Berlin Conference
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, also known as the Congo Conference or West Africa Conference, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power. The conference was organized by Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of Germany. Its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalisation of the Scramble for Africa, but some scholars of history warn against an overemphasis of its role in the colonial partitioning of Africa and draw attention to bilateral agreements concluded before and after the conference. The conference contributed to ushering in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.
Background
Prior to the conference, European diplomats approached governments in Africa in the same manner as they did in the Western Hemisphere by establishing a connection to local trade networks. In the early 1800s, the European demand for ivory, which was then often used in the production of luxury goods, led many European merchants into the interior markets of Africa. European spheres of power and influence were limited to coastal Africa at this time as Europeans had only established trading posts up to this point.In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium, who had founded and controlled the International African Association the same year, invited Henry Morton Stanley to join him in researching and so-called 'civilizing' the continent. In 1878, the International Congo Society was also formed, with more economic goals but still closely related to the former society. Léopold secretly bought off the foreign investors in the Congo Society, which was turned to imperialistic goals, with the 'African Society' serving primarily as a philanthropic front.
From 1878 to 1885, Stanley returned to the Congo not as a reporter but as Leopold's agent, with the secret mission to organise what would soon after the closure of the Berlin Conference, in August 1885, become known as the Congo Free State. French agents discovered Leopold's plans and in response France sent its own explorers to Africa. In 1881, French naval officer Pierre de Brazza was dispatched to central Africa, travelled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville in what is now the Republic of Congo. Finally, Portugal, which had essentially abandoned a colonial empire in the area, long held through the mostly defunct proxy Kongo Empire, also claimed the area, based on old treaties with Restoration-era Spain and the Roman Catholic Church. It quickly made a treaty on 26 February 1884 with its former ally, Great Britain, to block off the Congo Society's access to the Atlantic.
By the early 1880s many factors including diplomatic successes, greater European local knowledge, and the demand of resources such as gold, timber, and rubber, triggered dramatically increased European involvement in the continent of Africa. Stanley's charting of the Congo River Basin removed the last terra incognita from European maps of the continent, delineating the areas of British, Portuguese, French and Belgian control. These European nations raced to annex territory that might be claimed by rivals.
France moved to take over Tunisia, one of the last of the Barbary states, using a claim of another piracy incident. French claims by Pierre de Brazza were quickly acted on by the French military which invaded and subjugated what is now the Republic of the Congo in 1881 and Guinea in 1884. Italy became part of the Triple Alliance, which upset Bismarck's carefully laid plans with the state influencing Germany to join the European invasion of Africa.
In 1882, realizing the geopolitical extent of Portuguese control on the coasts, but seeing penetration by France eastward across Central Africa toward Ethiopia, the Nile, and the Suez Canal, Britain saw its vital trade route through Egypt to India threatened. Under the pretext of the collapsed Egyptian financing and a subsequent mutiny in which hundreds of British subjects were murdered or injured, Britain intervened in the nominally Ottoman Egypt, which it controlled for decades.
Conference
The European race for colonies made Germany start launching expeditions of its own, which frightened both British and French statesmen. Hoping to quickly soothe the brewing conflict, Belgian King Leopold II convinced France and Germany that common trade in Africa was in the best interests of all three countries. Under support from the British and the initiative of Portugal, Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of Germany, called on representatives of 13 nations in Europe as well as the United States to take part in the Berlin Conference in 1884 to work out joint policy on the African continent.The conference was opened on November 15, 1884, and continued until it closed on 26 February 1885. The number of plenipotentiaries varied per nation, but these 14 countries sent representatives to attend the Berlin Conference and sign the subsequent Berlin Act:
| State | Colonial empire | Plenipoteniaries |
| German Empire | German colonial empire | Otto von Bismarck Paul von Hatzfeldt Clemens Busch Heinrich von Kusserow |
| Austrian colonial empire | Emerich Széchényi von Sárvári Felsö-Vidék | |
| Belgian colonial empire | Gabriel August van der Straten-Ponthoz Auguste Lambermont | |
| Danish colonial empire | Emil Vind | |
| Restoration | Spanish colonial empire | Francisco Merry y Colom, 1st Count of Beñomar |
| American colonial empire | John A. Kasson Henry S. Sanford | |
| French Third Republic | French colonial empire | Alphonse de Courcel |
| United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland | British colonial empire | Edward Baldwin Malet |
| Kingdom of Italy | Italian colonial empire | Edoardo de Launay |
| Dutch colonial empire | Philipp van der Hoeven | |
| Portuguese colonial empire | Antônio José da Serra Gomes António de Serpa Pimentel | |
| Russian Empire | Russian colonialism | Pyotr Kapnist |
| Union between Sweden and Norway | Swedish colonial empire | Gillis Bildt |
| Vassal and tributary states of the Ottoman Empire | Mehmed Said Pasha |
Uniquely, the United States reserved the right to decline or to accept the conclusions of the Conference.
General Act
The General Act fixed the following points:- To gain public acceptance, the conference resolved to end slavery by African and Islamic powers. Thus, an international prohibition of the slave trade throughout their respected spheres was signed by the European members. That point made the writer Joseph Conrad sarcastically refer to one of the participants at the conference, the International Association of the Congo, as "the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs" in his novella Heart of Darkness. The first name of this Society had been the "International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa".
- The properties occupied by Belgian King Leopold's International Congo Society, the name used in the General Act, were confirmed as the Society's and hence Leopold's private property. On August 1, 1885, a few months after the closure of the Berlin Conference, Leopold's Vice-Administrator General in the Congo, Francis de Winton, announced that the territory was henceforth called "the Congo Free State", a name that in fact was not still not in use at the time of the conference and does not appear in the General Act.
