Scramble for Africa
For information on the colonization of Africa prior to the 1880s, including Carthaginian and early European colonization, see Colonization of Africa and colonialism.,
Rhodes, London, 1933, p.138 . ]]The
Scramble for Africa (or the
Race for Africa) was the proliferation of conflicting European claims to African territory during the
New Imperialism period, between the
1880s and the start of
World War I.
The latter half of the
19th century saw the transition from the "informal" imperialism of control through military influence and economic dominance to that of direct rule. Attempts to mediate imperial competition, such as the
Berlin Conference (
1884 -
1885) among the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the
French Third Republic and the
German Empire, failed to establish definitively the competing powers' claims. Ongoing disputes necessitated the formation of alliances and led to the
First World War.
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David Livingstone, early explorer of the interior of Africa who discovered in 1855 the Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfall, which he renamed Victoria Falls. He failed however in locating the source of the Nile. |
The opening of Africa to Western exploration and exploitation had begun in earnest at the end of the
18th century. By
1835,
Europeans had mapped most of northwestern Africa. Among the greatest of the European explorers was
David Livingstone, who charted the vast interior and
Serpa Pinto, who crossed both
Southern Africa and
Central Africa on a difficult expedition, mapping much of the interior of the continent. Arduous expeditions in the 1850s and 1860s by
Richard Burton,
John Speke and
James Grant located the
great central lakes and the source of the
Nile. By the end of the century, Europeans had charted the
Nile from its source, the courses of the
Niger,
Congo and
Zambezi Rivers had been traced, and the world now realized the
vast resources of Africa.
However, on the eve of the New Imperialist scramble for Africa, only ten percent of the continent was under the control of Western nations. In
1875, the most important holdings were
Algeria, whose conquest by
France had started in the 1830s — albeit
Abd al-Qadir's strong resistance and the
Kabyles' rebellion in the 1870s; the
Cape Colony, held by the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and
Angola, held by
Portugal.
Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism.
Industrialization brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of
steam navigation,
railroads, and
telegraphs. Medical advances also were important, especially medicines for
tropical diseases. The development of
quinine, an effective treatment for
malaria, enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be penetrated.
Africa and global markets
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European claims in Africa, 1913 |
Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism" and "
civilization", was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for economic and racial reasons. During a time when Britain's
balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly
protectionist continental markets due to the
Long Depression (1873-1896), Africa offered Britain, Germany and other countries an open market that would garner it a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments).
As Britain developed into the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially
capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominantly white
settler colonies, the
Middle East,
South Asia,
Southeast Asia, and
Oceania.
In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement to imperialism, of course, arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially
copper,
cotton,
rubber,
tea, and
tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent.
However, in Africa — exclusive of what would become the
Union of South Africa in
1909 — the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small, compared to other continents, before and after the 1884-85
Berlin Conference. Consequently, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were relatively small, apart from
Cecil Rhodes'
De Beers Mining Company, who had carved out
Rhodesia for himself, as
Léopold II would exploit the
Congo Free State. These observations might detract from the pro-imperialist arguments of colonial
lobbies such as the
Alldeutscher Verband,
Francesco Crispi or
Jules Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets. However, according to the classic thesis of
John A. Hobson, exposed in
Imperialism (1902), which would influence authors such as
Lenin's
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1916),
Trotsky or
Hannah Arendt's
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this shrinking of continental markets was a main factor of the global New Imperialism period. Later historians have noted that such statistics only obscured the fact that formal control of tropical Africa had great strategic value in an era of imperial rivalry, while the
Suez Canal has remained a strategic location. The 1886
Witwatersrand Gold Rush, which lead to the foundation of
Johannesburg and was a major factor of the
Second Boer War in 1899, accounted for the "conjunction of the superfluous money and of the superfluous manpower, which gave themselves their hand to quit together the country", which is in itself, according to Hannah Arendt, the new element of the imperialist era.
