Colonization of Africa in a nutshell please?

Question

I saw a program once many years ago (think it was channel 4)about how Africa was once over a 1000 kingdoms untill the colonisers decided to redefine the borders. Not that i can remember much of it. But the subject has been bugging me for a while now.

Was there some sort of formal agreement when they re-divided the african lands and did it have a name? When did it all happen and who got what in the first instance?

Excuse my ignorance, i can google this but i got no clue where to start. This is meant to be an objective question so if you do have to make a stupid comment it will only be a reflection of your ignorance. As for mine, it's why i'm asking the question, i'd like to know what happened in Africa.

You being american goes some way to excuse your self proclaimed ignorance i suppose. Better stay out of that Californian sunshine. You never know he?
****!

last comment was to JFord

Answer 1

In the late nineteenth century, the European imperial powers staged a major "scramble for Africa" and occupied most of the continent, creating many colonial nation states, and leaving only two independent nations: Liberia, the Black American colony, and Orthodox Christian Abyssinia (Ethiopia). This colonial occupation continued until after the conclusion of World War II, when all the colonial states gradually obtained formal independence.

Colonialism had a destabilizing effect on what had been a number of ethnic groups that is still being felt in African politics. Before European influence, national borders were not much of a concern, with Africans generally following the practice of other areas of the world, such as the Arabian peninsula, where a group's territory was congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence of drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the Congo River appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there were groups that otherwise shared a language, culture or other similarity who resided on both sides. The division of the land between Belgium and France along the river isolated these groups from each other. Those who lived in Saharan or Sub-Saharan Africa and traded across the continent for centuries often found themselves crossing borders that existed only on European maps.

In nations that had substantial European populations, for example Rhodesia and South Africa, systems of second-class citizenship were often set up in order to give Europeans political power far in excess of their numbers. In the Congo Free State, personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, the native population was submitted to inhumane treatments, and a near slavery status assorted with forced labor. However, the lines were not always drawn strictly across racial lines. In Liberia, the citizens who were descendants of American slaves managed to have a political system for over 100 years that gave ex-slaves and natives to the area roughly equal legislative power despite the fact the ex-slaves were outnumbered ten to one in the general population. The inspiration for this system was the United States Senate, which had balanced the power of free and slave states despite the much-larger population of the former.

Europeans often changed the balance of power, created ethnic divides where they did not previously exist, and introduced a cultural dichotomy detrimental to the native inhabitants in the areas they controlled. For example, in what is now Rwanda and Burundi, two ethnic groups Hutus and Tutsis had merged into one culture by the time German colonists had taken control of the region in the nineteenth century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, intermarriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide, the Belgians (the territories having been mandated to them following the First World War) instituted a policy of racial categorization, upon taking control of the region, as racial based categorization and philosophies was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term Hutu originally referred to the agricultural-based Bantu-speaking tribes that moved into present day Rwandan and Burundi from the West, and the term Tutsi referred to Northeastern cattle-based tribes that migrated into the region later. The terms to the indigenous peoples eventually came to describe a person's economic class. Individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.

The Belgians introduced a racialized system. Individuals who had characteristics the Europeans admired — fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses, etc. — were given power amongst the colonized peoples. The Belgians determined these features were more ideally Hamitic, and in turn more ideally European and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry. They instituted a policy of issuing identity cards based on this philosophy. Those closest to this ideal were proclaimed Tutsi and those not were proclaimed Hutu.

November 15, 2004 marked the 120th anniversary of an infamous meeting with far reaching effects. At the urging of Portugal and invitation of Otto von Bismarck, representatives from fourteen western powers, including the US, gathered in Berlin to discuss the rules for the partitioning of Africa. Naturally, no African nations were present. At the conclusion of the series of meetings in 1885, the brutal age of African colonization officially began.

The parties ratifying the agreement (the US did not) established rules of engagement for each other in order to reduce European bloodshed and the distraction of war from their true objective of economic exploitation of Africa and Africans. Waning colonial powers like Spain and Portugal were given relatively small slices of the African pie. Fledgling powers such as Belgium, Italy, and Germany were given a little at the table. France and Britain feasted. All eventually realized territories many times larger than their native lands with the natural resources, cheap labor, and forced non-competitive markets necessary to continue the growth of the European industrial revolution. After the loss of direct European control of the resources and markets of the western hemisphere, then in the emerging U.S. sphere of influence, the domination of Africa was not only convenient, it was necessary for the maintenance of the European “way of life.” Africa, decimated by the centuries of the slave trade, was ripe for the picking.

Answer 2

The colonization of Africa has a long history, the most famous phase being the European Scramble for Africa of the nineteenth century.

Ancient Colonization
North Africa in particular experienced colonization from Europe and Asia Minor in the early historical period.

The city of Carthage was established in what is now Tunisia by Phoenician colonists, becoming a major power in the Mediterranean by the 4th century BC. Over time the city changed hands, falling to the Romans after the Third Punic War, where it served as the capital city of the Romans' African province. Gothic Vandals briefly established a kingdom there in the 5th century, which shortly thereafter fell to the Romans again, this time the Byzantines. The Ancient Egyptian civilization also fell under the sway of the Greeks, later passing to the Romans. The whole of Roman/Byzantine North Africa eventually fell to the Arabs in the 7th century, who brought the Islamic religion and Arabic language (see History of Islam).

Early modern period
From the seventh century, Arab trade with sub-Saharan Africa led to a gradual colonization of East Africa, around Zanzibar and other bases. Although trans-Saharan trade led to a small number of West African cities developing Arab quarters, these were not intended as colonies, and while Morroco attempted to conquer areas of the Sahel in the Moroccan war, it was soon forced to withdraw its troops after pillaging the area.

Early European expeditions concentrated on colonizing previously uninhabited islands such as the Cape Verdes and Sao Tome Island, or establishing coastal forts as a base for trade. These forts often developed areas of influence along coastal strips, but (with the exception of the River Senegal), the vast interior of Africa was not colonized and indeed little known to Europeans until the late nineteenth century.

The Scramble for Africa

Established empires, notably Britain, Portugal and France, had already expropriated vast areas of Africa and Asia, and emerging imperial powers like Italy and Germany had done likewise on a smaller scale. With the dismissal of the aging Chancellor Bismarck by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the relatively orderly colonization became a frantic scramble. The 1885 Congress of Berlin, initiated by Bismarck to establish international guidelines for the acquisition of African territory, formalized this "New Imperialism". Between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War, Europe added almost 9 million square miles (23,000,000 km²) — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions.

Decolonization

The main period of decolonization in Africa began after World War II. Growing independence movements, indigeneous political parties and trade unions coupled with pressure from within the imperialist powers and from the United States ensured the decolonization of virtually the whole of the continent by 1980. While some areas, in particular South Africa, retain a large population of European descent, only the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the islands of Reunion, the Canary Islands and Madeira remain under European control.

Answer 3

There is no Apartheid system in South Africa anymore... I wish the world would get with the program already... It came to an end 14 [nearly 15] years ago..

Answer 4

Colonizationof Africa in a nutshell-

Bad idea better phrased: NUTS

That'll fill your nutshell