R1.5 European imperialism and the partition of Africa (circa 1840–1920)

Between about 1840 and 1920 almost the whole of Africa came under European rule. In 1870 European states held only scattered coastal colonies and French Algeria; by 1914 seven European powers had divided the continent between them, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent. This partition shaped the borders, economies and politics of modern Africa, and the ways in which African societies resisted, negotiated with or adapted to it remain central to how Africans remember their past.

The timeline of 1830–1920 shows the three phases used to organise the study: a long period of growing but limited European activity, two decades of rapid claims and conquest after about 1880, and a final phase in which conquest was completed, resistance was crushed or contained, and the First World War transferred Germany’s colonies to its rivals.

Africa and Europe around 1840

In 1840 Africa was a continent of independent states and societies. In the west the Sokoto Caliphate, founded in a reform jihad after 1804, ruled much of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Asante kingdom controlled the forest zone of modern Ghana. In the south the Zulu kingdom dominated the land between the Drakensberg and the sea; in the east Buganda was the strongest state around Lake Victoria; Ethiopia was still divided among regional lords, a period that ended with the reign of Tewodros II from 1855; and Egypt under Muhammad Ali (ruled 1805–1848) had built an army strong enough to defeat the Ottoman sultan’s forces in 1839. The internal history of these states is the subject of a separate regional study; here they matter as the powers that Europeans had to deal with.

European possessions were small and almost all coastal. Most had been built for the Atlantic slave trade, which Britain abolished for its own subjects in 1807 and then tried to suppress with naval patrols off West Africa. The table of European footholds lists the main ones.

Even this list overstates European power. Away from the coast, European traders depended on African rulers and merchants, who controlled the routes, set prices and could close markets. A British official on the Gold Coast or a French governor in Senegal could not move far inland without African consent.

The growth of European activity in Africa, c. 1840–1880

Between 1840 and 1880 Europeans became more active in Africa in four main ways: through the weakening of Ottoman power in North Africa, through expanding trade, through exploration and missions, and through new technology that made the interior accessible. Most of this activity did not involve formal rule. Historians call this kind of influence informal empire: control exercised through trade, debt, treaties and gunboats rather than through annexation.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa

In 1840 the North African coast from Egypt to Algeria was, in name, part of the Ottoman Empire. In practice Ottoman authority was weak. Egypt was ruled by Muhammad Ali and his heirs, Tunisia by its own beys, and Algeria, until 1830, by its deys. The Ottoman government in Istanbul could not defend these provinces against European pressure, and the weaker it grew, the more European powers saw them as open to intervention. The Ottoman Empire’s own crisis is studied separately; here its decline matters as an opportunity for European expansion.

Algeria

France invaded Algiers in June 1830. The pretext was a diplomatic insult (the dey had struck the French consul with a fly-whisk in 1827), but the restored Bourbon king, Charles X, also hoped a military success would strengthen his unpopular government. The conquest of the interior took decades. Abd al-Qadir, a religious and military leader, united many Arab and Berber groups in a jihad against the French from 1832 and built a state with its own taxes, workshops and standing army. French forces under General Bugeaud defeated him with mobile columns that destroyed crops, villages and livestock, and he surrendered in December 1847.

Algeria became France’s largest colony and a colony of settlement. European settlers (colons) took the best land, and by the early 1870s there were about a quarter of a million of them. Algeria showed both that conquest in Africa was possible and how costly and violent it could be: Abd al-Qadir held out for fifteen years against an army that at its peak numbered over 100,000 men.

Egypt, the Suez Canal and debt

Egypt was the richest and most strategically important of the Ottoman provinces. Muhammad Ali built a modern army and cotton economy, and his successors made Egypt part of the world economy. The opening of the Suez Canal on 17 November 1869, built by a French company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, cut the sea journey from Britain to India by thousands of miles and made Egypt vital to British imperial strategy.

The vertical timeline of Egypt from 1854 to 1882 shows how European control came through finance. Khedive Ismail (ruled 1863–1879) borrowed heavily in Europe to pay for railways, irrigation, the canal and wars in Sudan, often on ruinous terms. When cotton prices fell after the American Civil War, Egypt could not pay. In November 1875 the British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, bought Ismail’s shares in the canal company for £4 million. In April 1876 Egypt suspended payments on a foreign debt that historians estimate at between about £70 million and £90 million (the totals vary with what is counted), and its creditors imposed the Caisse de la Dette Publique, an international debt commission, and then the Dual Control, under which a British and a French controller supervised Egypt’s revenue and spending.

Foreign control of taxation provoked resistance. In the Urabi revolt of 1881–1882, army officers led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi, joined by landowners and religious scholars, forced the khedive Tawfiq to appoint a nationalist ministry under the slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians”. Britain answered the movement with invasion in 1882, which marked the change from informal to formal empire in Egypt and was one of the main causes of the New Imperialism.

Tunisia and Morocco

Tunisia followed a similar path. The bey’s borrowing led to an international financial commission in 1869, run by France, Britain and Italy. In April 1881 France invaded, using raids by Khroumir tribesmen across the Algerian border as a pretext, and on 12 May 1881 the bey signed the Treaty of Bardo, which made Tunisia a French protectorate. France acted partly to stop Italy, whose settlers and investors were numerous in Tunisia, from taking it first. Morocco, which had never been Ottoman, kept its independence, but it was defeated by France at Isly in 1844 and by Spain in 1859–1860, and European merchants and consuls gained growing privileges there.

Traders and the expansion of commercial activity

After Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, British humanitarians and merchants promoted legitimate commerce: trade in African produce in place of people. The most important product was palm oil, used in Europe for soap, candles and lubricating machinery, which was produced mainly in the Niger Delta and the forest zone of West Africa. Groundnuts (peanuts), grown in Senegambia from the 1830s and 1840s, became the main export of the French posts in Senegal.

The growth of this trade drew European governments further in. Three developments show the pattern:

• West African coast. Britain appointed a consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1849, intervened in a succession dispute in Lagos in 1851 and annexed Lagos in 1861 to control its trade and suppress slaving. After defeating Asante in 1873–1874, Britain declared the Gold Coast a colony (1874).

• Senegal. Under Governor Louis Faidherbe (1854–1861 and 1863–1865), France pushed its posts up the Senegal river with forts and gunboats, fought the Tukulor empire of Umar Tal, founded Dakar and in 1857 created the tirailleurs sénégalais, African soldiers in French service who later did much of the fighting in the conquest of French West Africa.

• Merchant firms. Hamburg firms such as Woermann traded in Cameroon from the 1860s, and in 1879 George Goldie merged the British firms on the lower Niger into the United African Company, which later became the Royal Niger Company. Merchants on the spot often asked their governments for protection against African rulers or foreign rivals, and these requests were an important link between trade and annexation.

In East Africa a different commercial system grew up around Zanzibar. The Omani sultan Sayyid Said moved his capital to Zanzibar in about 1840, and Arab and Swahili traders, using caravans of porters, carried ivory and enslaved people from the interior to the coast and the clove plantations of the islands. British consuls, above all John Kirk, gained great influence over the sultans, and in 1873 Britain pressed Sultan Barghash into closing the Zanzibar slave market. Here, as in Egypt, informal empire came first.

Trade alone rarely led to conquest before 1880. Most merchants wanted cheap, peaceful access to African producers, not costly administration. Yet when prices fell in the 1870s and 1880s, and when rival European firms competed for the same markets, merchants increasingly demanded that their governments secure trade by annexation.

Explorers

Between the 1850s and the 1870s European explorers mapped the main lakes and rivers of the African interior. Their motives mixed scientific curiosity, the search for the source of the Nile, fame, anti-slavery campaigning and the hope of opening markets. Learned societies such as the Royal Geographical Society in London (founded 1830) and newspapers that paid for expeditions turned their journeys into public events in Europe.

Livingstone’s lectures in Britain after his crossing of Africa turned exploration into a moral cause. He told his audience at Cambridge that Africa could be freed from the slave trade only by opening it to Christianity and legitimate trade.

