Let's talk about the Scramble for Africa, or rather let's talk about it's enablers.
There were historically three key factors that prevented Europeans from colonising Africa prior to the late 19th Century:
- diseases killed most Europeans who set foot there;
- similarly, European flora and fauna didn't take very well to the African climate; and
- there were a lot of Africans and Europe was far away.
I'm going to focus on the first one, because it gives a good insight into what the challenges associated with actually colonising Africa were.
People die when they are killed, and Africa had a lot of ways to die
Prior to the Scramble for Africa there was some limited colonisation of Africa, mostly on the coast. The British had a colony on the Gold Coast which in the early 19th century was used first as a naval base and then to run anti-slavery patrols out of. Every year it was common that over half of the British troops stationed there would die. They would die from blackwater fever, yellow fever, breakbone fever, bloody flux, any number of parasites, and of course malaria.
Africa was so frequently fatal that when Britain considered making the Gold Coast its new penal colony (after the American revolution meant that they could no longer ship convicts to Georgia) Edmund Burke called it an effective imposition of the death penalty after "a mock display of mercy".
The discovery of an effective anti-malarial in quinine changed the calculus somewhat so that a trip to Africa was no longer a definite death sentence but it was still perilous in the extreme. Even during King Leopold's depredations of the Congo in the 1890s Joseph Conrad, who himself nearly died, reported such high incidences of fever and dysentery that most of his fellow Europeans were sent home before their terms of duty were up, "so that they shouldn't die in the Congo. God Forbid! It would spoil the statistics which are excellent, you see! In a word, it seems that there are only seven percent who can do their three year service".
This is what the European powers were fighting against when trying to colonise Africa. Anti-malarials meant that colonisation was possible, not easy. It wasn't until the 20th century before medicine for most of Africa's diseases was discovered and African colonies became truly sustainable.
I haven't touched on the trials of growing European plants in Africa (spoiler: they don't), or the difficulties of supplying your colony when all your horses (which you need to move things) keep dying from sleeping sickness, or just the general logistical challenges of conquering a nation across an ocean on a different continent. But simply, prior to the late 1800s African colonies of European powers were coastal and relied on constant support from their mother nation to keep operating.
In my opinion, Crosby summed it up well: "The whites simply were not equipped to impose their will on Africa until [...] the age of cheap and plentiful quinine and repeating rifles."
