(OA) Conflict and Change: European Partitioning Lesson

Conflict and Change: European Partitioning

Europe first became interested in Africa while they were engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Although the slave trade ended by the early 1800s, interest in the wealth of the African continent did not. By the 19th century, Europeans established colonies to show national power. A strong country was supposed to have colonies to provide raw materials and markets to increase its wealth and importance in the world. This imperialistic mindset led to the European powers fighting over the lands of Africa to establish dominance and claim to the resources.

 

The European race to dominate portions of the African continent has been called “The Scramble for Africa” by historians. Although this period of history started in the mid-1800s, the story began many centuries earlier.

Trade Routes

For centuries, Europeans traded with Asia using a trade route called the Silk Road. This route carried merchants overland through the Middle East to Asia and included many dangers such as hostile nations, thieves, time, and harsh natural elements to the profits of those Europeans involved. In the late 1400s, the European nation of Portugal began its exploration into finding a less dangerous path for its merchants. Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama discovered that ships could sail south from Portugal, follow the African coastline along the Atlantic Ocean, pass under the African continent at the Cape of Good Hope and then continue sailing east to Asian ports. As this was quite a long voyage, the Portuguese established outposts along the African coastline to support its maritime merchants. These settlements soon started trading with the local Africans for gold, spices, ivory, and slaves. As Portugal was not the only European nation to trade with Africa and certainly not the only European nation interested in increasing its wealth and power, other European nations quickly followed the Portuguese example. Thus, the story of the European presence in Sub-Saharan Africa began.

European explorers were not just exploring the waters around Africa, though. Many ships sailed from the ports of Europe west to the lands and islands across the Atlantic Ocean. There, European nations set up many colonies in an effort to grow the wealth that flourished naturally. At that time, slavery was practiced in Africa. One group conquering another group would either incorporate, kill or enslave the defeated people. This was a practice that had existed for hundreds of years between African victors and vanquished. Shortly after the British established a colony in the area of North America that is now called Virginia, a Dutch ship arrived carrying roughly 20 African slaves aboard.

Atlantic Slave Trade

Thus was born the Atlantic Slave Trade. Molasses made on Caribbean islands sailed to New England in America. In America, the molasses was turned into rum which sailed east across the Atlantic Ocean. The rum was then traded on the continent of Africa in exchange for slaves who were brought to the islands of the Caribbean and traded for molasses. This endless cycle led to the Atlantic Slave Trade's name as the Triangular Trade.

Despite the hundreds of years that Europeans ran the Atlantic Slave Trade, the interior of Africa remained an enigma. As your studies on North Africa taught you, the Europeans had long since traded with North Africa. The Greeks and then the Romans had even controlled that region of Africa thousands of years before. Therefore, one part of Africa had been very familiar to Europeans for centuries. In trading with Africans, Europeans established several settlements along the coastline of Sub-Saharan Africa. Europeans were not as familiar with the rest of the continent that they referred to as "the dark continent" for the mysteries that it held. Exploration societies within Europe began funding those explorers and missionaries willing to risk traveling deeper into the continent in an attempt to fill in the blank parts of their maps of Africa. The most famous of these explorers was Dr. David Livingstone of Scotland. Between 1840 and 1873, Dr. Livingstone wandered all over the continent "discovering" previously unknown-to-European regions. His travels took him from east to west multiple times and allowed for the European map of Africa to fill in.

 

Click on the maps below to learn more about the European explorers' adventures in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But by the mid-1800s, Europeans were no longer interested in just putting words on a map of Africa. They wanted to control what and who were represented on the map. Over a period of fifty years, Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Belgium with France and Great Britain in the lead claimed territory after territory on the continent of Africa until the map of Africa looked like this...

 

When World War I began in 1914, all the colored-in areas of the map above were colonies of European nations. Notice that only two nations in Africa are not colored in on that map- Liberia (in West Africa) and Ethiopia (in East Africa). Ethiopians were successful in fighting off the potential colonization of their boundary by the Italians. The Ethiopian king, Menelik II, led his army to a decisive victory in 1896 at the Battle of Adwa that ended Italian hopes of conquering all the African Horn. Ethiopia became a symbol of inspiration to Africans attempting their own resistance to colonial rule.

Meanwhile, Liberians were experiencing a different story from the rest of Africa. The nation of Liberia was established in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as an African home for former American slaves. In 1847, Liberia declared itself a sovereign nation and a democracy. However, former American slaves led the new republic dominating the local African people who had lived there before Liberia was formed. So, in a way, Liberia was a colony of itself with a small percentage, roughly 5%, of the population, made up of former immigrants from America ruling over 95% of the population made up of native people.

Although Ethiopia was the only African state able to successfully avoid European colonization, it was not the only place that tried. Watch the presentation below to learn how Europe's colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa transpired.

 

In order to retain power in Africa, most of the European governments instituted policies designed to divide their colonies in an effort to weaken them. In the previous module, you learned how Great Britain divided the southern Sudanese from the northern Sudanese during its reign over Sudan. This was done to keep the two separate groups from joining together and rising as one against the British Imperial government. The idea behind that plan was the same idea that the different colonial powers implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa. European nations, by then well-rehearsed on how to take over a country, used and manipulated local ethnic rivalries to their advantage.

Although in some places of Africa, colonialism barely lasted a century; it left a permanent mark on the continent. The people, the language, the borders, the transportation, the culture, even the landscape of Sub-Saharan Africa were forever changed by the colonial experience. Click on the pictures below to learn more about the effects of colonialism on Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Challenge

Discover more about the Atlantic Slave Trade.

 

Take Away

 

The European colonies took advantage of African land and labor. They saw the African people as “second-class citizens,” or inferior and did little to improve the lives of Africans during the imperialistic years. This neglect remained largely the rule until after World War II. By the 1950s, change was being demanded and many Africans were openly opposed to continued European control of their countries. World Wars I and II opened Africa to the rest of the world. Africans had fought on the side of the Europeans, and they now began to demand freedom for themselves.

IMAGES CREATED BY GAVS