AFRICAN HISTORY-II

West Africa to the 1870s

From the 17th to the 19th century in sub-Saharan West Africa—from the Sénégal River estuary in the west to Cameroon in the east and as far south as Angola—political and economic life was dominated by the demands of the European-controlled Atlantic slave trade. By the late 18th century the scale of this trade had reached unprecedented heights, with up to 100,000 captives exported every year. The wars that generated this traffic in captives dominated life in the interior. States with standing armies became more centralized and more powerful, dominating smaller, village-based communities. For the most part, European presence was confined to coastal fortresses, which were fortified against European rivals rather than local Africans. Coastal African rulers tolerated the European presence because the European fortresses provided useful trading links that strengthened their positions against their own African rivals.

Two important developments occurred in 18th-century West Africa that presaged large-scale change in the 19th century. First, by the mid-18th century a rise in Islamic reformist zeal led to several jihads and the establishment of new Islamic states in Fouta Djallon (in what is now Guinea) and Fouta Toro (in Senegal). Second, in the 1780s and 1790s Britain helped freed slaves from Britain and North America establish settlements in the British territory of Sierra Leone. The Islamic states of Fouta Djallon and Fouta Toro served as inspirations for larger 19th-century West African jihads, while the colony of Sierra Leone was symbolic of the emerging abolitionist movement that would eventually bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade.

Jihads and New States in 19th-Century West Africa

West African Islamic reformist ideas of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were spread by Fulani peoples, who had played a prominent role in the earlier jihads of Fouta Djallon and Futa Toro. The Fulani—largely Muslim cattle herders who lived in the savanna lands from Senegal to Cameroon—typically lived in peace among farming populations. However, in the Hausa region of what is now northern Nigeria the Fulani became estranged from what they regarded as the corrupt rule of the nominally Muslim Hausa aristocracy. They particularly resented the Hausa’s heavy taxation of their cattle. The Fulani were therefore very receptive to the reformist teachings of Muslim scholar Usuman dan Fodio, who had begun his preaching as a young man in the 1770s in the Hausa city-state of Gobir.

By the early 1800s Usuman had accumulated a considerable following. In 1804 the ruler of Gobir sent his cavalry to capture or kill Usuman, but the force was defeated by his followers. This military action sparked a spontaneous revolutionary movement among Fulani and other oppressed Muslims across the whole of Hausaland. Within four years most of the Hausa city-states had fallen to the jihad. After Usuman’s death in 1817 his brother Abdullahi and son Muhammad Bello united the Hausa states into a single Islamic empire, with its capital at Sokoto. This brought an end to centuries of rivalry and clashes between the states. By the time of Muhammad Bello’s death in 1837 this Sokoto Caliphate stretched across the whole of northern Nigeria and was the largest West African state since 16th-century Songhai. Islam and Sharia (Islamic law) made up the unifying elements in what was otherwise a federation of semiautonomous emirates. Literacy became widespread and, with an end to inter-state Hausa wars, trade flourished. Those who benefited least were the Hausa peasantry, who had in effect changed one oppressive master for another.

Fulani pastoralists tried to extend the jihad into Bornu, but they were resisted by Muhammad al-Kanemi, a religious and military leader from Kanem. Although the state lost control of its eastern Hausa provinces, Bornu retained its independence under a new dynasty set up by al-Kanemi’s son Umar.

West of Sokoto, Usuman dan Fodio’s revolution inspired further Fulani-led jihads and political change. On the upper Niger River, a jihad was led by Umar Tal, a Muslim preacher from Fouta Toro. In the Fouta Djallon region, he built up an army and equipped it with firearms, bought in exchange for captives on the coast. From 1855 to 1862 Umar’s army captured the Bambara states of Kaarta and Ségou, and the Fulani state of Macina. He thus created what was known as the Tukolor Empire, which stretched from Fouta Djallon to Tombouctou. Following Umar’s death in 1864, Tukolor was weakened by internal revolts and was conquered by the French in 1893.

South of Tukolor, in what is now Guinea, military leader Samory Touré conquered and united the states of the Dyula people in the 1860s, creating the powerful Mandinka state. Unlike some of his contemporary state-builders, Samory was not a religious preacher and Mandinka was not a reformist state as such. Nevertheless, he used Islam to unite the nation, promoting Muslim education and basing his rule upon the Sharia. Samory’s professional army was the real strength of what had become a Mandinka empire by the 1880s. As such it provided one of the major forces of resistance to French conquest in the final decades of the century.

Abolition of the Slave Trade

How the Atlantic slave trade came to be abolished has been the subject of ongoing historical debate. The traditional view argued by British historians for much of the 20th century was that the abolition of the slave trade was the result of a humanitarian campaign spearheaded by a handful of prominent British philanthropists. This view was challenged in the mid-20th century by historians who argued that it was hard economics, not humanitarian concerns, that ended the slave trade. According to this view, by 1800 colonial plantations were declining in profitability, while the spread of industry in Britain (see Industrial Revolution) was becoming increasingly profitable, making the slave trade unnecessary.

Many historians now agree that the complete story of abolition was in fact very much more complex than either of these positions. Both economics and philanthropy were involved, though which was the more powerful force remains a subject of debate. Another factor, often overlooked, was African opposition to slavery, both in the form of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and resistance within Africa itself.

By 1817 the major European powers had officially banned the slave trade, but it still continued, and even increased at times, until slavery itself was completely abolished (in 1865 in the United States and in the 1880s in Cuba and Brazil). While there were still markets for slaves the trade continued, despite patrols by a British naval antislavery squadron. The British captured a number of slaving ships and freed their captives in Sierra Leone, which had been annexed as a British colony. Later in the century Britain and other European powers would use the anti-slave-trade campaign as a justification for seizing further African territory, and eventually for their colonization of the continent.

Coastal and Forest Regions

Africans powers had not been consulted in the official European ban on slave trading, and states in many areas, eager to acquire European firearms, continued to supply the European, American, and Brazilian ships that evaded the ban. One such area was the Yoruba lands of present-day southern Nigeria, which had not previously been a great supplier of captives for sale into slavery. But when the Fulani jihad spread southward from Sokoto in the 1820s it destabilized the Yoruba state of Oyo and prompted warfare across the whole of Yorubaland. Increasing numbers of Yoruba war captives were subsequently transported to the Lagos lagoon for export as slaves. This provided the British with the excuse to seize control of Lagos in 1851 in the name of suppressing the slave trade. In reality it provided the British with a colonial foothold. They declared Lagos a colony in 1861 and, over the next 40 years, gradually extended British control over the whole of what was to become the colony of Nigeria.

The Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is now southern Benin, used the Yoruba wars as an opportunity to break free of Oyo domination and assert its independence. With the backing of a large standing army, Dahomey’s kings built a highly efficient and powerful centralized state. Dahomey’s wealth was originally derived from the slave trade, but as the trade was suppressed in the mid-19th century, the king turned to the exploitation of the region’s numerous oil palm plantations. Palm production that was not directly controlled by the state was taxed in a highly efficient manner. When the French took over the territory at the end of the century, they estimated that it contained 40 million palm trees.

The Ashanti Kingdom, in what is now Ghana, was the largest and most powerful West African forest state throughout most of the 19th century. Ashanti derived its wealth from the production of gold dust, which it traded with British, Danish, and Dutch traders on the coast. Consequently, the region was known to Europeans as the Gold Coast. The British sought to control the gold trade, and allied themselves with the coastal Fante people, bitter rivals of the Ashanti, to keep Ashanti from monopolizing the trade. Ashanti and British forces clashed in the mid-1820s, but signed a peace treaty in 1826. In the 1840s the British bought a string of Danish forts along the coast and in 1872 purchased the Dutch fort of Elmina. This left Britain the sole European power in the area. The king of Ashanti challenged the rising colonial power by invading the British-held coast in 1873, sparking the Second Ashanti-British War. A British counterinvasion in 1874 penetrated deep into the Ashanti heartland where British forces sacked the Ashanti capital of Kumasi. The British withdrew, but Ashanti had been fatally weakened and finally fell to British forces in 1896.

To the west, at the mouth of the Sénégal River, the French held the trading towns of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, and Rufisque. These were important bases for access to trade in gum arabic (used in dying cloth) and groundnuts from the interior. The inland Wolof state of Fouta Toro imposed taxes on most of this trade, however, and in response the French sent an army up the Sénégal River valley in the 1850s. By 1858 the army had defeated the Wolof and established a protectorate over the region. In the process the French clashed with the jihad army of Umar Tal, which prompted him to turn east, toward the upper Niger River, where he founded the Tukolor Empire.

Over the course of the 19th century Sierra Leone grew rapidly, as the British transported freed African captives from all over West Africa to the colony. These mixed groups of Africans communicated in Creole (or Krio), a mixture of English and African languages, and they were known collectively as Creoles. Starting in the 1820s groups of freed African Americans began settling to the east of Sierra Leone in a region they named Liberia. These Americo-Liberians established Liberia as an independent nation in 1847.

East Africa to the 1870s

By the 19th century foreign powers dominated the East African coast, but in the inland regions indigenous Africans still largely controlled their own fates. The southern Arabian sultanate of Oman extended its influence to the northern Swahili coast in the 17th century, expelling the Portuguese from the Kenyan coast by 1700 and from the island of Zanzibar in 1729. To the south, along the Mozambique coast, the Portuguese remained the dominant trading power. This region supplied captives to meet the rising French demand for slave labor on sugar plantations on Mauritius and other French-held Indian Ocean islands.

In the interior, west of Lake Victoria, the lakeside kingdom of Buganda had grown to surpass Bunyoro, its older rival, in regional strength. To their south, Rwanda and Burundi had become powerful mountain kingdoms. The Nyamwezi people of the interior of present-day Tanzania were professional traders, carrying ivory between the lake kingdoms and the coast. Meanwhile, in the north, the Christian empire of Ethiopia continued to be a regional power in the highlands, while the Ottoman Empire controlled the coastal region of Eritrea.

19th-Century Swahili Coast

As the slave trade waned in West Africa in the 19th century, it was peaking on the East African coast. By this time Brazil had become one of the main markets for the trans-Atlantic trade. Restrictions on the slave trade drove up prices in West Africa, and starting in the 1820s it became more economical for Brazilian slavers to venture around southern Africa to Mozambique. There they found a well-established slave trading system supplying local Portuguese needs as well as those of French sugar planters on various Indian Ocean islands. Afro-Portuguese settlers, known as prazeros, in the Zambezi River valley used private slave armies to hunt and raid for ivory and slaves to sell on the coast. North of the Zambezi, the Yao people played a similar role as professional raiders and traders between southern Malawi and northern Mozambique.

