In Our Time - The Berlin Conference

Episode Date: October 31, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Berlin Conference of 1884. In the 1880s, as colonial powers attempted to increase their spheres of influence in Africa, tensions began to grow between European nations including Britain, Belgium and France. In 1884 the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, brought together many of Europe's leading statesmen to discuss trade and colonial activities in Africa. Although the original purpose of the summit was to settle the question of territorial rights in West Africa, negotiations eventually dealt with the entire continent. The conference was part of the process known as the Scramble for Africa, and the decisions reached at it had effects which have lasted to the present day. The conference is commonly seen as one of the most significant events of the so-called Scramble for Africa; in the following decades, European nations laid claim to most of the continent.With:Richard Drayton Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College LondonRichard Rathbone Emeritus Professor of African History at SOAS, University of LondonJoanna Lewis Assistant Professor of Imperial History at the LSE, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on November the 15th, 1884, the representatives of 14 world powers arrived at the Berlin Palace of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck for an international summit. For the next three months, they sat locked in negotiation in a grand ballroom, dominated by a 16-foot-high map of Africa. Officially the summit was known as the Conference on West African Affairs. In practice, the delegates were discussing the future of the entire continent and how to carve it up. European powers had been setting up colonies in Africa for decades. Now they decided which parts of the continent they would each be allowed to treat as their own.

The conference was part of the process known as the Scramble for Africa, and the decisions reached at it had effects which have lasted to the present day. Not a single African took part in the summit, and only two of the diplomats involved in these crucial negotiations had ever set foot there. With me to discuss the Berlin Conference and the Scramble for Africa, a Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, Richard Rathbone, Emeritus Professor of African History at Soas, University of London, and Joanna Lewis, Assistant Professor of Imperial History at the LSE, University of London.

Richard Drayton, the main events we'll be talking about took place in the late 90th century. But first of all, will you tell us how and in war? way the Europeans started to establish permanent semi-permanent residence in Africa? By the Treaty of Tortoise of 1494, Spain and Portugal pretended to divide the world between them. Portugal claimed for itself Africa. This claim was very rapidly disputed by other European powers. By the 17th and 18th centuries, Africa had become a critical part of the European global trading economy. African slaves were critical for the production of all commodities in the new world. Indeed, we now know that between 1500 and 1800, more Africans cross the Atlantic than Europeans.

At the same time, Africa was central for the reprocessing of the profits of the East India trading companies, profits which were remitted in the form of Indian clots, which then were sold in Africa for slaves, which then were exchanged in the Americas for specie. What this meant that by the middle of the 18th century, Africa actually was already a zone of significant imperial competition among European powers. And that many of the phenomena which came to a particular accelerated form in the late 19th century were already well in motion by the time we look at the late 18th century.

We can see there both a kind of scramble to explore Africa between France and Britain, but most clearly also a scramble to acquire particular secure trading enclaves. The British, for example, claiming the mouth of the Gambia River, the French emplacing themselves at Senegal, the British controlling bits, for example, Sierra Leone, becomes a formal colony by the end of the 18th century. Of course, the Dutch had been in the Cape from the late,

set in the middle of the 17th century. The Portuguese continued to claim large parts of Africa, and this was the pattern coming into the 19th century. But the actual settlement was largely coastal, wasn't it? They were nibbling around the fringes of this great continent. It was coastal. And what changed in the early 19th century? Was there a change in the nature of European intervention?

What changed in the 19th century was, to put it very briefly, the Industrial Revolution and the ways in which new technologies of transport and a particular warfare. Transport and arms, I think, are probably the two most significant technological revolutions. The slip which goes through the breech-loader, smokeless powder, the rifle, the machine gun. The repeater rifles. The repeater rifle. By the late 19th century is generating a significant arms gap between Europeans and non-Europeans. Europeans. New technologies of transport, the building of the Suez Canal, the possibility of sending

steamboats up rivers, the possibility of building railways. All of these turned the hinterland of Africa into a zone in which it was Europeans could begin to contemplate forms of speculative traffic. But we do have to return to these enclaves which were established in the 18th century to understand where the Berlin Conference comes from. Because it was up the river Okwe in Gabon, which was traditionally an area of French stronghold from the 18th century that a French explorer called Bratza reached the hinterland of the Congo and began to treat with a man called Makoko, King Makoko,

