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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    The map of Africa in 1914

    The Scramble for Africa was a historical process which occurred roughly between 1860 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. During it the major European powers sought to rapidly acquire colonies in Africa as the entire continent was swallowed up by imperial aggression in a very short period of time. While several powers had acquired colonies along the coastal perimeter of Africa between the late fifteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, these were limited in scale. From 1860 onwards the African interior was penetrated and new developments like the advent of fast steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal facilitated European expansion. The Scramble was at its most intense in the quarter century between 1875 and 1900. Britain and France were the foremost actors, with the British seeking to acquire a contiguous block of colonies from Egypt to South Africa and the French concentrating on western Africa. Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal and King Leopold II of Belgium in a private capacity were also involved. The Scramble for Africa led to the migration of European colonists to large parts of Africa, forming communities of white westerners that persisted in some places for much of the twentieth century. The connections formed between the colonial nations and many African nations have also led to the migration of millions of Africans to Europe in modern times.[1]

    The Scramble for Africa chronology of eventsThe Scramble for Africa chronology of events

    An aerial view of the Suez Canal

    European colonization of parts of Africa was underway from as early as the late fifteenth century when Portugal began establishing enclaves along the coast as way-stations on its voyages around the continent to India. Two of these were subsequently expanded and became the colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Later the French, Spanish and English became involved in the slave trade in West Africa and established stations here. One of these eventually grew into the colony that would become French Senegal. The Dutch settled a colony at the Cape of Good Hope in the 1650s, one which grew substantially over the next century and a half before it was taken over the British during the Napoleonic Wars. As substantial as these early efforts were, though, over 95% of the African continent remained under native rule into the early nineteenth century and the interior of the continent remained almost completely unknown to and uncharted by Europeans.[2]

    That all began to change in the middle of the nineteenth century. An early development was the French invasion of Algeria and conquest of the northern coast of the country in the 1830s. The British were expanding their holdings in southern Africa throughout these decades as well. A number of developments occurred in the 1860s to begin the rapid Scramble for Africa. The Suez Canal was opened in 1869, cutting drastically the amount of time needed to travel to East Africa in particular from Europe.[3] New technologies like steamships, railways and telegrams also made the possibility of ruling such vast lands distant from Europe much easier, while ever-increasing military technology meant that a few hundred European soldiers could conquer entire countries. With this the Scramble for Africa mushroomed in the mid-1870s. It became particularly heated during and after the Berlin Conference that took place between November 1884 and February 1885[4]

    Cecil Rhodes

    The British were the foremost imperial power of the day. They acquired a protectorate over Egypt in 1882 to safeguard their interest in the Suez Canal and the routeways to British India. Cecil Rhodes, a diamond, gold and rail magnate operating in South Africa, became the architect of the plan to build a contiguous series of British colonies from Cairo to Cape Town in the 1880s and 1890s, a dream which was very nearly realized as the British acquired lands equivalent to the modern-day countries of Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa.[5] The British also developed an interest in West Africa, conquering Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Benin and the Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana.[6]

    The British goal to develop a continuous chain of colonies from Egypt to South Africa was foiled by Germany. It was a latecomer to the Scramble for Africa, but in the mid-1880s it began acquiring some of the remaining parts of the continent. The acquisition of what was termed German East Africa, modern-day Tanzania minus the island of Zanzibar, meant the British could not link up Kenya and Uganda with Zambia. The Germans also acquired Namibia, then known as German South West Africa, much of the Cameroons and Togoland in West Africa. Its colonial empire was short-lived, as after the First World War these were taken over by the British and French.[7]

    The French were the great rivals of the British in almost every colonial theatre between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Africa was no different. While the British concentrated on the Cairo to Cape Town strategy, the French expanded out of their pre-existing colonies in Senegal and Algeria to conquer most of the Sahel and West Africa. They ultimately acquired lands corresponding to modern-day Tunisia, Mali, Chad, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger, Mauritania, Gabon and Upper Volta, as well as the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.[8]

    King Leopold II of Belgium

    A particularly unusual and unfortunate episode in the Scramble for Africa was the acquisition of much of the Congo, a vast territory, as the private fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. Over a period of a quarter of a century his private colony was administered by the Force Publique on Leopold’s behalf to acquire ivory, rubber and other commodities. Mass slavery, torture, dismemberment and murder were engaged in to maximize profits. Eventually, after revelations of Leopold’s misrule, the colony was taken over by the Belgian state itself. It approximated to the modern day Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.[9]

    Finally, a number of second-tier European powers were involved. Italy acquired Libya belatedly at the end of the Scramble in 1911, while it had also acquired several small colonies at Eritrea and Somaliland in the Horn of Africa. The Portuguese expanded and consolidated their control over Angola and Mozambique, while Spain had its own territories in Morocco and the Western Sahara. It was mired in domestic strife at home in Europe, though, and did not play a major role in the Scramble. At the end of the process, when France took over Morocco in 1912, only Liberia and Abyssinia/Ethiopia remained independent of European rule. Moreover, Liberia was a peculiar state established for freed slaves from America which could be viewed as a kind of American colony in West Africa, albeit one founded with altruistic intentions. Most of these colonies would remain under European rule until a vast wave of decolonization began in the late 1950s.[10]

