# data[].attributes.headline
MÁS INFORMACIÓN SOBRE LA LUCHA POR ÁFRICA

# data[].attributes.subject
MÁS INFORMACIÓN SOBRE LA LUCHA POR ÁFRICA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Scramble for Africa (1876-1914) was when European powers took over most of Africa in the late 1800s. By 1914 all of Africa was under white rule except for Ethiopia and Liberia. White rule in most places lasted till the 1960s. The European powers that took part: Britain France Portugal Germany Belgium Italy Spain As...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Scramble for Africa (1880 to 1900) was a period of rapid colonization of the African continent by European powers. But it wouldn't have happened except for the particular economic, social, and military evolution Europe was going through.

Before the Scramble for Africa: Europeans in Africa up to the 1880s

By the beginning of the 1880s, only a small part of Africa was under European rule, and that area was largely restricted to the coast and a short distance inland along major rivers such as the Niger and the Congo.

Britain had Freetown in Sierra Leone, forts along the coast of The Gambia, a presence at Lagos, the Gold Coast protectorate, and a fairly major set of colonies in Southern Africa (Cape Colony, Natal, and the Transvaal which it had annexed in 1877).

Southern Africa also had the independent Boer Oranje-Vrystaat (Orange Free State).

France had settlements at Dakar and St Louis in Senegal and had penetrated a fair distance up the river Senegal, the Assinie and Grand Bassam regions of Cote d'Ivoire, a protectorate over the coastal region of Dahomey (now Benin), and had begun colonization of Algeria as early as 1830.

Portugal had long established bases in Angola (first arriving in 1482, and subsequently retaking the port of Luanda from the Dutch in 1648) and Mozambique (first arriving in 1498 and creating trading posts by 1505).

Spain had small enclaves in northwest Africa at Ceuta and Melilla (África Septentrional Española or Spanish North Africa).

The Ottoman Turks controlled Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia (the strength of Ottoman rule varied greatly).

Causes of the Scramble for Africa

There were several factors which created the impetus for the Scramble for Africa, most of these were to do with events in Europe rather than in Africa.

End of the Slave Trade: Britain had had some success in halting the slave trade around the shores of Africa, but inland the story was different. Muslim traders from north of the Sahara and on the East Coast still traded inland, and many local chiefs were reluctant to give up the use of slaves. Reports of slaving trips and markets were brought back to Europe by various explorers, such as Livingstone, and abolitionists in Britain and Europe were calling for more to be done.

Exploration: During the 19th century, barely a year went by without a European expedition into Africa. The boom in exploration was triggered to a great extent by the creation of the African Association by wealthy Englishmen in 1788, who wanted someone to 'find' the fabled city of Timbuktu and the course of the Niger River. As the century moved on, the goal of the European explorer changed, and rather than traveling out of pure curiosity they started to record details of markets, goods, and resources for the wealthy philanthropists who financed their trips.

Henry Morton Stanley: This naturalized American (born in Wales) was the explorer most closely connected to the start of the Scramble for Africa. Stanley had crossed the continent and located the 'missing' Livingstone, but he is more infamously known for his explorations on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold hired Stanley to obtain treaties with local chieftains along the course of the River Congo with an eye to creating his own colony. Belgium was not in a financial position to fund a colony at that time. Stanley's work triggered a rush of European explorers, such as Carl Peters, to do the same for various European countries.

Capitalism: The end of European trading in slaves left a need for commerce between Europe and Africa. Capitalists may have seen the light over slavery, but they still wanted to exploit the continent. New 'legitimate' trade would be encouraged. Explorers located vast reserves of raw materials, they plotted the course of trade routes, navigated rivers, and identified population centers which could be a market for manufactured goods from Europe. It was a time of plantations and cash crops, dedicating the region's workforce to producing rubber, coffee, sugar, palm oil, timber, etc for Europe. And all the more enticing if a colony could be set up which gave the European nation a monopoly.