Strategic rivalry
While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior — between the gold- and diamond-rich
Southern Africa and
Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was thus under intense political pressure, especially among supporters of the
Conservative Party, to secure lucrative markets such as
British Raj India,
Qing Dynasty China, and
Latin America from encroaching rivals. Thus, securing the key waterway between East and West — the
Suez Canal— was crucial. The rivalry between the UK, France, Germany and the other European powers account for a large part of the colonization. Thus, while Germany, which had been unified under
Prussia's rule only after the 1866
Battle of Sadowa and the 1870
Franco-Prussian War, was hardly a colonial power before the New Imperialism period, it would eagerly participate in the race. A
rising industrial power close on the heels of Great Britain, it hadn't yet had the chance to control oversea territories, mainly due to its late unification, its fragmentation in various states, and its absence of experience in modern
navigation. This would change under
Bismarck's leadership, who implemented the
Weltpolitik (World Policy) and, after putting in place the bases of France's isolation with the
Dual Alliance with
Austria-Hungary and then the 1882
Triple Alliance with Italy, called for the 1884-85
Berlin Conference which set the rules of effective control of a foreign territory. Germany's
expansionism would lead to the
Tirpitz Plan, implemented by
admiral von Tirpitz, who would also champion the various
Fleet Acts starting in 1898, thus engaging in an
arms race with Great Britain. By 1914, they had given Germany the second largest naval force in the world (roughly 40% smaller than the
Royal Navy). According to von Tirpitz, this aggressive naval policy was supported by the
National Liberal Party rather than by the conservatives, thus demonstrating that the main supports of the European
nation states' imperialism were the rising
bourgeoisie classes.
[ Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (1919), quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, section on Imperialism, chapter I, part 3 ]Bismarck's Weltpolitik
Germany began its world expansion in the 1880s under Bismarck's leadership, encouraged by the national
bourgeoisie. Some of them, claiming themselves of
Friedrich List's thought, advocated expansion in the
Philippines and in
Timor, other proposed to set themselves in
Formosa (modern
Taiwan), etc. In the end of the 1870s, these isolated voices began to be relayed by a real imperialist policy, known as the
Weltpolitik ("World Policy"), which was backed by
mercantilist thesis. In 1881, Hübbe-Schleiden, a lawyer, published
Deutsche Kolonisation, according to which the "development of national
consciousness demanded an independent oversea policy"
[ German colonial imperialism: a late and short-term phenomenon (PDF) by Bernard Poloni, in "Imperialism, hegemony, leadership", March 26, 2004 Conference in the Sorbonne University, Paris ].
Pan-germanism was thus linked to the young nation's imperialist drives. In the beginning of the 1880s, the
Deutscher Kolonialverein was created, and got its own magazine in 1884, the
Kolonialzeitung. This colonial lobby was also relayed by the nationalist
Alldeutscher Verband.
Germany thus became the third largest colonial power in Africa, acquiring an overall empire of 2.6 million square kilometers and 14 million colonial subjects, mostly in its African possessions (Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika). The scramble for Africa led Bismarck to propose the 1884-85
Berlin Conference. Following the 1904
Entente cordiale between France and the UK, Germany tried to test the alliance in 1905, with the
First Moroccan Crisis. This led to the 1905
Algeciras Conference, in which France's influence on Morocco was compensated by the exchange of others territories, and then to the 1911
Agadir Crisis. Along with the 1898
Fashoda Incident between France and the UK, this succession of
international crisis proves the bitterness of the struggle between the various
imperialisms, which ultimately led to
World War I.
The clash of rival imperialisms
While
de Brazza was exploring the
Kongo Kingdom for France,
Stanley also explored it in the early 1880s on behalf of
Léopold II of Belgium, who would have his personal
Congo Free State (
See below).
France occupied
Tunisia in May 1881 (and Guinea in 1884), which partly convinced
Italy to adhere in 1882 to the German-Austrian
Dual Alliance, thus forming the
Triple Alliance. The same year, Great Britain occupied the nominally Ottoman Egypt, which in turn ruled over the Sudan and parts of Somalia. In 1870 and 1882,
Italy took possession of the first parts of
Eritrea, while Germany declared
Togoland, the
Cameroons and
Southwest Africa to be under its protection in 1884.
