Missionaries, explorers, and individual adventurers first opened up Africa to Europe without much assistance or interest from national governments. The historical pair, Livingstone and Stanley, well illustrate the drift of the early European activities in sub-Saharan Africa. Before the new imperialist age, in 1841, the Scot David Livingstone arrived in southeast Africa as a medical missionary. He gave himself to humanitarian and religious work, with some occasional trading and much travel and exploration, but without political or economical aims. Exploring the Zambesi River, he was the first white man to look upon the Victoria Falls. Fully home in inner Africa, save and on friendly terms with its native people, he was quite content to be left alone. But the hectic forces of modern civilization sought him out. Word spread in Europe and in America that Dr. Livingstone was lost. The New York Herald, to Manufacture news, sent the roving journalist H. M. Stanley to find him, which he did in 1871. Livingstone soon died, deeply honored by the Africans among who he worked. Stanley was a man of the new era. Seeing vast economic possiblities in Africa, he went to Europe to solicit backers. In 1878 he found someone with the same ideas, who happened to be a king, Leopold II, king of the Belgians.
Leopold, for all his royalty, was at heart a commerical promoter. China, Formosa, the Philippines, and Morocco had in turn attracted his fancy, but it was the central African basin of the Congo that he decided to develop. Stanley was exactly the man he needed, and the two founded at Brussels, with a few financiers, an International Congo Association in 1878. it was a purely private enterprise; the Belgian government and people had nothing to do with it. Europeans considered all Africa inland from the coasts to be, like America in the time of Columbus, a terra nullius, without government and claimed by nobody, wide open to the first Europeans or other outsider who might arrive. Stanley, returning to the Congo in 1882, in a year or two concluded treaties with over 500 chiefs, who received a few trinkets or a few yards of cloth for putting their marks on his mysterious European papers and accepting the blue-and-gold flag of the Congo Association.
Because the "Dark Continent" still lacked the clear boundaries of delineated internal frontiers, no one could tell how much territory the Association might soon cover by these methods. The German explorer Karl Peters, working inland from Zanzibar, was also signing treaties with the chiefs of East Africa. The Frenchman Brazza, departing from the west coast and distributing the tricolor in every village, was claiming territory on the Congo River that was larger than all of France. The Portuguese meanwhile aspired to join their long held coastal colonies of Angola and Mozambique into a trans-African empire, for which they sought a generous portion of the interior. Britain supported Portugal. In every case the home governments in Europe still hesitated to deepen their involvement in an Africa that remained almost totally unknown to even the most adventurous European travelers. But the governents where pushed on by small organized minorities of colonizing enthusiasts, and faced the probablility that if they missed the moment for colonization it would be too late.
Bismarck, who personally thought African colonies an absurdity but was sensitive to the new political pressures, called another conference at Berlin in 1885, this time to submit the African Question to international regulation. Most European states, as well as the United States, attended. The Berlin conference had two goals; to set up the territories of the Congo Association as an international state, under international auspices and restrictions; and to draft a code governing the way in which European powers wishing to aquire African territory should proceed.
The Congo Free State, which in 1885 took the place of the International Congo Association, was not only an international creation but also embodied in some ways what became known in the next century as international mandates or international (European controlled) trusteeships for non-European peoples. The Berlin conference specified that should not be a colony of any power, including Belgium, but delegated its administration to Leopold. It drew the boundaries, making the Congo Free State almost as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, and added certain specific provisions: the Congo River was internationalized, persons of all nationalities should be free to do business in the Congo state, there should be no tariff levied on imports, and the slave trade should be suppressed. Leopold in 1889 reassembled the signatory powers in a second conference, held at Brussels, the Brussels conference took further steps to root out the slave trade, which remained a stubborn though declining evil, because the Muslim societies lagged behind the Europeans and Americans in abolishing slavery. The Brussels conference also undertook to protect the rights of the local people, correct certain glaring abuses, and reduce the traffic in liquor and firearms.