to establish a French claim to the interior. Can we develop that, Richard Jathburn? The major powers began to have significant interest in Africa, although they didn't have significant land holdings at that stage. Could you just develop that for our listeners? I think the key thing to grab hold of is getting the image of Africa is a very, very gigantic, it's absolutely enormous continent and much, much bigger than the Mercator maps present it, that it's like a huge biscuit and that have been nibbles out of it for a very, very long time indeed.

The enclaves... Nibbles round the rim. Nibbles round the rim. European mice have been at the biscuit in a big way. And those are quite substantial in some cases. Some of them are real colonies, perceptible. colonies, particularly that, for example, at the mouth of the Senegal River, a French colony, in which the four communes, Saint-Livoufis, Géry and Dakar, are substantial colonial towns with a rather beautiful architecture inhabited as is Cape Coast, for example, in Ghana, by a mestizo elite, an elite of people of mixed race.

Mastizo being mixed race, excuse me, Mastizo being mixed race. People of mixed race, whose essential economy and essential lifestyle is based upon the Atlantic economy, they buy and sell, and they also become professional, they also become intellectuals, they become the first novelist, the first translators of the Bible and so on. They're fascinating group of people. And you can trace them around these enclave bits of colonialism with distinctive architecture, with distinctive lifestyles all the way around the coast of East Africa, West Africa. we get into the Indian Ocean, that those enclaves are matched by a Swahili elite who are partly Omani Arab

Muslim by faith, using a hybrid language by then, partly Bantu languages, partly Arabic, who are themselves trading into Africa and selling into the Indian Ocean markets. So that's the picture

of it. And I think that the extent that the expansion of this has everything to do with something we've not mentioned so far, which is basically this takes place during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I think that rolling back of the Ottoman Empire is a major explanation of

the timing of this. It's not just technology, but it's also the fact that by the late 19th century, it's clear that the Ottoman Empire is on its knees. Hence, the French have taken Algeria in 1830, the Italians who've got their eyes on what will become Libya, the British are already

trying to control Egypt and so on. That, over the Mediterranean is becoming a northern European power. The Italians are talking once again, like their ancestors, Maré Nostrum, the French... R-Z, R-C, with their eyes on that. This is a fantastic transformation in terms of balance of power. And that's represented in Berlin,

in that the Ottoman Empire is invited. I don't know what role they actually play in the Reichs Chancellor's Borum. But they're invited to this. but we're watching, picking up the pieces in a very tense moment, I think, in European history too. But from what you said, the Ottoman Empire leaves a power vacuum along a crest of northern Africa, the north of Africa.

There's all the rest, which is about 11-12s. What grip is held there by European, by European powers? The other European powers are, in a sense, Johnny come lately. There are two major players in Africa in before the conference. France and Britain. France are already expanding up, as I said, the Senegal River, but also across what we now call the Sahel, across the shores of the Sahara and into the Sahara.

So that by the end of the century, they've conquered, physically conquered by military force, an area from the Atlantic Ocean at its most westernly point of Africa, right the way across to Lake Chad, and then down, as Richard Drayton mentioned, before, all the way down to the Congo River under de Bratza's instigation. And then all the way up...

De Bratze, the explorer of that area, yes. And all the way up to Algeria. So it's a huge extent of land, a massive extent of land. Once explained to me by a filmmaker in Senegal is Bucre de Sable, a great deal of sand. And I think there's something in that. So there's a very big hitter.

and this accounts since to some extent for the map that I think many people are used to from childhood of those little red blobs in the midst of the French holdings the Gold Coast historically now a British holding the Nigerian the mouth of the Niger

