Skip to main content

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.

The colonial cast of Africa

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.

Article index

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.

The colonial cast of Africa

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 .

The colonial cast of 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

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Giacomo Fauser Biography

Giacomo Fauser (Novara, 1892- id ., 1971) Italian industrialist.With studies in chemical engineering, he carried out interesting research in the field of production processes by synthesis of nitrogen compounds, especially nitrogen fertilizers.

The history and origin of the Earth

The planet Earth 4.5 billion years ago was a mass of clustered rocks whose core melted the planet.Over time it dried and cooled to form a crust solid and consistent.After a long cooling process, the formation of gases and the interaction with the air is the atmosphere . Index of the article Formation of the solar system The scientific studies confirm that it does around of 13.8 billion years there was a big explosion that they called Big Bang .The exorbitant force that was unleashed dispersed all the matter that was in all possible directions at speeds too exorbitant.As time went by, they moved away from the place of the explosion and slowed down.The nearby matter stayed for p roast to be what are now the galaxies . In the immediate vicinity of the limit of our galaxy is the Via Lactea. These fractions of matter were condensed in a dense cloud about 5,000 million years ago.All this matter was constituting a huge mass thanks to gravitational forces, until a sphere ...

Tibet - History and Culture of Tibet in the 20th century

As we said in the previous article when we talked about the new Chinese repression in the Tibet , this region has lived through centuries of continuous invasions that have only served to obscure its memory and slowly exterminate its culture. The first Mongols, the English, the Indians and the Chinese , have razed their lands, devastating an already poor population in itself, and the monasteries and the Tibetans themselves are suffering the end of their pure race, because by their blood they already run the traces of the different empires that have dominated it to the point that two thirds of their population is Chinese. Little Tibet is known before the tenth century.Perhaps it was in those centuries when this region could be considered totally independent.But it was in the eleventh century II when they suffered their first invasion: that of the Mongol Empire .While it is true that during the centuries that the Mongol Empire dominated Tibet, the country's government enjo...

Agustín de Zárate Biography

Agustín de Zárate (Valladolid, around 1514-Seville ?, around 1577) Spanish historian.In 1528 he was appointed secretary of the Royal Council of Castile.In 1543 he passed to Peru as a grant accountant for said region and Tierra Firme, with the task of putting in order the boxes of the Royal Treasury of that province, going there in the squad that led Viceroy Núñez Vela.Secretary of the Court, he was involved in the civil strife that ravaged the country.Before the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro, Agustín de Zárate sided with Viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela.Later Carlos I awarded his services with the position of governor of the Hacienda de Flandes.In his leisure he composed History of the discovery and conquest of Peru (Antwerp, 1555), which includes from the conquest of the territory to its pacification by Pedro de La Gasca. Methodical writer and good stylist, his work, not very original, enjoyed high prestige and was translated into Italian, English, French and German.Zárate shows a rema...

George dewey Biography

George Dewey (Montpelier, 1837-Washington, 1917) American admiral, famous for commanding the North American fleet that defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay.He began his military studies at the Norwich School (New Hampshire), and in 1854 he entered the Annapolis Naval Academy, where he graduated in 1858.After serving on the steam frigate USS Wabash bound for the Mediterranean fleet, in 1861 he returned to the Naval Academy to obtain the rank of lieutenant. George Dewey When the civil war broke out that same year, he was assigned to the Mississippi frigate with the mission of participating in the blockade of the coast of the Confederacy, and commanding this ship took part in the Battle of New Orleans (April 1862).In 1863 he fought under the orders of Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Port Hudson, in which the Mississippi was destroyed.Later he was appointed commander of the Monongahela, flagship of Admiral Farragut, and of the Kearsarge, in which he served when the war ended. ...

César Oviedo linen Biography

Lino César Oviedo (Lino César Oviedo Silva; Juan de Mena, 1944) Paraguayan coup general.He completed a career in military academies in Germany.As a Paraguayan military officer, on February 3, 1989, and with the rank of colonel, his intervention was decisive in the overthrow of President Alfredo Stroessner. From this moment on, the promotions in Oviedo's military career followed one another.In May of that same year he was promoted to Brigadier General and in December 1991 to Division General.In that period of time, he served, first, as Head of the 1st Cavalry Division and, later, that of the 1st Army Corps, a position he held until the end of 1993, the year in which he became commander of the Army. He was only promoted to general in the Army when he starred in the most important political-military crisis of the democratic process in Paraguay.On April 22, 1996, and with the support of loyal commanders, he declared in absentia against President Juan Carlos Wasmosy.The military ...

The Mayan Religion

The Mayans inhabited Central America in the centuries before the Conquest of America, developing a highly evolved civilization.In it, religious beliefs played an essential role that we will talk about in the next article.In About History we talk to you now of the Mayan Religion . The Mayan religionThe Mayan calendarsThe Mayan ceremoniesOther entities in the Mayan religionVideo of the Mayan religion The Mayan religion : The religion of the Mayan culture was characterized basically for the passing of life around infinite cycles of the universe .that way, it will be possible to be noticed that the Mayan religion finds its roots in time, being this diagrammed by means of diverse systems of calendars based on different patterns, dividing the life cycles of the Mayan culture . The Mayas believed that the world had been created five times and destroyed four times , this being the basis of the Mesoamerican religious culture that spread from the year 900 onwards, later a...

Higinio Uriarte Biography

Higinio Uriarte (Asunción, 1843-1909) Paraguayan politician who reached the provisional presidency of his country between 1877 and 1878, after the death of Juan Bautista Gill.He studied in Buenos Aires and returned to Asunción at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870).He was a senator with Cirilo Antonio Rivarola, and later a deputy and president of the Chamber. Higinio Uriarte During the presidential period of Juan Bautista Gill (1874-1877) was elected vice president of the Republic.Higinio Uriarte acceded to the presidency in April 1877, after Gill's assassination in Asunción.In October 1877 he put down an uprising led by Cirilo Antonio Rivarola.During his tenure, US President Rutherford Hayes, arbitrator in territorial disputes after the War of the Triple Alliance, ruled that large tracts of the Chaco were Paraguayan domain. His government had to face the difficult economic and social situation in which the country had been after the War of the Triple All...

Charles II, the Bewitched

Carlos II was laultima, the most degenerate, and the most patent victim of the inbreeding of the Austrias.These words, by the British historian John Lynch, may seem excessive and somewhat loaded in the adjectives.But if we take a look at the history doctor who for thirty-five years was King Carlos II of Spain maybe we change our mind. Index of the article Carlos II, the Bewitched Carlos II was a soul quite unfortunate .Born at the end of a long line of inbreeding, he suffered health problems throughout his life, although short.Badly disfigured, he was considered unable to govern and, during his lifetime, most of the power was in the hands of his mother, Mariana of Austria.He was the last of the Spanish rulers of the Habsburgs and with his time on the throne, Spain fell into decline as an empire.Some of the wild rumors about his health were true, others pure sensation.However, his tragic life was also full of intrigue, and his death plunged much of Europe into a major war. ...