1. Age of Imperialism Timeline 1830 France occupies Algeria. *
Diamonds discovered in the Orange River, SOUTH AFRICA
The SUEZ CANAL is completed in Egypt.
Cecil Rhodes arrives in Cape Town, South Africa.
Great Britain gains control of the Suez Canal and establishes a protectorate over Egypt. *
British land troops in Egypt.
BERLIN CONFERENCE on meets to set guidelines for European imperialism in Africa. *
Germany controls German East Africa.
BOER WAR; British crush rebellion by Dutch farmers in South Africa. *

2. Africa: the “Dark Continent”
Africa PRE-IMPERIALISM
Africa: the “Dark Continent”
…THOUSANDS of ethnic groups in Africa! Each usually having its own language or dialect of a language.
Approx. 15 MAJOR ethno-linguistic groups!
* Africa was known as the Dark Continent, remained unknown (to Europe) until the late 19th century – WHY?

3. Africa: the “Dark Continent”
Africa PRE-IMPERIALISM
Africa: the “Dark Continent”
* EUROPEAN presence was limited to WEST COAST – WHY? (Atlantic Slave Trade, salt, gold, peanuts, timber, hides, palm oil)
* ISLAMIC presence was limited to N. Africa (EGYPT & LIBYA to ALGERIA – Ottomans in the 16th century)

4. FRANCE The Age of Imperialism
NORTH AFRICA (*Algeria; Morocco & Tunisia as protectorates)
* ALGERIA …Ottomans, 1832 – center of colonial French N. Africa (until 1960)
WEST AFRICA (federation, 8 colonies – Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Dahomey & Niger
* SENEGAL …old French colony, 1677 – expanded in 1880s
EQUATORIAL AFRICA (federation, 8 colonies – Chad, central African republic, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Gabon)
French West Africa was a federation of eight French colonial territories in Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali), French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Dahomey (now Benin) and Niger … The federation existed from 1895 until 1960.
FRANCE
- Africans were “French subjects” – lacking rights before law, property ownership, rights to travel, dissent or vote
- FRENCH WEST AFRICA: federation of 8 colonial territories – mostly military territories
- French historically controlled Senegal – starting in 1880s, began to move inland & conquer more land – eventually organized into “FWA” – cercle system, French colonial rule controlled by Parisian govt
- Mauritania, Senegal ( ), French Sudan (Mali), French guinea, ivory coast, upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Dahomey (Benin), Niger
- FRENCH NORTH AFRICA: Morocco (Germany vs. GB/France, protectorate, maintained local govt systems, ), Algeria (from Ottomans, became a part of France = basically annexation, French colonial rule = racist & quasi-apartheid, military control, ), and Tunisia (autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, protectorate, maintained local govt systems, )
- FRENCH EQUATORIAL AFRICA: federation of French colonial possessions in central Africa
- Chad, central African republic, Cameroon (after WWI), Republic of the Congo ( ), Gabon ( )
* AFRICANS as “FRENCH SUBJECTS” – lacking rights before law, property ownership, rights to travel, dissent or vote