Delta area major area of oil palm trading towards the end of the 19th century the Gambia which Richard Drayton has already mentioned and Sierra Leone of course a fascinating freed slave enclave set up in what is today Sierra Leone but not as extensive as it is today

so that's the British holding in West Africa And then there's a southern part of Africa isn't it? Then there's a southern part of Africa with the ancient holdings by the Portuguese of Angola and Mozambique again dominated by a mestizo elite people of mixed race both in Mozambique and Angola farming in the case of Mozambique

an extensive Latifune the extensive plantation farms called Prazzo, and in South Africa, of course, the merchant capital coaling station by port for the, originally the Dutch-India Company, but after the first decade of the 19th century for the East India Company of Cape Town. Then the East African, it's a big continent that did warn you. No, I'm intrigued. This is an area dominated, of course, by, basically Arab traders from places like Oman,

and particular places like Oman. They come to dominate Zanzibar, interested in both the ivory trade and the slave trade, and also increasingly in the clove trade, spices being very, very important. And then, of course, we've got the wonderful thing in the horn of a great independent African empire, namely that of Ethiopia,

which fends off for century after century, attempts at incursions on its sovereignty, ending, of course, in the most magnificent defeat of the Italians, which the Italians, of course, was so... You shouldn't be smiling so much, you know what you're saying? And certainly the E.C. Oaken's weren't smiling because the Italians returned for a second round in the mid-1930s, were they used, as we all know, weapons of mass destruction

on people, basically, with primitive weaponry. Well, that's a brilliant rounded map of a very complicated continent, which, in a sense, do I know it? These European powers meeting in Berlin wanted to simplify They wanted to simplify all this, which you described in detail, which was rich and lovely to hear. But can we go into that process? And one simplification, going by King Leopold of the Belgium, Leopold II, who he wanted a large, big chunk of Africa for himself, 78 times bigger than Belgium he wanted, and he said about that.

Can you tell us how he pursued his ambition? Absolutely. Here we've got a monarch who takes power in 1865. Very, very small kingdom. And he's definitely got kingdom envy, empire envy. His first cousin is Queen Victoria, about being made empress of India. And there he is with virtually no territory overseas at all.

He tries to do something about it. He actually tries to buy the Philippines, as you do. But that didn't work. he pursues his ambition desperate to have some imperial real estate so he can take his seat alongside all his cousins because he's related to most of the royal families in Europe. And he does this in a very ruthless, deadly, brilliant way. He's always such a child being fascinated with geography and explorers.

And, of course, one thing we haven't talked about is this is the age of exploration in Africa where you have figures like David Livingstone and then Henry Morton Stanley is going to be very important to our story, who've been marching all over Africa and been delighting the world's press with stories of their exploits. Leopold loves the Times and the Telegraph. He loves reading proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. So he learns that actually Central Africa is an area that's up for grabs.

Nobody seems to be interested in it. It's pretty wild. It's pretty scary. And he also discovers something else. that if you want to really get into Africa, you need to use the zeitgeist, and that is you need to be into anti-slavery. Because when David Livingstone dies in Africa in 1873, it's alleged that he dies on his knees as a sacrifice, praying that Africa will be delivered now from the evil serpent of slavery.

And at that time, a mark of civilisation in that period of European history was that you were anti-slavery. Absolutely, that is the gold badge. You get sort of gold-card membership to the high. club if you are an anti-slaver. So he understands that, learns that lesson very, very well. It's going to have deadly effect later on. He's also come across Henry Morton Stanley, who famously found Livingston, but then goes back to Central Africa after Livingston has died to try and solve the mysteries that Livingston failed to solve. Where was the headwaters of the Nile? And Stanley also

maps the Congo. And it makes him, you know, one of the greatest, the greatest African explorer of all time. So Leopold has been following this avidly and is one of the first people to congratulate him when he returns and he tries to then, in effect, buy his services. And this is the second part of his strategy because he set up the African International Association, which is a total front for his aims to try and dominate.

And he said the aim of the international was to civilise, humanish, humanitarian, and everybody could come down. He was doing this for the unblemished motives. Yes, absolutely. In fact, he was buying it for himself. Everybody brought into it. He was so devious and so clever.

He said he was doing it from the heart. He was putting his own money behind the Institute. He got philanthropists, anti-slavers, to support it. And he gets Stanley to go back to Africa and to start making treaties with chiefs up the Congo River. And that's the basis of his later push, and extraordinary, successful and extraordinary push. for power. Why was there, there seemed to be a crisis point, really in the early 1880s?

