How did the Scramble for Africa work?
The Scramble for Africa worked through the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) establishing 'rules' for claiming territory, followed by military conquest, treaty manipulation, and economic exploitation. European powers used superior firepower, divide-and-conquer tactics, and agreements with local elites to rapidly partition the continent, drawing arbitrary borders that ignored existing ethnic and political boundaries.
The Scramble for Africa was a process of continental conquest that combined diplomatic negotiation among European powers with military force against African peoples. It operated through several interconnected mechanisms that allowed a handful of European nations to subjugate an entire continent in just three decades.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 established the framework. Called by German Chancellor Bismarck, it brought together representatives of fourteen European nations and the United States — but no Africans. The conference established the principle of 'effective occupation' as the basis for territorial claims, meaning that a European power had to demonstrate administrative control over territory to claim it internationally. It also declared the Congo River basin a free-trade zone and established Leopold II of Belgium's personal control over the Congo Free State. The conference essentially gave European powers permission to divide Africa among themselves.
On the ground, conquest took multiple forms. Some territories were claimed through treaties — often deliberately misleading documents presented to African leaders who could not read them or who understood them as trade agreements rather than sovereignty transfers. Others were conquered by military force, with European armies using machine guns, artillery, and disciplined formations against African forces that typically lacked equivalent firepower. The Maxim gun, the first portable fully automatic machine gun, was devastatingly effective — at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, British forces killed approximately 12,000 Sudanese while suffering fewer than 50 dead.
Divide-and-conquer was a fundamental strategy. European powers exploited existing rivalries between African groups, allied with one faction against another, and recruited African soldiers to fight their colonial wars. The British relied heavily on Indian troops and locally recruited forces. The French built an army from West African conscripts. This meant that the conquest of Africa was, in significant part, carried out by African soldiers under European command.
The borders drawn during the scramble were arbitrary, reflecting European negotiations rather than African realities. They split ethnic groups across multiple colonies (the Somali people, for example, were divided between British, French, Italian, and Ethiopian territories) and combined historically antagonistic groups within single administrative units. Colonial governance typically relied on a thin layer of European administrators supported by local intermediaries — a system that maintained control cheaply but created lasting distortions in political authority.
African resistance was widespread and sometimes successful. Ethiopia defeated Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, preserving its independence. The Zulu, Asante, Mandinka, Herero, and many other peoples fought back fiercely. But the technological and organizational advantages of industrial European states ultimately proved overwhelming.