Meanwhile, under the rule of Sayyid Sa‘īd ibn Sultan, the sultanate of Oman was rising in power along the northern half of the Swahili coast. Starting in the 1820s the sultan encouraged Omani Arabs to set up clove plantations on the large offshore islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. Worked by slave labor from the mainland, these plantations became so successful that in 1840 Sayyid Sa‘īd moved his primary residence to Zanzibar itself. The growth of Omani plantations prompted a huge increase in the demand for slave labor. By the 1850s Zanzibar’s slave market had become the largest of its kind in Africa. Apart from local needs on the clove plantations, by the 1860s Zanzibar was exporting 60,000 slaves a year, mostly to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The increasing demand for slaves stimulated expeditions by Swahili-Arab and Nyamwezi slaving caravans into the African interior, to the Great Lakes region and beyond.

Following the 1873 death of Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had done much to bring the horrors of the African slave trade to the attention of Europeans, the British forced the closure of Zanzibar’s slave market. By then, however, Britain’s demand for East African ivory had reached such heights that slave labor continued to be used to transport it to the market in Zanzibar. In the last decades of the 19th century, Britain was to make the suppression of the inland slave trade its moral justification for the colonization of much of the region.

Political Developments in Ethiopia

Ethiopia had been independent and regionally powerful for 1,000 years before facing a political crisis in the 19th century. Before the 17th century Ethiopia had a roving capital which moved from province to province, helping the Ethiopian emperor retain effective central authority. However, in the 17th century Gondar (Gonder) gradually became the fixed capital, allowing Ethiopia’s regional nobility to develop a stubborn autonomy in their isolated valleys. Ethiopia became an increasingly fragmented feudal state until the mid-19th century, when Ethiopia’s relative security was threatened by the expansion of Egyptian control over southern Sudan. In response, a provincial leader named Kassa Haylu developed a trained army equipped with modern firearms and artillery. In 1855 he seized the Ethiopian throne and declared himself Emperor Theodore II.

Theodore saw that if he did not modernize Ethiopia’s military and unify the empire, it was in danger of being overrun by more powerful external enemies. He expanded his own fighting force, and built it into a modern national army. He stripped the hereditary provincial nobility of powers and appointed paid governors and judges to take their places. Fearing the power of the Ethiopian Church, Theodore seized much of its land and limited the number of clergy. These efforts to forge national unity made Ethiopia more powerful but earned Theodore many enemies.

In 1868, following a minor diplomatic row, Theodore arrested some British consular officials. In response, Britain invaded with an army of 30,000 men. The Ethiopian Church helped convince the majority of Ethiopian nobility to abandon their emperor in his hour of need. Left with only 4,000 men, Theodore’s army was easily overrun and he himself committed suicide. The British withdrew, leaving Europeans with the erroneous notion that Ethiopia could easily be captured in the future if the need arose.

Theodore’s successor, Johannes IV, regained the support of the Ethiopian Church and regional nobility by restoring their hereditary powers and privileges. In doing so he was able to summon a large enough army to defeat an Egyptian invasion in 1875, but at the expense of entrenching the feudal system into the fabric of Ethiopian economy and society.

Central Africa to the 1870s

For centuries, the trade in captives had dominated the commercial activity of Central Africa. North of the densely forested Congo River Basin the Bornu sultanate declined by the 18th century, and its place was taken by the sultanates of Wadai and Darfūr to the east. These states conducted slave raids through what is now southern Chad and the Central African Republic and transported captives eastward through Kordofan to southern Sudan and the Nile River Valley. South of the Congo River Basin the Kazembe Empire had grown to eclipse the former Luba and Lunda empires of the region and was a powerful trading state. Meanwhile, the histories of the forest peoples of the Congo River Basin are some of the least known in Africa beyond their riverine trade contacts with peoples and states to the north, south, and west. However, these peoples became more and more threatened as Swahili slave raiders penetrated ever farther into the forest.

Natural Resources and Trade

Besides captives, 19th-century European and Swahili traders also sought to tap into Central Africa’s vast supplies of raw materials, notably ivory. In response to the demand for ivory, some Central African peoples became professional elephant hunters. The Chokwe hunted elephants across the southern fringes of the forest, supplying ivory to Portuguese traders in Angola. Similarly, north of the Congo River, the Fang expanded from southern Cameroon into the forest of Gabon to supply ivory to European traders at the coast.

Other raw materials exported to the western coast included copper, palm kernels (the source of palm oil), cotton, coffee, and raw latex rubber. Africans collected these raw materials and traded them to Europeans in exchange for firearms, cloth, and other manufactured imports. Faced with competition from plentiful European manufactured goods, indigenous African industry—such as the manufacturing of iron tools, raffia cloth, and bark cloth—went into terminal decline in the 19th century. This economic pattern—Africa’s dependent role as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods—persists in much of Africa to this day.

Trading States of the Congo River Basin

In the Luapula River valley, on the southeastern fringes of the Congo River Basin, the Kazembe Empire entered the 19th century as the driving force behind a transcontinental trading network. A Lunda state, Kazembe controlled the trade in copper, which was mined in the Copperbelt region of what is now Zambia and southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and cast into ingots for use as currency. Besides copper, Kazembe also exported ivory, salt, and captives. The latter were sent mostly eastwards to meet the rising demand for slaves on the East African coast.

By mid-19th century the demand for ivory and slaves on the East African coast was so great that coastal Swahili, Nyamwezi, and Arab or mixed-race traders began exploring west of Lake Tanganyika, penetrating the Central African interior. Leading their own trading caravans of hunters, raiders, and porters, and heavily armed with guns, they sought out new sources of ivory and slaves. In the 1850s a Nyamwezi trader named Msiri set up his own raiding and trading state west of the Luapula River in defiance of Kazembe (which at the time was suffering a civil war). This state, known as Yeke, took control of the Copperbelt and with it the western Lunda trading network.

