shaped by imperial boundaries

“We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were”

“We (the British and the French) have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod: we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.”

Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister, 1906.

PREAMBLE

Since the 15th Century, Europeans had got familiar with the coasts of West Africa, and established settlements along the coast to facilitate trade; in particular, the transatlantic slave trade.

There was little interest in driving colonization inland before the 1870s except in the Cape region (South Africa) and in Algeria, which the French had turned into a settler colony. Forty years later, the situation would be radically different; in 1910, only Liberia and Ethiopia escaped European rule.

At the inception of colonialism in Africa, the alliance of European nations had carved up Africa into 50 political domains.

To gain a grip of the factors that influenced and enabled the partitioning of Africa and the deleterious effects of the partitioning on Africa’s ethnic identities.

In doing so, the chapter will rely deeply on the literary work of Jutta Bolt, a Google scholar and a member of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

Jutta Bolt leads us into a deeper understanding of the pervasive interest of Europe to “occupy,” and other factors — natural and technological — which provided the European powers leverage over Africa.

This will be followed by an overview of the process of balkanization and partitioning of Africa.

The chapter ends with a discussion of how the imposition of arbitrary colonial states fueled conflicts within the continent and robbed African states of true citizenship.

COLONIAL TRIGGERS, AND THE BERLIN CONFERENCE

The environment in parts of Africa was exceptionally hostile to Europeans. Malaria inflicted immense fatalities on Europeans. While malaria was not as deadly for Africans, who possessed some resistance to the disease due to a genetic trait called a sickle cell, the tropical parts of Africa were not considered a suitable or attractive place for European settlement.

This changed, in 1840, with the discovery of the anti-malaria drug, Quinine prophylaxis. The death rate had dropped substantially in the decades that followed. Thus, it was Quinine that first made possible the presence of Europeans on the western coast. Matters improved once again in 1901–02, with the discovery, in Europe, that mosquitoes were the source of malaria and other tropical diseases.

As time passed and more scientific and technological improvements were achieved by the colonizing Europeans, they gained more leverage over the relatively disadvantaged states and kingdoms of Africa.

The Europeans had derived more impetus to stake a bold and devastating scramble for Africa.

Firearms

In the decades leading up to the 1880s, several rapid technological developments took place that shifted the balance of power in favor of the Europeans. During the 19th century, the technology used to produce iron improved substantially.

In Africa, the most significant impact of these improvements was in the supply of better and cheaper firearms. Europeans initially held most of these weapons and, naturally, this gave them a military advantage.

The development of the Maxim-gun, a semiautomatic weapon, later proved a crucial factor in the establishment of European military superiority.

Due to its increased speed of firing, and the fact it was relatively light to carry, it became the standard machine gun of Europeans in Africa.

Superior weaponry indeed enabled the Europeans to conquer vast swathes of lands in a very short period.

The British army’s Martini-Henry breech-loading rifle could hit a target nearly a mile away and could be fired 12 times a minute.

The Maxim gun could fire 600 rounds a minute. In comparison, many Africans were fighting with single-shot muskets.

The Steam Engine

The invention of the steam engine was another important technological discovery that preceded the partitioning of Africa.

The steam engine had transformed industrial production and the transportation of goods over land in Europe.

It also revolutionized the transport of goods by sea. Steamboats, carrying goods between Africa and Europe, also transported a new generation of explorers. The most famous of all was David Livingstone.

Exploring large parts of the unknown interior of tropical Africa, he was the first to demonstrate that Quinine was the key to surviving the continent’s hostile disease environment.

Humanitarianism and Racism

The scramble for Africa required an ideological justification. The colonial conquest was based on the religious idea of a ‘mission,’ the ethical idea of ‘ending slavery,’ all inspired by racist ideas. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Slave Trade had become quite unpopular and viewed contrary to Christian values in the case of Britain, and Republican values in the case of France.

The 1889–90 Brussels anti-slavery conference perfectly illustrates this new vision of Africa where the Europeans considered themselves as the ‘’saviors of Africa’’ — a vision that prefigures modern-day humanitarian interventions in Africa, after natural or political upheavals.

For the British, Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity (often known as the 3 Cs) were the main reasons behind colonialism. For secular France, it was the ‘civilizing mission.’