5. Belgium & Exploring the Congo
The Age of Imperialism
Belgium & Exploring the Congo
* 1878: LEOPOLD II (Belgium) sent HENRY STANLEY to explore the CONGO & EST. TRADE with leaders in the Congo
* Rubber …also known as hydrocarbon polymer or latex, comes from plants and vines that once grew abundantly on the African continent. During the nineteenth century, French Guinea, Angola, the Gold Coast, French Congo, and the Congo Free State were among the five top rubber-producing states on the African continent. The Ivory Coast, German East Africa, and Nigeria also experienced rubber booms.
Nineteenth-century inventions …such as the pneumatic bicycle tire, and growing industrial uses of rubber products (tubing, hoses, springs, washers, and diaphragms) created a worldwide demand for rubber. During boom years, rubber was the most sought-after export commodity and the greatest income earner for many African states. The African rubber boom lasted from 1890 to 1913 with significant economic, social, and political consequences for many African states. Exploitation and hardship became standard for Africans in the colonies that produced rubber. However, the most devastating impact wrought by the demand for rubber occurred in the Congo Free State, the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium ( ).
African rubber came from two sources …trees and vines. Rubber vines were far less durable than trees. Rubber-producing vines, landolphia, were fragile and easily killed. Areas in which rubber was harvested from vines were constantly threatened by the exhaustion of supplies. For example, in Angola, rubber extraction from vines began in the Quiboco forest in 1869; by 1875 no rubber was left in the forest. Similarly, rubber production from Dahomey (now Benin) reached a peak of 14.5 tons per year in 1900, and then declined to 5.9 tons in 1901 and 1.6 tons the year after that as the vines died. Likewise, in French Guinea, the majority of the rubber vines were used up between 1899 and 1905.
Unlike the vines, rubber trees were hearty and tolerated frequent tapping. If the trees were overtapped they went dormant, but they did not die. Generally, within five years an overused tree was once again producing rubber and could be tapped. Methods of tapping trees to harvest rubber varied greatly from state to state. Early in the rubber boom, in the Gold Coast for example, workers simply cut down the trees to extract as much rubber as possible. Later, they began to climb the trees and tap them with a series of shallow cuts to the tree trunk.
* LEOPOLD’S RUBBER EXTRACTION IN THE CONGO
Using the premises of scientific exploration and the need to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, Leopold established the International Association of the Congo. He recruited Henry Morton Stanley ( ), the famous Welsh-born explorer of Africa, to seek out and establish several trading and administrative stations along the Congo River and to establish monopoly control over the rich ivory trade in the Congo.
Stanley was instructed to secure treaties from local clan chiefs. Unbeknownst to the local chiefs, they signed documents that ceded their lands and the labor of their people to Leopold. Based on treaties that Stanley acquired with some 450 chiefs, Leopold was granted the Congo as a personal possession at the Congress of Berlin ( ).
* Leopold’s Congo encompassed a vast territory, covering nearly one million square miles and inhabited by twenty million people. It was larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. The Congo region was primarily composed of thick, dense rain forest; however, savannahs and snow-covered volcanic mountains were also part of this terrain.
In the Belgian-controlled Congo Free State, Leopold carried out a massive plunder of the region’s resources from 1885 to He designed policies to loot its rubber, brutalized the people, and ultimately slashed the population by 50 percent (some 10 million people). Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies.
* The extraction of rubber was accomplished with the imposition of brutal practices against the local people. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the use of the chicotte were standard practices imposed on local peoples. (The chicotte was a whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long, sharp-edged corkscrew strips. It was most often applied to the bare buttocks of a man staked spread-eagle to the ground. These whippings left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of the chicotte sent a victim into unconsciousness, and one hundred or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used in Leopold’s Congo.)
In the Congo, concession companies were granted exclusive rights to exploit all the products of the forest for a period of thirty years. The people of the area were expected to collect ivory and wild rubber for the company in lieu of paying taxes to the state. Extra economic coercion in the form of beatings, kidnapping, mutilation, and rape of family members was necessary to force local people to gather rubber.
Rubber agents collected the names of all the men in the villages under their control; each man was given a quota of rubber to collect every two weeks. The rubber agents who worked for the concession companies signed two-year contracts. Their goal was to make a lot of money and return home as quickly as possible. In order to do this they assigned armed sentries, supported by the villages, to watch and ensure proper amounts of rubber were collected. The agents had a personal stake in the amount of rubber collected because they received a 2 percent commission on all rubber they shipped. More importantly, if an agent did not meet his quota he was docked the value of the missing rubber.
The majority of rubber in the Congo came from vines, which eventually died off. In order to increase the supply of rubber being produced, agents insisted that women and children gather rubber as well. In order to avoid exploitation and hardship, some rubber gatherers destroyed the vines on purpose. They believed that if the rubber was gone, the concession company would go away.
The search for rubber created a crisis in the Congo. The agents were irrationally harsh toward gatherers who could not produce enough rubber fast enough. Rubber gatherers abandoned their villages and went into hiding for fear of losing life, limb, or family members. Force Publique officers (Leopold’s army) sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill fleeing villagers and rebels hiding there. To prove they had succeeded, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back the right hand of every person they killed. Often, however, soldiers cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to satisfy the quota set by their officers.
This terror campaign succeeded in getting workers to collect rubber. A few villages attempted rebellion, attacking agents and killing sentries. However, resistance by villagers was met with extreme and immediate brutality. Whole villages would be massacred and burned to the ground. Some local people simply gave up and accepted massacre, preferring death to the ceaseless search for rubber that kept them searching in the forest for up to twenty-four days each month. The violence used against the people of the Congo was so extreme that in 1908 Leopold was forced to turn his colony over to the Belgian government.
The tactics used by the agents of the concession companies in Leopold’s Congo were perhaps little different than methods used by other colonial powers. The striking thing about Leopold’s Congo was the vast deception of his philanthropic mission there. Leopold convinced European powers and the United States to grant him the colony of the Congo. He promised to rid the area of the Arab slave trade and develop free trade on the Congo River. Leopold may have ended the Arab slave trade in the Congo, but he simply replaced it with his own form of slavery. He took possession of the land and its twenty million inhabitants and forced them to work for his personal enrichment and to the benefit of his business associates. He neither developed the region nor provided any benefit to the local people.
* In 1878, Leopold II of Belgium (b. 1835, ruled 1865–1909) sent Anglo-American newspaperman Henry Stanley (1841–1904), to explore the Congo and establish trade agreements with leaders in the Congo River basin.
Stanley, in 1871, had “found” the great Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873), who had traveled throughout Africa for over thirty years. When several years passed without a word from him, it was feared that he was dead. Stanley was hired in 1869 by the New York Herald, an American newspaper to find Livingstone. His famous greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” became legendary, even though there is some question about its authenticity. Stanley’s account of their meeting made headlines around the world and helped make him famous.
Stanley eventually sold his services to Leopold II, who had formed a financial syndicate entitled The International African Association. A strong-willed monarch, Leopold II’s intrusion into the Congo area raised questions about the political fate of Africa south of the Sahara. Other European nations were fearful that Belgium wanted to extend control over the entire area.
1 million sq. miles;
20 million people
LEOPOLD