I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity; do you carry out the work which I have begun. I leave it with you!

David Livingstone, lecture in the Senate House, University of Cambridge, 4 December 1857. Livingstone was appealing to students and clergy for missionaries and funds, and the lecture led to the founding of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. The extract shows how closely missionaries linked Christianity and trade, and how a humanitarian purpose could prepare public opinion for later intervention, though Livingstone himself did not call for conquest.

Explorers did not “discover” lands that Africans already knew and used. They travelled along established trade routes with African and Arab guides, porters and interpreters, and depended on the hospitality and permission of African rulers; Stanley’s descent of the Congo, for example, began with the help of Tippu Tip, the most powerful Swahili-Arab trader of the eastern Congo. Their importance for the partition lay in the information they brought back, in the publicity that made African “opportunities” visible to European governments and investors, and, from the late 1870s, in the treaties some of them collected.

Missionaries

Protestant missionary societies founded around 1800, such as the London Missionary Society (1795) and the Church Missionary Society (1799), expanded rapidly in Africa after the 1840s, and Catholic orders followed, including the Holy Ghost Fathers and the White Fathers, founded in Algeria by Archbishop Charles Lavigerie in 1868. Livingstone’s appeal of 1857 produced the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, and Scottish churches founded missions near Lake Nyasa in the 1870s.

Missionaries believed that Christianity, commerce and “civilisation” belonged together, and that the end of the slave trade required all three. They built schools, translated the Bible into African languages and created the first groups of mission-educated Africans. Some of these became leaders in their own right. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba man freed from a slave ship as a boy, was ordained and in 1864 became the first African bishop of the Church of England, leading the Niger mission.

Missions contributed to imperialism in three ways. They gave Europeans a permanent presence inland; they sent home reports that shaped public opinion about Africa; and when they felt threatened by African rulers or by rival Christian missions of other nations, they asked their governments for protection. The Scottish missions’ lobbying helped persuade Britain to declare a protectorate over Nyasaland in 1891, and the rivalry of Protestant and Catholic converts in Buganda became part of the struggle for that kingdom. Yet missionaries were also critics of colonial violence, and Africans adopted Christianity selectively and for their own purposes, often founding independent churches.

Technological innovations

Before the mid-nineteenth century the African interior was largely closed to Europeans by disease. Malaria killed so many Europeans in West Africa that it was called “the white man’s grave”; on the British Niger expedition of 1841, about 40 of the roughly 145 Europeans died, almost all of fever. In 1854 the doctor William Baikie led a steamer expedition up the Niger and Benue on which the Europeans took regular doses of quinine, a drug made from cinchona bark, and none died. Regular quinine use, together with better medical knowledge, cut European death rates sharply and made long stays inland possible.

The chain of “tools of empire” shows how each innovation removed an obstacle. Steamships cut journey times and costs, and shallow-draught river steamers carried men and goods up the Niger, the Congo and the Zambezi. The submarine telegraph and later the railways let officials send orders and move troops quickly. Above all, a series of weapons transformed warfare: breech-loading rifles in the 1860s, repeating rifles in the 1880s and the Maxim gun, the first fully automatic machine gun, patented by Hiram Maxim in 1884. A few hundred European-led soldiers could now defeat armies many times their size.

The British writer Hilaire Belloc mocked the confidence this gave Europeans in his comic poem The Modern Traveller (1898): “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.” The historian Daniel Headrick, in The Tools of Empire (1981), argues that these technologies were the means that made the New Imperialism possible: they did not create the desire for empire, but they lowered its costs so far that governments with only modest interests in Africa were willing to act.

The technological gap was neither total nor permanent. Africans bought firearms in large numbers, and some states, such as Ethiopia and Samori Toure’s empire, acquired modern rifles and even artillery. At Isandlwana in 1879 and at Adwa in 1896 African armies defeated European forces equipped with breech-loaders. Technology mattered most where Europeans could keep it from Africans, which is why the powers agreed in the Brussels Act of 1890 to restrict arms sales in much of Africa.

Why did the “New Imperialism” emerge in Africa?

Historians use the term New Imperialism for the rapid expansion of European empires between about 1880 and 1914, above all in Africa, the Pacific and Southeast Asia. It differed from earlier European expansion in its speed, in the number of powers involved (Germany, Italy and Belgium joined Britain, France and Portugal), in its emphasis on formal annexation rather than trade and influence, and in the racial ideas used to justify it.

The diagram of motives groups the causes into four kinds. In practice they worked together: a merchant lobby might ask for protection (economic), a minister might agree because a rival power was moving in nearby (political and strategic), and the public might accept the cost because of the “civilising mission” (ideological). The question that divides historians is which of these turned interest into action, and why the action came so suddenly after about 1880.

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Economic factors

From 1873 to about 1896 Europe went through what contemporaries called the Great Depression and historians now call the Long Depression: a long period of falling prices, lower profits and recurring crises, though not of falling output. Industrial competition grew as Germany and the United States industrialised, and most European states except Britain turned to protectionism (Germany in 1879, France in stages culminating in the Méline tariff of 1892). Manufacturers and politicians began to argue that colonies would provide secure markets that rivals could not close.

Africa also offered raw materials that industrial Europe needed: palm oil and groundnuts from West Africa; wild rubber, in great demand after the invention of the pneumatic tyre (1888) and the growth of the electrical industry; cotton, which governments hoped to grow in Africa to reduce dependence on the United States; and minerals. The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley (1867) and of gold on the Witwatersrand (1886) turned southern Africa into a magnet for investment, a story told in the regional study of South Africa.

The French politician Jules Ferry, twice prime minister and the leading advocate of French colonial expansion, set out the economic argument in a debate in the Chamber of Deputies in 1885, after his government had fallen over a setback in Indochina.

Yes, what our major industries [textiles, etc.], irrevocably steered by the treaties of 1860 into exports, lack more and more are outlets. Why? Because next door Germany is setting up trade barriers; because across the ocean the United States of America have become protectionists, and extreme protectionists at that …

Jules Ferry, speech in the French Chamber of Deputies, 28 July 1885 (translated by Ruth Kleinman; some reprints misdate it to 1884). Ferry was defending his record against critics on both the left and the right who said colonies wasted money and distracted France from recovering Alsace-Lorraine. The speech shows that leading imperialists believed in the economic case, but because Ferry was arguing to win votes he presented the case as stronger and more urgent than the trade figures supported.

A feature of the New Imperialism in Africa was the use of chartered companies. Governments that wanted territory but not its cost granted private companies royal or imperial charters to govern, tax and keep order in their regions. The table of chartered companies shows the main ones.

Most of these companies made little money and several collapsed: the Imperial British East Africa Company handed its territory to the British government in the mid-1890s, and the Royal Niger Company lost its charter in 1900. Their history weakens the claim that Africa was taken because it was profitable. Before 1914 the great majority of European overseas investment went to the Americas, Russia, India and the settler colonies, not to tropical Africa; South Africa was the main exception.

Strategic factors

For Britain, the largest imperial power, the central strategic concern was the security of India and the routes to it. Two routes ran past Africa: the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and the older sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. Control of Egypt and of South Africa therefore mattered to British governments more than any other part of the continent.

The British occupation of Egypt, 1882

In 1882 the Urabi movement threatened both the Dual Control and the security of the canal. In June 1882 riots in Alexandria killed about fifty Europeans. On 11 July a British fleet bombarded the forts of Alexandria; France, whose government was divided, withdrew its ships and took no part. A British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley landed in the Canal Zone and defeated Urabi at Tel el-Kebir on 13 September 1882. Urabi was exiled to Ceylon.

Britain said the occupation was temporary, but it lasted, in one form or another, until 1956. Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), British agent and consul-general from 1883 to 1907, effectively ruled Egypt behind the khedive. The occupation had wider effects. France, which saw Egypt as part of its sphere of interest, was humiliated and began to look for compensation elsewhere in Africa, especially in the west and on the upper Nile. Germany could use Britain’s need for support on the Caisse de la Dette to win concessions. And because Egypt depended on the Nile, Britain came to see the whole Nile valley, including Sudan and the lands around Lake Victoria, as strategically vital.

The historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, in Africa and the Victorians (1961), made the occupation of Egypt the key to the partition. In their view British ministers, the “official mind” of imperialism, did not want African colonies; they were drawn in by crises on the periphery, above all in Egypt, which threatened the route to India. Their move into Egypt broke the old understanding with France and set off a chain of defensive claims across the continent.

South Africa and the Nile

In southern Africa, British strategy aimed to keep the Cape and the naval base at Simon’s Town secure and to stop the Boer republics, enriched by gold after 1886, from linking up with Germany (which took South West Africa in 1884) or with Portugal’s ports in Mozambique. This concern lay behind the protectorate over Bechuanaland in 1885, the charter of the British South Africa Company in 1889 and the British Ultimatum to Portugal in 1890; the conflict with the Boers that it led to belongs to the regional study of South Africa.

In the north-east the security of Egypt was thought to depend on control of the Nile waters. The Mahdist state in Sudan, founded after the revolt of Muhammad Ahmad (the Mahdi) and the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in January 1885, cut Egypt off from the upper Nile for over a decade. Fear that France, Italy or Belgium might reach the upper Nile first led to the reconquest of Sudan by an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener (1896–1898) and to the Fashoda crisis of 1898.

Political factors

The rivalry of the European powers turned individual decisions into a race. After its defeat by Prussia in 1870–1871 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, France sought prestige and national revival overseas, though many French politicians argued that colonies distracted from the German threat. Germany and Italy, newly united, wanted the status of great powers, and colonies were a sign of that status. Leopold II, king of the small state of Belgium, pursued a colonial empire as a personal project. Once one power claimed a region, others hurried to claim neighbouring ones before they were closed to their trade.

Domestic politics also mattered. In Germany, Bismarck’s colonial policy of 1884–1885 coincided with elections in which colonies were popular with nationalist voters. Popular newspapers, such as the Daily Mail in Britain (founded 1896), and colonial pressure groups, such as the German Colonial Society and the parti colonial in France, celebrated imperial heroes and adventures. Historians call the use of imperial expansion to win support at home and distract from social conflict social imperialism.

Much of the partition was driven by men on the spot: officers, company agents and administrators in Africa who acted ahead of, or against, their governments’ instructions and then presented them with faits accomplis. Examples include Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa, George Goldie on the Niger, Carl Peters in East Africa, Frederick Lugard in Uganda and northern Nigeria, and French military officers in the western Sudan who pushed into the interior with little control from Paris. Governments often accepted their gains because withdrawing would have meant a loss of prestige or a gift to a rival.

The Punch cartoon of Rhodes as a colossus shows how the man on the spot was presented to the British public. Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape Colony and head of the British South Africa Company, had announced a telegraph line from the Cape to Cairo, part of his dream of a continuous belt of British territory along the length of Africa. The cartoon both admires and mocks his ambition; it does not show any Africans.

Social and ideological factors

Europeans of the late nineteenth century increasingly explained the world in racial terms. Social Darwinism misapplied Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human societies and claimed that races and nations competed for survival, so that the “fittest” were entitled to rule. Many Europeans believed African societies were backward or “savage” and that European rule would bring progress. These ideas turned conquest into a duty in the eyes of its supporters.

The French called this duty the civilising mission (mission civilisatrice). In the same speech of 1885, Ferry told the Chamber that the higher races had a right because they had a duty to “civilise” the inferior races. In 1899 the British poet Rudyard Kipling urged the United States, which was conquering the Philippines, to “Take up the White Man’s burden”, a phrase that became a shorthand for the whole ideology of benevolent racial rule.

Christian missions and the anti-slavery movement gave the civilising mission a humanitarian form. In 1888 Cardinal Lavigerie launched an anti-slavery crusade across Europe, calling for action against the slave trade in East and Central Africa, and the Brussels Conference Act of 1890 committed the powers to suppress the slave trade, which they used to justify military campaigns against African and Arab states. Leopold II presented his Congo venture as a humanitarian and scientific enterprise, while building a regime of forced labour there.

Why were African societies vulnerable to European imperialism?

The speed of the partition did not mean that African societies were weak in any absolute sense. Many had large armies, effective governments and long experience of diplomacy and war. Their vulnerability was relative and specific to the late nineteenth century: Europe’s industrial revolution had opened a gap in weapons and transport, and European powers could exploit divisions within and between African states. Historians identify four main sources of vulnerability.

Military weakness: the firepower gap

In the first half of the nineteenth century many African armies were roughly equal to the small European forces they met, as the long resistance of Abd al-Qadir in Algeria shows. By the 1880s the gap had widened. European armies had breech-loading rifles, light artillery and machine guns, while most African soldiers had muzzle-loading muskets, spears or older rifles. The difference was greatest in set-piece battles in open country, where massed charges met concentrated fire.

Figures are approximate and vary between sources, especially for African losses, which were rarely counted. The table of three battles shows that firepower was decisive only in some conditions. At Omdurman the Mahdist army attacked across open ground into rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire from a fortified position and from gunboats on the Nile. At Isandlwana a British camp was caught unprepared and spread out, and at Adwa Ethiopian soldiers armed with modern rifles outnumbered and surrounded divided Italian brigades.

Europeans also controlled access to modern arms. The Brussels Conference Act of 1890 banned the import of modern firearms and ammunition into a broad zone of Africa, except under licence, officially to fight the slave trade. And European conquest relied heavily on African soldiers: the tirailleurs sénégalais in French West Africa, askari in German and Italian East Africa, the Force Publique in the Congo, and the West African Frontier Force in British territories. Most of the soldiers who conquered Africa were Africans recruited, trained and armed by Europeans.

Political weakness and disunity

Africa contained many kinds of political organisation, from large centralised kingdoms to small societies governed by councils of elders. Decentralised societies had no single ruler who could organise resistance across a whole region, though they could also be very hard to conquer, as the long campaigns in southern Nigeria and the Igbo region showed. Centralised states had their own weaknesses: disputed successions, rival factions at court, and subject peoples who resented their rule.

Many states were also under strain from the economic changes of the nineteenth century. The end of the Atlantic slave trade forced states that had depended on it, such as Dahomey and Asante, to find new sources of revenue. Wars between African states were frequent, and Europeans used them. The table of rivalries gives examples.

Collaboration and treaties

Much of Africa was claimed through treaties. Explorers and company agents carried printed treaty forms and signed hundreds of them with African rulers in the 1880s: Stanley alone collected more than 400 for Leopold II between 1879 and 1884, and Carl Peters made a dozen in East Africa in a few weeks in late 1884. European powers then presented these treaties to each other as proof of their claims.

The meaning of the treaties was deeply disputed. They were written in European languages, often translated orally, and signed by rulers who frequently understood them as agreements of friendship, trade or alliance, not as the surrender of land or sovereignty. Some signatories had no authority to give away land at all. Three examples show the range:

• The Makoko treaty (10 September 1880). Makoko, ruler of the Teke kingdom north of the Congo, signed a treaty with Brazza placing his lands under French protection and allowing a French post at what became Brazzaville. For the Teke ruler it was an alliance; for France it became the basis of the French Congo.

• The Rudd Concession (30 October 1888). Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, granted agents of Cecil Rhodes exclusive mining rights in his kingdom in exchange for a monthly payment, 1,000 rifles and ammunition, and a steamboat. The missionary interpreter assured him orally that no more than ten white men would come to dig. Lobengula repudiated the concession, but Rhodes used it to obtain the royal charter for the British South Africa Company and to send the Pioneer Column into Mashonaland in 1890.

• The Lochner Concession (1890). Lewanika of the Lozi granted mining and trading rights to the British South Africa Company believing he was obtaining the protection of the British Crown, which he had sought for years; he discovered later that he had made an agreement with a company.

Treaties made partition cheap and legal in European eyes, because they allowed claims to be made without fighting. They also show African agency: many rulers signed for their own reasons, to gain allies, guns or trade, and some tried to use one European power against another. Collaboration, in this sense, was a political strategy as well as a source of weakness, and it is examined further with the African responses.