French West Africa (AOF) was founded in 1895, and
French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in 1910.
Italy continued its conquest to gain its "
place in the sun". Following the defeat of the
First Italo-Abyssinian War (1895-96), it acquired
Somaliland in 1899-90 and the whole of Eritrea (1899). In 1911, it engaged in a
war with the Ottoman Empire, in which it acquired
Tripolitania and
Cyrenaica (modern
Libya).
Enrico Corradini, who fully supported the war, and later merged his group in the early
fascist party (PNF), developed in 1919 the concept of
Proletarian Nationalism, supposed to legitimize Italy's imperialism by a surprising mixture of
socialism with
nationalism: "We must start by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations as well as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose living conditions are subject...to the way of life of other nations, just as classes are. Once this is realized, nationalism must insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation."
[ Enrico Corradini, Report to the First Nationalist Congress: Florence, December 3, 1919. ] The
Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-36), ordered by
Mussolini, would actually be one of the last colonial wars (that is, intended to colonize a foreign country, opposed to
wars of national liberation), occupying
Ethiopia for 5 years, which had remained the last African independent territory. The
Spanish Civil War, marking for some the beginning of the
European Civil War, would begin in 1936.
On the other hand, the British abandoned their
splendid isolation in 1902 with the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which would enable the
Empire of Japan to be victorious during the
war against Russia (1903-05). The UK then signed the
Entente cordiale with France in 1904, and, in 1907, the
Triple Entente which included Russia, thus pitted against the
Triple Alliance which
Bismarck had patiently made up.
The American Colonization Society and the foundation of Liberia
Even the
United States took part, marginally, in this enterprise, through the
American Colonization Society (ACS), established in 1816 by
Robert Finley. The ACS offered emigration to
Liberia ("Land of the Free"), a colony founded in 1820, to
free black slaves; emancipated slave
Lott Cary actually became the first American
Baptist missionary in Africa. This colonization attempt was resisted by the native people.
Led by
Southerners, the American Colonization Society's first president was
James Monroe, from
Virginia, who became the fifth
president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. Thus, one of the main proponents of American colonization of Africa was the same man who proclaimed, in his 1823
State of the Union address, the US opinion that European powers should no longer
colonize the Americas or interfere with the affairs of
sovereign nations located in the Americas. In return, the US planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and in wars between a European power and its colonies. However, if these latter type of wars were to occur in the Americas, the U.S. would view such action as hostile toward itself. This famous statement became known as the
Monroe Doctrine and was the base of the
US' isolationism during the 19th century.
Although the Liberia colony never became quite as big as envisaged, it was only the first step in the American colonization of Africa, according to its early proponents. Thus,
Jehudi Ashmun, an early leader of the ACS, envisioned an American empire in Africa. Between 1825 and 1826, he took steps to lease, annex, or buy tribal lands along the coast and along major rivers leading inland. Like his predecessor Lt.
Robert Stockton, who in 1821 established the site for
Monrovia by "persuading" a local chief referred to as "King Peter" to sell Cape Montserado (or Mesurado) by pointing a pistol at his head, Ashmun was prepared to use force to extend the colony's territory. In a May 1825 treaty, King Peter and other native kings agreed to sell land in return for 500 bars of tobacco, three barrels of rum, five casks of powder, five umbrellas, ten iron posts, and ten pairs of shoes, among other items. In March 1825, the ACS began a quarterly,
The African Repository and Colonial Journal, edited by Rev.
Ralph Randolph Gurley (1797-1872), who headed the Society until 1844. Conceived as the Society's propaganda organ, the Repository promoted both colonization and Liberia.
