Scramble for Africa
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The scramble for Africa was the rush by European powers to claim almost the whole African continent between 1881 and 1914, at the conference table as much as on the ground. Bismarck convened the Berlin conference of 1884 to 1885, which set rules for claiming territory: a flag and a treaty with a local ruler were required, and no European power recognised Leopold II's private Congo Free State as Belgian. Britain took Egypt in 1882 and then the Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Rhodesia; France took Tunisia, Madagascar and a vast bloc from Senegal to Chad; Germany acquired Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon and Togo; Portugal kept Angola and Mozambique; Italy took Libya, Eritrea and Somalia, and was humiliated at Adwa in 1896. Only Ethiopia, where Menelik II defeated the Italians, and Liberia remained independent. The map was drawn with straight lines that ignored language, kinship and trade, and the conquest itself was often brutal, from the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa to the forced labour of the Congo. By 1914 only Liberia and Ethiopia stood outside European rule, and the colony's costs and contradictions fed the nationalist movements of the twentieth century. The conference met without a single African present.