According to racist theories developed in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, Africans were supposed to belong to an inferior race that had to be enlightened by Europeans.

This racist justification of colonialism was backed up by pseudo-scientific theories which situated Africans at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Therefore, it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to educate an inferior race. These theories materialized again as justification for Apartheid in South Africa.

The Industrial Revolution

During the nineteenth century, most European powers experienced a dramatic growth in productivity caused by several technical innovations such as steam engines, steel furnaces, or electric power.

It meant that European countries produced more goods than they could sell. They were constantly looking for new markets because the Europeans did not consume enough to absorb the vast quantity of products made possible by new manufacturing techniques. This is the theory of European under-consumption.

The continent that Europe knew the least, Africa, needed to be open to trade. In exchange for tropical products in high demand in Europe, Africans would receive their manufactured products. The British, for example, wanted to obtain palm oil, cotton, and rubber from the Gold Coast, or groundnuts from the Gambia. Palm oil was used to create industrial lubricants, cotton to produce clothes, rubber to manufacture tires, and groundnuts were transformed into soap and wax. African products were thus at the center of the Industrial Revolution.

Powerful capitalistic interests were therefore among the reasons which pushed the Europeans to send expeditions along the rivers of Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This explains why the colonization of Africa was often driven by chartered companies, i.e. European private investors receiving privileges from their governments to trade in territories outside of Europe.

Some of these companies were instrumental in the creation of colonies, as was the case for the Royal Niger Company in Nigeria.

After years of the transatlantic slave trade, industrialization and what former slave trading European nations called “legitimate commerce” had thus become a strong motive for the European colonization of the continent.

Internal Politics and Rivalry in Europe

The start of the partitioning of Africa is often associated with how the balance of power within Europe evolved during that period. Wars and rivalries between European nations had brought the balance of power in Europe under pressure.

Any actions by one European nation required an immediate response from other countries to keep the balance. To preserve the power and diplomatic balance at home, European powers felt that carving up the African continent to settle conflicting interests in Africa was the only option.

The French, for example, had lost territory during a war with Germany and sought to compensate for that loss in Africa. The Portuguese, having had historic connections to Africa dating back to the 15th century, felt the British ignored their ‘historic claim’ on Africa. In response, they started claiming control over very extensive territories both on the west and east coast of the continent. Finally, Germany’s chancellor, Bismarck was frustrated with British behavior in Africa.

The British policy at the time was to exclude other powers from any political influence over territories, even when the British did not occupy or have any legal claim themselves.

For Britain, which was the only industrialized power until well into the 20th century, its informal empire in Africa would have been sufficient for some time. France and Germany, which both rapidly industrialized after the First World War, had not experienced significant problems in growth that needed to be solved by the establishment of an African empire.

And Portugal, a country with great colonial ambitions, was virtually a pre-industrial power in the 1880s and yet took control over very extensive territories in West and East Africa that, for long, remained a heavy burden on the country’s underdeveloped economy.

The combination of strategic/political and economic gains seems to have prevailed in providing a series of triggers and motives.

Cutting the Cake in Berlin

Amid the struggle for control of the trade route which ran through Egypt to the Red Sea and then to India, Britain and France were on the verge of a major conflict. This conflict had reached its peak when competitive annexation reached Algeria, western Sudan, and Madagascar.

Although unconvinced about the usefulness of territories, fearing that Britain and France would claim all the territory in Africa, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany called for an international conference in late 1884, officially titled the ‘West Africa Conference,” to discuss the increased tensions over Africa. Meanwhile, Bismarck claimed protectorates over Togo and Cameroon, and German West Africa.

In what became known as the Berlin Conference, the ground rules for the rest of the European conquest of Africa were established. At the conference, two major decisions were made: first, Leopold’s presence in the Congo Basin was recognized in return for free trade in the area; and, second, any European power could prohibit others from challenging certain territory by bringing it under effective control.

Besides conquests, each time Europeans obtained some regions through treaties with African chiefs, such treaties were received in Europe as proof of effective control. Meanwhile, the African chiefs typically regarded these treaties as pacts of friendship, or as safeguards from attack.