Steam Engines and Iron Hulled Boats: In 1840 the Nemesis arrived at Macao, south China. It changed the face of international relations between Europe and the rest of the world. The Nemesis had a shallow draft (five feet), a hull of iron, and two powerful steam engines. It could navigate the non-tidal sections of rivers, allowing access inland, and it was heavily armed. Livingstone used a steamer to travel up the Zambezi in 1858, and had the parts transported overland to Lake Nyassa. Steamers also allowed Henry Morton Stanley and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza to explore the Congo.

Quinine and Medical Advances: Africa, especially the western regions, was known as the 'White Man's Grave' because of the danger of two diseases: malaria and yellow fever. During the 18th century only one in 10 Europeans sent out to the continent by the Royal African Company survived. Six of the 10 would have died in their first year. In 1817 two French scientists, Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, extracted quinine from the bark of the South American cinchona tree. It proved to be the solution to malaria; Europeans could now survive the ravages of the disease in Africa. Unfortunately yellow fever continued to be a problem, and even today there is no specific treatment for the disease.

Politics: After the creation of a unified Germany (1871) and Italy (a longer process, but its capital relocated to Rome also in 1871) there was no room left in Europe for expansion. Britain, France and Germany were in an intricate political dance, trying to maintain their dominance, and an empire would secure it. France, which had lost two provinces to Germany in 1870 looked to Africa to gain more territory. Britain looked towards Egypt and the control of the Suez Canal as well as pursuing territory in gold rich southern Africa. Germany, under the expert management of Chancellor Bismarck, had come late to the idea of overseas colonies, but was now fully convinced of their worth. It would need some mechanism to be put in place to stop overt conflict over the coming land grab.

Military Innovation: At the beginning of the 19th century, Europe was only marginally ahead of Africa in terms of available weapons as traders had long supplied them to local chiefs and many had stockpiles of guns and gunpowder. But two innovations gave Europe a massive advantage. In the late 1860s percussion caps were being incorporated into cartridges. What previously came as a separate bullet, powder and wadding, was now a single entity, easily transported and relatively weather proof. The second innovation was the breach loading rifle. Older model muskets, held by most Africans, were front loaders, which were slow to use (maximum of three rounds per minute) and had to be loaded whilst standing. Breach loading guns, in comparison, had between two to four times the rate of fire, and could be loaded even in a prone position. Europeans, with an eye to colonization and conquest, restricted the sale of the new weaponry to Africa maintaining military superiority.

The Mad Rush Into Africa in the Early 1880s

Within just 20 years the political face of Africa had changed, with only Liberia (a colony run by ex- African-American slaves) and Ethiopia remaining free of European control. The start of the 1880s saw a rapid increase in European nations claiming territory in Africa:

In 1880 the region to the north of the river Congo became a French protectorate following a treaty between the King of the Bateke, Makoko, and the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza.

In 1881 Tunisia became a French protectorate and the Transvaal regained its independence.

In 1882 Britain occupied Egypt (France pulled out of joint occupation), Italy begins colonization of Eritrea.

In 1884 British and French Somaliland created.

In 1884 German South West Africa, Cameroon, German East Africa, and Togo created, Río de Oro claimed by Spain.

Europeans Set the Rules for Dividing Up the Continent

The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 (and the resultant General Act of the Conference at Berlin) laid down ground rules for the further partitioning of Africa. Navigation on the Niger and Congo rivers was to be free to all, and to declare a protectorate over a region the European colonizer must show effective occupancy and develop a 'sphere of influence'.

The floodgates of European colonization had opened.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Scramble for Africa (1880 to 1900) was a period of rapid colonization of the African continent by European powers. But it wouldn't have happened except for the particular economic, social, and military evolution Europe was going through.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Europeans called Africa the 'Dark Continent' because it was unknown to them. This got mixed up with the more sinister idea of 'Darkest Africa' a place where the inhabitants were savage and brutal. Europeans, after the industrial revolution, considered industrial towns and technology to be signs of civilisation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
British interests

Britain was primarily concerned with maintaining its lines of communication with India, hence its interest in Egypt and South Africa. But once these two areas were secure, imperialist adventurers like Cecil Rhodes encouraged the acquisition of further territory with the intention of establishing a Cape-to-Cairo railway.

Britain was also interested in the commercial potential of mineral-rich territories like the Transvaal, where gold was discovered in the mid-1880s, and in preventing other European powers, particularly Germany and France, from muscling into areas they considered within their 'sphere of influence'.

