Yosy
02-22-2005, 09:30 AM
The Scramble for Africa was the period between the 1880s and the start of World War I, when colonial empires in Africa were acquired faster than anywhere else on the globe. It is the canonical example of the New Imperialism.
The latter half of 19th century saw the transition from an "informal" empire of control through economic dominance to direct control, marked from the 1870s on by the scramble for territory in areas previously regarded as under influence. The Berlin Conference regulated the imperial competition between Britain, France and Germany, defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of colonial claims and codifying the imposition of direct rule, accomplished usually through armed force
Opening of the Continent
The opening of Africa had began in earnest at the end of the 18th century. By 1835, most of northwestern Africa had been mapped by Europeans. The greatest of the European explorers was David Livingstone, who charted the vast interior. By the end of the century, the source of the Nile had been charted by Europeans, the courses of the Niger and Congo Rivers had been traced, and the world now realized the vast resources of Africa.
However, on the eve of the New Imperialist scramble for Africa, only ten percent of the continent was under the control of western nations. In 1875, the two most important holdings were Algeria, administered by France, and Cape Colony, held by Britain. David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley, galvanized the European nations into action. But at first his ideas found little support except from the Belgian king, Leopold II, who in 1876 had organized the International African Association. As an agent of the association, Stanley was sent to the Congo region, where he made treaties with several African chiefs and by 1882 obtained over 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km²) of territory.
Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism. Industrialization brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs. Medical advances were also key, especially medicines for tropical diseases. The development of malaria treatment enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be penetrated in the first place.
Africa and global markets
Sub-Saharan Africa, the last vast region of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism" and "civilization," was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for other potential reasons. First, insofar as the "Dark Continent" was agricultural or extractive, and no longer stagnant since its integration with the world's interdependent capitalist economy, it required more capital for development than it could provide itself. Second, during a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets, Africa offered Britain an open market that would garner it a trade surplus— a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments).
As perhaps the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly more important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominantly white settler colonies, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.
In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement to imperialism, of course, arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper, cotton, rubber, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent.
However, in Africa (exclusive of what would become the Union of South Africa in 1909), the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small before and after the Berlin Conference, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were small and politically insignificant, exerting only a tiny influence on domestic politics. These observations might detract the pro-imperialist arguments of Leopold II, Francesco Crispi, and Jules Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets. But later historians have noted that such statistics only obscured the fact that formal control of tropical Africa had great strategic value in an era of imperial rivalry.
Strategic rivalry
While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior — between the gold and diamond-rich southern Africa and Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was thus under intense political pressure, especially among supporters of the Conservative Party, to secure lucrative markets such as India, China, and Latin America from encroaching rivals. Thus, securing the key waterway between East and West — the Suez Canal— was crucial.
As a result, the important developments were taking place in the Nile valley. Shortly before the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Ismail, the ruler of Egypt, borrowed enormous sums from French and English bankers at high rates of interest. By 1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Ismail repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in 1879, Britain and France assumed joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate. The Egyptian ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention. A serious revolt broke out in 1882. Britain decided to quell the revolt and then assume responsibility for the administration of the country.
The occupation of Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In 1884 Bismarck convened a conference in Berlin to discuss the Africa problem. The diplomats put on a humanitarian façade by condemning the slave trade, prohibiting the sale of alcohol and firearms in certain regions, and by expressing concern for missionary activities. More importantly, the diplomats in Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies, and they agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by Leopold II as a neutral area known as the Congo Free State in which trade and navigation were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. In spite of the rules, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient and on several occasions war was barely avoided.
Britain's occupations of Egypt and the Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the Nile River. By the end of the century Egypt was occupied by British forces in 1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until 1914, and never a colony proper); Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 1900s; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighboring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics.
The Fashoda Incident (1898) was one of the most crucial conflicts on Europe's way of consolidating holdings in the continent. It brought Britain and France to the verge of war but ended in a major strategic victory for Britain. It stemmed from battles over control of the Nile headwaters, which caused Britain to expand in the Sudan.