    Extent of migration caused by the Scramble for AfricaExtent of migration caused by the Scramble for Africa

    The Scramble for Africa led to mixed migration in different places. For instance, the expansion of British colonial rule in South Africa and the discovery of extensive seams of both gold and diamonds in the region led to the migration of hundreds of thousands of British and other Europeans to southern Africa in the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s in ways which impacted on southern Africa for much of the twentieth century and which still resonate today.[11] Because of their proximity to Europe, the North African colonies also experienced considerable settlement. Cairo was a city with a thriving British colonial community in the first half of the twentieth century. Similarly Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, had a large British colonial community. Comparable examples could be cited in many colonial cities around the continent such as French Dakar in Senegal, Lagos under British rule in Nigeria and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo.[12]

    However, many other parts of the continent did not experience major migration at all. German East Africa, for instance, was about three times the size of modern-day Germany and yet at the very peak of colonial settlement there were probably just over 10,000 Europeans there. While there were major centers of French colonial rule in places like Dakar and the northern parts of Algeria, a traveller crossing the Sahel through French Mali or Chad in the early twentieth century would have barely come across a Frenchman except for the odd colonial administrator and a few soldiers and businessmen in some of the larger towns and villages. Hence, the impact of the Scramble for Africa on migration to Africa from Europe was a very varied thing.[13]

    Demographic impact of the Scramble for AfricaDemographic impact of the Scramble for Africa

    The longer term demographic impact of this migration was as mixed as the migration itself. In South Africa and Rhodesia it led to the development of a very large white minority, one which was able to drive white-minority rule in both regions for much of the remainder of the twentieth century until the end of the Rhodesian Bush War and Apartheid. Similarly, Algeria came to be considered an extension of France itself, such was the level of French colonization of the country. However, even in those regions which were most impacted by European migration and settlement, it ultimately proved transient in many cases. The huge French colonial population in Algeria eventually upped and left at the time of the Algerian War of Independence and its immediate aftermath in the 1950s and 1960s.[14]

    British RAF planes in Egypt in 1932

    The white-minority population of Rhodesia continued to grow in the 1960s and 1970s, even as the Bush War was underway to end their control over the country. Eventually they lost that war and Zimbabwe today only has a tiny community of white people remaining. The British colonial community in Egypt came to an end after the Second World War and in particular following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, with many British families heading home to Britain. Only in South Africa has the white colonial community remained a major factor in the demography of the country and even that has declined in size since the end of Apartheid in the early 1990s.[15]

    In contrast to all of this, the Scramble for Africa facilitated the migration of African people to Europe a century later. Many African countries retained strong ties to the former colonial power once decolonization occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. This facilitated the movement of people from a wide range of African nations to European countries, a process that was well under way before decolonization, as students from the colonies travelled to study in cities like London and Paris and sometimes settled permanently there. Labor shortages in Europe following the Second World War further fuelled this movement. Thus, for instance, Britain has large communities today of people of Nigerian and Kenyan ancestry, while Malians, Senegalese and Algerians are prominent in France. The story of how the Scramble for Africa has impacted on migration, settlement and people’s genealogical stories is a very complex one.[16]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Scramble for AfricaExplore more about the Scramble for Africa

    References

    1. ↑ Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London, 1992).
    2. ↑ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191737589.timeline.0001
    3. ↑ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/suez-canal-opens
    4. ↑ Daniel R. Headrick, ‘The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 2, Technology and War (June, 1979), pp. 231–256.
    5. ↑ Robert Williams, ‘The Cape to Cairo Railway’, in Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 20, No. 80 (July, 1921), pp. 241–258.
    6. ↑ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191737589.timeline.0001
    7. ↑ Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, ‘German Imperialism in Africa: The Distorted Images of Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, and Togo’, in Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, Special Issue: The Image of Africa in German Society (December, 1992), pp. 235–246.  
    8. ↑ C. W. Newbury and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, ‘French Policy and the Origins of the Scramble for West Africa’, in The Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1969), pp. 253–276.
    9. ↑ Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (New York, 2012).
    10. ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/liberia
    11. ↑ Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa (London, 2007).
    12. ↑ David Nelson, ‘Defining the Urban: The Construction of French-Dominated Colonial Dakar, 1857–1940’, in Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 33, No. 2, French Colonial Urbanism (Summer, 2007), pp. 225–255.
    13. ↑ Gregory Mann, ‘French Colonialism and The Making of the Modern Sahel’, in Leonardo A. Villalón (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel (Oxford, 2021).
    14. ↑ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137010230_5
    15. ↑ https://www.history.com/news/end-apartheid-steps
    16. ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/it-takes-village-despite-challenges-migrant-groups-lead-development-senegal


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    Dr. David Heffernan. (2025, January 17). *Scramble for Africa*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa