Europe’s Race for Africa and the Colonial Era

Europe’s race for Africa, “the scramble for Africa”, began around 1880. By means of hundreds of agreements, the Europeans defined the borders of their territories on the black continent. Due to inaccurate maps, ignorance of local conditions, raw material deposits and ancestral ethnic settlement areas, and pre-existing indigenous administrations, this became a very uncertain undertaking.

Africa’s colonial borders around 1912. After independence, most African countries adopted the borders drawn by the colonial powers in the founding act of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963. This led to relatively few wars between states, but all the more wars within states for power. Numerous ethnic groups were suddenly separated by impermeable national borders, while still others lived together with ethnic groups whose language they did not understand. In addition, the colonial borders gave the countries very irrational forms, even to the point of ungovernability.

The colonial rulers carried out far-reaching changes on the ground: Colonies, protectorates, special zones or merely free trade zones were governed. To this end, some areas were ruled directly by Europeans, others by privileged ethnic groups who extended their advantage through better health services, European education and networking – while other peoples fell by the wayside as serfs, working class or plain ballast. Investments in roads and railways mainly benefited European settlers who mined and extracted cocoa, tobacco, coffee, tea, palm oil, minerals, ores, gold, rubber, cotton and precious stones for voracious European industry.

The Germans, for example, began to arbitrarily divide the citizens of Rwanda into privileged Tutsis and underprivileged Hutus; the Belgians deepened this difference by indirectly imposing much higher coffee quotas on the Hutus, thus creating a two-tier society – which eventually exploded into ethnic cleansing as part of decolonisation.

If some people want to emphasise the positive sides of colonialism, they usually talk about the infrastructure and public services built by the colonial powers, such as education or health. This was largely realised by Christian missions and carried into the interior of the country by indigenous missionaries. Here, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, born in 1809 in the then Oyo Empire (present-day Nigeria), the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa. (Source: unknown/wikicommons, 1867)

Read more in Africa’s Century – Is the Grip on Prosperity Working?