But all this effort at internationalism failed because Europe had no international machinery by which the hard daily work of enforcing general agreement could be carried out. Although slavery was banned, Leopold went his own way in Congo. His determination to make it commercially profitable for his own benefit led him to unconscionable abuses. Europe and America demanded rubber, and the rubber trees of the Congo were at the time one of the world's few sources of supply. The Congo people, already afflicted by the diseases and weakening effects of a lowland equatorial climate, could be made to fulfill assigned quotas of rubber sap only by inhumanly severe coercion. Leopold and his agents, some of whom were African, and the managers of the concessions he leased out extorted forced labor from the native population, compelling them to meet impossible quotas under brutal conditions, which resulted in thousands of deaths. The rubber trees meanwhile were destroyed without any plans of replacement.
Leopold, by ravaging its resources and virtually enslaving its people, was able to draw from the Congo a handsome income and to amass a personal fortune. He nevertheless could not make the entire enterprise profitable and needed more investment capital for further development. He therefor borrowed from his own government in 1889 and 1895 in return for giving the government the right to annex the Congo in 1901. The Belgian parliament turned down the opportunity that year, but beginning in 1904 public outrage mounted after European press revelation of the scandalous atrocities in the Congo. A concerted campaign compelled the Belgian government in 1908 to take the Congo from Leopold, who died the following year. The Congo Free State became Belgian Congo, a Belgian colony, Under the Belgian government's administration the worst excesses of forced labor and other abuses were ended even though the Congo continued to attract investments from Europeans and other outsiders.
The Berlin conference of 1885 had also laid down certain rules for imperial claims of African territories: a European power with holdings on the coast had prior rights in the hinterland, occupation must not be on paper only through drawing lines on a map, but must consist in real occupation by administrators or troops; and each power must give proper notice to the others as to what territories it considered its own. A wild scramble for "real occupation" quickly followed. In 15 years almost the entire continent was "occupied" by the various European nations. The sole exceptions being Ethiopia and, technically, Liberia.
Everywhere a variant of the same process was repeated. First would appear a handful of white men, bringing their inevitable treaties, sometimes in printed forms. To get what they wanted, the Europeans commonly had to ascribe powers to a tribal chief that by the customs of the tribe he did not possess, power to convey sovereignty, sell land, or grant mining concessions. Thus Africans were baffled at the outset by unfamiliar European legal conceptions. Then the Europeans would build up the position of the chief to whom they had ascribed new powers. This enhancement of a local leader's position was essential for the colonizing process because the Europeans themselves had no influence over the people.
The collaboration with tribal chiefs led to the widespread system of indirect rule, by which colonial authorities acted through and expanded existing social and political hierarchies. There were many things that only the chief could arrange, such as security for isolated Europeans, the organization of baggage trains, or gangs of workmen to build roads or railroads.
Labor was the overwhelming problem. For pure slavery the Europeans now had an abhorrence, and they abolished it wherever they could. But the Africans, so long as they lived within the traditional social customs and values of their own communities did not react to European economic plans like the free wage earner postulated in European business and commercial theories. They had little expectation of individual gain and almost no use for money. They thus seemed to work only sporadically by European standard, distaining the continuous and tedious labor that Europeans wanted them to perform. The result was that Europeans all over Africa resorted to forced labor, thereby disrupting the social communities that most Africans valued more than the (very low) wages of European companies. For road building, colonial officials forced workers to contribute their labor to construction systems that resembled the French corvée before the Revolution. A local chief would often be required to supply a quota of able-bodied men for a certain amount of time, and frequently he did so gladly to raise his own importance in the eyes of the Europeans. More indirect methods were also used. The colonial government might levy a hut tax or a poll tax, payable only in money, for which the Africans would have to seek a job. Or the new government, once installed, might allocate so much land to Europeans as private property (another foreign conception) that the local tribe could no longer subsist on the lands that remained to it. Or the whole tribe might be moved to a reservation, like the displacements of the Native Americans in the United States. In any case, while the women tilled the fields or tended the stock at home, the men would move away from their communities to take jobs under European control for infinitesimal pay. The men lived in compounds, far from family and tribal kindred, they became demoralized; and the labor they gave, untrained and unwilling, would scarcely have been tolerated in more industrialized societies.