The Society controlled the colony of Liberia until 1847 when, under the perception that the British might annex the settlement, Liberia was proclaimed a free and independent state, thus becoming the first African
decolonised state. By 1867, the Society had sent more than 13,000 emigrants. After the
American Civil War (1861-1865), when many blacks wanted to go to Liberia, financial support for colonization had waned. During its later years the society focused on educational and missionary efforts in Liberia rather than further emigration. President
Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have repeatedly tried to arrange resettlements of the kind the ACS supported, but
each arrangement failed. According to those rumors, by 1865 Lincoln was one of the few strong advocates of colonization remaining in the United States Government, causing the program's abandonment after his assassination.
The colonization of the Kongo Empire (early 1880s)
David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by
Henry Morton Stanley, galvanized the European nations into action. But at first, his ideas found little support, except from
Léopold II of Belgium, who in
1876 had organized the
International African Association. From 1879 to 1884, Stanley was secretly sent by Léopold II to the
Congo region, where he made treaties with several African chiefs and by
1882 obtained over 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km²) of territory, the
Congo Free State. Léopold II, who personally owned the colony starting in 1885 and exploited it for
ivory and
rubber, would impose such a
terror regime on the colonized people that Belgium decided to annex it in 1908. Including mass killings and slave labour, the terror had made between 3 to 22 million victims. This prompted Belgium to end Leopold II's rule, under influence from the
Congo Reform Association, and to annex the Congo in 1908 as a colony of Belgium, known as the
Belgian Congo.
While Stanley was exploring Congo on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, the French marine officer
Pierre de Brazza traveled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded
Brazzaville in 1881, thus occuping today's
Republic of the Congo. Portugal, which also claimed the area due to old treaties with the native
Kongo Empire, made a treaty with Great Britain on
February 26,
1884 to block off the Congo Society's access to the Atlantic.
The Suez Canal
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Nott and Gliddon's Indigenous races of the earth (1857) used misleading imagery to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between whites and chimpanzees. Note the different angles at which the "white" and "negro" skulls are positioned. Such works were instrumental in the legitimation of colonialism. |
As a result, the important developments were taking place in the Nile valley.
Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained concessions from
Isma'il Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, in 1854-56, to build the
Suez Canal. During the decade of work, over 1.5 million Egyptians were forced to work on the canal, 125,000 of whom perished due to malnutrition, fatigue and disease, especially
cholera. Shortly before its completion in
1869,
Isma'il Pasha, the
ruler of Egypt, borrowed enormous sums from French and English bankers at high rates of interest. By
1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by the
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,
Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Isma'il Pasha repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in
1879, Britain and France assumed joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate. The Egyptian ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention. The
Urabi Revolt broke out against the
Khedive and European influence in
1882, a year after the
Mahdist revolt.
Muhammad Ahmad, who had proclaimed himself the
Mahdi, redeemer of
Islam, in 1881, led the rebellion and was defeated only by
Kitchener in 1898. Britain then assumed responsibility for the administration of the country.
The 1884-85 Berlin Conference
The occupation of
Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In
1884,
Otto von Bismarck convened the 1884-85 Berlin Conference to discuss the Africa problem. The diplomats put on a humanitarian façade by condemning the
slave trade, prohibiting the sale of
alcoholic beverages and
firearms in certain regions, and by expressing concern for missionary activities. More importantly, the diplomats in
Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies, and they agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by
Léopold II of Belgium as a neutral area known as the
Congo Free State in which trade and navigation were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. However, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient and on several occasions war was barely avoided.
Britain's occupation of Egypt and South Africa
Britain's occupations of
Egypt and the
Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the
Nile River. Egypt was occupied by British forces in
1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until
1914, and never a colony proper);
Sudan,
Nigeria,
Kenya and
Uganda were subjugated in the
1890s and early
1900s; and in the south, the
Cape Colony (first acquired in
1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighboring African states and the Dutch
Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics. In 1877,
Theophilus Shepstone annexed the
South African Republic (or Transvaal — independent from 1857 to 1877) for the British. The UK consolidated its power over most of the colonies of
South Africa in 1879 after the
Anglo-Zulu War. The Boers protested and in December 1880 they revolted, leading to the
First Boer War (1880-1881). Head of the British government
Gladstone (
Liberal) signed a peace treaty on
March 23,
1881 giving self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal. The
Second Boer War was fought between 1899 to 1902; the independent Boer republics of the
Orange Free State and of the South African Republic (Transvaal) were this time defeated and absorbed in the British empire.
