Gunpowder and Colonial Campaigns in Africa

By around 1880, European colonial intrusion in Africa consisted of a series of coastal enclaves and settlements in the Cape in the far south and Algeria in the far north. Up to that point, Europeans had been kept out of most of the interior of Africa both by deadly tropical diseases for which they had little immunity and by powerful African states. Most Africans lived in independent societies that ranged from highly centralized kingdoms to decentralized “stateless” groups. This changed rapidly from around 1880 to 1914 when, in a process called “the Scramble for Africa,” European powers conquered all of Africa except for Ethiopia, which defended itself from Italian invasion, and Liberia, which was a settlement of freed enslaved people from the United States who conquered indigenous Liberians. On the European side, important factors that facilitated this process included superior firepower from new magazine-fed rifles and machine guns, extreme racism, and nationalistic competition. Since they had planned the conquest at the 1884 Berlin Conference, the European powers did not fight each other over parts of Africa. On the African side, rulers did not perceive the European invasion as a common threat and reacted separately, some cooperating and others resisting. While the initial colonial conquest was often achieved by privately owned chartered companies with commercial interests in a particular area, financial problems meant that the respective European governments took over the colonies within a few years. Since these events took place, various theories have sought to explain this dramatic conquest, including Hobson 1902, which sees it as related to the rise of greedy ultrarich businessmen; Lenin 1963, which claims it represented the last stage of the capitalist system that was beginning to tear itself apart; Robinson and Gallagher 1961, which explains it in terms of European powers trying to secure points of strategic importance; and Hopkins 1973 (all cited under General Overviews), which demonstrates that the European desire to secure sources of raw materials related to industry motived the scramble for West Africa. In Southern Africa, the discovery of valuable minerals, diamonds in the late 1860s and gold in the 1880s, prompted the British to secure the interior, which led to a series of wars and eventually the creation of the self-governing and white settler–dominated Union of South Africa in 1910.

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