6. Belgium & Exploring the Congo
The Age of Imperialism
Belgium & Exploring the Congo
* 1878: LEOPOLD II (Belgium) sent HENRY STANLEY to explore the CONGO & EST. TRADE with leaders in the Congo
* Rubber …also known as hydrocarbon polymer or latex, comes from plants and vines that once grew abundantly on the African continent. During the nineteenth century, French Guinea, Angola, the Gold Coast, French Congo, and the Congo Free State were among the five top rubber-producing states on the African continent. The Ivory Coast, German East Africa, and Nigeria also experienced rubber booms.
Nineteenth-century inventions …such as the pneumatic bicycle tire, and growing industrial uses of rubber products (tubing, hoses, springs, washers, and diaphragms) created a worldwide demand for rubber. During boom years, rubber was the most sought-after export commodity and the greatest income earner for many African states. The African rubber boom lasted from 1890 to 1913 with significant economic, social, and political consequences for many African states. Exploitation and hardship became standard for Africans in the colonies that produced rubber. However, the most devastating impact wrought by the demand for rubber occurred in the Congo Free State, the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium ( ).
African rubber came from two sources …trees and vines. Rubber vines were far less durable than trees. Rubber-producing vines, landolphia, were fragile and easily killed. Areas in which rubber was harvested from vines were constantly threatened by the exhaustion of supplies. For example, in Angola, rubber extraction from vines began in the Quiboco forest in 1869; by 1875 no rubber was left in the forest. Similarly, rubber production from Dahomey (now Benin) reached a peak of 14.5 tons per year in 1900, and then declined to 5.9 tons in 1901 and 1.6 tons the year after that as the vines died. Likewise, in French Guinea, the majority of the rubber vines were used up between 1899 and 1905.
Unlike the vines, rubber trees were hearty and tolerated frequent tapping. If the trees were overtapped they went dormant, but they did not die. Generally, within five years an overused tree was once again producing rubber and could be tapped. Methods of tapping trees to harvest rubber varied greatly from state to state. Early in the rubber boom, in the Gold Coast for example, workers simply cut down the trees to extract as much rubber as possible. Later, they began to climb the trees and tap them with a series of shallow cuts to the tree trunk.
* LEOPOLD’S RUBBER EXTRACTION IN THE CONGO
Using the premises of scientific exploration and the need to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, Leopold established the International Association of the Congo. He recruited Henry Morton Stanley ( ), the famous Welsh-born explorer of Africa, to seek out and establish several trading and administrative stations along the Congo River and to establish monopoly control over the rich ivory trade in the Congo.
Stanley was instructed to secure treaties from local clan chiefs. Unbeknownst to the local chiefs, they signed documents that ceded their lands and the labor of their people to Leopold. Based on treaties that Stanley acquired with some 450 chiefs, Leopold was granted the Congo as a personal possession at the Congress of Berlin ( ).
* Leopold’s Congo encompassed a vast territory, covering nearly one million square miles and inhabited by twenty million people. It was larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. The Congo region was primarily composed of thick, dense rain forest; however, savannahs and snow-covered volcanic mountains were also part of this terrain.
In the Belgian-controlled Congo Free State, Leopold carried out a massive plunder of the region’s resources from 1885 to He designed policies to loot its rubber, brutalized the people, and ultimately slashed the population by 50 percent (some 10 million people). Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies.
* The extraction of rubber was accomplished with the imposition of brutal practices against the local people. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the use of the chicotte were standard practices imposed on local peoples. (The chicotte was a whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long, sharp-edged corkscrew strips. It was most often applied to the bare buttocks of a man staked spread-eagle to the ground. These whippings left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of the chicotte sent a victim into unconsciousness, and one hundred or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used in Leopold’s Congo.)
In the Congo, concession companies were granted exclusive rights to exploit all the products of the forest for a period of thirty years. The people of the area were expected to collect ivory and wild rubber for the company in lieu of paying taxes to the state. Extra economic coercion in the form of beatings, kidnapping, mutilation, and rape of family members was necessary to force local people to gather rubber.
Rubber agents collected the names of all the men in the villages under their control; each man was given a quota of rubber to collect every two weeks. The rubber agents who worked for the concession companies signed two-year contracts. Their goal was to make a lot of money and return home as quickly as possible. In order to do this they assigned armed sentries, supported by the villages, to watch and ensure proper amounts of rubber were collected. The agents had a personal stake in the amount of rubber collected because they received a 2 percent commission on all rubber they shipped. More importantly, if an agent did not meet his quota he was docked the value of the missing rubber.
The majority of rubber in the Congo came from vines, which eventually died off. In order to increase the supply of rubber being produced, agents insisted that women and children gather rubber as well. In order to avoid exploitation and hardship, some rubber gatherers destroyed the vines on purpose. They believed that if the rubber was gone, the concession company would go away.
The search for rubber created a crisis in the Congo. The agents were irrationally harsh toward gatherers who could not produce enough rubber fast enough. Rubber gatherers abandoned their villages and went into hiding for fear of losing life, limb, or family members. Force Publique officers (Leopold’s army) sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill fleeing villagers and rebels hiding there. To prove they had succeeded, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back the right hand of every person they killed. Often, however, soldiers cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to satisfy the quota set by their officers.
This terror campaign succeeded in getting workers to collect rubber. A few villages attempted rebellion, attacking agents and killing sentries. However, resistance by villagers was met with extreme and immediate brutality. Whole villages would be massacred and burned to the ground. Some local people simply gave up and accepted massacre, preferring death to the ceaseless search for rubber that kept them searching in the forest for up to twenty-four days each month. The violence used against the people of the Congo was so extreme that in 1908 Leopold was forced to turn his colony over to the Belgian government.
The tactics used by the agents of the concession companies in Leopold’s Congo were perhaps little different than methods used by other colonial powers. The striking thing about Leopold’s Congo was the vast deception of his philanthropic mission there. Leopold convinced European powers and the United States to grant him the colony of the Congo. He promised to rid the area of the Arab slave trade and develop free trade on the Congo River. Leopold may have ended the Arab slave trade in the Congo, but he simply replaced it with his own form of slavery. He took possession of the land and its twenty million inhabitants and forced them to work for his personal enrichment and to the benefit of his business associates. He neither developed the region nor provided any benefit to the local people.
* In 1878, Leopold II of Belgium (b. 1835, ruled 1865–1909) sent Anglo-American newspaperman Henry Stanley (1841–1904), to explore the Congo and establish trade agreements with leaders in the Congo River basin.
Stanley, in 1871, had “found” the great Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873), who had traveled throughout Africa for over thirty years. When several years passed without a word from him, it was feared that he was dead. Stanley was hired in 1869 by the New York Herald, an American newspaper to find Livingstone. His famous greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” became legendary, even though there is some question about its authenticity. Stanley’s account of their meeting made headlines around the world and helped make him famous.
Stanley eventually sold his services to Leopold II, who had formed a financial syndicate entitled The International African Association. A strong-willed monarch, Leopold II’s intrusion into the Congo area raised questions about the political fate of Africa south of the Sahara. Other European nations were fearful that Belgium wanted to extend control over the entire area.
STANLEY
1 million sq. miles;
20 million people
LIVINGSTONE

