Why scramble for africa

Alistair Boddy-Evans. History Expert. Alistair Boddy-Evans is a teacher and African history scholar with more than 25 years of experience. Updated August 02, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Boddy-Evans, Alistair. Events Leading to the Scramble for Africa. The Berlin Conference to Divide Africa. Countries in Africa Considered Never Colonized. West Africa had a long history of connection to trans-Saharan gold trade, and from the 15th century was drawn into trade with Europe, in gold and increasingly in slaves.

The Ashanti kingdom had emerged from the mid- 17th century, benefitting from access both to rich agricultural resources and gold, much of the labour for production of which was provided by a domestic slave trade.

The Expansion of the Asante Kingdom, Image source. Many parts of West Africa was still unknown to the rest of the world, thus By the late 15th century and early 16th century many European nations like Portugal started to send the missionaries and explorers to investigate various parts of Africa and West Africa in particular.

As early as in the 19th century European powers like France, Germany, and Britain likewise sent number of missionaries, explorers, traders and philanthropists in West Africa. When the Ashanti kingdom showed ambitions to expand its control southwards in negotiating treaties with African authorities and protecting trading interests, the British invaded Ashanti in and burnt its capital.

The majority of European Explorers spent their time to investigate and to detail the interior and coast of West Africa to help European powers that were searching areas with potential materials as European countries were experiencing mushrooming of industries. Explores assisted the European merchant groups; penetration of west Africa interior in 18th century was real a hard and difficult but with the aid of explorers, European merchant groups had advantage of trading in West Africa freely with assurance of security of themselves and their trading commodities.

As Britain increasingly colonised more and more African countries, the British had become the dominant power along the coast, and they began annexing and laying claim to territory gradually. The expansion of the Asante kingdom towards the coast was the major cause of this, as the British began to fear that the Asante would come to monopolise coastal trade in their place.

The British placed the Governor of neighbouring Sierra Leone, which was already annexed, in charge of British forts and settlements along the coast. He formed an unfavourable opinion of the Asante, and began the long process of attempting to bring them under British control. However, disputes over jurisdiction of the area known as Ashanti led to war between the British and the Asante, and in , the Asante succeeded in killing the Governor as well as seven of his men.

In retaliation, the British with the help of tribes oppressed by the Asante, including the Fante and the Ga beat the Asante back in , and successfully ended their dominance of coastal regions. The establishment of British law and jurisdiction in the colony was a gradual process, but the Bond with the Fante is popularly considered to be its true beginning.

This recognised the power of British officials and British common law in the Gold Coast and over the Fante people. A supreme court was established in , and led to British common law becoming enforced. However, all of this brought financial challenges, and saw the policy of making the colonies pay come in to force in the Gold Coast for the first time.

European troops entering Kumane during the second Anglo- Ashanti War. The British fought against the Ashanti four times in the 19th century and suppressed a final uprising in before claiming the region as a colony. It ended with a standoff after the British beat an Ashanti army near the coast in After two generations of relative peace, more violence occurred in when the Ashanti invaded the British "protectorate" along the coast in retaliation for the refusal of Fanti leaders to return a fugitive slave.

The result was another stand-off, but the British took casualties and public opinion at home started to view the Gold Coast as a quagmire. In , the Second Ashanti War began after the British took possession of the remaining Dutch trading posts along the coast, giving British firms a regional monopoly on the trade between Africans and Europe. The Ashanti had long viewed the Dutch as allies, so they invaded the British protectorate along the coast.

A British army led by General Wolseley waged a successful campaign against the Ashanti that led to a brief occupation of Kumasi and a "treaty of protection" signed by the Ashantehene leader of Ashanti, ending the war in July This war was covered by a number of news correspondents including H.

Stanley and the "victory" excited the imagination of the European public. In , the Third Anglo-Ashanti War began following British press reports that a new Ashantehene named Prempeh committed acts of cruelty and barbarism.

Strategically, the British used the war to insure their control over the gold fields before the French, who were advancing on all sides, could claim them. In , the British government formally annexed the territories of the Ashanti and the Fanti. In , a final uprising took place when the British governor of Gold Coast Hodgson unilaterally attempted to depose the Ashantehene by seizing the symbol of his authority, the Golden Stool.

The British were victorious and reoccupied Kumasi permanently. The change in the Gold Coast's status from "protectorate" to "crown colony" meant that relations with the inhabitants of the region were handled by the Colonial Office, rather than the Foreign Office. That implied that the British no longer recognized the Ashanti or the Fanti as having independent governments. It arrived in Kumasi in January The Asantehene directed the Ashanti to not resist.

Shortly thereafter, Governor William Maxwell arrived in Kumasi as well. Asantehene Agyeman Prempeh was deposed and arrested. Britain annexed the territories of the Ashanti and the Fanti in , and Ashanti leaders were sent into exile in the Seychelles. The Asante Union was dissolved. Robert Baden-Powell led the British in this campaign. The British formally declared the coastal regions to be the Gold Coast colony. A British Resident was permanently placed in the city, and soon after a British fort.

As a final measure of resistance, the remaining Asante court not exiled to the Seychelles mounted an offensive against the British Residents at the Kumasi Fort. On April 25 the telegraph wires were cut, and Kumasi was surrounded. Thirty British were dying per day in June. On June 23 three officers and made a sortie and managed to escape. Governor Hodgson reached Cape Coast on July The people were disarmed, and only licensed hunters could carry guns.