The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from West Africa (modern day Senegal) eastward, through the Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara, a territory covering modern day Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted link between the Niger River and the Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region, by virtue of their existing control over the Caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in Southern Africa (modern South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia), with their territories in East Africa (modern Kenya), and these two areas with the Nile basin. Sudan (which in those days included modern day Uganda) was obviously key to the fulfillment of these ambitions, especially since Egypt was already under British control. This 'red line' through Africa is made most famous by Cecil Rhodes. Along with Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa), Rhodes advocated such a "Cape to Cairo" empire linking by rail the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich Southern part of the continent. Though hampered by German occupation of Tanganyika until the end of World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire.
When one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes' dream), and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa (now Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti), (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. In short, Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from Dakar to the Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff, continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March 1899 the French and British agreed that the source of the Nile and Congo Rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.
Germany was the third largest colonial power in Africa, acquiring an overall empire of 2.6 million square kilometers and 14 million colonial subjects, mostly in its African possessions (Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika).
In the process, by the end of the century, Europe added almost 9 million square miles (23,000,000 km²) — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions. Europe's formal holdings now included the entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia.
The Colonial Encounter
The production of cash crops
Capitalism, an economic system in which capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital, revolutionized traditional economies, inducing social changes and political consequences that revolutionized African and Asian societies. Maximizing production and minimizing cost did not necessarily coincide with traditional, seasonal patterns of agricultural production. The ethic of wage productivity was thus, in many respects, a new concept to supposedly 'idle natives' merely accustomed to older patterns of production. Balanced, subsistence-based economies shifted to specialization and accumulation of surpluses. Tribal states or empires organized along precarious, unwritten cultural traditions also shifted to a division of labor based on legal protection of land and labor — once inalienable, but now commodities to be bought, sold, or traded.
The Congo Free State
The integration of traditional economies in Africa within the framework of the modern, capitalist economy was particularly exploitative. Exploitation of the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, German Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa paled in comparison to that of the Congo basin, where the Congo Free State was ruled (1885-1908) by King Leopold II of Belgium but not by the state of Belgium as such. The fortunes of Leopold, the famed "philanthropist," "abolitionist," and self-anointed sovereign of a territory seventy-six times larger geographically than Belgium itself, and those of the multinational concessionary companies under his auspices, were mainly made on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had never before been produced on such a scale. Unknown numbers of "indolent natives," unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease. International exposure (1903-04) of the atrocities conducted by Leopold's agents and concession-holders forced him (1907-08) to submit the territory to formal Belgian colonial rule.
The Herero massacre
The Herero massacre occurred in 1904-1907 and is considered one of the worst atrocities in German colonial history.
In 1904 the Hereros revolted and killed about 120 Germans, destroying their farms.
In the same year General Lothar von Trotha was dispatched with a force of 10,000 volunteers to resolve the crisis. He issued an appeal to the Hereros:
I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero nation. The Hereros are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and robbed, they have cut off the ears and noses and privy parts of wounded soldiers, and they are now too cowardly to fight. I say to the nation: Any person who delivers one of the Herero captains as a captive to a military post will receive 1,000 Marks. The one who hands over Samuel will receive 5,000 Marks. All Herero must leave the country. If they do not, I will force them with cannons to do so. Within the German frontier every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will not take over any more women and children, but I will either drive them back to your people or have them fired on. These are my words to the nation of the Hereros. The great General of the Mighty Emperor, von Trotha.
German forces met the 3000-5000 Herero combatants at the Waterberg and shot them indiscriminately. The survivors retreated with their families towards Bechuanaland, after the British offered the Hereros asylum under the condition not to continue the revolt on British soil.
The German troops, however, were badly infected with Typhus and Cholera and were unable to pursue them.