7. Belgium & Exploring the Congo
The Age of Imperialism
Belgium & Exploring the Congo
* 1878: LEOPOLD II (Belgium) sent HENRY STANLEY to explore the CONGO & EST. TRADE with leaders in the Congo
“From Aug to June 1884, Stanley was in the Congo… where he built roads & launched steamers on the upper river. While exploring the Congo for Leopold, Stanley set up treaties with the local chiefs & with native leaders. Few to none of these tribal leaders had a realistic idea of what they were signing, &, in essence, the documents gave over all rights of their respective pieces of land to King Leopold II. With Stanley's help, Leopold was able to claim a great area along the Congo River, & military posts were established.”
* Rubber …also known as hydrocarbon polymer or latex, comes from plants and vines that once grew abundantly on the African continent. During the nineteenth century, French Guinea, Angola, the Gold Coast, French Congo, and the Congo Free State were among the five top rubber-producing states on the African continent. The Ivory Coast, German East Africa, and Nigeria also experienced rubber booms.
Nineteenth-century inventions …such as the pneumatic bicycle tire, and growing industrial uses of rubber products (tubing, hoses, springs, washers, and diaphragms) created a worldwide demand for rubber. During boom years, rubber was the most sought-after export commodity and the greatest income earner for many African states. The African rubber boom lasted from 1890 to 1913 with significant economic, social, and political consequences for many African states. Exploitation and hardship became standard for Africans in the colonies that produced rubber. However, the most devastating impact wrought by the demand for rubber occurred in the Congo Free State, the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium ( ).
African rubber came from two sources …trees and vines. Rubber vines were far less durable than trees. Rubber-producing vines, landolphia, were fragile and easily killed. Areas in which rubber was harvested from vines were constantly threatened by the exhaustion of supplies. For example, in Angola, rubber extraction from vines began in the Quiboco forest in 1869; by 1875 no rubber was left in the forest. Similarly, rubber production from Dahomey (now Benin) reached a peak of 14.5 tons per year in 1900, and then declined to 5.9 tons in 1901 and 1.6 tons the year after that as the vines died. Likewise, in French Guinea, the majority of the rubber vines were used up between 1899 and 1905.
Unlike the vines, rubber trees were hearty and tolerated frequent tapping. If the trees were overtapped they went dormant, but they did not die. Generally, within five years an overused tree was once again producing rubber and could be tapped. Methods of tapping trees to harvest rubber varied greatly from state to state. Early in the rubber boom, in the Gold Coast for example, workers simply cut down the trees to extract as much rubber as possible. Later, they began to climb the trees and tap them with a series of shallow cuts to the tree trunk.
* LEOPOLD’S RUBBER EXTRACTION IN THE CONGO
Using the premises of scientific exploration and the need to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, Leopold established the International Association of the Congo. He recruited Henry Morton Stanley ( ), the famous Welsh-born explorer of Africa, to seek out and establish several trading and administrative stations along the Congo River and to establish monopoly control over the rich ivory trade in the Congo.
Stanley was instructed to secure treaties from local clan chiefs. Unbeknownst to the local chiefs, they signed documents that ceded their lands and the labor of their people to Leopold. Based on treaties that Stanley acquired with some 450 chiefs, Leopold was granted the Congo as a personal possession at the Congress of Berlin ( ).
* Leopold’s Congo encompassed a vast territory, covering nearly one million square miles and inhabited by twenty million people. It was larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. The Congo region was primarily composed of thick, dense rain forest; however, savannahs and snow-covered volcanic mountains were also part of this terrain.
In the Belgian-controlled Congo Free State, Leopold carried out a massive plunder of the region’s resources from 1885 to He designed policies to loot its rubber, brutalized the people, and ultimately slashed the population by 50 percent (some 10 million people). Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies.
* The extraction of rubber was accomplished with the imposition of brutal practices against the local people. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the use of the chicotte were standard practices imposed on local peoples. (The chicotte was a whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long, sharp-edged corkscrew strips. It was most often applied to the bare buttocks of a man staked spread-eagle to the ground. These whippings left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of the chicotte sent a victim into unconsciousness, and one hundred or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used in Leopold’s Congo.)
In the Congo, concession companies were granted exclusive rights to exploit all the products of the forest for a period of thirty years. The people of the area were expected to collect ivory and wild rubber for the company in lieu of paying taxes to the state. Extra economic coercion in the form of beatings, kidnapping, mutilation, and rape of family members was necessary to force local people to gather rubber.
Rubber agents collected the names of all the men in the villages under their control; each man was given a quota of rubber to collect every two weeks. The rubber agents who worked for the concession companies signed two-year contracts. Their goal was to make a lot of money and return home as quickly as possible. In order to do this they assigned armed sentries, supported by the villages, to watch and ensure proper amounts of rubber were collected. The agents had a personal stake in the amount of rubber collected because they received a 2 percent commission on all rubber they shipped. More importantly, if an agent did not meet his quota he was docked the value of the missing rubber.
The majority of rubber in the Congo came from vines, which eventually died off. In order to increase the supply of rubber being produced, agents insisted that women and children gather rubber as well. In order to avoid exploitation and hardship, some rubber gatherers destroyed the vines on purpose. They believed that if the rubber was gone, the concession company would go away.
The search for rubber created a crisis in the Congo. The agents were irrationally harsh toward gatherers who could not produce enough rubber fast enough. Rubber gatherers abandoned their villages and went into hiding for fear of losing life, limb, or family members. Force Publique officers (Leopold’s army) sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill fleeing villagers and rebels hiding there. To prove they had succeeded, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back the right hand of every person they killed. Often, however, soldiers cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to satisfy the quota set by their officers.
This terror campaign succeeded in getting workers to collect rubber. A few villages attempted rebellion, attacking agents and killing sentries. However, resistance by villagers was met with extreme and immediate brutality. Whole villages would be massacred and burned to the ground. Some local people simply gave up and accepted massacre, preferring death to the ceaseless search for rubber that kept them searching in the forest for up to twenty-four days each month. The violence used against the people of the Congo was so extreme that in 1908 Leopold was forced to turn his colony over to the Belgian government.
The tactics used by the agents of the concession companies in Leopold’s Congo were perhaps little different than methods used by other colonial powers. The striking thing about Leopold’s Congo was the vast deception of his philanthropic mission there. Leopold convinced European powers and the United States to grant him the colony of the Congo. He promised to rid the area of the Arab slave trade and develop free trade on the Congo River. Leopold may have ended the Arab slave trade in the Congo, but he simply replaced it with his own form of slavery. He took possession of the land and its twenty million inhabitants and forced them to work for his personal enrichment and to the benefit of his business associates. He neither developed the region nor provided any benefit to the local people.
* In 1878, Leopold II of Belgium (b. 1835, ruled 1865–1909) sent Anglo-American newspaperman Henry Stanley (1841–1904), to explore the Congo and establish trade agreements with leaders in the Congo River basin.
Stanley, in 1871, had “found” the great Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873), who had traveled throughout Africa for over thirty years. When several years passed without a word from him, it was feared that he was dead. Stanley was hired in 1869 by the New York Herald, an American newspaper to find Livingstone. His famous greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” became legendary, even though there is some question about its authenticity. Stanley’s account of their meeting made headlines around the world and helped make him famous.
Stanley eventually sold his services to Leopold II, who had formed a financial syndicate entitled The International African Association. A strong-willed monarch, Leopold II’s intrusion into the Congo area raised questions about the political fate of Africa south of the Sahara. Other European nations were fearful that Belgium wanted to extend control over the entire area.