Ecological disaster

A series of disasters struck eastern and southern Africa in the late 1880s and 1890s, just as the scramble reached the interior. The rinderpest epizootic, a cattle disease introduced to the Horn of Africa around 1887–1888, swept south to the Cape by 1896–1897 and killed up to about 90 per cent of cattle in many regions. For pastoral peoples such as the Maasai, the Herero and the Ndebele, whose wealth, diet and social life depended on cattle, it was a catastrophe. In Ethiopia it contributed to the Great Famine of 1888–1892, in which a large part of the population died. Drought, locusts, smallpox and, later, sleeping sickness added to the losses.

These disasters weakened societies at the moment they faced conquest. Famine and the loss of cattle reduced their ability to feed armies, drove some groups to seek European protection or work, and in the Ndebele and Shona case contributed to the risings of 1896, when the company’s officials shot cattle to stop the disease spreading and Africans blamed the colonisers for the disaster.

The causes and impact of the partition of Africa

The term scramble for Africa was coined by journalists in the 1880s for the rush of European claims. Historians still use it, but it can suggest a chaotic free-for-all. In fact the partition combined a period of rapid claims in 1879–1885, a long process of negotiation between the powers (above all in 1885–1898), and a slower military conquest on the ground that lasted into the 1900s and, in places, the 1920s.

Leopold II, Brazza and the Congo basin, 1876–1884

The Congo basin became the first great prize of the scramble. In September 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium hosted a Geographical Conference in Brussels, which founded the International African Association, officially a scientific and humanitarian body to explore Central Africa and fight the slave trade. Leopold used it as a cover for his own ambitions. In 1878 he set up the Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo and hired Stanley, who between 1879 and 1884 built stations and a road along the lower Congo and collected treaties from local rulers. By 1884 Leopold’s enterprise had become the International Association of the Congo, which claimed the treaties as the basis of a state.

France competed directly. Brazza’s Makoko treaty of 1880 gave France a foothold on the north bank of the Congo at Stanley Pool, and the French parliament ratified it in November 1882 amid a wave of public enthusiasm. Portugal, which claimed the mouth of the Congo on the basis of its centuries-old presence in the region, tried to block both. In February 1884 Britain signed a treaty recognising Portugal’s claim in return for trading guarantees, but the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty met fierce opposition from British merchants, France and Germany and was never ratified. Leopold won important support when the United States recognised his association’s flag in April 1884, followed by Germany in November.

Bismarck and Germany’s colonies, 1884–1885

Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, had long opposed colonies as costly and a source of conflict. In 1884–1885, however, Germany declared protectorates over four African territories in under a year: South West Africa (from April 1884, after the Bremen merchant Adolf Lüderitz had bought land at Angra Pequena), Togoland and Kamerun (July 1884, through treaties made by the explorer and consul Gustav Nachtigal), and German East Africa (February 1885, when the Kaiser granted a charter of protection to the treaties made by Carl Peters).

Historians disagree about why Bismarck changed course, and the main explanations are compared in the table of explanations.

These explanations are not exclusive. Bismarck’s own view of Africa as a matter of European diplomacy was expressed in his remark to the colonial enthusiast Eugen Wolf in 1888, as Wolf later reported it: “my map of Africa lies in Europe.” Whatever his motives, Germany’s sudden entry made every other power more anxious to secure its own claims.

The Berlin Conference, 1884–1885

To settle the disputes over the Congo and the Niger, and to show Germany’s new role as a colonial power, Bismarck and the French government jointly called an international conference. The Berlin Conference met from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885. Fourteen states attended: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway and the Ottoman Empire. No African ruler was invited, and when the Sultan of Zanzibar protested in 1885 against German claims on his mainland territory, the powers ignored him.

The flow chart of the General Act shows its four main decisions. The conference declared free trade in a vast “conventional basin” of the Congo and free navigation of the Congo and Niger rivers; it recognised, in effect, Leopold’s Congo state, which he proclaimed as the Congo Free State in 1885 and ruled as a personal possession (its later history belongs to the regional study of Rwanda and the Congo); it committed the powers to suppress the slave trade and protect missionaries and “native tribes”; and it set two rules for future claims on the coast.

The Signatory Powers of the present Act recognize the obligation to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African Continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and, as the case may be, freedom of trade and of transit under the conditions agreed upon.

General Act of the Berlin Conference, Article 35, 26 February 1885 (English text). Article 34 required any power taking possession of land on the African coast, or declaring a protectorate there, to notify the others. Article 35 is the origin of the doctrine of effective occupation. As a source it shows the concerns of the diplomats who drafted it: “existing rights” and “freedom of trade” meant the rights of European states and merchants, and the article applied only to the coasts, so it said nothing about how interior lands could be claimed.

The conference did not divide Africa into colonies and drew no lines on a map. Its significance lay elsewhere. It created a framework of rules that made claims easier to register and defend; it gave Leopold his state; and it encouraged every power to make treaties and send expeditions quickly, so that its claims would be secure. Most of the actual borders were drawn in bilateral treaties over the next fifteen years. In this sense the conference accelerated the scramble rather than starting it, since France, Britain, Leopold and Germany had all made major claims before it met.

The scramble for annexation by the European powers

Seven European states took part in the partition. The table of the powers gives the main territories each acquired and how; the map of European possessions in 1914 shows the result.

The map of European possessions in 1914 shows the scale of the change. In 1880 most of the continent was ruled by African states, from the Sokoto Caliphate to Buganda, and European territory was confined to North Africa, the West African coast and the south. By 1914 the territories of seven European powers covered the continent, and only Ethiopia and Liberia were shaded as African. Commonly cited estimates put the share of Africa under European control at about 10 per cent in 1870 and about 90 per cent by 1914.

The French and British empires grew in different ways. France took the largest area, much of it the thinly populated Sahara and Sahel, mostly by military conquest led by army officers advancing from Senegal towards Lake Chad. Britain took fewer square miles but more of the population and wealth, through a mixture of chartered companies, protectorates and conquest, guided by its strategic interest in Egypt, the Nile and southern Africa.

Political and military disputes between European powers

The partition produced frequent disputes between the powers, but none of them led to a European war in Africa before 1914. The vertical timeline of the scramble shows how claims made in 1884–1889 were turned into borders by negotiation.

Bargaining over borders, 1885–1891

Britain and Germany settled their rivalry in East Africa in the Anglo-German Agreement of 1 July 1890, often called the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty: Germany recognised British claims to Zanzibar, Kenya and Uganda, and Britain gave Germany the small North Sea island of Heligoland and recognised German East Africa. In the same year an Anglo-French agreement recognised a French sphere from Algeria to Lake Chad, and Britain forced Portugal to abandon its “Pink Map”, which had claimed the land between Angola and Mozambique, with an ultimatum on 11 January 1890. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, joked in 1890 that the powers were drawing lines across lands no European had seen and giving away mountains, rivers and lakes whose exact location they did not know.

The Fashoda crisis, 1898

The most dangerous crisis came on the upper Nile. A French expedition under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand crossed Africa from the Congo and in July 1898 raised the French flag at Fashoda, on the White Nile in southern Sudan, hoping to give France a say over the Nile and to reopen the Egyptian question. Kitchener, having destroyed the Mahdist army at Omdurman on 2 September, arrived at Fashoda on 19 September with a much larger force and gunboats. Both sides held their ground while their governments negotiated. With Britain’s navy far stronger and France divided by the Dreyfus affair, the French government ordered Marchand to withdraw in November 1898. An Anglo-French agreement of March 1899 recognised the Nile basin as a British sphere.

The Fashoda crisis marked the end of serious Anglo-French rivalry over Africa. In the Entente Cordiale of April 1904, France accepted British control of Egypt and Britain accepted French predominance in Morocco. African questions were now traded as part of European diplomacy.