The crisis point comes because he's been very, very successful, Leopold, in appointing key people to go into the Congo for him and to get all these treaties with the chiefs. So he then embarks on a series of diplomatic maneuvers. So he gets his agent to go over to America and get the Americans to recognize that his Africa Association, and nobody really knows what it is actually has sovereignty now in this large area of the Congo. We're talking about an area of 1.3 million square miles, but that his agents have got treaties with the chiefs. America says, yes, okay, we recognize your flag.

He then goes to the French and says, look, will you recognize us? And the French don't initially want to, but then they say, okay, yes, if we have first rights in the Congo. And he says to them, if I fail, you can have it, not the Brits. And that encourages the French to come in. also does the same with Bismarck, who's quite keen. Bismarck works him out, actually. Calls him a swindler and a phantasis, but nevertheless goes along with it.

Exactly, goes along with it nevertheless. And the crisis point is really that Britain has done a treaty with the Portuguese to recognise Portuguese control over the sort of Congo-mouth region, but Germany refused to ratify this. So who is going to have sovereignty over the Congo that's now been opened up by Stanley in the context of this scramble for Africa for coasts? as we've heard where it is perceived that Britain is in a position of decline

and looking slightly wobbly. There's a sense Richard Rayne, isn't there, for I've got from the notes that you've all sent to me, that Leopold, although it wasn't there, was one of the people more responsible for the bringing together of the Berlin Conference. Well, he was in a way, but the momentum for this really comes very clearly

out of Bismarck's diplomacy from the 1870s onwards. And the link with the various attempts to solve an inverted commas the Ottoman question, is extremely strong. It's not just simply the... Bismarck had just brought about, let us say, the unification of Germany.

He wasn't particularly interested in Africa, but he wasn't very keen on other people getting hold of it either. He was concerned, essentially, to maintain Germany's place within the European state system. And in particular, he was concerned about his France to his left, which he knew wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine. And he was concerned to certain extent about Britain, the extent to which Britain sought to possess a kind of commercialman,

monopoly. But the real roots of the conference actually lie in Franco-British competition. That's actually the nub of the matter. And the ways in which free-trading Britain had locked up bits of the palm oil trade along the Niger through a cunning device called the trust, which restricted Africans' abilities to trade freedom of European. There are always these weasel words, aren't they? Trust, all that stuff. And the French, of course, would do exactly the same, using tools and tariffs and other forms of protective contracts. So that when the French arrived with Bratza, attempting to find this backway into the interior of Africa in circa 1880,

they set off panic in the foreign office. And the foreign office then quickly decides, well, the way to solve this problem is to quickly recognize that Portugal owns everything. And so the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty is pushed in by February of 1884 and sets up the context in which the other European powers say, wait a minute, Portugal now has all of this. This is quickly...

Portugal learns everything and we, the Brits, can trade really because of our privileged relationship with Portugal. So a bit of perfidious Albion, you know, showing its skills once again. The response of Berlin, as with Paris, is that this treaty should not be recognised. And indeed, Bismarck very quickly decides to recognise one of his adventures, a man called Ludovitz, who has created a little trading port in Namibia called Angra Piccena

in April 1884. So the tempo of things is growing. Now, the point is that Leopold certainly has various projects, and he's very much in the background. But the stage which he was given was one that was given to him by the really important players at the conference, which were France, Britain and Germany. Bismar gave a grand speech about the conference.

He wanted it in Berlin because he did basically, he didn't want it to be in Britain. So he grabbed it for Berlin and he made a grunt speech, we're doing this for, civilisation for, for all the best reasons in the world, and that's where all gathered here, got everybody there. Most of them hadn't a, hadn't a hope in anything of getting any bit of Africa

whatsoever, but he wanted them all there because it looked terrific. Well, he wasn't with all the very specific reason, because this is linked to the logic. Norway. This is linked to the logic of the Congress of Vienna. Because the point of this particular settlement. Not what I was trying to do, but it's only four of them in the battle, really. Well, exactly. And so these are high words. What did

what did he hope really would come out of this conference, is distinct from what he said? Well, I think the reason why you have all these other European powers there is also to have a kind of counterweight, specifically against Britain or France, to be able to appeal to King Oscar the second of Sweden, to appeal to have to play one power off against the other, which was Bismarck's great skill.