As a result, during the last 20 years of the 19th century, Britain occupied or annexed Egypt, the Sudan, British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), British Somaliland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe and Zambia), Bechuanaland (Botswana), Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South Africa), Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, British Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nyasaland (Malawi). These countries accounted for more than 30% of Africa's population.

The other chief colonisers were France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Germany had only been unified in 1871 and so was a late starter in imperial terms. Its first acquisition in 1884 was German South-West Africa (Namibia), which at the time was peopled by two semi-nomadic tribes, the Herero of the arid central plateau and the Nama of the still more arid steppes to the south.

When the two tribes went to war over cattle grazing, German traders and missionaries persuaded their government to intervene and fill the political vacuum.

A later Herero rebellion in 1904, provoked by the brutality of the German settlers, was put down by General Lothar von Trotha with savage efficiency, and tens of thousands of Herero men, women and children fell victim to his infamous ' Vernichtungsbefehl' (extermination order).

'Spirit of Berlin'

The philanthropic 'spirit of Berlin', however, was not entirely hollow. Once it became known that slavery was alive and well in the Congo, which was run as a personal fiefdom of Leopold, King of Belgium, an international anti-slavery conference was held in Brussels in 1889-1890.

The man who exposed the existence of slavery in Leopold's Congo was a French missionary to Africa called Cardinal Charles Lavigerie. During a sermon at St Sulpice in Paris in 1888, Lavigerie had shocked his audience by describing the horrors of the Congo slave trade: villages surrounded and burnt; men captured and yoked together; women and children penned like cattle in the slave markets.

The upshot of the Brussels conference was that Leopold cynically agreed to stamp out Arab slavery in return for the right to tax imports. He thereby overturned one of the key resolutions of the Act of Berlin, which had guaranteed free trade for the region.

But while Leopold made all the right noises, his agents in the Congo used forced labour (slaves in all but name) to extract rubber, his single most profitable export. By 1902, rubber sales had risen 15 times in eight years, and were valued at 41 million francs (£1.64 million).

By taking the women of Congolese villages hostage, Leopold had turned the men into forced labourers, with a monthly quota of wild rubber to collect from the rain forest. The system was harsh. Many hostages starved to death and many male forced labourers were worked to death.

More people were killed as rebellions were brutally crushed. Demographers today estimate that the population of the Congo fell roughly by half over the 40-year period beginning in around 1880.

The truth behind the Congo's rubber trade - 'legalised robbery enforced by violence' - was finally exposed by Edmond Morel, an Anglo-French ex-shipping clerk, who wrote a series of accusatory articles in 'The Speaker' in 1900.

By arguing that Leopold's illegal state monopoly was robbing British merchants as well as African peasants, Morel was able to enlist the support of both businessmen and humanitarians. A British consul, Roger Casement, was sent to investigate, and the publication of his damning report in 1904 was, for Leopold, the beginning of the end.

In 1908, in return for £3.8 million, Leopold handed over control of the Congo to the Belgian state. But even then, the forced labour system continued. It took a different form during World War One, when tens of thousands of Congolese were conscripted as porters for the Belgian army.

The forced labour system significantly changed only in the early 1920s, when Belgian colonial authorities realised the population was dropping so rapidly that they soon might have no labour force left.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Britain was primarily concerned with maintaining its lines of communication with India, hence its interest in Egypt and South Africa. But once these two areas were secure, imperialist adventurers like Cecil Rhodes encouraged the acquisition of further territory with the intention of establishing a Cape-to-Cairo railway.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ancient Africa for Kids: Boers of South Africa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the history of the Dutch Boers of South Africa including the Great Trek, British rule, the Boer Wars, concentration camps, and interesting facts.

# data[].attributes.headline
INFORMACIÓN ENCICLOPÉDICA SOBRE LA COLONIZACIÓN DE ÁFRICA

# data[].attributes.subject
INFORMACIÓN ENCICLOPÉDICA SOBRE LA COLONIZACIÓN DE ÁFRICA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kids.Net.Au - Encyclopedia > Colonization of Africa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids.Net.Au - Encyclopedia > Colonization of Africa