Scramble for Africa.

« additional territorial grabs.

The most significant of these rules stated that colonial powers were obligated to notify each other when they claimed African territory.Further, subsequent “effective occupation” of the claimed area was necessary for the claim to remain valid.

Through it all, as Europeans negotiated their rights toAfrican territory, not a single African was present.

Once the conference was over, it was clear that a European Scramble for African territories was underway. Southern Africa became a much more important element in the Scramble a year after the Berlin Conference.

At that time, word spread of the world’s largest knowndeposits of gold in the Afrikaner-controlled South African Republic (or Transvaal).

Western miners and industrialists flocked into southern Africa to profit.

Among thoseinvolved in finance and operation of the mines was British magnate Cecil Rhodes, a leader of diamond mining in the Cape Colony.

Rhodes was a believer in the“civilizing” mission of British colonialism—he dreamed of a British African empire stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo, Egypt.

Thus, hoping to find still moregold north of Transvaal in 1890, he led a “pioneer column” of settlers north.

These prospectors overcame African opposition and carved out the new British colonies ofSouthern and Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia). Most European powers were not content to let a chance at claiming further territory slip.

France may have had the grandest territorial desires of any nation.

Its majoradvances were eastward from the Sénégal River and down the Niger from its headwaters.

French armies slowly overcame opposition from the powerful Tukolor Empireand advanced on the ancient city of Tombouctou (Timbuktu).

Italy, too, laid claim to Eritrea, on the Red Sea, and then announced a protectorate over a large portion ofSomaliland along the Indian Ocean. IV FINAL STAGES (1891-1912) The early years of the Scramble were accomplished with minimal bloodshed, but that would not be the case in the 1890s and afterward.

Some of the most powerfulAfrican states put up strong resistance, requiring Europeans to send in well-armed forces.

Massed African armies with outdated weapons defeated European forces onoccasion, but more frequently modern weaponry won out, producing some of the most one-sided battles in the history of warfare. France and Britain speeded their conquests in West Africa.

France united footholds on the coast with vast holdings of interior grasslands and desert by the century’send.

The major delay for the French was caused by the Mandinka hero Samory Touré.

Touré united peoples around the headwaters of the Niger and Volta rivers andfought a guerrilla war until he was captured and exiled in 1898.

The British overcame the Ashanti Kingdom in the Gold Coast by 1896 and established protectorates inwestern and eastern Nigeria.

They also allowed the chartered Royal Niger Company to administer northern Nigeria until the company’s forces encountered theadvancing French on the middle Niger and came into conflict with the powerful northern Sokoto caliphate.

In 1900 the British government took over the control of theterritory of Nigeria from the company.

By 1903, Britain had conquered the Sokoto caliphate. Across the rest of the Sudan and into East Africa, resistance was greater and tensions higher.

French forces occupied the rest of the central Sudan.

These forces metresistance in present-day Chad from Muslim forces of Rabih al-Zubayr until Rabih was killed in 1900.

Britain had its hands full taking the upper Nile because of the largeSudanese state created by the Muslim holy leader, Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi.

In 1885 the Mahdi’s forces had taken Khartoum and killed British generalCharles George Gordon.

By the 1890s the Mahdist state was among the strongest in Africa.

The British sent in troops under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, and in1898 they met the Mahdist forces at Omdurman, near Khartoum.

Kitchener won a decisive victory, killing almost 11,000 Africans and wounding 16,000 while the Britishforces suffered only 430 casualties.

In the battle’s wake, Kitchener learned of a French force at Fashoda, about 600 km (about 400 mi) south of Khartoum, which wasclaiming French possession of the Upper Nile.

The Upper Nile was nominally Egyptian territory, and since Britain occupied Egypt, it had been considered British.However, France claimed that Britain had failed to achieve “effective occupation” in the Upper Nile as required by the Berlin Conference.

Kitchener and a contingent ofBritish troops immediately traveled down the Nile for a standoff that brought the countries to the brink of war.