The British annexed the Asante confederacy as a Crown Colony and did not allow chiefs to rule in Kumasi until Prempeh became Kumasihene in Asante was forcibly incorporated into the British Gold Coast colony in , along with further territory to its immediate north which had not belonged to the kingdom itself. Internal European politics might be responsible for the beginning of the Scramble for Africa. In , newly-created Germany won a war against France.

After this France tried to restore its national pride by competing with the Ottoman Empire and Italy for domination in North Africa and with the United Kingdom for commercial influence in West Africa. The new French colonial empire in West Africa presented an opportunity to show the strength and the values of the French Third Republic.

For the British, the Suez Canal was a crucial bridgehead for the sea route leading to India. Egypt was officially under the control of the Ottoman Empire but was experiencing a series of political and economic upheavals in the s.

Afraid of losing control of such an important economic and strategic asset, the British invaded Egypt in For the British, the occupation of Egypt marked the transition between the period of informal empire, i. The rivalry between European powers was also one of the main drives behind the Scramble for Africa.

In order to prevent each other from acquiring more territories, the Europeans carved up the African continent into colonies. Acquiring prestige by invading new territories was particularly important and the competition between the British and the French was responsible for the creation of most borders in West Africa. Most African borders were created rapidly between c.

Why did it happen so quickly and how was West Africa partitioned? Europeans imagined Africa as terra nullius : a vast land belonging to no none. Terra nullius was a legal invention of the Europeans to justify their encroachment on non-European lands. This was of course an absurdity which took no heed of the realities of complex African states and historical changes dating back to distant times.

It was an invention of racist historians who knew nothing of Africa. During the nineteenth century, there were many well-organised states in West Africa. For example, following the jihad of Usman dan Fodio at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hausa-Fulanis created a caliphate which was the largest state in Africa at the time, and which had extensive textile industry and long distance trade.

While these larger states may have been the exception during the nineteenth century, smaller communities in West Africa also had a long history of trade and contact with the rest of the world. In the nineteenth century, West Africans lived in complex and varied political systems where authority could be exerted by men and women alike. The difference between societies living in organised states and those living in non-centralised polities might explain why African men and women reacted differently to the arrival of colonial troops.

Historians have tried to explain why some of them chose to fight while the large majority of them did not make or were not offered the same choice. In societies with little tradition of centralised government, traditions of local autonomy made submission to a colonial empire inconceivable for example, the relatively small communities living in the Niger Delta, Nigeria or the Bissagos Islands, Guinea-Bissau.

Other larger societies in contact with the European for longer might have known the superior European firepower and accommodated themselves to the prospect of foreign rule accordingly; their subjects were also used to accommodating to political power, so the larger states were easier to conquer — as the Spanish had found in the Americas in the sixteenth century. Other societies were also profoundly divided and used the Europeans in their internal struggle.

Africa like other continents was not a monolithic block and the idea of a continental-wide African resistance to colonialism would be anachronistic. Africans were thus divided when European troops conquered the continent. For example, the British became players in a civil war in Northern Nigeria and backed one side against the other.

This was the pattern of divide and rule which had long been used by European imperialists, since the sixteenth century. In , the conquest of Kano was thus undertaken with the help of its own inhabitants, just as the conquest of Mexico City by the Spanish had been undertaken with the help of Native American allies from Tlaxcala.

The conference of Berlin in set the rules for the partition of the whole of Africa. British Broadcasting Corporation Home. What were the motives behind the European colonisation of Africa at the end of the 19th century? Did the stamping out of slavery really play a part?

Until the 19th century, Britain and the other European powers confined their imperial ambitions in Africa to the odd coastal outpost from which they could exert their economic and military influence. British activity on the West African coast was centred around the lucrative slave trade. Between and , when the slave trade was abolished, British ships carried up to three million people into slavery in the Americas.

In total, European ships took more than 11 million people into slavery from the West African coast, and European traders grew rich on the profits while the population of Africa's west coast was devastated. And yet by , European nations had added almost 10 million square miles of Africa - one-fifth of the land mass of the globe - to their overseas colonial possessions. One of the chief justifications for this so-called 'scramble for Africa' was a desire to stamp out slavery once and for all.

Shortly before his death in May at Ilala in central Africa, the celebrated missionary-explorer David Livingstone had called for a worldwide crusade to defeat the slave trade controlled by Arabs in East Africa, that was laying waste the heart of the continent.

The only way to liberate Africa, believed Livingstone, was to introduce the 'three Cs': commerce, Christianity and civilisation. The theory that all the peoples of Europe belonged to one white race which originated in the Caucasus hence the term 'Caucasian' was first postulated at the turn of the 19th century by a German professor of ethnology called Johann Blumenbach.

Blumenbach's colour-coded classification of races - white, brown, yellow, black and red - was later refined by a French ethnologist, Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, to include a complete racial hierarchy with white-skinned people of European origin at the top. Such pseudo-scientific theories were widely accepted at the time and motivated Britons like Livingstone to feel they had a duty to 'civilise' Africa.

The Berlin Conference of , convened by Otto von Bismarck to discuss the future of Africa, had the stamping out slavery high on the agenda. The Berlin Act of , signed by the 13 European powers attending the conference, included a resolution to 'help in suppressing slavery'. In truth, the strategic and economic objectives of the colonial powers, such as protecting old markets and exploiting new ones, were far more important.