In the 1860s Hamed bin Muhammed (also known as Tippu Tip), a man of mixed coastal and Nyamwezi ancestry, established similar raiding and trading bases on the Lualaba River (the upper Congo River), west of Lake Tanganyika. Tippu Tip considered his “kingdom” an outpost of the sultanate of Zanzibar, by then Africa’s largest market for ivory and slaves. The activities of traders such as Tippu Tip and Msiri brought the full horrors of the slave trade to the remotest forest regions of the Congo River Basin, which had previously been little affected by the trade.

Lozi Kingdom

By the 19th century the Lozi Kingdom grew to dominate the savanna woodland region of the upper Zambezi River valley in what is now western Zambia. Lozi was a complex, centralized state. Its king delegated regional authority to aristocratic bureaucrats, who directed the seasonal cultivation of the Zambezi floodplains. In 1840 Lozi was overrun by Kololo raiders from what is now South Africa, but in the 1860s the Lozi dynasty and aristocracy were restored. In the second half of the 19th century, ivory hunting and cattle raiding accompanied an expanding Lozi state.

Southern Africa to the 1870s

In the 18th century Sotho and Tswana states emerged on the grasslands south of the Limpopo River. As was the case with the earlier Toutswe states of eastern Botswana, cattle were an important source of power and wealth, and conflict between peoples over cattle ownership was a regular feature of 18th-century life. Across much of southern Africa population was still relatively sparse. In this setting, political change was fluid and ongoing: Dynastic clashes and disputes over cattle often led to the breakup of states and the establishment of new ones.

In the Cape of Good Hope region, the spread of Dutch-speaking settlers known as Boers (ancestors of South Africa’s modern Afrikaners) had largely been halted in the east by effective resistance from Xhosa herders and farmers who were themselves eager to expand their chiefdoms westward. The strategic position of the Cape to world sea trade, however, was to draw it into inter-European conflicts. The British seized the Cape from the Dutch permanently in 1806 (after having first occupied it from 1795 to 1803), adding a new dimension to European influence in South Africa.

The Mfecane

From the 1810s to the 1830s southern Africa went through a period of violent turmoil and political upheaval in which many different chiefdoms and other states came into conflict with each other, spurring wars and large-scale migrations. This period, referred to as the mfecane (from a Nguni word meaning “the crushing”), has long been the subject of debate among historians. For years, historians generally believed that the violence was singularly the result of the emergence of an expanding Zulu kingdom under military leader Shaka. However, many historians now contend that this emphasis on Zulu expansion obscures the fact that, as we have seen, the rise and fall of similar states and conflict over the control of cattle were already very common in the region. It also ignores two important factors: Firstly, the rise in the demand for slaves along the southern Mozambique coast from the 1820s likely played a role in the emergence of some of these new states, particularly the Gaza Empire. Secondly, assaults by armed and mounted raiders from the Cape Colony region—searching for cattle and captives for sale in the colony—were also a major source of disruption among the peoples of the area.

Apart from the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and the Gaza Empire under Soshangane, other new states in the region included the Sotho kingdom under Moshoeshoe, the Swazi kingdom under Sobhuza, and numerous Tswana kingdoms of the western grasslands. The Ndebele, led by Mzilikazi, left the Zulu region in the early 1820s and settled briefly north of the Vaal River, absorbing local Sotho and Tswana into their ranks. Constantly harassed by Boer, Griqua, and Kora raiders, the Ndebele moved north and established a new kingdom in southern Zimbabwe in about 1840. By this time, groups of other migrants, who came to be known as the Ngoni, had already moved north through Zimbabwe to settle in the region of eastern Zambia, Malawi, and southern Tanzania. In the far south of the region the Xhosa held out against the increasingly violent challenge of the British-occupied Cape Colony, only finally going down to defeat and colonization in the 1870s.

Boer Trek and Boer Republics

In the late 1830s several thousand Boer families began migrating from British-ruled Cape Colony to the northeast, across the Orange and Vaal rivers. These migrants sought new expanses of land unclaimed by Europeans, as well as unrestricted access to African forced labor. Their further occupation of land in the colony had been limited by Xhosa resistance from the east, while their use of forced African labor had been restricted by the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s. These Boer trekkers established settlements in the lands north of the Orange River, farther north in the Transvaal, and in the eastern lowlands of Natal.

Later in the century Boers and other Dutch-speaking South Africans began calling themselves Afrikaners. As part of a cultural and political struggle against British domination, Afrikaner historians portrayed this Boer migration as a Biblical-style “Great Trek” into unoccupied wilderness. But the reality was very different. The early Boer intrusion was challenged throughout, and many Africans died at their hands. They fought bloody battles with Zulu in the east and with Sotho, Tswana, and Ndebele in the north.

The British intervened as well, annexing the colony of Natal in 1843, and seizing the land between the Orange and Vaal rivers in 1848. Eventually, however, the British recognized two independent Boer republics: the South African Republic (in Transvaal) in 1852, and the Orange Free State in 1854.

Discovery of Mineral Wealth

By 1867 large parts of what is now South Africa were still under independent African control. However, the discovery that year of diamonds near the confluence of the Orange and Vaal rivers, followed by the 1886 discovery of the world’s largest gold deposits in the Transvaal would ultimately transform the economic and political life of all southern Africans. As a vast and hugely lucrative industrial market opened up in the interior, conflict over land and labor heightened. Britain in particular was determined to bring the whole area under its imperial control.

The Scramble for Africa

In the final two decades of the 19th century European colonial powers took over virtually the whole continent of Africa, racing each other to claim territory to expand their colonial empires. This so-called Scramble for Africa marked an irreparable turning point in the history of the continent. Almost overnight, most Africans lost control of their own historical destinies. Nations and whole empires were swept aside as the political layout of the continent was reconfigured according to European dictate.