8. Belgium & Exploring the Congo
The Age of Imperialism
Belgium & Exploring the Congo
* 1878: LEOPOLD II (Belgium) sent HENRY STANLEY to explore the CONGO & EST. TRADE with leaders in the Congo
1885, formed the CONGO FREE STATE – IVORY & RUBBER!
* Rubber …also known as hydrocarbon polymer or latex, comes from plants and vines that once grew abundantly on the African continent. During the nineteenth century, French Guinea, Angola, the Gold Coast, French Congo, and the Congo Free State were among the five top rubber-producing states on the African continent. The Ivory Coast, German East Africa, and Nigeria also experienced rubber booms.
Nineteenth-century inventions …such as the pneumatic bicycle tire, and growing industrial uses of rubber products (tubing, hoses, springs, washers, and diaphragms) created a worldwide demand for rubber. During boom years, rubber was the most sought-after export commodity and the greatest income earner for many African states. The African rubber boom lasted from 1890 to 1913 with significant economic, social, and political consequences for many African states. Exploitation and hardship became standard for Africans in the colonies that produced rubber. However, the most devastating impact wrought by the demand for rubber occurred in the Congo Free State, the personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium ( ).
African rubber came from two sources …trees and vines. Rubber vines were far less durable than trees. Rubber-producing vines, landolphia, were fragile and easily killed. Areas in which rubber was harvested from vines were constantly threatened by the exhaustion of supplies. For example, in Angola, rubber extraction from vines began in the Quiboco forest in 1869; by 1875 no rubber was left in the forest. Similarly, rubber production from Dahomey (now Benin) reached a peak of 14.5 tons per year in 1900, and then declined to 5.9 tons in 1901 and 1.6 tons the year after that as the vines died. Likewise, in French Guinea, the majority of the rubber vines were used up between 1899 and 1905.
Unlike the vines, rubber trees were hearty and tolerated frequent tapping. If the trees were overtapped they went dormant, but they did not die. Generally, within five years an overused tree was once again producing rubber and could be tapped. Methods of tapping trees to harvest rubber varied greatly from state to state. Early in the rubber boom, in the Gold Coast for example, workers simply cut down the trees to extract as much rubber as possible. Later, they began to climb the trees and tap them with a series of shallow cuts to the tree trunk.
* LEOPOLD’S RUBBER EXTRACTION IN THE CONGO
Using the premises of scientific exploration and the need to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, Leopold established the International Association of the Congo. He recruited Henry Morton Stanley ( ), the famous Welsh-born explorer of Africa, to seek out and establish several trading and administrative stations along the Congo River and to establish monopoly control over the rich ivory trade in the Congo.
Stanley was instructed to secure treaties from local clan chiefs. Unbeknownst to the local chiefs, they signed documents that ceded their lands and the labor of their people to Leopold. Based on treaties that Stanley acquired with some 450 chiefs, Leopold was granted the Congo as a personal possession at the Congress of Berlin ( ).
* Leopold’s Congo encompassed a vast territory, covering nearly one million square miles and inhabited by twenty million people. It was larger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. The Congo region was primarily composed of thick, dense rain forest; however, savannahs and snow-covered volcanic mountains were also part of this terrain.
In the Belgian-controlled Congo Free State, Leopold carried out a massive plunder of the region’s resources from 1885 to He designed policies to loot its rubber, brutalized the people, and ultimately slashed the population by 50 percent (some 10 million people). Almost all exploitable land was divided among concession companies.
* The extraction of rubber was accomplished with the imposition of brutal practices against the local people. Forced labor, hostages, slave chains, starving porters, burned villages, paramilitary company “sentries,” and the use of the chicotte were standard practices imposed on local peoples. (The chicotte was a whip made out of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long, sharp-edged corkscrew strips. It was most often applied to the bare buttocks of a man staked spread-eagle to the ground. These whippings left permanent scars. Twenty strokes of the chicotte sent a victim into unconsciousness, and one hundred or more strokes were often fatal. The chicotte was freely used in Leopold’s Congo.)
In the Congo, concession companies were granted exclusive rights to exploit all the products of the forest for a period of thirty years. The people of the area were expected to collect ivory and wild rubber for the company in lieu of paying taxes to the state. Extra economic coercion in the form of beatings, kidnapping, mutilation, and rape of family members was necessary to force local people to gather rubber.
Rubber agents collected the names of all the men in the villages under their control; each man was given a quota of rubber to collect every two weeks. The rubber agents who worked for the concession companies signed two-year contracts. Their goal was to make a lot of money and return home as quickly as possible. In order to do this they assigned armed sentries, supported by the villages, to watch and ensure proper amounts of rubber were collected. The agents had a personal stake in the amount of rubber collected because they received a 2 percent commission on all rubber they shipped. More importantly, if an agent did not meet his quota he was docked the value of the missing rubber.
The majority of rubber in the Congo came from vines, which eventually died off. In order to increase the supply of rubber being produced, agents insisted that women and children gather rubber as well. In order to avoid exploitation and hardship, some rubber gatherers destroyed the vines on purpose. They believed that if the rubber was gone, the concession company would go away.
The search for rubber created a crisis in the Congo. The agents were irrationally harsh toward gatherers who could not produce enough rubber fast enough. Rubber gatherers abandoned their villages and went into hiding for fear of losing life, limb, or family members. Force Publique officers (Leopold’s army) sent their soldiers into the forest to find and kill fleeing villagers and rebels hiding there. To prove they had succeeded, soldiers were ordered to cut off and bring back the right hand of every person they killed. Often, however, soldiers cut off the hands of living persons, even children, to satisfy the quota set by their officers.
This terror campaign succeeded in getting workers to collect rubber. A few villages attempted rebellion, attacking agents and killing sentries. However, resistance by villagers was met with extreme and immediate brutality. Whole villages would be massacred and burned to the ground. Some local people simply gave up and accepted massacre, preferring death to the ceaseless search for rubber that kept them searching in the forest for up to twenty-four days each month. The violence used against the people of the Congo was so extreme that in 1908 Leopold was forced to turn his colony over to the Belgian government.
The tactics used by the agents of the concession companies in Leopold’s Congo were perhaps little different than methods used by other colonial powers. The striking thing about Leopold’s Congo was the vast deception of his philanthropic mission there. Leopold convinced European powers and the United States to grant him the colony of the Congo. He promised to rid the area of the Arab slave trade and develop free trade on the Congo River. Leopold may have ended the Arab slave trade in the Congo, but he simply replaced it with his own form of slavery. He took possession of the land and its twenty million inhabitants and forced them to work for his personal enrichment and to the benefit of his business associates. He neither developed the region nor provided any benefit to the local people.
* In 1878, Leopold II of Belgium (b. 1835, ruled 1865–1909) sent Anglo-American newspaperman Henry Stanley (1841–1904), to explore the Congo and establish trade agreements with leaders in the Congo River basin.
Stanley, in 1871, had “found” the great Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873), who had traveled throughout Africa for over thirty years. When several years passed without a word from him, it was feared that he was dead. Stanley was hired in 1869 by the New York Herald, an American newspaper to find Livingstone. His famous greeting, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” became legendary, even though there is some question about its authenticity. Stanley’s account of their meeting made headlines around the world and helped make him famous.
Stanley eventually sold his services to Leopold II, who had formed a financial syndicate entitled The International African Association. A strong-willed monarch, Leopold II’s intrusion into the Congo area raised questions about the political fate of Africa south of the Sahara. Other European nations were fearful that Belgium wanted to extend control over the entire area.
1 million sq. miles;
20 million people