Richard Rothburn, how did they manage to get through the rhetoric the humanitarian front of it were to these four or five real powers who were going to do the business. It took three months. It must have been an immense amount of manoeuvring. How did these four identify themselves and come through as the powerful contenders?

I think that there are things that lie behind what the power was about, which we haven't really discussed. And that, of course, is the fact that Britain is still the major maritime power in the world. Germany is coming up very fast on the outside track and that the animus between powers varies. In the case of Britain and Germany,

it's certainly the case that as the parmoral trade in West Africa grows, for example, one of the major beneficiaries of that is Hamburg, and it's the Hamburg merchant shipping companies, particularly Vilm and Linear, a very, very famous shipping line, that is carrying a great deal of these very valuable cargoes back. So there's real competition for goods, but also competition for access to ports. And this massive expansion that's taking place before the Berlin Conference of access to these ports.

Something like, I can't remember, something like 30 ports are shipping palm oil in about 1850 or 1860. By 1875, it's something like 300. And this is growing enormously. It's the major commodity. So there's a competition between Britain and Germany at the level of, mercantile interests. So when we talk about France and Germany and Britain, I think we need to break that down a bit

and talk about the interests behind these. The Foreign Office is a tiny agency in all of this. The interest actually, I don't think there isn't a Secretary of State for, there isn't a Secretary of State for the colonies at the time, who sits in Cabinet, for example. It's a minor post, and the Colonial Office is a tiny little instrument in White Hall.

What's going on here, I think, very often is a world of pressure politics, pressure group politics, in which major ports like Liverpool, like London, like Hamburg, like Marseilles and like Bordeaux, are playing big roles in pushing their governments to sometimes, I think, rather unwillingly go along with it.

In the case of Bismarck, Bismarck has to follow the Hamburg line because they're crucially important to his electoral politics. He's got to be nice to these people, but he himself is not very much interested in Africa and says, you know, I'm not. much concerned with us. Can I come to Joanna first, Richard?

Can you just take on the negotiations a bit further than, is this where the doctrine of the effective occupation came in? Absolutely. And what is that? Can you explain that? The powers argue, especially somebody like Leopold and his representatives that are there, and Stanley has the treaties there, for example, that because they have treaties with chiefs that have said,

look we will hand over the rights to trade, to the rights for waterways, that in effect you are going to be in charge of everything, you are in effect the recognised government. So this is effective occupation, even though you don't have people all over the place? Absolutely. And Leopold has been very, very crafty, because previous to the conference, he's taken the advice of an Oxford scholar called Sir Travers Twiss,

it's actually a real name, and he has told Leopold how he can come. convert his sort of company, his shady association, into being recognised as a formal state by doing certain things. So this is why he gets Stanley, who initially won't do it, to up the ante with making treaties with the chiefs. And the treaties are quite shocking. For example, two chiefs are told that they will get a piece of cloth every month.

If they hand over all the rights to their kingdoms and will always give labour for various projects when they're asked for, will give over the rights to fisheries to all the sort of natural goodies that are there. For a piece of cloth every month? Yeah. Wow. Somebody got a good deal there.

Yeah. Richard Drayton. Well, the principle of effective occupation... You were going to say something. Well, there are two responses reading. The principle of effective occupation actually had emerged already by the 17th century.