Morocco and Libya, 1905–1912

Germany challenged the Anglo-French arrangement over Morocco. In March 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II landed at Tangier and declared his support for Moroccan independence, causing the First Moroccan Crisis. At the Algeciras Conference (January–April 1906) only Austria-Hungary supported Germany, and France’s special position in Morocco was confirmed. In July 1911 Germany sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir to protest against a French military occupation of Fez; the crisis ended in November with Germany accepting a French protectorate over Morocco in exchange for part of the French Congo. France declared its protectorate in March 1912, and Spain received a zone in the north. Meanwhile Italy, fearing it would be left out, invaded Ottoman Libya in September 1911 and gained it at the peace of October 1912.

These crises were dangerous for Europe more than for the partition of Africa itself. They hardened the alliances that went to war in 1914, a theme of the regional study of Europe and the First World War. In Africa they settled the fate of the last independent states of the north.

The First World War and the redistribution of colonies, 1914–1920

The First World War spread to Africa in August 1914, when British and French forces invaded Togoland, which surrendered on 26 August. Kamerun fell in 1916 after a long campaign, and South African forces conquered German South West Africa by July 1915. In German East Africa, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck led a small force, mostly askari, in a guerrilla campaign that tied down far larger British, South African, Indian, Belgian and Portuguese armies until he surrendered on 25 November 1918, two weeks after the armistice in Europe.

The war in Africa was fought mainly by Africans. Estimates suggest that more than two million Africans served as soldiers or as carriers and labourers. The East African campaign, fought in country where animals died of disease and roads did not exist, relied on hundreds of thousands of porters in the Carrier Corps and other labour units, of whom tens of thousands, perhaps over 100,000 in all, died, mostly of disease, exhaustion and hunger. Requisitioning of food and men caused famine in parts of East Africa.

At the Paris Peace Conference Germany lost its colonies under Article 119 of the Treaty of Versailles. They were not returned to independence but divided among the victors as mandates supervised by the League of Nations: Britain and France shared Togoland and Kamerun, Britain took Tanganyika, Belgium took Ruanda-Urundi, and South Africa took South West Africa. The mandate system was presented as a trust for the inhabitants, but in practice it extended the partition, completing the transfer of almost all of Africa to European rule by 1920.

Why did African rulers and peoples resist or collaborate?

African responses to European imperialism ranged from full-scale war to alliance, and many rulers moved between them. Historians once divided Africans into “resisters”, seen as heroes or as backward-looking, and “collaborators”, seen as traitors or as modernisers. Since the 1960s historians such as A. Adu Boahen and Terence Ranger have argued that both were rational strategies chosen by African leaders to defend their sovereignty, their people’s interests or their own position, and that the same leader often used both.

Both words are used in a specific sense. Neither implies a moral judgement, and the same ruler could move from one to the other as circumstances changed.

The diagram of the choice rulers faced groups the reasons for each response. The most important were political leadership, military strength and social factors, together with the behaviour of the colonisers themselves.

Political leadership

Leaders mattered because they judged the threat and the options. Menelik II of Ethiopia and Samori Toure combined diplomacy with long preparation for war. Khama III of the Bangwato and Lewanika of the Lozi judged that British protection was the best way to keep their kingdoms, and their land, intact. Where leaders were divided or a succession was disputed, as in the Zulu kingdom after 1879 or in Buganda in the 1880s, rival factions could seek European support against each other.

The structure of a state also shaped its choices. Centralised kingdoms with standing armies, such as the Zulu, Asante, Ethiopian and Ndebele states, could fight major wars but could also be defeated in a single campaign and lose their kings. Decentralised societies rarely fought pitched battles, but resisted village by village for years, as in much of southern Nigeria and the Ivory Coast forest.

Military strength

Rulers who had firearms, trained soldiers and defensible territory were more likely to fight. Samori built workshops that copied French rifles and bought arms through Sierra Leone; Menelik imported tens of thousands of rifles from France, Russia and Italy itself in the 1880s and 1890s. Rulers who knew they could not match European firepower often chose negotiation. Khama, whose Bangwato were threatened by Ndebele raids and Boer settlers, had no hope of fighting either alone.

Social factors

Religion and ideology could unite people against colonial rule. Islam gave a framework for resistance in the western Sudan, Sudan and Somaliland, where leaders such as Samori and the Mahdists presented their struggle as a defence of the faith. Spirit mediums led the Shona in 1896, and in German East Africa a prophet’s “water medicine” (maji) united many peoples in the Maji Maji rising of 1905. Christianity, by contrast, often created groups that favoured cooperation with the British, as in Buganda and among Khama’s people, who were Christian converts. Social structure mattered too: societies in which cattle, land and status were bound together, such as the Herero and Ndebele, faced total loss when settlers arrived.

The behaviour of the colonisers

The demands and conduct of Europeans often decided the matter. Brutal or inflexible colonisers who seized land and cattle, imposed taxes and forced labour, or humiliated rulers provoked risings even among peoples who had first cooperated, as with the Herero in 1904 and the Shona in 1896. Colonisers who were willing to negotiate and offered real gains, such as Britain in Buganda in 1900, won collaborators. Timing mattered as well: many “risings” came after conquest, when people discovered what colonial rule actually meant.

African responses: case studies

African responses ranged from the most successful armed resistance, in Ethiopia, through long but ultimately failed resistance, as in West Africa and the south, to collaboration, negotiation and migration. Comparing the cases shows how far leadership, military strength, social factors and the conduct of the colonisers decided each outcome.

Ethiopia under Menelik II: successful resistance

Ethiopia was the only African state to defeat a European power decisively and keep its independence through the partition. Menelik II, king of Shewa in the south from 1865, became emperor (negusa nagast, “king of kings”) in 1889 after the death of Emperor Yohannes IV fighting the Mahdists. As king of Shewa he had already expanded his territory southwards, using firearms bought from European traders, and he continued this expansion as emperor, roughly doubling the size of the empire. Ethiopia was thus itself an expanding empire, which conquered and ruled peoples such as the Oromo, Sidama and others in the south, while resisting European conquest.

The Treaty of Wuchale and its dispute

Italy had held the Red Sea port of Massawa since 1885 and expanded inland, proclaiming the colony of Eritrea in 1890. On 2 May 1889 Menelik signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Italy, which recognised Italian possession of part of the northern highlands in return for recognition of Menelik as emperor, and a loan and arms. Article 17 caused the dispute. In the Amharic text, Menelik could use the Italian government for his dealings with other powers; in the Italian text, he was obliged to do so. Italy then announced to the other powers that Ethiopia was an Italian protectorate.

Menelik rejected this interpretation. In April 1891 he sent a circular letter to the European powers setting out the borders he claimed and his refusal to be partitioned.

I have no intention at all of being an indifferent spectator, if the distant Powers hold onto the idea of dividing up Africa …

Menelik II, circular letter to the European heads of state, April 1891 (English translation). Menelik wrote as the ruler of an ancient Christian kingdom addressing other monarchs as equals, using the diplomatic language of the powers themselves. The letter shows that African rulers understood the partition and tried to shape it through diplomacy; it is also evidence of Menelik’s own claims to territory well beyond the Ethiopian heartland, which he went on to conquer.

In February 1893 Menelik formally renounced the Treaty of Wuchale, and he repaid the Italian loan. He used the following years to buy large quantities of modern rifles and artillery, mainly through French Djibouti and from Russia, and to secure the loyalty of the great regional nobles, including Ras Mengesha of Tigray, who had earlier been in contact with Italy.

The war of 1895–1896 and the Battle of Adwa

Italian forces under General Oreste Baratieri advanced into Tigray in 1895. Ethiopian armies defeated an Italian column at Amba Alagi in December 1895 and besieged the Italian fort at Mekele, which surrendered in January 1896. Under pressure from the Italian prime minister, Francesco Crispi, to win a victory, Baratieri attacked the Ethiopian army near the town of Adwa early on 1 March 1896. His four brigades advanced at night through mountain passes with inaccurate maps, lost contact with one another and were attacked separately by an army about five times their size.

