Between 1880 and 1900 Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy scrambled for African possessions as if their national livelihoods depended on it (Map 24.2). By 1900 nearly the whole continent had been carved up and placed under European rule: only Ethiopia, which fought off Italian invaders, and Liberia, which had been settled by freed slaves from the United States, remained independent. In all other African territories, European powers tightened their control and established colonial governments in the years before 1914.

In the complex story of the European seizure of Africa, certain events and individuals stand out. Of enormous importance was the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, which established the new model of formal political control (see “Western Penetration of Egypt”). King Leopold II of Belgium (r. 1865–1909), an energetic, strong-willed monarch of a tiny country with a lust for distant territory, also played a crucial role. As early as 1861, he had laid out his vision of expansion: “The sea bathes our coast, the world lies before us. Steam and electricity have annihilated distance, and all the nonappropriated lands on the surface of the globe can become the field of our operations and of our success.”5

By 1876 Leopold’s expansionism focused on central Africa. He formed a financial syndicate under his personal control to send Henry M. Stanley, a sensation-seeking journalist and part-time explorer, to the Congo basin. Stanley established trading stations, signed unfair treaties with African chiefs, and planted the Belgian flag. Leopold’s actions alarmed the French, who quickly sent out an expedition under Pierre de Brazza. In 1880 de Brazza signed a treaty of protection with the chief of the large Teke tribe and began to establish a French protectorate on the north bank of the Congo River.

Leopold’s intrusion into the Congo area called attention to the possibilities of African colonization, and by 1882 Europe had caught “African fever.” A gold-rush mentality led to a determined race for territory, and rampant greed threatened the balance of power in Europe. To lay down some basic rules for this new and dangerous global competition, Jules Ferry of France and Otto von Bismarck of Germany arranged an international conference on Africa in Berlin in 1884 and 1885. The Berlin Conference, attended by over ten Western powers including the United States, established the principle that European claims to African territory had to rest on “effective occupation” (a strong presence on the ground) to be recognized by other states. This meant that Europeans would push relentlessly into interior regions from all sides and that no single European power would be able to claim the entire continent. The conference recognized Leopold’s personal rule over a neutral Congo Free State and agreed to work to stop slavery and the slave trade in Africa.

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The Berlin Conference coincided with Germany’s sudden emergence as an imperial power. Prior to about 1880, Bismarck, like many other European leaders at the time, had seen little value in colonies. In 1884 and 1885, as political agitation for expansion increased, Bismarck did an abrupt about-face, and Germany established protectorates over a number of small African kingdoms and tribes in Togo, the Cameroons region, southwest Africa, and, later, East Africa. In acquiring colonies, Bismarck cooperated against the British with France’s Jules Ferry, an ardent republican who also embraced imperialism. With Bismarck’s tacit approval, the French pressed southward from Algeria, eastward from their old forts on the Senegal coast, and northward from their protectorate on the Congo River to take control of parts of West and Central Africa.

Meanwhile, the British began to enlarge their own African colonies, beginning at the southern tip of the African continent. Led by Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony, British colonists leapfrogged over the two Afrikaner states — the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (see Map 24.2) — in the early 1890s and established protectorates over Bechuanaland (bech-WAH-nuh-land; now Botswana) and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), named in honor of its founder. (See “Individuals in Society: Cecil Rhodes.”)

English-speaking capitalists like Rhodes developed fabulously rich gold mines in the Transvaal, and this unilateral territorial and economic expansion heightened tensions between the British and Afrikaner (Dutch Boer) settlers. In 1899 the conflict erupted in the bloody South African War, or Boer War (1899–1902). After a series of defeats at the hands of the determined Boers, the British shipped some 180,000 troops to southern Africa. Overwhelming British forces put the Boers on the defensive, and they responded with an intensive guerrilla war that took two years to put down. During the fighting, both sides enlisted the support of indigenous African troops. The British forces resorted to “scorched earth” policies, burning crops and villages in Boer regions, and, most notoriously, placed Boers and native Africans in rudimentary concentration camps in an attempt to halt the guerrilla campaign. News of these tactics provoked liberal outrage at home in Britain.

The war ended with a British victory in 1902, and in 1910 the Afrikaner territories were united with the old Cape Colony and the eastern province of Natal in a new Union of South Africa, established as a largely “self-governing” colony but still under British control. Gradually, however, the defeated Afrikaners used their numerical superiority over the British settlers to take political power, as even the most educated nonwhites lost the right to vote, except in the Cape Colony.

The British also fought to enlarge their colonies in West Africa, impatiently pushing northward from the Cape Colony, westward from Zanzibar, and southward from Egypt. In 1885 British troops stationed in the Sudanese city of Khartoum, an outpost on the Nile that protected imperial interests in Egypt, were massacred by fiercely independent Muslim Sudanese. A decade later the British sought to establish permanent rule in the disputed territory. Under the command of General Sir Herbert Kitchener (who would serve Britain as secretary of state for war during World War I), a well-armed force moved cautiously and more successfully up the Nile River, building a railroad to supply arms and reinforcements as it went. Finally, in 1898 these British troops confronted the poorly armed Sudanese army at the Battle of Omdurman (ahm-duhr-MAHN) (see Map 24.2). Sudanese soldiers charged the British lines time and time again, only to be cut down by the recently invented Maxim machine gun. In the solemn words of one English observer, “It was not a battle but an execution. The bodies were . . . spread evenly over acres and acres.” In the end, about 10,000 Sudanese soldiers lay dead, while 28 Britons had been killed and 145 wounded.6

Continuing up the Nile after the battle, Kitchener’s armies found that a small French force had already occupied the village of Fashoda (fuh-SHOH-duh). Locked in imperial competition with Britain ever since the British occupation of Egypt, France had tried to be first to reach one of Africa’s last unclaimed areas — the upper reaches of the Nile. The result was a serious diplomatic crisis and the threat of war between two major European powers. Wracked by the Dreyfus affair (see Chapter 23) and unwilling to fight, France eventually backed down and withdrew its forces, allowing the British to take over.

The British conquest of Sudan exemplifies the general process of empire building in Africa. The fate of the Muslim-Sudanese force at Omdurman was inflicted on native peoples who openly resisted European control: they were blown away by vastly superior military force. The violent German suppression of armed rebellions in the colonies of German East Africa and German Southwest Africa, where revolt led to full-scale warfare and the deaths of some one hundred thousand Herero and Nama Africans, confirmed the rule. But as the Fashoda incident showed, however much the European powers squabbled for territory around the world, they had the sense to stop short of actually fighting each other. Imperial ambitions were not worth a great European war.