Some 24,000 Hereros managed to flee through a gap in the netting into the Kalahari Desert in the hope of crossing into Botswana. German patrols later found skeletons around holes (25-50 feet deep) dug up in a vain attempt to find water. Survivors, mostly women and children, were coralled in to concentration camps - many of them died from lack of food, shelter or care. The conflict continued until 1907, by which time some 40,000 Hereros had perished. Chief Samuel Maherero and 1000 men crossed the Kalahari into Bechuanaland.
It should be noted however, that there are no absolutely reliable casualty figures for the Hereros, largely because the German administration never conducted a census before 1904. Only in 1905 did a counting take place which revealed that 25,000 Herero remained in German South-West Africa. It is therefore out of question that the Herero suffered a great deal through the conduct of the German forces and their general.
In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Ngunvanva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He also pointed out that reparations were out of the question.
On the 100th anniversary in 2004, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's development aid minister officially apologized for the first time and expressed grief about the genocide committed by Germans.
Partition of Africa
British
Egypt; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan; British East Africa: Kenya, Uganda; British Somaliland; Southern Rhodesia; Northern Rhodesia; Bechuanaland; Orange Free State; British South Africa; The Gambia; Sierra Leone; Nigeria; British Gold Coast.
French
Algeria;Morocco; French West Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan(now Mali), Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin); French Equatorial Africa: Gabon, Middle Congo(now the Republic of the Congo), Oubangi-Chari (now the Central African Republic), Chad; French Somaliland; Madagascar.
German
German Kamerun; German East Africa; German South-West Africa; German Togoland.
Portuguese
Angola; Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique); Portuguese Cabinda; Portuguese Guinea.
Italian
Italian North Africa; Eritrea; Italian Somaliland .
Belgian
Belgian Congo.
Spanish
Spanish Sahara; Rio De Oro; Rio Muni.
Independent Nations
Liberia, founded by the United States' American Colonization Society; Abyssinia, now Ethiopia and annexed by Italy during the Abyssinia Crisis.
Conclusions
Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under her control, to 15% for France's, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 1% for Italy. Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. It was paradoxical that Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to her long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting her advantageous position at its inception.
Map showing European claimants to the African continent in 1913
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2a/ColonialAfrica.png
The latter half of 19th century saw the transition from an "informal" empire of control through economic dominance to direct control, marked from the 1870s on by the scramble for territory in areas previously regarded as under influence. The Berlin Conference regulated the imperial competition between Britain, France and Germany, defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of colonial claims and codifying the imposition of direct rule, accomplished usually through armed force
Opening of the Continent
The opening of Africa had began in earnest at the end of the 18th century. By 1835, most of northwestern Africa had been mapped by Europeans. The greatest of the European explorers was David Livingstone, who charted the vast interior. By the end of the century, the source of the Nile had been charted by Europeans, the courses of the Niger and Congo Rivers had been traced, and the world now realized the vast resources of Africa.
However, on the eve of the New Imperialist scramble for Africa, only ten percent of the continent was under the control of western nations. In 1875, the two most important holdings were Algeria, administered by France, and Cape Colony, held by Britain. David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley, galvanized the European nations into action. But at first his ideas found little support except from the Belgian king, Leopold II, who in 1876 had organized the International African Association. As an agent of the association, Stanley was sent to the Congo region, where he made treaties with several African chiefs and by 1882 obtained over 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km²) of territory.
Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism. Industrialization brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs. Medical advances were also key, especially medicines for tropical diseases. The development of malaria treatment enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be penetrated in the first place.
Africa and global markets
Sub-Saharan Africa, the last vast region of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism" and "civilization," was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for other potential reasons. First, insofar as the "Dark Continent" was agricultural or extractive, and no longer stagnant since its integration with the world's interdependent capitalist economy, it required more capital for development than it could provide itself. Second, during a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets, Africa offered Britain an open market that would garner it a trade surplus— a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall. Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments).
As perhaps the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly more important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominantly white settler colonies, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.
In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labor, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement to imperialism, of course, arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper, cotton, rubber, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent.