It was essentially the basis on which the French, the British and the Dutch pretended to establish their colonial spaces. So it's a very old doctrine. It draws on the Roman Roman law. But it certainly is something which the French are pushing particularly hard. And we see that the ambassador of France writes to Jeux in December of 1884 saying this has got to be our strong card. And we must occupy and prove that we occupy and are in a position not only

to keep what we claim, but to administer, or at least to govern the country. So this idea of essentially that the proof of sovereignty would be found in government comes to be the card which is pushed particularly by those powers like France, which have a stake. in establishing themselves in particular places. Now, to go back to the earlier point, I think Richard's absolutely right, that we need to look at what was happening, not just inside the council chamber,

but surrounding it, when figures like Foreman, Goldie, the African Lakes Company, missionary and railway promoters, Baron Lambermont, the Dutch Mercantile Association of Rotterdam, these were parties that were circulating around the conference chamber

and were lobbying the delegates. And, of course, their negotiations are no part of the final record, but their interests would, of course, have been fully represented. Richard Rathburn, I said, I think, in the introduction, or in the trail, the conference agreed to a final text in 1885. There were no Africans there at all. Did that strike anybody at the time as being rather than an omission?

I think Africans who knew about it thought it was a very serious omission, as we all would. No, I don't think it did. I think the paternalism that lurks behind this is a very, very powerful bit of 19th century reasoning. This was good for Africans. Africans were going to be saved from themselves, saved from the darkness,

by the combination of Christianity, commerce and civilisation, as it was seen. And that notion of civilising mission lurks behind as a kind of mystical goal, a holy grail issue, behind the liberal and left supporters of this is of course cynically driven over in incredible ways by people who are much more savvy. And I think that the, to pick up the point that Richard just been digging in very,

very well, I think, one of the extraordinary things about this period is the way that it brings back into major significance the chartered company. Now, we thought we'd seen the end of that in 1857, the Indian mutiny and the takeover ultimately of the Indian possession of the East India Company by the British Crown. It was a disgraced company in that sense it couldn't administer its Indian territories. But here, nearly all of these territories administered not by the European states,

but actually by work that's put out to companies. So a big business, really? Well, not quite little business in many cases. These are only 5% of British trade is with Africa by the mid-1880s. It's not a big deal. These are small and very often very unscrupulous companies, as of course Leopold's company proves beyond any doubt whatever.

So I think this is a very important issue. But on the point of effective occupation, it seems to me that one of the very, very significant things about what the conference does is it permits a colonial world in which there are very powerful centres, metropolitan centres, capital cities, where rule is conducted. from and incredibly weak peripheries, which seems to typify, and to certain extent, modern African states. And you can see this in the cartography, very dense, well-mapped

southern areas, bits that butt on to these ruling areas, and a virtual absence of detail the further north, the further into the hinterland you get. Joanna, briefly, can there be seen major winners and losers at these negotiations? Absolutely. Leopold, as you rightly mentioned at the beginning, ends up with the territory, 78 times the size of his own kingdom, which is quite shocked. He's a major winner. He's a major winner. And 10 million people are killed in no time at all. Yes, he's going to be responsible for one of the major humanitarian disasters of the modern age. And he takes his seat alongside great powers to international acclaim. He's applauded at the end by Bismarck and says, you know,

well done and thank you very much for upholding these great principles. And the worrying thing now. Why are they taking in so easily? I mean, why does Bismack say that? When in his notes on Leopold's submission, he calls him a swindler and a fantasy. The British as well. It's a duplicitous to the rest of them, isn't it? There is that. I think maybe they also feel it'll be

all right on the night, but actually they don't know the extent of what's actually going to happen. He has huge support from anti-ab abolitionists from Baroness Bedet Kutz. I mean, you know, he is the toast of all humanitarians virtually although there is just some

skepticism, but he's been very, very canny. He's had supporters in a number of counts. So he's a big winner. Who briefly are the losers? Well, Congolese people. All the elephants. I mean a part of that. Portugal hasn't done that well. Britain was going into the conference slightly worried. There was some worry that Bismarck was going to

quote, attack her sort of vital parts. So she's gone into the conference a bit worried, but actually comes out of it all right. She's managed to protect her interests, so trade interests in West Africa, has stopped France getting the Congo, so hurrah for that, and has had some luck on anti-slavery measure,

although foreign office officials feel that it's very watered down and milky. Richard Drayton, how did the outcome of this conference affect activity in Africa in the immediate period afterwards? Can I just quickly follow up on a couple of points? Well, I've got to go to move. And you couple of follow-up now. I think it's interesting to note that the precedent is set by the second Burden Conference of 1880, which excludes the Ottomans from any negotiations about their own territory.

