Roland Oliver

The European Scramble and Conquest in African History

African history has been too much dominated by blanket terms, generalisations which prompt comparisons rather than contrasts. African authorities lost the race for power and, as they did so, became increasingly divided. Europeans accumulated power, but were not much less divided over how to convert it into authority. In the mid-1880s the first scramble for Africa took up a number of threads of African history. Western Africa was divided between two contrasted frontiers of trade and belief. The savanna states of the Sudan, recently revolutionised by Islam, were orientated to internal trade and the northern outlets over the Sahara. An examination of these frontiers of change can help to illuminate the wide variety of the African experience of colonial conquest. Robinson and Gallaghers earlier explanation was continental in scale and attracted attention because they took changes in Europe and in Africa equally seriously. The mass of Africans were still more unwilling to play their part in the scheme of reconstruction.

King Leopold's Congo, 1886–1908

The Congo Independent State, under the personal government of King Leopold, lasted from 1885 to 1908. In the first years of existence of the Congo State, when only a tiny part of the territory of the state was occupied, Leopold tried to extend his frontiers in all directions. In the early years the prosperity of the administration depended on the relations between the administrator and the local African authorities, including the balance of physical power. Districts in turn were sub-divided into posts, of which there were 183 by 1900. The grass roots organisation was provided by the 1891 decree on chiefs. These were appointed by the administration as an area came under occupation. At first the growth of the Congo State was accompanied by the development of traditional commercial companies. The Congo State was anxious to promote agriculture, but its economic policies in effect prevented this.

The European Partition of Africa: Origins and Dynamics

In 1879 the French launched in the Senegal hinterland the first deliberate European attempt to create a large territorial empire in tropical Africa. Until the 1870s, Africa as a whole had been a purely geographical concept, of no practical relevance to the European politicians and merchants concerned with the continent. Advances or acquisitions in Africa undertaken primarily to secure a diplomatic advantage in Europe are not however quite unknown. The most striking is the Anglo-Egyptian advance into the Sudan in March 1896. For the French, the one redeeming feature of British informal empire was its purely de facto existence, devoid of legal warrant and therefore instantly vulnerable should the power-balance ever tilt in favour of France. Until the mid-1890s the European scramble had surprisingly little effect upon Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries in South Africa. After the collapse of the Anglo-Congolese Agreement, Rosebery attempted to negotiate an upper Nile settlement directly with Paris.

Angola and Mozambique, 1870–1905

The inception of the scramble for Africa obliged Portugal to act on what had been an established ideal for many centuries. Whereas their contemporaries in other European countries had eschewed the acquisition of territory, many Portuguese had envisaged the ultimate conquest and consolidation of the territories in the hinterland of their coastal settlements in Angola and Mozambique. The restructuring of African societies mirrored the economic transformation which Angola had undergone during the nineteenth century. The Berlin Conference had resolved the issue of the Congo mouth, but failed to delimit frontiers between Leopolds Independent State and Angola. The aggressive spirit which emerged from the defeat of Gungunyana was largely responsible for a Portuguese attempt to bring northern Mozambique under control. Events in Mozambique after the financial crisis followed a course similar to that in Angola. The advent of colonial rule in Mozambique did not produce many changes in the colonial social structure.

Southern Africa, 1867–1886

In 1870, the political economy of Southern Africa was characterised by tremendous regional diversity. The discovery and subsequent mining of diamonds and gold in southern Africa in the 1870s and 1880s was not fortuitous. Africans in southern Africa had prospected for and exploited the gold, copper and iron of the sub-continent since the first millennium AD By the mid-nineteenth century, European explorers were aware that minerals existed in abundance in the Transvaal and adjacent territories. A major justification for confederation and the annexation of the Transvaal had been the danger of a black-white confrontation in South Africa. Both Cetshwayo and Lobengula, king of the Ndebele kingdom north of the Limpopo, feared that Christianity and its new mores would undermine their authority. For people south of the Zambezi, and to some extent even for the Lozi to the north-west, the crucial issue in these years was increasingly what strategy to adopt towards the intruders from the south.

French Congo and Gabon 1886–1905

In 1885 the European opening up of Gabon and Congo had only just begun. The intervention of metropolitan France in the archaic and brutal form of the regime concessionnaire copied from the Leopoldian model, soon resulted in the upsetting of the fragile pre-colonial balance. Social and political disintegration took place rapidly following the operations of the conquest, and the rapid proliferation of European commercial enterprises had disrupted the main traditional trade routes. The idea of an economic conquest based on the opening up of great penetration routes with the aim of linking the mouth of the Congo to Upper Egypt across Africa went back to Brazza. Given the dreadful state of the finances of the colony, the apparent success of the Leopoldian system after 1896 made the decision inevitable. The military expeditions to Chad swallowed the entire budget. The development of the colony demanded a considerable investment in men and in capital and every kind of infrastructure.

Africa on the Eve of Partition

This chapter reviews the state of the Africa on the eve of partition, roughly over the decade of the 1870s. The situation of Egypt and the Maghrib countries and their response to European influence and interference, and to modernisation in general, varied considerably at the beginning of the period. In the remarkably uniform ecological zones of West Africa the patterns of economic production and trade on the one hand, and political development on the other, had by the 1870s undergone a century or more of rapid change. South of the equator farming populations only started to build up their numbers within the Iron Age. In the 186os the boundaries of the Portuguese colony of Angola were receding and its economy was passing through a deep recession. Widespread ideological and cultural changes had taken place as a result of African experiences of the Muslim Near East and Christian Europe.