The Partition of Africa

And European Imperialism 1880-1900

John Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135836092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Much of the historical debate surrounding the partition of Africa, the events that led up to it and its implications for the continent itself and for the rest of the world is so controversial that it is difficult to provide a coherent survey of the shifting theories of the last twenty years. In this pamphlet Dr MacKenzie attempts to do this, by sketching the historical background to the partition, surveying the events of the partition in the four main regions of Africa and then examining in turn the theories produced to explain the sequence of events.

The Partition of Africa 1880–1900
and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century

We have been witnesses of one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world.

So wrote Sir John Scott Keltie in the opening sentence of his book The Partition of Africa, published in 1893. Keltie and his contemporaries were enthralled by the statistics of that ‘most remarkable episode’. More than 10 million square miles of African territory and over 100 million African people had fallen to European rule in the space of little more than a decade. The concluding acts of the Partition were yet to come in the late 1890s and in the years immediately preceding the first world war, but in Keltie’s time the map of Africa was already beginning to look like its modern counterpart. In the middle of the century the European cartographer saw Africa as a continent of blank spaces where the principal physical features—rivers, lakes, mountains—were gradually being filled in by European exploration. In the late 1880s and early 1890s maps of Africa in school atlases were revised every year, for political boundaries and various colourings for the different empires were now the rage.

Since the publication of Keltie’s book, writers and historians have conducted an energetic debate on the causes of the Partition of Africa, culminating in a veritable flood of books and articles in the last twenty years. This enduring interest is perhaps not surprising. The Scramble for Africa (as the Partition is sometimes more luridly known) was the most dramatic instance of the partition of the world by Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. It inaugurated a great revolution in the relationship between European and African peoples, and it sent out political, economic and social shock-waves, which continue to be felt in Africa to this day. Africans naturally find the Partition a distasteful event, yet they are prepared to defend the artificial boundaries established by it to the point of war if necessary. The modern challenge to Africa remains the struggle to consolidate and develop the national and economic units carved out by Europeans in the Partition period, and so knowledge of the Partition is fundamental to an understanding of contemporary Africa.

This pamphlet is concerned, however, with one great problem. What were the causes of the Partition of Africa and why did it occur when it did? Why was it that, after several centuries of nibbling at the edges of Africa, Europeans suddenly rushed in to establish direct military and political control over almost the entire continent? Why did European politicians who had traditionally resisted the extension of empire in Africa become caught up in a hectic demarcation of territory?

The actual events of the Partition and the explanations offered for it are highly complex. To boil them down into the short space of this pamphlet necessitates careful subdivision and the provision of signposts to help you through the maze of interpretations. The material that follows is divided into two main sections, Description and Interpretation. In the descriptive section, the historical background to the Partition will be sketched in, and then the actual events of the Scramble will be surveyed in the four main regions of Africa, north, west, south and east. In Section 2 each of the explanations offered for the Partition will be laid out, and that will be followed by an attempt at a conclusion based on recent thinking on the subject. There are, however, no final answers to such a complex problem. You must yourselves debate which of the interpretations of the causes of ‘one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the world’ seems most convincing.

Historical background and the events of the Partition

At first sight it may seem surprising that Europeans did not successfully penetrate Africa until the late nineteenth century, for Africa is after all Europe’s nearest neighbour, and the first continent with which Europe had established contact, both in the ancient world and at the beginning of the modern period. North Africa was a most important part of the Roman empire, as the great Roman remains of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, as magnificent as any in Rome itself, testify. When Spain and Portugal began tentatively to explore south and west in the fifteenth century in their efforts to outflank the power of Islam in the Mediterranean, inevitably their first contacts were with Africa. Spain established a number of small colonial enclaves in north Africa which she holds to this day. In the sequence of voyages associated with the school of navigation of Prince Henry the Navigator the Portuguese felt their way round the African Atlantic coast, established themselves on offshore islands and at one or two points on the mainland, all this before Columbus set out on his epic voyage for the Americas.