The Battle of Adwa was the largest defeat of a European army in Africa in the nineteenth century. Italian losses, Italians and Eritrean askari together, were about 7,000 killed, about 1,500 wounded and some 3,000 taken prisoner; Ethiopian losses were also heavy, perhaps 4,000–7,000 killed. Crispi’s government fell. By the Treaty of Addis Ababa (26 October 1896), Italy annulled the Treaty of Wuchale and recognised Ethiopia’s full independence, though it kept Eritrea.

The factors diagram of Adwa shows why Ethiopia won. Menelik’s leadership combined diplomacy (renouncing Wuchale, exploiting French and Russian hostility to Italy) with military preparation. Ethiopia had modern rifles in large numbers, artillery and a mass army that the empire’s tribute system could supply for a short campaign. The nobility, whatever their rivalries, united against a foreign invader, and the Wuchale dispute gave the war a clear cause. Italian errors turned likely defeat into catastrophe.

The results of Adwa were lasting. Britain, France and Italy signed border treaties with Ethiopia in 1897–1908, recognising it as a sovereign state, and Ethiopia went on to join the League of Nations in 1923. Adwa became a symbol of African resistance and of Black pride across Africa and the African diaspora, and the name “Ethiopia” was adopted by independent African churches and later Pan-African movements. Yet the victory also confirmed Ethiopia’s own empire in the south, whose conquered peoples experienced Menelik’s expansion as conquest.

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Samori Toure and the Mandinka: long resistance in West Africa

Samori Toure (c. 1830–1900), a Mandinka (Maninka) trader turned military leader, built the Wassoulou empire in the upper Niger region (in modern Guinea, Mali and Côte d’Ivoire) from the 1860s, using Islam as a source of authority and taking the title of almami. From 1882 his armies clashed with the French, who were advancing from Senegal towards the Niger.

Samori combined military reform with diplomacy. He organised a professional army, part of it armed with modern repeating rifles bought through Freetown in British Sierra Leone, and set up workshops in which smiths copied and repaired French rifles. He signed treaties with France at Kenieba-Koura (1886) and Bissandugu (1887), conceding land on the left bank of the Niger to gain time, and tried to obtain British protection to play the two powers against each other. When the French attacked again from 1891, he moved his whole state eastwards, rebuilding it in the northern Côte d’Ivoire and the hinterland of the Gold Coast while using scorched-earth tactics to deny the French supplies.

Samori resisted for about sixteen years, longer than almost any other African ruler, but he failed in the end. The British refused to protect him, the Brussels Act cut off legal arms imports, his migrating state lost its economic base, and the peoples he conquered in the east resented his rule, as did those whose villages his armies devastated. He was captured by the French on 29 September 1898 and died in exile in Gabon in 1900. His long war and his attempt at modernisation made him a hero of later Guinean nationalism; his own conquests and slave raiding make him a more contested figure among some of his neighbours’ descendants.

Asante: from war to the War of the Golden Stool

Asante, the powerful forest kingdom of the Gold Coast hinterland, fought a series of wars with Britain over control of the coastal states and trade. In 1873–1874 a British army under Garnet Wolseley invaded with breech-loading rifles and artillery, briefly occupied the capital, Kumasi, and burned it; Asante lost its control over the coast, which became the British Gold Coast Colony. In the 1880s Asante was weakened by civil war over the succession, until Agyeman Prempeh I became king (asantehene) in 1888.

Britain, anxious to keep France and Germany out of the hinterland, demanded in the 1890s that Prempeh accept a protectorate. He refused and sent an embassy to London. In January 1896 a British expedition entered Kumasi; Prempeh chose not to fight, to spare his people, but he was arrested and exiled, first to Sierra Leone and in 1900 to the Seychelles. In March 1900 the British governor, Sir Frederic Hodgson, demanded that the Golden Stool, the sacred symbol of the Asante nation’s soul, be handed over so that he could sit on it. The Asante rose in the War of the Golden Stool, led by Yaa Asantewaa, the queen mother of Ejisu, and besieged the British in the Kumasi fort for months.

The rising was defeated by September 1900; Yaa Asantewaa was exiled to the Seychelles, where she died in 1921, and Britain annexed Asante as a colony with effect from January 1902. But the Golden Stool was never surrendered, Britain never again tried to take it, and Prempeh was allowed to return in 1924. The war is an example of military failure that secured a cultural and symbolic success, and Yaa Asantewaa became one of the best-known women of African resistance.

The Zulu kingdom under Cetshwayo: victory and destruction

The Zulu kingdom, ruled by Cetshwayo kaMpande from 1872, had a large army organised in age regiments and had kept peaceful relations with the British colony of Natal. In the late 1870s, the British high commissioner in South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere, wanted to unite South Africa in a confederation and saw the independent Zulu army as an obstacle. On 11 December 1878 he presented Cetshwayo with an ultimatum demanding, among other things, that he disband his army within thirty days, terms that no independent ruler could accept. Frere acted largely without the approval of the government in London.

British forces invaded in January 1879. On 22 January a Zulu army of about 20,000 overran the British camp at Isandlwana, killing about 1,300 British soldiers and African auxiliaries, one of the worst defeats of the British army in the colonial era; the defence of the mission station at Rorke’s Drift the same night became a British legend. Reinforcements arrived, and on 4 July 1879 the British defeated the Zulu army at Ulundi and burned the royal homestead. Cetshwayo was captured in August.

Britain then destroyed the kingdom without annexing it, dividing it among thirteen appointed chiefs, which led to civil war in the 1880s. Cetshwayo, briefly restored in 1883, was defeated by his rivals and died in 1884. Zululand was annexed by Britain in 1887 and joined to Natal in 1897. The last armed protest, the Bambatha rebellion against a poll tax in 1906, was crushed with heavy loss of life. The Zulu case shows that early victory could not save a kingdom without modern weapons, and that the British used division as effectively as force.

The Ndebele and Shona: the Rudd Concession and the First Chimurenga

After the Rudd Concession, the British South Africa Company’s Pioneer Column occupied Mashonaland in 1890 and founded Fort Salisbury (now Harare). In 1893 the company provoked a war with the Ndebele kingdom, whose regiments were defeated by Maxim guns; Lobengula fled and died early in 1894, and the company seized Ndebele land and cattle. In 1896, after the rinderpest epidemic and the company’s seizure of cattle, forced labour and taxes, the Ndebele rose, and then many Shona joined them, in what Zimbabweans call the First Chimurenga (chimurenga means struggle or uprising in Shona). Spirit mediums, among them Charwe Nyakasikana (the medium of Nehanda) and Kaguvi, played a leading role in uniting the Shona.

The rising surprised the settlers and killed about 10 per cent of the European population of the territory, but by 1897 it had been defeated by dynamite, starvation and the destruction of crops. Nehanda and Kaguvi were hanged in 1898. Rhodes negotiated a settlement with Ndebele leaders in the Matopos hills in 1896 that gave them some concessions. The memory of the First Chimurenga, and of the prophecy attributed to Nehanda that her bones would rise again, inspired the guerrillas of the Second Chimurenga in the 1960s and 1970s, which is the main evidence for Terence Ranger’s argument that primary resistance was linked to later nationalism.

The Herero and Nama in German South West Africa: war and genocide

German South West Africa (now Namibia) was a colony of settlement. In the 1890s German settlers and traders acquired Herero land and cattle through purchases, debt and fraud, and the rinderpest of 1897 destroyed much of what remained of the Herero herds. Settlers and soldiers treated Africans with violence that the colonial courts rarely punished. On 12 January 1904 the Herero under Samuel Maharero rose, attacking farms and killing about 120 German men, while sparing most women and children, missionaries and Boer and British settlers.

The war was not begun by me this year, but it has been started by the whites; you know how many Hereros are killed by the white people, especially traders, with guns and in prisons. And whenever I brought this matter to Windhoek, the blood of my people always cost [no more than] some [pieces of] small cattle …

Samuel Maharero, paramount chief of the Herero, letter to Governor Theodor Leutwein, 6 March 1904 (translated by Insa Kummer for German History in Documents and Images). Maharero wrote to the governor, who had earlier dealt with him by negotiation, to justify the rising and perhaps to open talks. The letter shows the Herero explanation of the war, debt, land seizure and unpunished killings, though it was written to persuade a German official and was published in Germany by a colonial writer.