However, the French government, struggling withinternal political problems, backed down rather than start a war, and Britain took control of the entire Sudan.

In the meantime, the Sultanate of Zanzibar, a formerslave and ivory trading power, saw much of its mainland territory seized by Britain and Germany.

In 1890 the sultanate submitted to a British protectorate overZanzibar.

The British declared a protectorate over Uganda in 1894, over Kenya in 1895, and completed a railroad from the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in 1901.The only resistance to European takeover that was successful over the long run occurred in Ethiopia.

Here the forces of Emperor Menelik II soundly defeated aninvading Italian army at the Battle of Ādwa in 1896. Two events in the early 1900s served to stifle enthusiasm for colonial takeover in Africa.

One was the exposure of atrocities in Leopold’s Congo Free State.

Here, colonialagents and private companies were forcing Africans to gather raw rubber without payment and killing or maiming those who failed to meet quotas.

In the end,international pressure forced Leopold to cede his private colony to Belgium, and in 1908 the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo.

The other event was the BoerWar (1899-1902) in southern Africa, which pitted whites against whites.

Discovery of gold in the Transvaal in the mid-1880s had brought wealth to the Afrikanerrepublics in southern Africa.

When Afrikaner governments taxed foreigners heavily and stifled foreign profit-taking, British imperialists sought to take over the region.Cecil Rhodes’s 1895 plot to stage a revolt in the Transvaal failed.

Tensions between the mighty British government and the small, white-ruled republics escalated untilwar broke out in 1899.

Following early Afrikaner success, the war settled into a brutal guerrilla struggle, putting off ultimate British victory until 1902.

In 1910 thevarious British colonies at Africa’s southern tip were joined into the Union of South Africa, a dominion of Britain. North Africa was the scene of the Scramble’s final events.

After years of rivalry that sometimes verged on open hostilities, Britain and France signed the EntenteCordiale in 1904.

This “friendly agreement' quietly gave France a free hand to take Morocco while it officially removed the obsolete Egyptian “dual control” system andleft Egypt to Britain.

France, Spain, and Germany quarreled over Morocco until 1912, when France and Spain divided the territory.

The same year, Italy seized what isnow Libya, the last vestige of Ottoman territory in Africa.

(The Italians were opposed by Muslim groups in the interior until 1931.) V EFFECTS OF THE SCRAMBLE Africa on the eve of World War I (1914-1918) was nothing like the Africa of 40 years earlier.

What had been a largely independent continent with some foreign controlof its coasts was now almost entirely in European hands.

Britain and France held the lion’s share.

The British had almost fulfilled Cecil Rhodes’s dream of an unbrokenline of colonies from the Cape to Cairo.

Their colonies held promising economic potential, with gold in South Africa and cash crops in East and West Africa.

The Frenchcontrolled huge amounts of territory in North and West Africa, but much was desert and only a few colonies were productive.

Germany would lose its African colonies inlosing World War I, as would Italy in World War II (1939-1945).

Britain and France would give up most of their colonies in the 1950s and 1960s.

Spain would remainlonger but be a less-significant participant in the colonial picture.

Portugal would entrench itself and become, in the mid-1970s, the last European power to begin torelinquish its claims. The Scramble and its aftermath held great irony.

While the conquest was going on, events in Africa were of the greatest importance throughout Europe.

Europeancompetition for African territory dominated headlines, brought down governments, and nearly drove nations to war.

But once the conquest was complete, Africa waslargely forgotten and not considered again until the movement for African independence of the 1950s and 1960s. Effects of the European takeover on Africans were considerable.

In the short term, the Scramble obviously led to Africans’ loss of control of their own affairs.

But it alsobrought enormous hardship to most Africans.

In addition to the deaths caused by the conquest itself, many Africans died as a result of disrupted lifestyles andmovement of people and animals among different disease environments.

Africa’s population did not begin to recover from the devastation caused by the Scramble andits aftermath until well into the 20th century.

In the long term, the Scramble was part of a larger process of bringing non-Western peoples into the world economy—in. »