130 Years Ago: Carving Up Africa in Berlin

The details of the division of the continent into colonies reflected European interests more than African realities. Colonial lines were drawn with little or no attention given to local tribal, religious, or clan-related identities or commercial patterns. Seeds were thus sown for instability both within and between the countries that emerged from c

Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units

South of Morocco, no important state had the will or the means to contest Portugal’s use of African coastal waters. Most African states looked inland, regarding the ocean as an aquatic desert and (in West Africa) seeing the dry desert of the Sahara as the real highway to distant markets.

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

Having covered those misconceptions, I would like to speak about the undeniable influence of colonialism. Africa has been colonialized by many countries, most notably: Germany, Portugal, Spain, France, and England.

Colonialism results in, among other things, cultural and behavioral transfer. The slave t