- The 14 signatory powers would have free trade throughout the Congo Basin as well as Lake Malawi and east of it in an area south of 5° N.
- The Niger and Congo rivers were made free for ship traffic.
- The Principle of Effectivity was introduced to prevent powers from setting up colonies in name only.
- Any fresh act of taking possession of any portion of the African coast would have to be notified by the power taking possession, or assuming a protectorate, to the other signatory powers.
- Definition of regions in which each European power had an exclusive right to pursue the legal ownership of land
Principle of effective occupation
The principle of effective occupation stated that powers could acquire rights over colonial lands only if they possessed them or had "effective occupation": if they had treaties with local leaders, flew their flag there and established an administration in the territory to govern it with a police force to keep order. The colonial power could also make use of the colony economically. That principle became important not only as a basis for the European powers to acquire territorial sovereignty in Africa but also for determining the limits of their respective overseas possessions, as effective occupation served in some instances as a criterion for settling disputes over the boundaries between colonies. However, as the Berlin Act was limited in its scope to the lands that fronted on the African coast, European powers in numerous instances later claimed rights over lands in the interior without demonstrating the requirement of effective occupation, as articulated in Article 35 of the Final Act.At the Berlin Conference, the scope of the Principle of Effective Occupation was heavily contested between Germany and France. The Germans, who were new to the continent, essentially believed that as far as the extension of power in Africa was concerned, no colonial power should have any legal right to a territory unless the state exercised strong and effective political control and, if so, only for a limited period of time, essentially an occupational force only. However, Britain's view was that Germany was a latecomer to the continent and was assumptively unlikely to gain any new possessions, apart from territories that were already occupied, which were swiftly proving to be more valuable than those occupied by Britain. That logic caused it to be generally assumed by Britain and France that Germany had an interest in embarrassing the other European powers on the continent and forcing them to give up their possessions if they could not muster a strong political presence. On the other side, Britain had large territorial holdings there and wanted to keep them while it minimised its responsibilities and administrative costs. In the end, the British view prevailed.
The disinclination to rule what the Europeans had conquered is apparent throughout the protocols of the Berlin Conference but especially in the Principle of Effective Occupation. In line with Germany and Britain's opposing views, the powers finally agreed that it could be established by a European power establishing some kind of base on the coast from which it was free to expand into the interior. The Europeans did not believe that the rules of occupation demanded European hegemony on the ground. The Belgians originally wanted to include that "effective occupation" required provisions that "cause peace to be administered", but Britain and France were the powers that had that amendment struck out of the final document.
That principle, along with others that were written at the conference, allowed the Europeans to conquer Africa but to do as little as possible to administer or control it. The principle did not apply so much to the hinterlands of Africa at the time of the conference. This gave rise to "hinterland theory", which basically gave any colonial power with coastal territory the right to claim political influence over an indefinite amount of inland territory. Since Africa was irregularly shaped, that theory caused problems and was later rejected.
Agenda
- Portugal–Britain: The Portuguese government presented a project, known as the "Pink Map", or the "Rose-Coloured Map", in which the colonies of Angola and Mozambique were united by co-option of the intervening territory. All of the countries attending the conference, except for Britain, endorsed Portugal's ambitions, but just over five years later, in 1890, the British government, in breach of the Treaty of Windsor and the Treaty of Berlin itself, issued an ultimatum that demanded for the Portuguese to withdraw from the disputed area.
- France–Britain: A line running from Say in Niger to Maroua, on the northeastern coast of Lake Chad, determined which part belonged to whom. France would own territory to the north of the line, and Britain would own territory to the south of it. The baisin of the Nile would be British, with the French taking the basin of Lake Chad. Furthermore, between the 11th and 15th degrees north in latitude, the border would pass between Ouaddaï, which would be French, and Darfur in Sudan, which would be British. In reality, a no man's land 200 km wide was put in place between the 21st and 23rd meridians east.
- France–Germany: The area to the north of a line, formed by the intersection of the 14th meridian east and Miltou, was designated to be French, and the area to the south would be German, later called German Cameroon.
- Britain–Germany: The separation came in the form of a line passing through Yola, on the Benoué, Dikoa, going up to the extremity of Lake Chad.
- France–Italy: Italy was to own what lies north of a line from the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer and the 17th meridian east to the intersection of the 15th parallel north and the 21st meridian east.
Aftermath
The Scramble for Africa sped up after the Conference since even within areas designated as their sphere of influence, the European powers had to take effective possession by the principle of effectivity. In central Africa in particular, expeditions were dispatched to coerce traditional rulers into signing treaties, using force if necessary, such as was the case for Msiri, King of Katanga, in 1891. Bedouin- and Berber-ruled states in the Sahara and the Sub-Sahara were overrun by the French in several wars by the beginning of World War I. The British moved up from South Africa and down from Egypt and conquered states such as the Mahdist State and the Sultanate of Zanzibar and, having already defeated the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa in 1879, moved on to subdue and dismantle the independent Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Within a few years, Africa was at least nominally divided up south of the Sahara. By 1895, the only independent states were:
- , involved in colonial conflicts with Spain and France, which conquered the nation in the 20th century.
- , founded with the support of the United States for freed slaves to return to Africa.
- , the only free native state, which fended off Italian invasion from Eritrea in the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1889–1896 but was defeated in 1936 during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
- Majeerteen Sultanate, founded in the early 18th century, it was annexed by Italy in the 20th century.
- Sultanate of Hobyo, carved out of the former Majeerteen Sultanate, which ruled northern Somalia until the 20th century, when it was conquered by Italy.
- , a Boer republic founded by Dutch settlers
- , also a Boer republic
The Boer republics were conquered by British in the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902. Morocco was divided between the French and Spanish in 1911, and Libya was conquered by Italy in 1912.