The 1898 Fashoda Incident
The 1898 Fashoda Incident was one of the most crucial conflicts on Europe's way of consolidating holdings in the continent. It brought Britain and
France to the verge of war but ended in a major strategic victory for Britain, and provided the bases for the 1904
Entente Cordiale between the two rival countries. It stemmed from battles over control of the
Nile headwaters, which caused Britain to expand in the Sudan.
The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from
West Africa (modern day
Senegal) eastward, through the
Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara, a territory covering modern day
Senegal,
Mali,
Niger, and
Chad. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted link between the
Niger River and the
Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region, by virtue of their existing control over the Caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in
Southern Africa (modern
South Africa,
Botswana,
Zimbabwe,
Lesotho,
Swaziland, and
Zambia), with their territories in
East Africa (modern
Kenya), and these two areas with the Nile basin.
Sudan (which in those days included modern day Uganda) was obviously key to the fulfillment of these ambitions, especially since
Egypt was already under British control. This 'red line' through Africa is made most famous by
Cecil Rhodes. Along with
Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa), Rhodes advocated such a "Cape to Cairo" empire linking by rail the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich Southern part of the continent. Though hampered by German occupation of
Tanganyika until the end of
World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire.
When one draws a line from
Cape Town to
Cairo (Rhodes' dream), and one from
Dakar to the
Horn of Africa (now
Ethiopia,
Eritrea,
Djibouti, and
Somalia), (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern
Sudan near
Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. In short, Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from
Cairo to the
Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from
Dakar to the
Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the
Atlantic Ocean to the
Red Sea.
A French force under
Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda soon followed by a British force under
Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British army since
1892. The French withdrew after a standoff, and continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March
1899 the French and British agreed that the source of the
Nile and
Congo Rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.
The Moroccan crisis
Although the 1884-85 Berlin Conference had set the rules for the scramble for Africa, it hadn't weakened the rival imperialisms. The 1898 Fachoda Incident, which had seen France and the UK on the brink of war, ultimately led to the signature of the 1904
Entente cordiale, which reversed the influence of the various European powers. As a result, the new German power decided to test the solidity of the influence, using the contested territory of
Morocco as a battlefield.
Thus, on
March 31,
1905, the
Kaiser Wilhelm II visited
Tangiers and made a speech in favor of Moroccan independence, challenging French influence in Morocco. France's influence in Morocco had been reaffirmed by Britain and Spain in 1904. The
Kaiser's speech bolstered French
nationalism and with British support the French foreign minister,
Théophile Delcassé, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when Delcassé was forced out of the ministry by the more conciliation minded premier
Maurice Rouvier. But by July 1905 Germany was becoming isolated and the French agreed to a conference to solve the crisis. Both France and Germany continued to posture up to the conference, with Germany mobilizing reserve army units in late December and France actually moving troops to the border in January 1906.
The 1906
Algeciras Conference was called to settle the dispute. Of the thirteen nations present the German representatives found their only supporter was
Austria-Hungary. France had firm support from Britain, Russia, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. The Germans eventually accepted an agreement, signed on
May 31,
1906, where France yielded certain domestic changes in Morocco but retained control of key areas.
However, five years later, the second Moroccan crisis (or
Agadir Crisis) was sparked by the deployment of the German gunboat
Panther, to the port of
Agadir on
July 1 1911. Germany had started to attempt to surpass
Britain's
naval supremacy — the British navy had a policy of remaining larger than the next two naval fleets in the world combined. When the British heard of the
Panther's arrival in Morocco, they wrongly believed that the Germans meant to turn Agadir into a naval base on the Atlantic.