Berlin replaced Leutwein with General Lothar von Trotha, who had fought colonial wars in East Africa and China. At the Battle of Waterberg on 11 August 1904 his forces surrounded the Herero but left a gap to the south-east, towards the Omaheke desert. Many thousands of Herero, with their families and cattle, fled into the desert, where German patrols sealed off the waterholes. On 2 October 1904 Trotha issued a proclamation to the Herero.

Any Herero found within the German frontier, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I spare neither women nor children—I drive them back to their people or I will fire upon them.

Lothar von Trotha, proclamation to the Herero people, Osombo-Windhuk, 2 October 1904 (translated by David Ciarlo for German History in Documents and Images). The proclamation was addressed to the Herero but was also read to German troops, with an order that firing on women and children should be over their heads to drive them away. Historians use it as central evidence of an intention to destroy the Herero as a people. After protests in Germany, including from Chancellor Bülow and the churches, the Kaiser ordered it withdrawn in December 1904, by which time most of the Herero who had fled into the desert had died.

In October 1904 the Nama under Hendrik Witbooi, who had earlier fought the Germans and then made peace and served as their allies, rose as well, joined by Jakob Marengo (Morenga) and others, and fought a guerrilla war until 1907–1908. Witbooi was killed in October 1905. Surviving Herero and Nama were held in concentration camps, the worst on Shark Island at Lüderitz, where a very high proportion of prisoners died of disease, hunger and forced labour. Survivors lost their land and cattle and were forced into labour for settlers.

The chart of Herero and Nama populations shows the scale of the losses, though all the figures are estimates. Most historians now describe the destruction of the Herero and Nama as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Isabel Hull, in Absolute Destruction (2005), explains it through a German military culture that pursued total victory regardless of political aims; others, such as Jürgen Zimmerer and David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen in The Kaiser’s Holocaust (2010), argue for links with later Nazi policies, a continuity thesis that remains contested. In 2021 the German government acknowledged that the events were, in today’s terms, genocide, in a joint declaration with Namibia that offered about €1.1 billion in development funding rather than reparations. Many Herero and Nama representatives rejected the agreement, and by 2025 neither parliament had ratified it.

The Maji Maji rising in German East Africa, 1905–1907

In the south of German East Africa, the colonial government forced villages to grow cotton on communal plots for very low pay, under African agents (akida and jumbe) who used violence. In 1905 a prophet, Kinjikitile Ngwale, gave his followers a sacred water (maji) that was said to turn German bullets into water. The belief spread rapidly and united more than twenty different peoples, who had no common political organisation, in a rising that began in July 1905. Kinjikitile was hanged in August 1905, but the rising spread across a large part of the colony.

The Germans defeated attacks on their posts with machine guns, which also showed the maji did not work, and then crushed the rising by deliberately destroying crops and villages to create famine. Deaths are estimated at between about 75,000 and 300,000, most from starvation. The Maji Maji rising failed militarily, but it led Germany to reform colonial administration under Bernhard Dernburg, and later Tanzanian nationalists, including Julius Nyerere, presented it as the first national movement of the country’s peoples.

Buganda: resistance and collaboration within one kingdom

Buganda, the most powerful kingdom on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, shows both responses in one state. From the 1870s Muslim traders, Protestant missionaries of the Church Missionary Society and Catholic White Fathers all won converts at the court of the kabaka (king), especially among the young pages and chiefs. Kabaka Mwanga II, who came to the throne in 1884, feared that converts owed loyalty to foreign powers. In 1885 he had the Anglican bishop James Hannington killed as he approached the kingdom from the east, and in 1885–1887 he ordered the execution of many Christian pages and officials, most of them in 1886; they are remembered by the churches as the Uganda Martyrs.

The converts, now an armed and organised force, deposed Mwanga in 1888, and in a series of religious civil wars (1888–1892) the Christian factions defeated the Muslims and then fought each other. Frederick Lugard, an agent of the Imperial British East Africa Company, intervened on the Protestant side with a Maxim gun in 1892. Britain declared a protectorate over Buganda in 1894. Mwanga, restored as a puppet ruler, rebelled against the British in 1897; he was defeated, deposed and exiled, and his infant son Daudi Chwa was made kabaka under regents.

The leading regent, the Protestant chief minister (katikiro) Sir Apolo Kagwa, chose collaboration. Ganda chiefs and soldiers helped the British conquer the neighbouring kingdom of Bunyoro and suppress Mwanga and the Sudanese mutiny of 1897. In return the Buganda Agreement of 10 March 1900 recognised the kabaka’s government, gave Buganda its own parliament (the Lukiiko) and granted the chiefs about half the kingdom’s land as private freehold, known as mailo land. Buganda gained Bunyoro territory (the “lost counties”), and Ganda agents were used to administer other parts of Uganda, a role historians call sub-imperialism.

For Kagwa and the Protestant chiefs, collaboration was a success: they kept their power, gained land and turned Buganda into the privileged core of the protectorate. For Mwanga, resistance failed. For ordinary peasants, who became tenants on the chiefs’ mailo land, and for the people of Bunyoro, the agreement brought losses rather than gains.

Lewanika and Khama: collaboration to preserve the kingdom

Two southern African rulers sought British protection to keep their kingdoms safe from stronger African and settler neighbours. Lewanika, king (litunga) of the Lozi of Barotseland on the upper Zambezi, feared the Ndebele and the Portuguese. Advised by the French missionary François Coillard and impressed by Khama’s example, he asked for British protection and in 1890 signed the Lochner Concession, believing he was dealing with the British Crown. It was in fact the British South Africa Company. Lewanika kept his title, a reserved territory and some authority, and Barotseland later had a special status within Northern Rhodesia, but the company acquired wide rights over its land and minerals.

Khama III, king (kgosi) of the Bangwato in Bechuanaland and a Christian convert, welcomed the British protectorate of 1885 as a shield against the Ndebele and the Boers. In 1895, when the British government planned to hand the protectorate to Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, Khama and two other kings, Sebele I of the Bakwena and Bathoen I of the Bangwaketse, travelled to Britain with missionary support. They toured the country, addressed public meetings and won the backing of religious and temperance groups. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, agreed that their lands would stay under the Crown, though the company received a strip of land for a railway. A few weeks later the Jameson Raid, launched from that strip, discredited Rhodes.

Khama’s diplomacy was one of the most successful African responses of the period. It kept Bechuanaland out of company rule and out of the later Union of South Africa, and the territory became independent as Botswana in 1966. His success depended on circumstances: British public opinion distrusted Rhodes, missionaries lobbied for the kings, and Bechuanaland had little that settlers wanted.

Other responses: negotiation, escape and migration

Across the continent many rulers tried negotiation before or instead of war, and many were removed when negotiation failed. Jaja of Opobo, a powerful palm-oil trader in the Niger Delta, insisted on his right to trade directly with Europe and was tricked aboard a British ship and deported in 1887. Behanzin of Dahomey fought the French in 1892–1894 and was exiled. Lat Dior, the damel of Kayor in Senegal, opposed the railway from Dakar to Saint-Louis and was killed in battle in 1886. In Sierra Leone, Bai Bureh led the Hut Tax War of 1898 against a new British tax. In German East Africa, Mkwawa of the Hehe destroyed a German column in 1891 and resisted until 1898, when he shot himself rather than be captured.

Escape and migration were also responses. Surviving Herero, including Samuel Maharero, crossed the Omaheke desert to British Bechuanaland, where some of their descendants still live. Samori moved his entire state east to escape the French. In many colonies, people fled from forced labour, taxes or conscription into neighbouring territories or remote areas; whole villages moved across the borders between French and British West Africa to escape French labour demands. Migration was a way to keep some autonomy when neither fighting nor negotiation offered it.

Successes and failures of African responses

Judging the success of African responses depends on what counts as success. A ruler who kept his kingdom independent, one who kept his throne and land under colonial rule, one who delayed conquest for a decade, and a movement that failed but inspired later nationalists all achieved something. The table of measures of success sets out the main criteria.