9. A father stares at a hand and a foot of his five-year-old daughter, severed in punishment by the Force Publique.

12. “Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
The Age of Imperialism
“Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
* Napoleon gets interested in the 1790s – then withdraws in 1811 (OTTOMANS since early 1500s – autonomous province)
Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt opened a new era in European contact with the Muslim world. It focused attention on the fading power of the Ottoman empire. By the early 1800s, European countries were nibbling at the fringes of the Muslim world. Before long, they would strike at its heartland.

13. MUHAMMAD ALI (Ottoman Governor of Egypt)
Muhammad Ali (1769–1849) was the son of a military commander who died when Muhammad Ali was a young boy.
He was appointed governor of Egypt by the Ottomans and seized power during the chaos of the civil war following Napoleon’s invasion.
Often called the “founder of modern Egypt,” Muhammad Ali set in motion a number of economic, political, administrative, and military reforms. His reforms were intended to secure Egyptian independence and place Egypt on the road to becoming a major Middle Eastern power.
* Muhammad Ali is sometimes called the “founder of modern Egypt.”
He introduced a number of political and economic reforms … First, he ended the power of the old ruling oligarchy and seized huge farms from the old landowning class. He reduced the power of religious leaders and crushed any protest against his rule. He then set out to rebuild Egypt along modern lines. He improved tax collection and backed large irrigation projects to increase farm output.
Ali ordered Egyptian farmers to plant a new kind of cotton, to be sold as a cash crop. By expanding cotton production and encouraging the development of many local industries, Ali brought Egypt into the growing network of world trade.
Ali also brought Western military experts to Egypt to help him build a well-trained, modern army. He promoted education and the study of medicine. Before he died in 1849, he had set Egypt on the road to becoming a major Middle Eastern power.
MUHAMMAD ALI (Ottoman Governor of Egypt)
* Modernization – economic, political & military reforms … $$$$$$$