European Motivations

Historians have debated the questions of what sparked the Scramble, what Europe’s motives were, and why the takeover happened so rapidly and completely. In the early 20th century the colonizing powers set the terms of the debate, arguing that they came to Africa with a “civilizing” mission. Because it morally justified their actions, they unfairly portrayed Africa as a dark and primitive continent with no discernible record of historical achievement. European powers claimed they had come to suppress the slave trade, end endemic warfare, and establish their own right to trade freely in the continent without local interference. Attempts by African rulers to control and tax the trade within their own states were arrogantly dismissed by European traders, who accused them of interfering with the free flow of trade. Income from the taxation of trade had always been an essential source of government revenue in most African states and the removal of this rightful income deliberately and seriously weakened them in the face of the European challenge.

From the beginning, Europe’s presumed “moral justification” for imperialism was challenged by contemporary thinkers (including British social reformer John Hobson and, later, Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin) who identified economics as the prime motivator underlying the European conquest of Africa. Industrial Europe needed Africa’s raw materials: palm oil, cotton, rubber, and minerals. Furthermore, while the ancient gold riches of West Africa and Zimbabwe had long been known, the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated the presence of spectacular diamond and gold wealth in southern Africa. But Africa was not only a source of raw materials for European factories, it was also a vast, untapped market for the overproduction of those same factories. African indigenous industry was unable to compete with European mass-produced cloth, metal tools, and liquor.

Conquest of a Continent

In 1877 Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley emerged at the mouth of the Congo River, completing an arduous, three-year transcontinental trek and proving the Congo’s navigability for thousands of kilometers above the rapids near its mouth. Ambitious Europeans, led by King Leopold II of Belgium, recognized the river as a major potential trading artery. By the early 1880s Belgium and France had competing claims to territories on either side of the lower Congo. Territorial acquisition quickly became competitive and strategic, as Europe’s major powers decided that their future economic prosperity depended on their seizing as much of the continent for themselves as possible. The biggest players were Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, with Spain and Italy playing lesser roles, and Portugal maintaining its claims to its longstanding colonies. The process was already well under way by the time the European powers met at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885 to lay down the ground rules of the Scramble. The principal of these was that European claimants to any part of Africa had to prove their presence in the area by getting the signed agreement of a local African ruler or—if that was not possible or convenient—by military conquest.

Europeans frequently tricked illiterate African rulers into signing documents under false pretences. For example, in 1888 Ndebele king Lobengula inadvertently gave British businessman Cecil Rhodes and his private mining company the right to take over the whole of what is now Zimbabwe. The British government ignored Lobengula’s subsequent protests and approved Rhodes’s colonization of the country. Some African rulers, more experienced in European ways, willingly agreed to “protection” before the arrival of European military forces, and in this way managed to obtain some concessions. Lozi king Lewanika achieved better treatment for Lozi than the rest of what is now Zambia by agreeing to an 1889 British treaty of protection which left him with some power and kept the British from seizing Lozi land.

European armies eventually occupied most of the continent, brutally conquering most African states that resisted. African powers lost virtually every conflict for two main reasons: the age-old principle of divide-and-conquer and the superior weaponry of the European armies. Europeans were able to play one African ruler against another because a ruler’s first duty to his people was to protect them from their traditional rivals or enemies. Up to this point, Europeans had been trading partners and not necessarily rivals or enemies, roles more likely to be played by neighboring African states. Therefore, neighbors of West African slave-trading states were often prepared to help Europeans overcome their traditional enemies, who had long raided them for captives to sell into slavery. Many African states even provided military support for European colonizing armies.

Despite trading firearms into Africa for more than a century, Europeans were much better armed. European armies had access to the latest weapons technology, which was developing rapidly in the final decades of the 19th century. Some African armies possessed breech-loading rifles (loaded through the rear of the barrel rather than through the muzzle), but none had the newly-developed machine gun and, with almost the sole exception of Ethiopia, none had artillery with explosive shells. African bravery and strategic skill resulted in a few memorable African victories, such as the Zulu victory over the British in the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. However, with huge resources of equipment and soldiers at their disposal, European imperial victory was virtually inevitable. Often it was a very one-sided fight: In 1898 at Omdurman, Sudan, the British killed 20,000 Sudanese fighters in a matter of hours.

Some of the longest struggles for political survival occurred in what was to become French West Africa, where Samory Touré’s Mandinka state fought off French incursion from the early 1880s until 1898. Sudanese military leader Rabih al-Zubayr, using a disciplined and well-armed cavalry, waged a jihad in the Chad region and conquered Bornu in 1893. There he set up a militaristic empire that held up French conquest until 1900, when two French armies converging from north and the south finally overcame Rabih.

In many parts of Africa, rural people were initially unaware of the fact that European powers had, on paper, taken over. Rural resistance to European presence, when it came, was often small in scale but long in duration.

Victory at Ādwa

Ethiopia stands as the exception to the rule in the Scramble. Menelik II became emperor in 1889 and proceeded to use the powerful, well-equipped Ethiopian army to expand south, east, and west, incorporating the territories of the Oromo, Sidama, and Somali peoples into his empire. Italy, which had taken Eritrea from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1880s, invaded Ethiopia in 1895, anticipating an easy victory. The Ethiopian army, using breech-loading rifles and artillery, annihilated the Italian force at the Battle of Ādwa in 1896. With this victory, Ethiopia became the only indigenous African state to successfully resist European colonization during the Scramble for Africa.