And that's actually quite important for understanding what happens in the exclusion of Africans in 84. Another point of Richards about the charter companies is a very odd back to the future institution. So we might note in general a kind of Arnaumeer persistence of the old regime theme in the presence of these crown sovereigns, negotiating this kind of settlement. Oscar the second appeals to the Swedish constitution of 1809 for his own diplomatic prerogatives in negotiating in Berlin. Figures like Leopold are at the same time. I really do want to move on. Okay. Yeah. Well, in terms of types of legacies. Can you tell us what happened after the conference in Africa? Well, very, very rapidly, by early March 1885, literally within days after the conference settlement, the Germans proclaim a protectorate over

East Africa, the space which we now know is Tanganyika, based on hastily. executed and legally dubious treaties between the German Empire and chiefs conducted by an adventure called Carl Peters. Within a matter of months, the British are also attempting to enforce more effectively their control over the Niger. By 1887, King Jaja of Apobo, for example, is sent away on a gunboat to Barbados because he had interfered with trade in the Niger. But the most striking things happen in the Congo, where Leopold decrees very quickly that all vacant lands belong to the Congo territory, that he creates a force public to drive Corvay Labor. He reduces the population to serfs. He installs this regime. So, I mean, if we look at the actual

general act of the Congo of the Berlin Conference, essentially every single one of its articles was very quickly uprooted and turned upside down within a decade. Richard Rothburn, you talked about 5% of trade with Africa from this country. Did trade increase? We've got the ivory trade. Lots of people. canos and billiard balls having a massive effect on African people. I think fundamentally we ought to be looking at

slavery as the major commodity going out over the Indian Ocean. The Arab traders? Well, they're called Arab traders. There are all sorts and conditions of traders. One finds Africans... Well, why are they called the Arab traders? Because that's the shorthand and a rather racist shorthand indeed, as of course deployed

by Joanna's hero, Devi Livingston. Very many of them are. of course people of mixed race. They're very often from places like Madagascar, which the French have held for some time, going to do things like pearl diving and plantation labour in the Indies, but also as far afield as Macau.

So there is that. Palm oil and Palm kernel trade increases enormously on the West African side largely because there are no elephants left. All of that is of some significance. The great break point, of course, comes in the 1880s onwards with the discovery of gold in South Africa.

And suddenly it seems to me that the imperial justification occurs in the discovery at long last of real wealth, not just a small basket of commodities, but a big commodity. And that has huge implications for capital markets, huge implications for the geopolitics of Southern Africa, which, you know, are with us to this day. And would you, are there more discoveries of that nature, John Lewis? Well, one significant discovery which affects the Congo dramatically and increases the enslavement of peoples that's going on there, ironically, under the banner of getting rid of slavery, is the discovery of the inflatable tyre by Joseph Dunlop in 1890. So that means that Leopold has got another lease of life

in order to try and clear his debts and make oodles of cash, in that he now turns to the vines, the rubber vines that are growing in the trees because of course Congo is mostly forest. So that's going to lead to this awful, awful story that Joseph Conrad will eventually write about in hearts of darkness because he's gone there as a captain and Gozep River and will base the character of Kurtz on this evil Belgian officer in the force public, Captain Leon Rom.

And then of course we've got the heroism of Edmund Morrill, who was just a shipping clerk. and saw that there were actually all these guns going out to Leopold's Congo, no actual goods being traded, as he said, it was going to be all about commerce to get rid of slavery. And then we have this fantastic Congo reform movement that does actually show the power of the individual and journalism to get governments to do something about what was happening.