14. “Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
The Age of Imperialism
“Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
* Suez Canal Company (French) begins to build in the 1850s & is completed by 1869!
1858, a French entrepreneur, Ferdinand de Lesseps (lay seps), organized a company to build the Suez Canal, a waterway connecting the Mediterranean and Red seas. Europe hailed its opening in 1869 because it greatly reduced the travel time between Europe and Asia.
To Britain, especially, the canal was a "lifeline" to India, where its influence was increasing.
In 1875, the ruler of Egypt was unable to repay loans he had contracted for the canal and other modernization projects. To pay his debts, he sold his shares in the canal. The British prime minister Disraeli quickly bought them, giving Britain a controlling interest in the canal.
Britain soon expanded its influence in Egypt. When a nationalist revolt erupted in 1882, Britain made Egypt a protectorate. In theory, the governor of Egypt was still an official of the Ottoman government. In fact, he followed policies dictated by Britain.
Under British influence, Egypt continued to modernize. At the same time, nationalist discontent simmered and flared into protests and riots well into the next century.
* 1882–1914: often called the "veiled protectorate.” During this time the Khedivate of Egypt remained an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, and the British occupation had no legal basis but constituted a de facto protectorate over the country.
This state of affairs lasted until the Ottoman Empire joined the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914 and Britain unilaterally declared a protectorate over Egypt … The ruling khedive was deposed and his successor, Hussein Kamel, compelled to declare himself Sultan of Egypt independent of the Ottomans in December 1914
120 miles long & 250 ft. wide
SHORTENS TRIP BY 5,000 MILES!

15. “Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
The Age of Imperialism
“Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
* Into the 1870s, nationalism spread to Egypt – caused instability for OTTOMAN CONTROLLED Egypt… (EXTERNAL DEBTS, UPRISINGS, internal feuds)
* – Egypt sells its share of the canal to GB… in 1882 GB invades & occupies Egypt!
British occupation of Egypt…
the “Scramble for Africa”

16. The Berlin Conference (1884-1885)
The Age of Imperialism
The Berlin Conference ( )
…‘SETTLE CONFLICTING CLAIMS,’ Bismarck convened BERLIN CONFERENCE in 1884!
…LAID DOWN GROUND RULES for the partitioning of Africa:
1.) Navigation on the major African rivers was to be free to all
2.) To create a colony the European colonizer must show EFFECTIVE OCCUPANCY & the means to do so!
The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, also known as the Congo Conference or West Africa Conference, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power.
Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalization of the Scramble for Africa.
The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.

17. “Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
The Age of Imperialism
“Cape to Cairo” – Great Britain
Britain’s holdings in Africa were not as large as France’s but it controlled the more populated regions, particularly of southern Africa, which contained valuable mineral resources such as diamonds and gold.
* In 1806, the British displaced Holland in South Africa and ruled the Cape Colony … However, the British soon came into conflict with the Boers (farmers), the original Dutch settlers who resented British rule … In the 1830s, the Boers left British territory, migrated north, and founded two republics—the Orange Free State and Transvaal … The Boers soon came into conflict with the powerful Zulus, a native-African ethnic group, for control of the land … When the Zulus and the Boers were unable to win a decisive victory, the British became involved in The Zulu Wars and eventually destroyed the Zulu empire.
* In 1890, Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), who was born in Great Britain and had become a diamond mine millionaire, became prime minister of the Cape Colony. He wanted to extend the British African Empire from Cape Town to Cairo and decided to annex the Boer Republic. In the Boer War (1899–1902), the British, with great difficulty, defeated the Boers and annexed the two republics.
* In 1910, Britain combined its South African colonies into the Union of South Africa. Whites ran the government, and the Boers, who outnumbered the British, assumed control. This system laid the foundation for racial segregation that would last until the 1990s.