Colonial Rule

By World War I (1914-1918) Ethiopia and Liberia were the only independent nations left in Africa. France and Britain held the most African territory: French colonies stretched across almost all of West Africa, while Britain held an almost unbroken string of colonies from Egypt to South Africa.

Colonial North Africa

European colonial control came earlier to North Africa than to most of the continent. As the British occupied Egypt in 1882, the French extended their control from Algeria to Tunisia. Morocco managed to resist the establishment of a French protectorate until 1912. Banding together in Islamic resistance forces, North Africans provided European colonists with their most persistent opposition. When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911 they faced formidable opposition from the Sanusi Brotherhood, who conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign that lasted for 20 years. In the northern extent of Morocco in the early 1920s the Berbers of the Er Rif mountains almost expelled the Spanish from the region until the French came to their aid in 1926. In Algeria, Islamic brotherhoods had fought French rule for decades in the mid-19th century. However, by the 20th century French control was secure, and the French settler population rose rapidly.

In early-20th-century Egypt, anticolonial opposition, protests, and riots were commonplace, as were violent British reactions. The pressure on the British, compounded by the demands of World War I, led Britain to make political concessions. In 1922 Egyptians gained nominal independence and a parliament under King Fuad I, although Britain remained in control behind the scenes. The corruption and ineffectiveness of Fuad’s government undermined the parliamentary system as a viable form of government. In the 1930s an organization called the Muslim Brotherhood emerged in vehement opposition to parliamentary government as well as European culture and interference. This brotherhood inspired other movements throughout Islamic North Africa, and its impact is still felt in the region.

Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa

Across most of sub-Saharan Africa, colonial rule was accompanied by the exploitation of the continent’s raw materials by private European concessionary companies. The conduct of these companies was often brutal. The worst excesses were in the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which Belgian king Leopold II ruled as his personal fiefdom until it was taken over by the Belgian government in 1908. Leopold’s agents used forced African labor to collect rubber, and regularly tortured and mutilated African workers. Violence by concessionary companies was also experienced in British Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); German East, West, and South-West Africa (now Tanzania, Cameroon, and Namibia); Portuguese Mozambique; and French Equatorial Africa (now several countries, including Gabon, Republic of the Congo, and Central African Republic).

In the early 20th century European colonists in Africa directed the building of new infrastructures, such as port facilities and numerous railways. Railways were built with African forced labor and the railway companies were often paid with vast grants of African land or mineral concessions. Almost exclusively, the railways linked the source of a colony’s agricultural or mineral wealth with ports. They were arteries by which colonizing powers extracted the continent’s raw materials to benefit themselves, with virtually no thought given to local African economies. Although Europeans would later claim that they had given Africa a modern infrastructure, Africans had paid for it and Europeans were the main beneficiaries. Furthermore, land along the railways became valuable commercial farmland because of the easy access to wider urban or international markets, and so it was often set aside for white settlement. In Kenya, a railway built to link Uganda with the coast provided the British with the incentive to seize the Kikuyu highlands of Kenya for exclusive white settlement.

Colonial taxation of Africans was an important method of control. Throughout much of the continent—but especially in countries with extensive white settlement, such as Kenya, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa—taxation was used as a deliberate tool to drive Africans into the labor market. In order to earn the money to pay the new taxes, Africans had to work European farms and mines. Colonists encouraged Africans to migrate from rural areas to work their various enterprises. They recruited men from rural areas and paid them minimal wages on short, fixed-term contracts. Colonists assumed that the workers’ wives who remained behind would be able to grow enough food to feed their families’ children and elderly. The reality was that rural areas became impoverished by the absence of male labor and insufficient income from wages to compensate. Women therefore often followed men to urban areas in search of casual employment, further impoverishing the rural areas. This migratory pattern would persist throughout the 20th century.

African farmers who were able to retain their land grew a variety of crops for the new colonial markets. They grew groundnuts in the Sénégal and Gambia river valleys and in northern Nigeria. Palm oil continued as an important product of the forest region, from Côte d’Ivoire to the Niger River delta, while cocoa planting was adopted by the Akan of the Ashanti forest of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). In Uganda local African initiative ensured the development of thriving cotton production for export by rail to Indian Ocean ports.

Minor rebellions were widespread in colonial Africa wherever land was seized for white use, forced labor was particularly oppressive, or taxation was harshly or unreasonably imposed. Major rebellions aimed at expelling colonizers altogether erupted in Rhodesia (1896-1897), German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia, 1904-1907) and German East Africa (now Tanzania, 1905-1907). Ultimately, however, the colonizers had the resources to summon however many reinforcements were needed to suppress these rebellions.

In South Africa, Africans suffered the most extreme form of colonization. The British controlled the entire area following their victory over the independent Boer republics in the South African War, or Boer War (1899-1902). In 1910 Britain established the Union of South Africa, granting the white population—both British and Afrikaners—control of their own parliamentary government. Between 1910 and 1940 successive white governments pursued increasingly restrictive policies of segregation, which included restricting Africans to bantustans (homelands) that amounted to a mere 13 percent of the country’s land area. For the most part, Africans were only allowed into the “white areas,” which included all the cities, if they were employed by whites. What emerged was an unbalanced economic system based upon race, designed for the benefit of whites and dependent on the subservience of blacks. It evolved haphazardly in the first half of the 20th century, but following 1948 the National Party government codified it into the apartheid (Afrikaans for “separateness”) system, which lasted until 1994.

Africa and the World Wars

World War I impacted many parts of Africa as British, French, and Belgian forces invaded their neighboring German colonies. Africans suffered badly, mostly as noncombatant forced laborers. In addition, many thousands served in the French Army as combatants in the trenches of Western Europe. After the war, Germany’s African colonies were handed over to neighboring colonial powers.

