The colonial division of Africa was carried out in two ways; either division of the continent into small countries or division of the countries into small factions. The reasons for this have been articulated in Africa must unite, a book by Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. He stated:
“To ensure their continuous hegemony over this continent, they will use every and any device to halt and disrupt the growing will among the vast masses of African population for unity. Just as our strength lies in a unified policy, the strength of the imperialist lies in disunity.”
Invaders arrive
When the First World War began in 1914, nearly the entire African continent except Ethiopia and Liberia had already fallen under colonial rule, with France occupying most of West Africa, Britain dominating Eastern and Southern Africa and the Portuguese and Belgians occupying some parts of Southern Africa and Congo, respectively.
Colonial powers used to depict the continent as an ownerless mysterious world, asserting they had discovered the so-called ‘uncivilized dark continent’. This imperialistic motive of the colonial powers influenced their decision to name the territories based on what they could exploit.
As far back as the 17th century the Portuguese (who first arrived in Africa in the 15th century) named present-day Ghana, the Gold Coast because of the abundance of gold in the territory, while the French labelled Cote d’Ivoire the Ivory Coastfor its ivory. Present-day Liberia and Sierra Leone were called the Malaguetta Coast due to their flourishing malaguetta pepper trade.
By the 16th century, the colonial powers had already started treating Africans as worthless commodities through the transatlantic slave trade. Hence, they named some territories depending on the role they played in the trade. Togo, Benin and some parts of Nigeria were named the Slave Coast due to the trade in slaves, a barbaric form of commercial activity that reduced Africans to lifeless objects. The naming of the territories under the clout of trade was a step towards establishing formal oppressive control of the African people.
Britain established extensive control over African territories by the 16th century due to huge profits made from the monopoly it exercised in transporting captured Africans as slaves to work on their sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations under inhumane and degrading conditions in former British colonies like the Caribbean Sugar Islands.
Tensions grow
Such extensive control over African territories threatened the vested interests of other colonial powers. The Germans in particular were worried about the role of the British in Cameroon, while British control of Egypt after the Orabi revolution of 1882 was questioned by the French. The revolution had been an attempt by the Egyptians to dismantle the influence of Britain and France in the country. Even though neither of them occupied Egypt at the time, they exercised significant influence due to the strategic importance of the Suez Canal, in which they were both stakeholders. The British responded to the revolution with force and occupied Egypt, but the Suez Canal remained an international waterway for maritime trade.
The British and Portuguese had growing skepticism about the French and Belgian influence in Central Africa and whether the notorious Belgian King Leopold could be entrusted with the task of ensuring free trade among colonial powers in the Congo river basin, because trade in looted objects in the region was particularly important for the invaders.
This potentially explains why the US recognized the flag of the notorious king of Belgium, Leopold’s Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) in April 1884, a so-called international organization that carried out some yeoman’s colonial tasks of the Belgians, particularly in the Congo basin even before the conference. The Congo basin was rich in rubber and natural resources, which the United States as a growing economic and industrial power at the time was interested in accessing.
Growing tensions between the colonizers resulted in notable bilateral agreements such as the Anglo-Portuguese Agreement in 1883, which was meant to enforce a form of Portuguese control over some parts of the Congo river as part of the trade routes for European colonial powers. However, the agreement was depicted as ‘dead on arrival’, meaning it was seen as not having the potential to resolve the rising tensions between the colonizers.
Hence, it required a multilateral treaty among the powers to formalize control over African territories. To that end, a conference under the chairmanship of German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck opened in Berlin in November 1884.
The Scramble
The conference, intended to legalize European mastery over the captured territories and resolve disputes among the colonizers, began at noon on November 15, with a map 16.4 feet tall showing Africa with lakes, rivers, mountains and white spots mounted on the wall of the chancellery in Berlin, ready for long lines of latitude and longitude to be drawn, making artificial borders, demarcating the new colonies, and naming the territories. Geographical elements such as mountains and lakes served as borders for the partition.