Conditions began to improve in the 20th century as a more professional or enlightened colonial administration was slowly and gradually built up. Throughout the colonial era many Europeans officials that part of the ethos of imperialism was to put down slavery, tribal warfare, superstition, disease, and illiteracy. Slowly a "Europeanized" class of Africans developed in various colonial societies, chiefs or sons of chiefs, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, warehouse clerks and government employees. Young men appeared from Nigeria or Uganda as student of Oxford, or the university of Paris, or universities in the United States. These students increasingly resented both the exploitation and paternalism of the colonial systems. They showed signs of turning nationalistic, and wanted to develop their societies at their own pace and without foreign interference. As the 20th century progressed, nationalism in Africa grew more vocal, more intense, and more forceful in challenging the European powers.
Meanwhile, in the 15 years between 1885 and 1900 the Europeans in Africa came dangerously near to open blows. Italy and Portugal, like the Congo Free State and Spain, were able to enjoy sizeable holdings in Africa because mutual fears among the principal contenders. The principal contenders were Great Britain, France and Germany. Each preferred to have territory held by a minor power rather than by one of its significant rivals.
The Germans were latecomers in the African colonial race, which Bismarck entered which reluctance. By the 1880s all the usual imperialist arguments were heard in Germany, though most of them, such as the need for new markets, for emigration to overseas territories, or for the investment of capital, had little or no application in tropical Africa. The Germans established colonies in German East Africa and the Cameroons and Togo on the west coast, along with a desert area that came to be called German Southwest Africa. It did not escape the notice of German planners that they might one day "acquire" the Congo and the Portuguese colonies in the area to create a solid German Belt across the African heartland.
The French controlled most of West Africa from Algeria to Sudan, they also occupied Obok on the Red Sea. After the Italian defeat against Ethiopia in 1896 their influence in Ethiopia grew. French planners therefore dreamed of a solid French belt across Africa from Dakar to the Gulf of Aden. The French government in 1898 dispatched Captain J.B. Marchand with a small party to push eastward from lake Chad to hoist the tricolor on the upper Nile, in the southern part of Sudan, which no European power had as yet "effectively" occupied.
The two presumptive east-west belts, German and French, were cut (presumptively) by a north-south belt, projected in the British imperial imagination as an "Africa British from Cape to Cairo." From the Cape of Good Hope Cecil Rhodes pushed northward into what was later called Rhodesia. Kenia and Uganda in the mid-continent were already under British control. In Egypt, a British protectorate since 1882 after the population revolted against the pro-European ruler, the British began to support old Egyptian claims to the upper Nile. The first venture ended in disaster in 1885 when a popular British general known as "Chinese Gordon" was killed leading Egyptian troops against Muslims forces at Khartoum. In the following decade British opinion turned imperialist in earnest. Another British officer, General Kitchener (with a young man named Winston Churchill under is command), again started pushing southward up the Nile and defeated the local Muslims in 1898 at Omdurman. He pushed further up stream. At Fashoda he met Marchand, who had moved his small French force into this area on the White Nile tributary of the great river.
The ensuing Fashoda crisis brought Britain and France to the verge of war. Already at odds over Egypt and Morocco, the two governments used the encounter at Fashoda to force a showdown. It was a test of strength, not only for their respective plans for Africa but also for their relative position in all imperialist and international issues. Both at first refused to yield. The British virtually threatened to fight. The French, fearful of their own insecurity agains Germany, at last decided not to take the risk. They backed down and recalled Marchand's expedition from Fashoda and a wave of hatred for the British swept over France.
Soon after the Fashoda crisis the British became in a major conflict on the other end of Africa, The Second Boer war. The Fashoda crisis and the Second Boer war, coming in rapid succession, revealed to the British the bottomless depths of their unpopularity in Europe. All European governments and people were pro-Boer; only the United States, involved at the time in a similar military conquest of the Philippines, showed any sympathy for the British. After the Second Boer war, the British began to rethink their international position.