World War II (1939-1945) combat was limited to Ethiopia and North Africa. Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and, with the use of aerial bombardment and poison gas, conquered it in 1936. Driven into exile, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie failed to gain any wide support for Ethiopia until Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. With the aid of British troops and volunteers from all over Africa, Ethiopians expelled the Italians in 1941 and Haile Selassie was restored to the throne. In North Africa, the British, Germans, and Italians fought a hugely destructive war across the deserts of Libya and Tunisia until 1943. African volunteers from British- and French-controlled areas served in the Allied army in Europe and Asia.

In the long term, the most significant impact of World War II on Africa was political and psychological. The brief colonization and subsequent liberation of Ethiopia had galvanized the emerging class of urban, educated Africans. These people were determined that the war—fought and won in the name of freedom—should liberate them too. Throughout the continent, from Algeria to Ghana to South Africa, Africans awoke with a new determination to bring an end to the humiliation of colonization.

The Winning of Independence

After World War II the dominant African colonial powers, France and Britain, were too economically weakened to resist African demands for political reform. They hoped, however, that even as they loosened their political grip upon the continent, the colonial economic subservience of Africa to Europe could be maintained.

North Africa

In some parts of North Africa, independence came fairly quickly and smoothly after the war: Libya became independent in 1952, and both Morocco and Tunisia in 1956. Meanwhile, in Algeria, the numerous and powerful French colonists were determined that it would remain part of France. The bitter and bloody Algerian War of Independence was fought until the French finally conceded independence in 1962. In Egypt, radical Muslim army officers overthrew the British puppet government in 1952. Led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, they redistributed Egyptian land to the peasantry and nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. This was the final symbol of Egyptian independence from Europe, and the failure of Britain’s attempt to regain the canal signaled to the rest of Africa that the colonial bluff had been called.

French Sub-Saharan Colonies

In sub-Saharan Africa, the French were quickest with political reform. Across French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the French allowed the election of local government representatives and in return received African agreement to maintain close economic ties with France. In 1946 the French established a common West African French currency, the CFA franc (franc de la communauté financière Africaine, or franc of the African financial community). The currency, exchanged at a fixed rate with the French franc, assured that virtually all of France’s decolonizing African territories would continue to bank, invest, and trade with France. All of France’s sub-Saharan colonies became independent in 1960, except Guinea (1958) and Djibouti (1977).

British Colonies and South Africa

The British decolonizing process was more haphazard and often more African-driven in its initiatives. The Gold Coast led the way, becoming independent Ghana in 1957. Thereafter, the pace of liberation of British colonies largely depended on how long it took the population to agree on its leaders and form of government. Most sub-Saharan British colonies became independent in the period from 1960 to 1964. It was only in the colonies with substantial numbers of white settlers that the process was seriously delayed or fought over. Thus, the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s was required to persuade the British to drop their backing of white settler power in Kenya. The British did little to prevent the white settlers of Rhodesia from declaring the independence of their own white minority regime in 1965. After a decade of guerrilla warfare, Zimbabwe was finally liberated in 1980.

White settler power in industrialized South Africa was more entrenched. The white South African government overrode the wave of African nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by the use of widespread oppression and imprisonment. Through the 1980s internal rebellious pressures combined with the loss of Western support finally prompted the South African government to change. South African-occupied Namibia became independent in 1990, and the government negotiated an end to the oppressive apartheid system with the country’s African majority from 1990 to 1994.

Belgian Congo

Belgium had no plans for decolonizing the Belgian Congo until 1959, when it panicked in the face of rapid political change in surrounding colonies. It rushed toward an ill-prepared decolonization in 1960, with the departing Belgians hoping to retain a measure of economic control by handing political power over to a weak and disunited government. With Belgian prompting, civil war erupted. As the country slid into chaos, the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered, while United Nations peacekeeping troops were largely ineffective. Order was only restored in 1965 with the establishment of the brutal military dictatorship of Joseph Désiré Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko). Mobutu’s regime was to last until 1997 when, following his overthrow, the country once more slid into a state of civil war.

Portuguese Colonies

The liberation of Portugal’s colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique was only achieved after lengthy and bitter guerrilla wars. Exhausted, Portugal withdrew from its colonies in 1974 (in Guinea-Bissau) and 1975 (in Angola and Mozambique), leaving behind revolutionary Marxist regimes to attempt to transform battered economies. Instead, Angola and Mozambique became pawns in the Cold War, as South Africa and the United States supported rebel armies in both countries in the name of fighting communism. These external pressures were not lifted until the late 1980s. Even then, Angola’s civil war continued for another decade.

Africa into the 21st Century

Africa’s political inheritance from colonial rule was a mass of artificial “nations” with arbitrarily drawn borders and ethnically diverse populations with few or no historical ties. In the buildup to independence, “nationalism” presented only a façade of unity in the face of the colonial opponent. After independence that unity only survived while the new African government was able to deliver on its promise to improve the lives of its citizens, particularly in terms of employment and social services.