The German move was aimed at reinforcing claims for compensation for acceptance of effective French control of the
North African kingdom, where France's pre-eminence had been upheld by the 1906 Algerisas Conference. In November 1911, a convention was signed under which Germany accepted France's position in Morocco in return for territory in the
French Equatorial African colony of
Middle Congo (now the
Republic of the Congo).
France subsequently established a full
protectorate over Morocco (
March 30,
1912), ending what remained of the country's formal independence. Furthermore, British backing for France during the two Moroccan crises reinforced the Entente between the two countries and added to Anglo-German estrangement, deepening the divisions which would culminate in World War I.
The production of cash crops
Capitalism, an economic system in which capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital, revolutionized traditional economies, inducing social changes and political consequences that revolutionized African and Asian societies. Maximizing production and minimizing cost did not necessarily coincide with traditional, seasonal patterns of agricultural production. The ethic of wage productivity was thus, in many respects, a new concept to supposedly 'idle natives' merely accustomed to older patterns of production. Balanced, subsistence-based economies shifted to specialization and accumulation of surpluses. Tribal states or empires organized along precarious, unwritten cultural traditions also shifted to a division of labor based on legal protection of land and labor — once inalienable, but now commodities to be bought, sold, or traded.
The colonial consciousness and colonial exhibitions
The "colonial lobby"
In its early stages, imperialism was mainly the act of individual explorers and some adventurous merchantmen. The
metropoles were a long way from approving without any dissent the expensives adventures carried out abroad, and various important political leaders opposed themselves to the colonization in its first years. Thus,
William Gladstone (
Liberal), British premier between 1868â€"1874, 1880â€"1885, 1886 and 1892â€"1894, opposed himself to it. However, during his second ministry, he couldn't oppose himself to the colonial lobby, and thus didn't execute his electoral promise to disengage from Egypt. Although Gladstone was personally opposed to imperialism, the
social tensions caused by the
Long Depression pushed him to favorise
jingoism: the imperialists had become the "parasites of
patriotism" (
Hobson [ John A. Hobson, Imperialism, 1902, p.61 (quoted by Arendt) ]). In
France, then
Radical politician
Georges Clemenceau also adamantly opposed himself to it: he thought colonization was a diversion from the "blue line of the
Vosges" mountains, that is
revanchism and the patriotic urge to reclaim the
Alsace-Lorraine region which had been annexed by the 1871
Treaty of Frankfurt. Clemenceau actually made
Jules Ferry's cabinet fall after the 1885
Tonkin disaster. According to
Hannah Arendt's classic
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), this unlimited expansion of national
sovereignty on oversea territories contradicted the unity of the
nation-state which provided
citizenship to its population. Thus, a tension between the
universalist will to respect
human rights of the colonized people, as they may be considered as "citizens" of the nation-state, and the imperialist drives to cynically
exploit populations deemed inferior began to surface. Some rare voices in the metropoles opposed what they saw as unnecessary evils of the colonial administration, left to itself and described in
Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness (1899) — contemporary of
Kipling's
The White Man's Burden — or in
Céline's
Journey to the End of the Night (1932).
Thus, colonial
lobbies were progressively set up to legitimize the Scramble for Africa and other expensives oversea adventures. In Germany, in France, in Britain, the bourgeoisie began to claim strong oversea policies to insure the market's growth. In 1916,
Lenin would publish his famous
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to explain this phenomenon. Even in lesser powers, voices like
Corradini began to claim a "place in the sun" for so-called "proletarian nations", bolstering
nationalism and
militarism in an early prototype of
fascism.
Colonial propaganda and jingoism
However, by the end of
World War I, the colonized empires had become very popular almost everywhere:
public opinion had been convinced of the needs of a colonial empire, although many of the metropolitans would never see a piece of it.