The General Act of Berlin was adopted as a result – an international legal instrument for colonization. All the countries that participated in the conference, including Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Sweden-Norway ratified the act. Only the United States, because of its Monroe doctrine-centered foreign policy at the time, condemned European colonialism.
The focus of the doctrine on the western hemisphere limited its extension to Africa. The US maintained strategic relations with the colonial powers.
As Kwame Nkrumah puts it:
“The position of Portugal in maintaining her colonial dictatorship was in addition immensely strengthened by her membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).”
Hence, not ratifying the General Act of Berlin could be classified as a more covert way of endorsing such an inhumane act, and does not absolve the US of complicity in colonization and the slave trade in Africa.
’Open door’ and effective occupation
Considering the fact that the colonial powers were predominantly based in coastal regions, the General Act of Berlin established the ‘open-door policy’. This emphasized free and safe navigation for ships, primarily for their trade in looted objects. Such conditions only emboldened the colonizers to dig deeper into the territories for resources. This had the potential to lead to conflicts due to the lack of demarcation of the artificial borders. To address this, articles 34 and 35 of the General Act of Berlin were specifically dedicated to the concept of effective occupation. This obliged the invaders to demonstrate effective control of occupied territories and to regulate the expansion of their boundaries by notifying the other colonial powers.
Therefore, partition of Africa did not begin with the Berlin conference of 1884, but the conference made it official for the invaders to occupy the territories and loot the resources of the African people.
Establishing control
The divided territory had become much more viable for exploitation, hence several instruments, particularly the media, were employed to carry out such activities. By the 1950s, the full force of the British press had been deployed to distract from Kwame Nkrumah’s idea of unity by labelling the constitution for achieving such a purpose as one of dictatorial ambitions and instead, it backed the National Liberation Movement (the opposition political party), which supported a weaker federal system that would fragment the homogenous Ghanaian population.
Nkrumah’s insistence on development of the African continent through unity later led to his overthrow by the National Liberation Council (a military junta) through an alleged CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat led by Major General Kwasi Kotoka, General Joseph Arthur Ankrah, Brigadier Kwasi Amankwa Afrifa and Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. All of them were trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst or at the British Army Staff College, both in the United Kingdom.
The concept of divide and rule was much worse in countries that had strong ethnocentrism and segregation like Rwanda and South Africa. Before Rwanda had first contact with the colonial invaders in 1894, the country was made up of clans believed to have evolved from the Bantu-speaking people from Burundi and Rwanda. Over time, the Tutsi clan became more powerful and to a large extent ruled over the rest through the ‘Uburetwa’ (a form of labor system). Despite the differences, one could not imagine a serious catastrophe would unfold, but after the First World War, the Belgians widened the existing differences by introducing identity cards for each clan as a way of differentiating between the Tutsis and Hutus. This helped the Belgians provide preferential treatment for the Tutsis, as a way of getting favors to control the people and resources. Such marginalization led to bloody clashes between the Hutus and Tutsis that claimed the lives of more than 800,000 people in 1994, with 2,000,000 displaced.
Africa’s quest for unity in a multipolar world
The balance of powers displayed in South Africa, for instance, prevented a genocide like that in Rwanda from occurring. The racist Western-backed Apartheid regime that favored the imperialist looting of South African resources through various capitalist approaches, particularly by the United Kingdom and the United States, was crushed by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as a result of the massive support it had from the Soviet Union at the time.
The concept of African unity envisioned by Nkrumah inspired Pan-African leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, whose decision to unite African economies by trading Africa’s oil in the gold dinar currency instead of the United States dollar, threatened the dominance of USD and US-led Western hegemony. As a result, he was eliminated by US-led NATO political machinations, including airstrikes and arms supplies to rebel groups.
Africa’s quest for a multipolar system has evolved based on historical experiences with imperialism. Today, Kwame Nkrumah and Muammar Gaddafi may be no more, but the concept of African unity in a multipolar world resonates deeply in the minds of Africans.