However, in Africa (exclusive of what would become the Union of South Africa in 1909), the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small before and after the Berlin Conference, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were small and politically insignificant, exerting only a tiny influence on domestic politics. These observations might detract the pro-imperialist arguments of Leopold II, Francesco Crispi, and Jules Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets. But later historians have noted that such statistics only obscured the fact that formal control of tropical Africa had great strategic value in an era of imperial rivalry.
Strategic rivalry
While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior — between the gold and diamond-rich southern Africa and Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was thus under intense political pressure, especially among supporters of the Conservative Party, to secure lucrative markets such as India, China, and Latin America from encroaching rivals. Thus, securing the key waterway between East and West — the Suez Canal— was crucial.
As a result, the important developments were taking place in the Nile valley. Shortly before the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Ismail, the ruler of Egypt, borrowed enormous sums from French and English bankers at high rates of interest. By 1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Ismail repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in 1879, Britain and France assumed joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate. The Egyptian ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention. A serious revolt broke out in 1882. Britain decided to quell the revolt and then assume responsibility for the administration of the country.
The occupation of Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In 1884 Bismarck convened a conference in Berlin to discuss the Africa problem. The diplomats put on a humanitarian façade by condemning the slave trade, prohibiting the sale of alcohol and firearms in certain regions, and by expressing concern for missionary activities. More importantly, the diplomats in Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies, and they agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by Leopold II as a neutral area known as the Congo Free State in which trade and navigation were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. In spite of the rules, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient and on several occasions war was barely avoided.
Britain's occupations of Egypt and the Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the Nile River. By the end of the century Egypt was occupied by British forces in 1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until 1914, and never a colony proper); Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 1900s; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighboring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics.
The Fashoda Incident (1898) was one of the most crucial conflicts on Europe's way of consolidating holdings in the continent. It brought Britain and France to the verge of war but ended in a major strategic victory for Britain. It stemmed from battles over control of the Nile headwaters, which caused Britain to expand in the Sudan.
The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from West Africa (modern day Senegal) eastward, through the Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara, a territory covering modern day Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted link between the Niger River and the Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region, by virtue of their existing control over the Caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in Southern Africa (modern South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia), with their territories in East Africa (modern Kenya), and these two areas with the Nile basin. Sudan (which in those days included modern day Uganda) was obviously key to the fulfillment of these ambitions, especially since Egypt was already under British control. This 'red line' through Africa is made most famous by Cecil Rhodes. Along with Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa), Rhodes advocated such a "Cape to Cairo" empire linking by rail the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich Southern part of the continent. Though hampered by German occupation of Tanganyika until the end of World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire.
When one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes' dream), and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa (now Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti), (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. In short, Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from Dakar to the Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
A French force under Jean-Baptiste Marchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff, continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March 1899 the French and British agreed that the source of the Nile and Congo Rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.
Germany was the third largest colonial power in Africa, acquiring an overall empire of 2.6 million square kilometers and 14 million colonial subjects, mostly in its African possessions (Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika).
In the process, by the end of the century, Europe added almost 9 million square miles (23,000,000 km²) — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions. Europe's formal holdings now included the entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia.
The Colonial Encounter
The production of cash crops
Capitalism, an economic system in which capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital, revolutionized traditional economies, inducing social changes and political consequences that revolutionized African and Asian societies. Maximizing production and minimizing cost did not necessarily coincide with traditional, seasonal patterns of agricultural production. The ethic of wage productivity was thus, in many respects, a new concept to supposedly 'idle natives' merely accustomed to older patterns of production. Balanced, subsistence-based economies shifted to specialization and accumulation of surpluses. Tribal states or empires organized along precarious, unwritten cultural traditions also shifted to a division of labor based on legal protection of land and labor — once inalienable, but now commodities to be bought, sold, or traded.