18. Southern Africa The Age of Imperialism ZULU vs. BOERS
* 1650s-1800s… European influence in S. AFRICA had been growing (DUTCH & BRITISH) – the “CAPE OF GOOD HOPE”
ZULU vs. BOERS
* The Cape of Good Hope, also known as the Cape Colony, was a British colony in present-day South Africa and Namibia, named after the Cape of Good Hope. The British colony was preceded by an earlier Dutch colony of the same name established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company.
* Dutch East India Company Traders, under the command of Jan van Riebeeck, were the first people to establish a European colony in South Africa. The Cape settlement was built by them in 1652 as a re-supply point and way-station for Dutch East India Company vessels on their way back and forth between the Netherlands and Jakarta in the Dutch East Indies. The support station gradually became a settler community, the forebears of the Afrikaners, a European ethnic group in South Africa.
The Dutch lost the colony to Britain following the 1795 Battle of Muizenberg, but had it returned following the 1802 Peace of Amiens. It was re-occupied by the British following the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, and British possession affirmed with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.
The Cape of Good Hope then remained in the British Empire, becoming self-governing in 1872, and uniting with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910 … It then was renamed the Cape of Good Hope Province.
South Africa became fully independent in 1931 by the Statute of Westminster. Following the 1994 creation of the present-day South African provinces, the Cape of Good Hope Province was partitioned into the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, and Western Cape, with smaller parts in North West province.
* The British started to settle the eastern border of the colony, with the arrival in Port Elizabeth of the 1820 Settlers. They also began to introduce the first rudimentary rights for the Cape's Black African population and, in 1833, abolished slavery. The resentment that the Dutch farmers felt against this social change, as well as the imposition of English language and culture, caused them to trek inland en masse. This was known as the Great Trek, and the migrating Afrikaners settled inland, forming the "Boer republics" of Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
* British immigration continued in the Cape, even as many of the Afrikaners continued to trek inland, and the ending of the British East India Company's monopoly on trade led to economic growth. At the same time, the long series of border wars fought against the Xhosa people of the Cape's eastern frontier finally died down when the Xhosa partook in a mass destruction of their own crops and cattle, in the belief that this would cause their spirits to appear and defeat the whites. The resulting famine crippled Xhosa resistance and ushered in a long period of stability on the border.
Peace and prosperity led to a desire for political independence. In 1854, the Cape of Good Hope elected its first parliament, on the basis of the multi-racial Cape Qualified Franchise. Cape residents qualified as voters based on a universal minimum level of property ownership, regardless of race.
* In 1872, after a long political battle, the Cape of Good Hope achieved "Responsible Government" under its first Prime Minister, John Molteno. Henceforth, an elected Prime Minister and his cabinet had total responsibility for the affairs of the country. A period of strong economic growth and social development ensued, and the eastern-western division was largely laid to rest. The system of multi-racial franchise also began a slow and fragile growth in political inclusiveness, and ethnic tensions subsided.
However, the discovery of diamonds around Kimberley and gold in the Transvaal led to a return to instability, particularly because they fuelled the rise to power of the ambitious imperialist Cecil Rhodes.
* On becoming the Cape's Prime Minister in 1890, he instigated a rapid expansion of British influence into the hinterland. In particular, he sought to engineer the conquest of the Transvaal, and although his ill-fated Jameson Raid failed and brought down his government, it led to the Second Boer War and British conquest at the turn of the century. The politics of the colony consequently came to be increasingly dominated by tensions between the British colonists and the Afrikaners. Rhodes also brought in the first formal restrictions on the political rights of the Cape of Good Hope's Black African citizens.
The Cape of Good Hope remained nominally under British rule until the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it became the Cape of Good Hope Province, better known as the Cape Province.
* Cecil Rhodes (1853 – 1902) was a British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa, who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.
An ardent believer in British imperialism, Rhodes and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895.
South Africa's Rhodes University is also named after him. Rhodes set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate, and put much effort towards his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory.
The son of a vicar, Rhodes grew up in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, and was a sickly child … He was sent to South Africa by his family when he was 17 years old in the hope that the climate might improve his health … He entered the diamond trade at Kimberley in 1871, when he was 18, and over the next two decades gained near-complete domination of the world diamond market.
His De Beers diamond company, formed in 1888, retains its prominence into the 21st century.
Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament in 1880, and a decade later became Prime Minister. After overseeing the formation of Rhodesia during the early 1890s, he was forced to resign as Prime Minister in 1896 after the disastrous Jameson Raid, an unauthorised attack on Paul Kruger's South African Republic (or Transvaal). After Rhodes's death in 1902, at the age of 48, he was buried in the Matopos Hills in what is now Zimbabwe. At the time of his death he was already a very controversial figure.
One of Rhodes's primary motivators in politics and business was his professed belief that the Anglo-Saxon race were, to quote his will, "the first race in the world".
Under the reasoning that "the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race", he advocated vigorous settler colonialism and ultimately a reformation of the British Empire so that each component would be self-governing and represented in a single parliament in London. Ambitions such as these, juxtaposed with his policies regarding indigenous Africans in the Cape Colony—describing the country's black population as largely "in a state of barbarism,” he advocated their governance as a "subject race" and was at the centre of moves to marginalise them politically—have led recent critics to characterise him as a white supremacist and "an architect of apartheid."
Historian Richard A. McFarlane has called Rhodes "as integral a participant in southern African and British imperial history as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln are in their respective eras in United States history. Most histories of South Africa covering the last decades of the nineteenth century are contributions to the historiography of Cecil Rhodes." According to McFarlane, the aforementioned historiography "may be divided into two broad categories: chauvinistic approval or utter vilification".
* The South African Boer War begins between the British Empire and the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
The Boers, also known as Afrikaners, were the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa. Britain took possession of the Dutch Cape colony in 1806 during the Napoleonic wars, sparking resistance from the independence-minded Boers, who resented the Anglicization of South Africa and Britain’s anti-slavery policies. In 1833, the Boers began an exodus into African tribal territory, where they founded the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two new republics lived peaceably with their British neighbors until 1867, when the discovery of diamonds and gold in the region made conflict between the Boer states and Britain inevitable.
Minor fighting with Britain began in the 1890s, and in October 1899 full-scale war ensued. By mid June 1900, British forces had captured most major Boer cities and formally annexed their territories, but the Boers launched a guerrilla war that frustrated the British occupiers. Beginning in 1901, the British began a strategy of systematically searching out and destroying these guerrilla units, while herding the families of the Boer soldiers into concentration camps. By 1902, the British had crushed the Boer resistance, and on May 31 of that year the Peace of Vereeniging was signed, ending hostilities.
The treaty recognized the British military administration over Transvaal and the Orange Free State and authorized a general amnesty for Boer forces. In 1910, the autonomous Union of South Africa was established by the British. It included Transvaal, the Orange Free State, the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal as provinces.
CAPE COLONY becomes GB’s – 1806
“GREAT TREK” – 1837
BOER REPUBLICS – 1850s
DIAMONDS discovered! – 1860s

19. By 1910, GB had created the INDEPENDENT UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
The Age of Imperialism
Southern Africa
CECIL RHODES
‘BSAC’ begins control of ‘Rhodesia’ – 1890
PRIME MINISTER of Cape Colony – 1890
BOER WAR – 1899
By 1910, GB had created the INDEPENDENT UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA

20. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain & Great Britain
Pre & Post Imperialism
Africa: 1876 to 1914

22. The Berlin Conference (1884-1885)
The Age of Imperialism
The Berlin Conference ( )
* By the early 1880s:
W. Africa – GB (Gold Coast, Nigeria), FRANCE (French West Africa)
N. Africa – GB (Egypt), France (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia)
Central Africa – BELGIUM (Congo) & GERMANY
E. & S. AFRICA – RIVALRY ENSUED (Germany, Portugal & Italy)
…‘SETTLE CONFLICTING CLAIMS,’ Bismarck convened BERLIN CONFERENCE in 1884!
The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, also known as the Congo Conference or West Africa Conference, regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period, and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power.
Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalization of the Scramble for Africa.
The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.
…LAID DOWN GROUND RULES for the partitioning of Africa:
1.) Navigation on the major African rivers was to be free to all
2.) To create a colony the European colonizer must show EFFECTIVE OCCUPANCY & the means to do so!

23. “Scramble for Africa” “What image does “carving up the cake” inspire?”
Interpret the political cartoon
What do you see?
What do you think?
What is the point & purpose?
Belgian presence in the CONGO & the BERLIN CONFERENCE
“Scramble for Africa”
“What image does “carving up the cake” inspire?”