I think one of the things that's rather pity we left Africa Africans out of this. I was going to come to that. Okay, forgive me. My next question. But you ask it for me. I was going to say that I think the notion that this is all happening on the sort of tabular rasa is a very mistaken view, and it's not one that I hope we've propagated today, but that basically all sorts of things have been going on in Africa throughout the 19th century,

which are predisposing issues so far as the eventual scramble for Africa is concerned. Certainly the tremendously debilitating effects of the importation of firearms is a very noticeable thing right the way across the continent, almost without exception. The beginnings of serious war laudry in Central Africa, the breakdown of law and order, which of course helps the slave trade. The denuding of the food stock by things like the killing of elephants

for pianos and billet balls. That's certainly the case. There are things that balance this out, the importation of new food crops and the Americas bolst the population at a time when population is being bled out by the slave trade and by the violence occasioned by the slave trade. But these massive movements going on within Africa

a whole range of things that occur as a result of these disturbances like civil wars. And the idea that somehow colonialism comes in and opposes itself as a kind of blanket over these situations, I think forgets the fact that for many people in Africa, these are divided polities, and the arrival of Europeans is the arrival of allies on the grounds that my enemy is enemy, etc. That is being worked out in a very big way in Africa. So Africa and Africans are, as it were, agents in this process, every bit as much as they are victims.

They're not just people having their hands chopped off because they aren't producing enough rubber. They're also very much involved as politicians, as military dictators, as founders of new states, and so on in a very exciting and dramatic fashion. So the Scramble for Africa itself is a very dynamic process and not just an imposition. And it's not just European imperialism,

but also Muslim imperialism as well. with the importation of guns, the spread of slavery, the East African slave trade is increasing in the 1870s, 1880s. Richard Wrighton. Oh, yes, what we see certainly by the end of the century is the attempt throughout the continent to transform what had previously been forms of collaborative relationships in which it was not at all clear that Africans, in fact,

were in a subordinate position, into positions which were, in fact, more strictly. So many of our understandings of European imperialism essentially involve a kind of retrospective application to the early 19th century of a kind of white dominance which didn't really exist in the earlier period. And in fact, we could see the Scramble for Africa from another perspective as having to do with what we might call

the crisis of the middlemen states, the states which had emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries on the coast of West Africa, and which had actually become quite strong and wealthy, dealing in slaves, first of all, and then later on in palm oil and gum and other commodities. And in some ways, the European advance is also linked to this particular crisis within these African policies. Can we stay for the last battle of the programme on, are there any ways? We know about these terrible murders, 10 million people.

Is there any ways? Because you're suggesting, Richard Rathbone, that the Africans put more in and got more out than we've given, than we've alluded to in this conversation. They're winners and losers. And one of the real problems, I think, with the whole question of the scramble is the counterfactual problem. What would have happened if there hadn't been a scramble for Africa? And I think Africa is a wonderful place from that point of view in that we do have a place where the scramble didn't occur, namely Ethiopia. What would have happened if Africans had been in control of their own destinies to a certain extent,

in control of the nature of modernisation and then in terms of their relationship with the global economy. And I think one can see in the case of Ethiopia a form of modernisation which is autonomous, autotournous and quite deliberate in terms of the creation of a very, very powerful military state, for example. A shaking of the head is going on with this is great one. Well, I think it's, from my perspective,

it's really difficult to attempt to disaggregate regions of African and say, well, this is the Belgian case, whereas this is the British case. And this is the Ethiopian case. The point is that the forms of modernity which emerged in Ethiopia, as in Liberia and American protection, were forms which were encompassed by a world dominated by European norms and in which Europeans had acquired this kind of disproportionate violent command of the world's resources. If one looks at the kinds of options that were available for African sovereignty, they were all constrained by. the particular balance of power, what in Bordeaux's terms would be the field of imperial power in this period. When we look certainly at the kinds of possibilities for decolonisation,

which emerged later on, they all are extremely constrained by the kinds of structures set in place. So what would you say as the legacy, Joanna Lewis? The legacy of the scramble for Africa is that Africa gets devoidable. divided up by countries who produce states that are too greedy, too rushed and too racist, to live up to any of the humanitarian ideals that were on the books in Brussels' conference in 1889, on anti-slaver and empire and Berlin. And so at independence, they were then passed over states and not nations. Thank you very much. I'm sorry that it's been a rush.

Well, actually, I've enjoyed it. It's been a terrific rush. Thank you, Joanna Lewis, Richard Drayton, Richard Ruther. Next week we'll be talking about ordinary language philosophy and Wittgenstein. Thank you for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio 4.