The Congo Free State
The integration of traditional economies in Africa within the framework of the modern, capitalist economy was particularly exploitative. Exploitation of the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, German Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa paled in comparison to that of the Congo basin, where the Congo Free State was ruled (1885-1908) by King Leopold II of Belgium but not by the state of Belgium as such. The fortunes of Leopold, the famed "philanthropist," "abolitionist," and self-anointed sovereign of a territory seventy-six times larger geographically than Belgium itself, and those of the multinational concessionary companies under his auspices, were mainly made on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had never before been produced on such a scale. Unknown numbers of "indolent natives," unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease. International exposure (1903-04) of the atrocities conducted by Leopold's agents and concession-holders forced him (1907-08) to submit the territory to formal Belgian colonial rule.
The Herero massacre
The Herero massacre occurred in 1904-1907 and is considered one of the worst atrocities in German colonial history.
In 1904 the Hereros revolted and killed about 120 Germans, destroying their farms.
In the same year General Lothar von Trotha was dispatched with a force of 10,000 volunteers to resolve the crisis. He issued an appeal to the Hereros:
I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Herero nation. The Hereros are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and robbed, they have cut off the ears and noses and privy parts of wounded soldiers, and they are now too cowardly to fight. I say to the nation: Any person who delivers one of the Herero captains as a captive to a military post will receive 1,000 Marks. The one who hands over Samuel will receive 5,000 Marks. All Herero must leave the country. If they do not, I will force them with cannons to do so. Within the German frontier every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will not take over any more women and children, but I will either drive them back to your people or have them fired on. These are my words to the nation of the Hereros. The great General of the Mighty Emperor, von Trotha.
German forces met the 3000-5000 Herero combatants at the Waterberg and shot them indiscriminately. The survivors retreated with their families towards Bechuanaland, after the British offered the Hereros asylum under the condition not to continue the revolt on British soil.
The German troops, however, were badly infected with Typhus and Cholera and were unable to pursue them.
Some 24,000 Hereros managed to flee through a gap in the netting into the Kalahari Desert in the hope of crossing into Botswana. German patrols later found skeletons around holes (25-50 feet deep) dug up in a vain attempt to find water. Survivors, mostly women and children, were coralled in to concentration camps - many of them died from lack of food, shelter or care. The conflict continued until 1907, by which time some 40,000 Hereros had perished. Chief Samuel Maherero and 1000 men crossed the Kalahari into Bechuanaland.
It should be noted however, that there are no absolutely reliable casualty figures for the Hereros, largely because the German administration never conducted a census before 1904. Only in 1905 did a counting take place which revealed that 25,000 Herero remained in German South-West Africa. It is therefore out of question that the Herero suffered a great deal through the conduct of the German forces and their general.
In 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited Namibia and met Herero leaders. Chief Munjuku Ngunvanva demanded a public apology and compensation. Herzog expressed regret but stopped short of an apology. He also pointed out that reparations were out of the question.
On the 100th anniversary in 2004, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, Germany's development aid minister officially apologized for the first time and expressed grief about the genocide committed by Germans.
Partition of Africa
British
Egypt; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan; British East Africa: Kenya, Uganda; British Somaliland; Southern Rhodesia; Northern Rhodesia; Bechuanaland; Orange Free State; British South Africa; The Gambia; Sierra Leone; Nigeria; British Gold Coast.
French
Algeria;Morocco; French West Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan(now Mali), Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin); French Equatorial Africa: Gabon, Middle Congo(now the Republic of the Congo), Oubangi-Chari (now the Central African Republic), Chad; French Somaliland; Madagascar.
German
German Kamerun; German East Africa; German South-West Africa; German Togoland.
Portuguese
Angola; Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique); Portuguese Cabinda; Portuguese Guinea.
Italian
Italian North Africa; Eritrea; Italian Somaliland .
Belgian
Belgian Congo.
Spanish
Spanish Sahara; Rio De Oro; Rio Muni.
Independent Nations
Liberia, founded by the United States' American Colonization Society; Abyssinia, now Ethiopia and annexed by Italy during the Abyssinia Crisis.
Conclusions
Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under her control, to 15% for France's, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 1% for Italy. Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. It was paradoxical that Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to her long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa", reflecting her advantageous position at its inception.
Map showing European claimants to the African continent in 1913
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2a/ColonialAfrica.png