lasting of all high civilisations, its history stretching from the fourth to the first millennium bc. Egypt derived some of its ideas and technology from western Asia, some from Black Africa to its south and perhaps some from a hypothetical ‘Saharan-Sudanese’ culture embracing a wide of variety of peoples and stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea during the ‘wet’ Makalian phase (c. 5500–2500 bc), when much of the Sahara was fertile. But essentially Egyptian civilisation was an indigenous product created in the Nile Valley at astonishing speed. Within a thousand years the Egyptians had developed a state characterised by divine kingship, a highly developed bureaucracy and a hardworking and skilled artisan force. Egypt's great age was over by the first millennium bc but for some centuries it formed part of what western Europe was later to think of as the classical world of Greece and Rome. Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century ad and by the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth. Egypt virtually disappeared from the gaze of Europe. Eighteenth-century Europe knew little about it. When Napoleo...