The Berlin Conference and the organized plunder of Africa

I find the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 a weirdly fascinating event.

Noble, it definitely was not. It was a meeting hosted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck for European powers to agree on divvying up Africa among each other. Shola Lawai notes an important element of the conference: “No African leader was present.” (1)

Deutsche Welle has this 2024 16-minute description of the conference: (2)

Lawai’s article gives quite a bit of information on the Berlin Conference. It was an attempt to manage the conquest of new colonies in Africa in a way that would manage the risk of competition for colonies leading to a war among the European “metropoles” themselves. That competition became a major factor in the tensions that led to the outbreak of the First World War.

[In the second half of the 19th century] Great Britain, Portugal, France, Germany, and King Leopold II of Belgium began sending scouts to secure trade and sovereignty treaties with local leaders, buying or simply staking flags and laying claim to vast expanses of territory crisscrossing the continent rich with resources from palm oil to rubber.

Squabbles soon erupted in Europe over who “owned” what. The French, for example, clashed with Britain over several West African territories, and again with King Leopold over Central African regions.
To avoid an all-out conflict between the rival European nations, all stakeholders agreed to a meeting in Berlin, Germany in 1884-1885 to set out common terms and manage the colonisation process.

The carving up of Africa into European colonies proceeded rapidly in the wake of the Berlin Cofnerence. Lawai’s article includes this dramatic graphic:

The competition for territory wasn’t restricted to Africa. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 were in part due to the decisions at the Berlin Conference, as well as nationalist rebellions against the Ottoman Empire::

Austria-Hungary had in October 1908 annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, territory that was legally part of the Ottoman Empire but under Austro-Hungarian occupation and administration after the Congress of Berlin (1878). The Austro-Hungarian government, moreover, had a treaty right to occupy the sanjak (district) of Novi Pazar, which separated Montenegro from Serbia. Deeply resentful of Austria-Hungary’s action, which excluded an eventual union of the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina with Serbia, the Serbian government nevertheless realized that it could not challenge one of the great powers. It therefore turned its attention to Macedonia, where a weaker power like Turkey could more easily be attacked if an alliance could be achieved with Bulgaria. The Agadir Incident of 1911, moreover, revealed that the two great-power groupings, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, were evenly balanced, so that the small powers might exercise some measure of individual initiative. (3)

The particular scramble for African colonies that eventually produced the Berlin Conference was set off by Belgium:

The small nation of Belgium had few African connections, and most Belgians had little interest in that continent. The exception was Leopold II, who became their king in 1865. Leopold desired a larger world stage than his nation provided, and establishing an overseas empire appealed to him. Sub-Saharan Africa was a logical focus, but he disguised his imperial ambitions under the cloak of humanitarianism. In 1876, he sponsored a geographical conference in Brussels, attended by a number of notable explorers, with the exception of Henry Morton Stanley, who then [was] crossing Africa from its east to its west coast. Under Leopold’s leadership, the conference participants created the International African Association (Association International Africaine; AIA) … [w]ith King Leopold as its first chairman ... (4)

Notes:

(1) Lawai, Shola (2025): Colonising Africa: What happened at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885? Al Jazeera 02/26/2025. <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/26/colonising-africa-what-happened-at-the-berlin-conference-of-1884-1885> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).

(2) Why the conference that divided Africa still matters today. DW News YouTube channel 11/23/2024. <https://youtu.be/cKgTf-_ouVI?si=sFUb_o7KSLkwEJm3> (Accessed: 2025-26-08).

(3) Editors (2025): Balkan Wars. Encyclopedia Britannica 08/01/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Balkan-Wars> (Accessed: 2025-30-08).

(4) Larson, Eugene (2023): Berlin Conference and the Partition of Africa. EBSCO Knowledge Advantage. <https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/berlin-conference-and-partition-africa> (Accessed: 2025-30-08).