Leopold hired the explorer Stanley to explore the Congo River and to obtain extensive economic concessions from local African rulers. During the Conference of Berlin, these treaties formed the basis upon which King Leopold claimed the area of the Congo Free State. At the same time de Brazza, who explored the area of Gabon and northern Congo and signed several treaties with chiefs in the Congo basin did the same for France. He founded Brazzaville in 1880, and thereby gave France a gateway to the heart of Africa. And in Eastern Africa, Karl Peters signed treaties with African chiefs on behalf of Germany. In 1885 Germany declared the protectorate over Tanganyika.

European powers carved up the continent, established nation-states, and started to develop their (European) national economies. However, as there were so few Europeans there, it was the Africans that worked in construction, agriculture, and industry. Hence it was the Africans that built up the colonial states and paid the taxes to maintain them.

The creation of these countries had important long-term consequences. It determined not only the location, shape, and size of nations but also which societies, from then on, shared the same nationality. Hence the creation of countries during colonial times decided the geographical and ethnic basis of African countries today.

Africa was divided without consideration of local populations or pre-existing cultural groups. The result was that most African borders were the products of European geopolitical rivalries rather than West African history. This explains why most West African borders were created in European chancelleries and followed astronomical, mathematical, or geographical lines.

The Portuguese who had been present on the coasts of Africa since the fifteenth century played a particular role in the creation of borders. They collected and published numerous documents on the history of their possessions to justify their presence in Africa. Historical precedents were particularly sought after in a period where written documents were used as legal evidence.

The border treaties signed between Europeans were often very vague and needed to be adapted on the ground. The lack of geographical knowledge of Africa on the part of the Europeans meant that precise borders needed to be delimitated with the help of African populations. So, at the scale of West Africa, most borders were traced in Europe but, at a local level, African populations could influence the creation of the colonial borders.

This can be seen in the case of the Bundu kingdom which was used to separate the two colonies of Senegal and French Sudan (Mali). The northern boundary of the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno was also used by the British and the French in their negotiations to separate Nigeria and Niger.

After the defeat of Germany during the First World War, its West African colonies of Togo and Cameroun were divided between the British and the French under the aegis of the League of Nations. It was an opportunity for the Ewe populations of Togoland to be reunited with other Ewe speakers in the British colony of Gold Coast. The First World War was thus the last opportunity to redraw borders in West Africa.

With the dismissal of the aging Chancellor Bismarck by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the relatively orderly colonization became a frantic scramble, known as the “Scramble for Africa.” The Berlin Conference, initiated by Bismarck to establish international guidelines for the acquisition of African territory, formalized this “New Imperialism.”

Between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, Europe added almost 9 million square miles — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions. The occupation of Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in the scramble for African territory.

At the moment of their creation, African borders were not conceived as rigid state boundaries but as administrative colonial limits. Europeans imagined Africa as terra nullius: a vast land belonging to no one. Terra nullius was a legal invention of the Europeans to justify their encroachment on non-European lands. This was of course an absurdity that took no heed of the realities of complex African states and historical changes dating back to distant times.

This runs contrary to the fact that during the nineteenth century, there were many well-organized states in West Africa, as had earlier been illustrated in this book. For example, following the jihad of Usman Dan Fodio at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hausa-Fulanis created a caliphate which was the largest state in Africa at the time, and which had extensive textile industry and long-distance trade. Meanwhile, the neighboring Kingdom of Bornu was the heir of the sixteenth-century empire of Kanem Bornu, while in Guinea, the Fuuta Jalon state spread over a large area and conquered Kaabu’s longstanding empire in neighboring Guinea-Bissau in the 1860s.

CONCLUSION

The partition of Africa affected the continent in diverse ways. They encompass social, political, and to some extent, economic ramifications. By setting up the political administration of the continent, with Europeans as governors and governors-general, Britain, for instance, was able to block access and interaction between Nigerians and Germans.

The colonizing authority, for a given African colony, gained unchallenged power over the exploitation and use of Africa’s resources within its domain.

This chapter has examined the consequences of a neglected aspect of colonization, the Scramble for Africa, which resulted in the partitioning of several African ethnicities across different countries. Partitioned ethnicities have suffered systematically more from civil conflict compared to groups that have not been directly affected by the improper border design.

It is worth noting that civil conflict is not only concentrated in the historical homeland of partitioned ethnic groups, but groups adjacent to split ethnicities are also more likely to experience longer and more devastating (in terms of casualties) conflicts.

