Europe grabbed nearly all of Africa in one generation
As late as the 1870s, European flags covered only about a tenth of Africa, mostly coastal footholds. By 1914 Ethiopia and Liberia alone still stood outside formal European rule. Steamships, rails, telegraphs, and tropical medicine turned earlier trading posts into a continental land rush among Western empires.
Historians call that accelerated conquest the Scramble for Africa: invasion and colonisation powered by industrial technology and the politics of late-century empire-building. Several Western European states raced for territory, markets, and prestige. Diplomats met in Berlin in 1884 and 1885 to set ground rules for colonisation and trade; that gathering became the scramble's signature conference even while rivalries kept pushing borders inland.
Earlier in the century, European traders often clung to coastal posts because malaria and related tropical diseases made interior travel lethal. Industrial transport and communication—steamships, railways, telegraphs—plus medicines that blunted those diseases, lowered the barrier. Economic motives piled on during the Long Depression: protectionist continental markets and trade deficits pushed Britain and others toward African raw materials such as rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, and tin, while strategists eyed routes securing India and southern African gold fields.
Colonies also supplied coaling stations for steam navies, bargaining chips in European diplomacy, and pools of colonial soldiers. After two world wars eroded European empires, most African colonies won independence during the Cold War. Meeting in 1964, the Organisation of African Unity chose to keep colonial borders rather than redraw them, fearing civil wars and regional chaos, and stressing pan-African solidarity instead.
Once the grab began, it moved quickly. In the early 1880s two explorers competed along the Congo River: Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza working for France, and Henry Morton Stanley working for a committee financed by Leopold II of Belgium, whose share later became his private Congo Free State. France seized Tunisia in May 1881, Britain took over Egypt the next year, and in 1884 Germany claimed Togoland, the Cameroons and South West Africa. By 1914 Germany ranked third among colonial powers on the continent, where most of its 2.6 million square kilometres of overseas territory and 14 million colonial subjects lay.
Source: Scramble for Africa