Colonial exhibitions had been instrumental in this change of popular mentalities brought about by the colonial
propaganda, supported by the colonial lobby and by various scientifics. Thus, the conquest of territories were inevitably followed by public displays of the
indigenous people for scientific and leisure purposes. Karl Hagenbeck, a German merchant in wild animals and future entrepreneur of most Europeans
zoos, thus decided in 1874 to exhibit
Samoa and
Sami people as "purely natural" populations. In 1876, he sent one of his collaborators to the newly conquered Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and
Nubians. Presented in Paris, London and Berlin, these Nubians were very successful. Such "
human zoos" could be found in Hamburg, Anvers, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, Warsaw, etc., with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition.
Tuaregs were exhibited after the French conquest of
Timbuktu (discovered by
René Caillé, disguised as a Muslim, in
1828, who thus won the prize offered by the French
Société de Géographie);
Malagasy after the occupation of
Madagascar;
Amazons of
Abomey after
Behanzin's mediatic defeat against the French in 1894... Not used to the climatic conditions, some of the indigenous exposed died, such as some
Galibis in Paris in 1892
[ From human zoos to colonial apotheoses: the era of exhibiting the Other, by Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire ].
 |
English-edition cover of Hergé's Tintin in the Congo (1930-31). Le Petit Vingtième magazine staged a triumphant return of "Tintin" and "Snowy" to Brussels on July 9, 1931. They were accompanied by ten Congolese and met by Hergé himself. |
Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Parisian Jardin d'acclimatation, decided in 1877 to organize two "ethnological spectacles", presenting Nubians and
Inuit. The public of the Jardin d'acclimatation doubled, with a million paying entrances that year, a huge success for these times. Between 1877 and 1912, approximatively thirty "ethnological exhibitions" were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation
[ "These human zoos of the Colonial Republic", Le Monde diplomatique, August 2000, (Translation ) ]. "Negro villages" would be presented in Paris' 1878 and 1879 World's Fair; the 1900 World's Fair presented the famous
diorama "living" in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) would also display human beings in cages, often nudes or quasi-nudes
[ February 2003, the end of an era ]. Nomadic "
Senegalese villages" were also created, thus displaying the power of the colonial empire to all the population.
In the US,
Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, exposed
pigmy Ota Benga in the
Bronx Zoo alongside the apes and others in 1906. At the behest of Grant, a prominent
scientific racist and
eugenicist, zoo director Hornaday placed Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him "The Missing Link" in an attempt to illustrate
darwinism, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.
Such colonial exhibitions, which include the 1924
British Empire Exhibition and the successful 1931 Paris
Exposition coloniale, were doubtlessly a key element of the colonisation project and legitimized the ruthless Scramble for Africa, in the same way that the popular comic-strip
The Adventures of Tintin, full of
clichés, were obviously carrier of an
ethnocentric and
racist ideology which was the condition of the masses' consent to the imperialist phenomenon.
Hergé's work attained summits with
Tintin in the Congo (1930-31) or
The Broken Ear (1935).
While comic-strips played the same role as
westerns to legitimize the
Indian Wars in the United States, colonial exhibitions were both popular
and scientific, being an interface between the crowds and serious scientific research. Thus,
anthropologists such as
Madison Grant or
Alexis Carrel built their
pseudo-scientific racism, inspired by
Gobineau's
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55). Human zoos provided both a real-size
laboratory for these racial hypothesis and a demonstration of their validity: by labelling
Ota Benga as the "missing link" between
apes and
Europeans, as was done in the Bronx Zoo,
social darwinism and the pseudo-hierarchy of races, grounded in the biologization of the notion of "
race", were simultaneously "proved", and the layman could observe this "scientific truth".