Before colonial rule, many African societies lived in relatively small groupings that were much smaller than modern, centralized states. This put limits on the extent to which power could be abused. Colonial rule fundamentally changed this societal picture in two ways. It reinforced authoritarian elements while undermining the inclusion and accountability that once balanced these societies.

The demarcated national boundaries and a central authority structure enabled post-colonial presidents to wield power over a vast territory and diverse groups of communities and cultures.

Also, because colonial governments typically did not have enough officials to effectively administer colonized territories, they collaborated with — or subordinated — existing leaders and power structures, funding and arming willing collaborators to enable them to exert greater control over their communities.

These protégés were expected to manage their communities and prevent a rebellion against colonial rule. It was more efficient for colonial governments to engage with fewer leaders — indirect rule — as a strategy to bring extensive areas and a greater number of people into subjugation. This concentrated power in the hands of a relatively small number of “Big Men” and entrenched ethnic dominations.

In other communities of Africa, political entrepreneurs gave colonial regimes what they wanted, in a bid to accumulate more power.

In both instances, the colonial era grossly disenfranchised and disempowered its subjects, in the course of partitioning, and deprived the nation-states so created of the people-commitment required for nation-building. It starved and continues to starve many African peoples of the sense of ownership of their nations, leading to the blight of nationalism.

Postcolonial African states were also profoundly divided and used the Europeans in their internal struggles. For example, the British became players in a civil war in Nigeria and backed one side against the other. This was the pattern of divide and rule which had long been used by European imperialists, since the sixteenth century. In 1903, the conquest of Kano was thus undertaken with the help of its inhabitants, just as the conquest of Mexico City by the Spanish had been undertaken with the help of Native American allies from Tlaxcala.

As of 2018, the African borderline was 83,500 kilometers (51,884 miles) long. Apart from the cases of Liberia and Ethiopia, most African borders were defined in Europe in a very short period between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the First World War. Nearly 44% of them were defined after astronomical lines (meridians and parallels), 30% after mathematical lines (arcs and lines), and 26% after geographic landmarks (mainly rivers and mountains). France is behind the creation of 32% of African borders, the United Kingdom 26.8%, Germany 8.7%, Belgium 7.6%, Portugal 6.9%, the Ottoman Empire 4%, Italy 1.7%, and Spain 1.5%.

The pioneering work of George Peter Murdock (1959) has mapped the spatial distribution of 834 ethnicities at the time of colonization in the mid/late 19th century. It identifies 231 ethnic groups with at least 10% of their historical homeland falling into more than one country. Using a more restrictive threshold of 20%, there are 164 ethnicities partitioned across the national borders.

For example, the Maasai have been split between Kenya (62%) and Tanzania (38%), the Anyi between Ghana (58%) and the Ivory Coast (42%), and the Chewa between Mozambique (50%), Malawi (34%), and Zimbabwe (16%). The Malinke are split into six different countries; the Ndembu are split between Angola, Zaire, and Zambia; and the Nukwe are split between Angola, Namibia, Zambia, and Botswana.

In the words of Stelios Michalopoulos, the ‘’Scramble for Africa — the artificial drawing of African political boundaries among European powers at the end of the 19th century — led to the partitioning of several ethnicities across newly created African states.”

In conclusion, the scramble for and criminal partition of Africa enabled Europeans to create islanded or “controlled” economies out of European colonies in Africa, today’s nation-States, and has served to stifle African nations, disabling them from attaining higher levels of human and economic development. Had Europeans not dislocated the natural formations of African societies, and stunted the continent’s capacity to grow its markets, Africa could well have mustered the cohesion and will require to engage the quest for industrial development.

The criminal enterprise of the partition of Africa in 1884, under the dictates of Bismarck, was a master-craft of a ‘Deed of Assignment’ executed for the disemboweling of Africa, and its effective colonization whereof, and the subsisting minimization of the continent.

Africans lost the use of their resources and had to fight for the right to basic access to them, and, later, for the right to self-governance. The poor demarcation of the territories in Africa by the Europeans bred various border disputes, which sometimes degenerated into wars. The conflict between Mali and Burkina Faso over the Agadez strip, where the Bobo resides, illustrates this. A second instance is a conflict between Nigeria and Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsular. More conflicts and wars were to follow.