Military responses

Armed resistance usually failed, because of the firepower gap, the European use of African soldiers and allies, and the colonisers’ willingness to use famine and destruction. It succeeded where an African state could match European weapons in quantity, fight on favourable ground and stay united, as Ethiopia did; it delayed conquest where leaders adapted, as Samori did. Mass risings after conquest, such as Maji Maji and the First Chimurenga, showed that religious ideas could unite peoples without a common state, but they also met the most brutal repression.

Political negotiations, treaties and collaboration

Negotiation and collaboration secured better terms more often than war, but only for some. Khama, Lewanika and Kagwa kept their positions, their peoples’ land in part, and a degree of self-government that later shaped Botswana, western Zambia and Uganda. Their success depended on European rivalries, missionary allies and a colonial power that needed their cooperation. Many treaties, however, were misunderstood or broken, and collaboration did not protect Lobengula, whose concession led to conquest, or Jaja of Opobo, who was deported.

Escape and migration

Flight preserved lives and some freedom, as for the Herero who reached Bechuanaland, but it meant losing land, cattle and political independence. It was a sign of the limits of other choices rather than a strategy of success.

The impact of colonial rule on the outcome

The outcome of each response also depended on what colonial rule meant in practice. Where colonial regimes demanded land and labour on a large scale, as in German South West Africa, German East Africa and Rhodesia, resistance continued after conquest and repression was most violent. Where the colonisers ruled through existing rulers and demanded less, as in Buganda and Bechuanaland, collaboration brought real gains for elites. The systems of colonial administration that followed conquest, such as indirect rule, are studied in the regional study of colonialism after 1890.

Perspectives and debates: why was Africa partitioned?

The causes of the partition have been debated since it happened. The main interpretations differ in two ways: whether they stress economic or political and strategic motives, and whether they locate the driving force in Europe (the “metropole”) or in Africa itself (the “periphery”).

Economic interpretations

The first major interpretation came from critics of empire. The British economist J. A. Hobson, writing after the South African War, argued that imperialism served a small class of financiers and investors who could not find profitable uses for their capital at home because the mass of the population was too poor to buy what industry produced.

It is this economic condition of affairs that forms the taproot of Imperialism. If the consuming public in this country raised its standard of consumption to keep pace with every rise of productive powers, there could be no excess of goods or capital clamorous to use Imperialism in order to find markets …

J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, 1902. Hobson was a radical liberal who had reported on the South African War for the Manchester Guardian and blamed it on mining financiers; his book was a political argument for social reform at home as much as an analysis of empire. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), turned Hobson’s idea into a Marxist theory: imperialism was the inevitable stage of capitalism in which monopolies and banks divided the world among themselves.

Critics point out that most European capital went to the Americas, Russia and the settler colonies, not to tropical Africa, and that many colonies cost more than they earned. Later economic historians therefore refined the argument. A. G. Hopkins (1968, and An Economic History of West Africa, 1973) argued that the fall in palm-oil prices after the 1870s caused a crisis in West African trade, conflict between European merchants and African rulers, and pressure for annexation, so that economic forces worked through crises on the coast. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, in British Imperialism (1993), argued that British expansion was driven by “gentlemanly capitalism”, the financial and service interests of the City of London, which explains Egypt (a debt crisis) and South Africa (gold) better than a search for markets for manufactures.

Strategic and political interpretations

Robinson and Gallagher’s Africa and the Victorians (1961) rejected the economic explanation for British policy. Using the records of the Foreign and Colonial Offices, they argued that the “official mind” of British policy-makers cared about Africa mainly for strategic reasons: the route to India through Egypt and around the Cape. Britain acted reluctantly and defensively, in response to local crises, and the occupation of Egypt in 1882 set off the partition by provoking France and giving Germany a means of pressure on Britain. Critics reply that Robinson and Gallagher relied on the records of officials, who rarely wrote about commercial pressure, and that the partition was already beginning in West Africa and the Congo before 1882.

Other historians stress European diplomacy and nationalism. A. J. P. Taylor saw Bismarck’s colonies as a diplomatic manoeuvre, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler saw them as social imperialism. Henri Brunschwig, in French Colonialism, 1871–1914 (1966), argued that French expansion was driven by nationalism and the search for prestige after 1871, not by economic need. D. K. Fieldhouse, in Economics and Empire, 1830–1914 (1973), developed a “peripheral” explanation: crises on the frontiers of European influence, often caused by men on the spot, drew metropolitan governments into annexations they had not planned.

African perspectives

From the 1960s African historians argued that explanations focused on Europe left out Africans. A. Adu Boahen, editor of volume VII of the UNESCO General History of Africa (1985) and author of African Perspectives on Colonialism (1987), argued that African initiative and resistance shaped the timing and form of the partition, and that the main theme of the period was the African determination to keep sovereignty. Others have shown how African rulers’ decisions, the crisis of legitimate commerce and conflicts within African states created the local crises that the peripheral theory describes. Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa (1991), a detailed narrative, gives great weight to the ambitions and actions of individual Europeans, from Leopold to Rhodes.

The interpretations can be weighed rather than simply listed. Economic motives explain the interest of merchants and financiers and the importance of South Africa and Egypt, but not why governments took vast regions of little commercial value. Strategic explanations fit British policy in Egypt and the Nile, but less well French or German expansion. Political and peripheral explanations account for the speed and competitiveness of the scramble after 1884. Most historians now combine them: economic change and technology made Africa accessible and interesting, crises such as Egypt in 1882 and the Congo in 1884 triggered competition, and rivalry between the powers then turned competition into a race.

Perspectives and debates: resistance, collaboration and memory

A second debate concerns the meaning of African responses. Colonial historians often presented resistance as the reaction of “traditional” rulers who could not accept progress, and collaborators as the far-sighted friends of civilisation. Nationalist historians after independence reversed this, celebrating resisters such as Samori, Yaa Asantewaa and Nehanda as founders of the nation and treating collaborators as traitors.

Terence Ranger, in an influential article of 1968 on “primary resistance” in East and Central Africa, argued that movements such as the First Chimurenga and Maji Maji were not backward-looking: they built new forms of organisation across ethnic lines, often through religion, and they were connected, in ideas and memory, to the nationalist movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Later historians, including Ranger himself, qualified this, showing that the links were often made by later nationalists who used the memory of resistance for their own purposes. Ronald Robinson, by contrast, emphasised collaboration: colonial rule depended on African collaborators, and its end came when they withdrew their support.

Most historians now see resistance and collaboration as two strategies on a spectrum, chosen according to circumstances, and stress African agency in both. The debate about the Herero and Nama genocide, and its possible links to later German history, shows that judgements about this period continue to matter in present-day politics, memory and law.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the causes of the partition

Paper 3: the Berlin Conference

Paper 3: the vulnerability of African societies

Paper 3: African responses

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the decline of Ottoman power in North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia) opened the way for European expansion before 1880.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of traders, legitimate commerce, explorers and missionaries in the growth of European activity, with named examples.

• To do:

  I can explain how quinine, steamers, the telegraph and new weapons made the conquest of the interior possible.

• To do:

  I can explain the economic, strategic, political and social causes of the New Imperialism and weigh them against each other.

• To do:

  I can explain why Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 and why this mattered for the partition.

• To do:

  I can explain why African societies were vulnerable: military weakness, political weakness, treaties and collaboration, disunity and ecological disaster.

• To do:

  I can describe the roles of Leopold II, Brazza and Bismarck in starting the scramble.

• To do:

  I can explain what the Berlin Conference decided, including Articles 34 and 35, and correct the myth that it divided Africa.

• To do:

  I can outline what each of the seven European powers acquired and describe the disputes between them, including Fashoda and the Moroccan crises.

• To do:

  I can explain how the First World War and the mandate system completed the partition by 1920.

• To do:

  I can explain why African rulers resisted or collaborated, using leadership, military strength, social factors and the conduct of the colonisers.