Anthropology, the daughter of colonisation, participated in this so-called
scientific racism based on
social darwinism by supporting, along with
social positivism and
scientism, the claims of the superiority of the Western civilization over "
primitive cultures". However, the discovery of ancient cultures would
dialectically lead anthropology to criticize itself and reevalue the importance of foreign cultures. Thus, the 1897
Punitive Expedition led by the British Admiral
Harry Rawson captured, burned, and looted the city of
Benin, incidentally bringing to an end the highly sophisticated
West African
Kingdom of Benin. However, the sack of Benin distributed the famous
Benin bronzes and other works of art into the European
art market, as the
British Admiralty auctioned off the confiscated patrimony to defray costs of the Expedition. Most of the great Benin bronzes went first to purchasers in
Germany, though a sizable group remain in the
British Museum. The Benin bronzes then catalyzed the beginnings of a long reassessment of the value of West African culture, which had strong influences on the formation of
modernism.
Several contemporary studies have thus focused on the construction of the
racist discourse in the 19th century and its propaganda as a precondition of the colonization project and of the Scramble of Africa, made with total disconcern for the local population, as examplified by
Stanley, according to whom "the
savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision."
Anthropology, which was related to
criminology, thrived on these explorations, as had
geography before them and
ethnology — which, along with
Claude Lévi-Strauss' studies, would theorize the
ethnocentric illusion — afterwards. According to several historians, the formulation of this racist discourse and practices would also be a precondition of "
state racism" (
Michel Foucault) as incarnated by the
Holocaust (see also
Olivier LeCour Grandmaison's description of the
conquest of Algeria and
Sven Lindqvist, as well as Hannah Arendt). The invention of
concentration camps during the Second Boer War would also be an
innovation used by the
Third Reich.
The extermination of the Namaka and the Herero
Main article: Herero and Namaka genocide
|
Surviving Herero, emaciated, after their escape through the Omaheke desert. |
In
1985, the
United Nations' Whitaker Report recognized
Germany's turn of the century attempt to exterminate the
Herero and
Namaqua peoples of
South-West Africa as one of the earliest attempts at
genocide in the
20th century. In total, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Namaqua (50 percent of the total Namaqua population) were killed between 1904 and 1907. Characteristic of this genocide was death by starvation and the poisoning of wells for the Herero and Namaqua population who were trapped in the
Namib Desert.
During the New Imperialism period, by the end of the century, Europe added almost 9 million square miles (23,000,000 km²) — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions . Europe's formal holdings now included the entire African continent except
Ethiopia,
Liberia, and
Saguia el-Hamra, the latter of which would be integrated into
Spanish Sahara. Between
1885 and
1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 1% for
Italy .
Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of
French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. It was paradoxical that Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. In terms of surface area occupied, the French were the marginal victors but most of their empire was covered by desert.
The political imperialism followed the economic expansion, with the "colonial lobbies" bolstering
chauvinism and
jingoism at each crisis in order to legitimize the colonial enterprise. The tensions between the imperial powers led to a succession of crisis, which finally exploded in August
1914, when previous rivalries and alliances created a domino situation that drew the major European nations into the war. Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia to avenge the murder by serbian agents of Austrian crown prince Francis Ferdinand, Russia would mobilize to assist its slav brothers in Serbia, Germany would intervene to support Austria-Hungary against Russia. Since Russia had a military alliance with France against Germany, the
German General Staff, led by
General von Molte decided to realize the well prepared
Schlieffen Plan to invade France and quickly knock her out of the war before turning against Russia in what was expected to be a long campaign. This required invading Belgium which brought Great Britain into the war against Germany. German u-boat campaigns against ships bound for Britain eventually drew the United States in and became the first world war.
*
Arendt, Hannah.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, second section on imperialism) ISBN 0156701537
*
Lindqvist, Sven.
Exterminate All the Brutes (
Utrota varenda jävel, 1992)
*
Pakenham, Thomas,
The Scramble for Africa, Abacus, 1991 ISBN 0349104492
*Rodney, Walter.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London and Tanzanian Publishing House, Dar-Es-Salaam 1973.
*
Chronology of colonialism*
Colonialism*
Decolonization of Africa*
Human Zoo*
Impact and evaluation of colonialism and colonization*
Pseudo-scientifical racial theories*
White African*
World War I*
Congo Reform Association*
Belgium exhumes its colonial demons