Africa has sometimes been depicted as no more than a giant barrier to the real objective of Europeans in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Asia. But Africa was a vital part of the Portuguese design. For many centuries African gold—from the region of the modern country of Ghana—had appeared in north Africa, brought by the Moors across the caravan routes of the Sahara. On the east coast, Muslims traded gold from Zimbabwe, sending it to the Middle East and India. The Portuguese wished to divert this trade into their own hands, for they needed gold to pay for the spices they sought in south India and elsewhere in the East.

One of the first Portuguese settlements on the west African coast was called, rather hopefully, El Mina, the mine. In east Africa they succeeded by the late sixteenth century in penetrating the Zambezi region and establishing settlements and trading posts on the highlands of the modern Zimbabwe. But these efforts to secure the African gold trade to themselves failed. Not only did they never actually reach the sources of the gold, their position was always a very weak one. In the course of the seventeenth century they were subjected to constant revolts, and in the 1690s all their positions in the interior of south-central Africa were destroyed.

This helps us to understand why Europeans failed to penetrate Africa as successfully as they penetrated the Americas and Asia in this period. Africans successfully resisted them. It used to be customary to explain European difficulties in Africa in terms of geography, climate and disease. It is true that Africa has few navigable rivers; it is true that in the west Europeans on the coast were separated from the interior by forest, and in the south and east both by arid areas just inland from the coast and by the escarpment that forms the edge of the high plateau of east, central and southern Africa; it is also true that Europeans suffered high mortality rates through fevers, and, more importantly perhaps, found it impossible to use draught animals like the horse and the ox to penetrate Africa because none could survive the sickness borne by the tsetse fly. But Europeans in other continents faced very considerable difficulties which they were able to overcome. The forest in west Africa was in fact criss-crossed by trade routes, as was the Sahara Desert to the north. The Portuguese managed to hold trading posts in the interior of the Zambezi region for over 70 years, despite problems of disease and terrain. But at this stage Europe did not enjoy the military preponderance she was to establish later. Just beyond the coastal belt of west Africa lay a sequence of powerful states, many of them with well-organized armies. There were important states in east and central Africa also, and a black military revolution in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century provided some African peoples with fresh powers of resistance there too. Europeans continued to be defeated by Africans, for example the Ashanti, the Zulu and the Abyssinians, until the late nineteenth century.

Despite repeated failures, however, Europeans continued to cling to the coasts of Africa. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese had been joined by the Dutch, the English, the French, the Danes, and traders from the north German ports. They established fortified trading posts at various places on the west African coast. They would have liked to reach the sources of gold and other commodities they wished to trade from Africa, but they had no need to do so. African middlemen successfully supplied the European coastal positions for more than 200 years. This was particularly true of the slave trade. Europeans created a great demand in the American colonies, the Caribbean and South America. Africans supplied that demand, and European merchants and shipping interests made large profits from it. Africa had now fulfilled two auxiliary roles in the European scheme—first as the supplier of gold to pay for the Asian trade, next as the supplier of slaves for the plantations, cotton, tobacco and sugar of the Americas.

For the most part, Europeans hoped that they would make only brief trading visits to Africa, for the death rates of the west coast were certainly extremely high. However, Europeans did succeed in settling in a few places. Spaniards settled in Morocco. Portuguese settled in the Zambezi Valley, but there they intermarried with the local population and soon ceased to be fully European. Only at the Cape did Europeans settle successfully and maintain their racial exclusiveness. The Dutch established a ‘refreshment station’ at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to supply their ships sailing to the Indies. Soon grants of land for permanent settlement were being made, and the Dutch began an expansion into the interior that was to have incalculable consequences in later centuries.

During the first half of the nineteenth century it became apparent that significant changes in the pattern of Europe’s relationship with Africa were on the way. Africa was beginning to be important for the commodities it could supply directly to Europe, most notably palm oil and groundnuts from west Africa, ivory and other products, including a plantation-grown spice called cloves, from east Africa. In west Africa Europeans were beginning to understand more about the interior. The Senegal and Gambia rivers had become important arteries of trade. The route of the Niger and the fact that the ‘Oil Rivers’ were its delta had been established by 1830. By the middle of the century, the effectiveness of a medicine, quinine, to ward off malaria was well attested and Europeans were able to survive in west and other parts of Africa. In southern Africa the slow advance of Europeans in...