The colonial cast of Africa

The colonial cast of Africa by European powers was the product of the imperialism generated after the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century.The distribution and appropriation of African lands was done, at first in disorder, and then, at the end of the 19th century, arbitrarily.

When a little attention is paid to the political map of Africa it is not difficult to feel that there is something strange, something too tidy, in the borderline provision of the countries.

The limits determine regions of approximately similar sizes, and in similar ways.The reason for this, it is not a coincidence, or some romantic agreement between the nations that today make up the continent.

The political map of Africa , like so many others in the world, is the p roduct of the European colonization .But in the African case, the colonial cast was made without considering any kind of cultural, social, or economic factors of the region.

Africa was geographically divided: it was distributed as if the European colonizers were cutting a cake.

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Exploration

In the last years of the 17th century until approximately 1880, a large number of explorations took place, promoted, on the one hand, by individual initiatives based on scientific curiosity, for the concern of making a Methodical inventory of the planet, for the romantic taste for adventure or missionary vocation.

On the other hand, the explorations were carried out due to the action of societies composed of few but select members, such as African Association, the Royal Geographical Society of London, or that of Paris.

Representation of the construction of a large canoe during the Stanley expedition

The exploration remained for a long time the heritage of the old colonial nations.

Portugal took the initiative in southern and central Africa, when the installation of the English in El Cabo (1795) he was afraid of an intrusion into his coastal possessions of Angola and Mozambique.At the same time he began exploring the Niger river basin and the central Sudan region.

Las German expeditions came to continue, in the second half of the century, the British explorations.They recognized the region between Niger and Chad.Later, between 1860 1875 other trips were oriented more towards Sahara and Sudan Eastern.

Shortly before 1850, Dr. Krapf explored the region of the Kilimanjaro and Kenya mountains, and They multiplied several English trips to explore the area of ​​the great lakes, and the origin of the Nile River.

Further south, Livingstone across the Africa austral, and explored the region for a long time before he died.His trips began to interest the great European public.

A newspaper hired the journalist Stanley to search for Livingstone , whom I finally find, but not before confirming that the Nile originated in what they called Lake Victoria.In addition, it continued exploring the Congo region.

Victoria Falls, the largest in the world , explored by Livingstone

Occupation

But once the European curiosity about the geography of Africa was satisfied, the first political attempts to colonize began the new land explored.

In 1877, Stanley put himself at the service of King Leopold II of Belgium , and with time mpo formed the idea of ​​an African state in the Congo Basin, of which Leopoldo would be sovereign.

This initiative sparked the distrust of England , and still more than France , who had just entrusted the exploration of the Ogoue Valley, after its long presence on the coasts of Senegal and Gabon.

So it happened, without transition, from the era of travel to the of territorial rivalries between European powers.

In the 1860s, the Interior occupation took its first steps in the west of the black Africa .

Representation of King Leopold devouring the Congo (credit: Linley Sambourne)

The English had created since the beginning of the second century official colonies: Sierra Leone in 1808, and Gambia, in 1816.But around the third, Gold Coast, colonization began to expand slowly.

The colonizers began to intervene in the internal affairs of African tribal confederations, annexing regions and towns.

In addition, English merchants began to replace the premises of the organization to organize the circuit of products at their convenience.

In Central Africa , the situation became increasingly tense. Leopold II maintained its colonialist ambitions, and France he imposed his protectorate at the same time on the king of Tunisia and Makomo, king of the batekes.

Meanwhile, England intervenes in Egypt, and Germany in the Africa Tropical, equatorial and Austral.

Cast

This situation caused the need for European imperialists to reach agreements to avoid a war for new lands that appropriated.

In 1885, an international conference was convened in Berlin that managed to defer conflicts between the various powers, although imposing German arbitration (and the conduct of Bismark ), both in the colonies and in Europe.

The African Mediterranean coast is in the hands of France and the United Kingdom The eastern coast was divided between the Germans to the south and the British to the north.The West African coast was held by the Belgians , French and British .

The Spaniards took over Western Sahara, the Italians got Somalia and the Portuguese extended or strengthened their control over Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, Santo Tome and Principe and Mozambique while the Germans obtain Namibia.

The colonial cast of Africa before the Great War breaks out (credit: Jose Manuel Roas Trivino)

The fever was suppressed for some time: Britain strongly defended its dominance in the Lower Niger region, it seemed to abandon the rest to French influence.

The freedom of trade was proclaimed and navigation in the Niger and in the Congo, and the conditions of the effective occupation of the colonial territories were defined.

While Europeans avoided for some years (up to 1 914) entering a war , the native populations and cultures of Africa were totally unstructured, when not annihilated, by imperialist intervention and the intrusion of their governments and economies.