The colonial powers had been at pains to emphasize ethnic diversity, as a way to weaken national opposition. They had encouraged a sense of ethnic difference and rivalry far greater than that which had existed in precolonial times. In the most extreme version of this policy, for instance, the German and Belgian rulers of Rwanda and Burundi had encouraged Hutu and Tutsi adversity. They co-opted the Tutsi aristocracy as their partners in colonial rule and, in doing so, deprived the Hutu peasantry of educational and economic opportunities. In this policy lay the seeds of Hutu-Tutsi ethnic hatred that was to lead to massacres and genocide in the 1990s. In many democratic nations of independent Africa, political parties developed around ethnic identity. As a result, insecure governments constantly feared ethnic conflict or secession. The fear was well founded, as shown by the 1967 secession of the Igbo homeland, called Biafra, from Nigeria, leading to the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

Political Development in Independent Africa

In the 1960s fear of divisive tendencies encouraged many African governments to set up one-party states, in which it was argued that the entire population could work together for the common good of development. In practice, this allowed weak governments to become dictatorial in order to stay in power. In many of these cases, the country’s military responded by intervening and seizing power by force.

In the first decades of independence, military intervention was often welcomed by urban populations who felt betrayed by weak civilian governments tainted by corruption and failed economic schemes. Military governments proved no better, however, and they too supported themselves by corruption. Many grew even more brutally dictatorial and, unrestricted by constitutional rule, committed atrocities against their perceived opponents. Among the most extreme examples were the rules of Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, both overthrown in 1979. Through the 1980s many dictators were kept in power by external support, usually in the name of Cold War politics.

It was not until this support was withdrawn around 1990, at the end of the Cold War, that most African people had the chance to demand accountable governments. From 1990 to 1994 most countries established or reestablished multiparty systems of elective government. Citizens voted long-standing autocratic governments out of office in countries such as Niger, Mali, Malawi, and Zambia, while the more astute military rulers, such as Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, discarded their uniforms and were elected as civilian presidents.

Several African countries went against the trend of ousting dictatorial and military governments in favor of multiparty democracy in the first half of the 1990s. The scale of military corruption in oil-rich Nigeria delayed the process until the late 1990s. Mobutu’s 1997 overthrow by armed rebellion created the instability that slid the Congo into outright civil war in the late 1990s and early 21st century. In Algeria, when it appeared that a militant Islamist party was about to win 1992 legislative elections, the Algerian military cancelled the election, suspended the legislature, and ushered in a decade of violent civil conflict. In Libya, the long-standing one-party regime of revolutionary leader Muammar al-Qaddafi ruled on, supported by huge oil wealth, reasonably redistributed among a sparse population.

Although a new era of accountable government arrived in Africa in the 1990s, it is still very unstable, and military coup d’états still occur. Nevertheless—as in the cases of The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Niger in the mid- or late 1990s—an incoming military ruler now has to justify his presence by declaring that he is only there temporarily to right some specific wrongs and to reestablish civilian democracy within a very short timespan. Africa no longer tolerates indefinite dictatorships.

However, the proliferation of weapons across the continent, economic hardship, and weak government infrastructures have combined to encourage banditry and civil conflict across much of Africa. In West Africa, a violent civil war in Liberia in the 1990s spilled over into Sierra Leone, where it continued long after peace returned to Liberia. Even Côte d’Ivoire—long a model of stability—has not been immune from violent conflicts. At least, however, African governments have taken up a collective sense of responsibility and are prepared to intervene on a regional basis to settle disputes or even to restore peace and order.

Africa and the World Economy

Africans are faced with widespread poverty, ill health, and lack of educational opportunities. Despite the positive political developments of the late 20th century, many African governments have been unable to improve their peoples’ standards of living. The foundation of Africa’s disadvantaged position has been its economic role in the world trading system.

Since at least the mid-19th century African economies were increasingly reworked to meet the needs of industrial Europe. Virtually all economic infrastructure was geared toward the export of Africa’s raw materials to Europe. Economic transaction and communication between neighboring states stopped if they were ruled by different colonial powers. African manufacturing was discouraged, and even banned, if it was likely to compete with the interests of European manufacturers. Indigenous African industry dwindled, and Africa was forced to import virtually all of its manufactured consumer goods. This was the economic system that Africa inherited at independence.

Making Africa even more dependent, the prices paid for its exported raw materials were set in the major financial markets of the world: New York City, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The prices on African commodities rose and fell according to the needs of the industrial world, bearing no relationship to the costs of production or the economic needs of Africa. The full implications of this were powerfully demonstrated during the energy crisis of 1973. As oil prices quadrupled, the Western world went into recession and African commodity prices tumbled. Although North African oil producers benefited, sub-Saharan Africans were not yet oil producers on a significant scale and they too suffered from the hike in oil prices. The industrial world paid less and less for African commodities, while at the same time demanded higher and higher prices for its manufactured goods, which Africans needed to import. In this way Africa helped subsidize the industrial world’s economic recovery while most African countries spiraled into debt, poverty, corruption, and political instability, from which they have spent decades trying to recover.

Since the 1980s the industrial world’s financial tools, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), have proposed solutions to Africa’s chronic indebtedness. These solutions have been based upon the economics of developed economies, however, rather than upon the specialized needs of developing countries. They have directed African development plans to increase raw material exports, in order to generate the foreign exchange to pay back Africa’s debts. But as Africans export more coffee, for example, the price of coffee falls. Thus, Africans work harder and receive less for their efforts. The ultimate goal of the IMF and World Bank has been to enable Africa to pay its debts rather than to enable Africa to develop the self-sufficient ability to compete on equal terms with the industrialized world. They have succeeded in their goal: Africa pays back more in debt servicing than it receives in direct aid. But this means that governments have less to spend on health and education, leading to falling living standards.

African leaders are striving to establish regional trading groups to strengthen their position in the global market. In 2002 they inaugurated the African Union, an organization intended eventually to establish a common economic market and political union across the entire continent. Achieving this goal, which would make Africa a formidable world power, remains Africa’s primary task for the 21st century.