Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
In Britain and much of Europe, too little is remembered about how the continent was carved up at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. In Africa, however, colonial legacies remain deeply felt. This divide became painfully clear when a delegate of African descent attended an International Red Cross conference in Berlin and recalled the city’s role in the 1884-85 Scramble for Africa and opened with a related joke – only to be met with silence. As highlighted in the #AfricaScramble essay series, such moments expose the erasure of colonial history in European public consciousness.
But contrary to what little there is of a British popular imagination of these events, which often focuses on things like railways that colonial powers ‘brought’ to Africa, European countries largely sought to formalise existing business ties. For instance, as Steven Press writes in Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa, the primary motivations behind European colonisation of Africa during the Berlin Conference were far more self-serving than the official rhetoric, emphasising what might today be understood as human rights claims, suggested. The conference was primarily a diplomatic manoeuvres by European powers to solidify their commercial dominance under the guise of free trade and humanitarianism. Economic incentives, strategic competition, and political machinations, which justified those railways in the first place, dominated proceedings. Instead of the traditional view of the conference as a well organised division of Africa, Press underscores that it was a chaotic and opportunistic land grab.
But European colonial ambitions were not just about land. They were built on other economic foundations, including business deals rooted in the slave trade. While the slave trade most prominently included the Trans-Atlantic slave trade it also included the Trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades. For instance, the South Sea Company was explicitly created to manage Britain’s involvement in the Spanish-controlled slave trade in the early 18th century. As historian Philip Stern writes in Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, corporate colonialism did not just profit from empire – it actively resisted abolition. Stern notes how James Rochfort Maguire, a British imperialist and Irish nationalist politician who had multifaceted and seemingly paradoxical roles in both the British South Africa Company and the somewhat anti-colonial Irish Parliamentary Party recalled in his 1896 book:
‘One did not go to all the expense and risk of colonial expansion “for the childish vanity of painting as much of the atlas red as is in our power”. It was “the love of money” that “lies at the root of Empire”, and as such, no institution was better positioned to undertake it than the company’.
Imperial legal legacies still shape African economies today, including laws governing joint-stock companies and corporate ownership. Those same colonial laws enabled the British East India Company and the Royal African Company state-like powers, including monopolies on trade, the rights to wage war and sign treaties, and to govern territories, including levying taxes. In Britain, the modern stock market evolved from colonial-era systems that enabled joint-stock companies to raise capital. As the historian Vanessa Ogle writes, today’s corporate tax havens have their roots in British laws designed to benefit colonial enterprises, which endured even as the world decolonized.
We should also be reminded of the state of the continent at the time of the conference. As Richard Reidhas written in The Fragile Revolution: Rethinking War and Development in Africa’s Violent Nineteenth Century’, Africa was seething with violent conflict at the time of the Berlin Conference. With the abolition of slavery near the start of the 19th century the continent’s most lucrative commodity – enslaved people – collapsed. This disintegration subsequently bottomed out the economies of the slave raiding empires that had been built up over the course of roughly 400 years: the continent was effectively at war with itself. Many African empires that depended on the raiding and trade of enslaved people economically and socially fragmented and fought as the loss of power created a vacuum that many communities were keen to capitalise upon.
Reid provides a few examples. The Oyo Empire, in what is now southern Benin and western Nigeria, fell in the early 19th century owing to the end of the slave trade. The Oyo had dominated the region since the late 17th century, with the slave trade as its primary source of revenue. However, as profits from the trade diminished, the Oyo could no longer afford to buy horses from the north, which in turn weakened its cavalry, the backbone of its military. This economic decline led to increased internal taxation, which further destabilised the empire. Additionally, the advance of Sokoto’s jihadist forces from the north exacerbated the situation, ultimately leading to Oyo’s deterioration in the 1820s and 1830s.
Similar examples also took place in West and Central Africa among militarised states such as the Dahomey and the Asante, which also thrived on slave trade and subsequently declined. In eastern Africa the Nyamwezi and Yao were similarly affected; Nyamwezi ‘war boys’ known as the ruga ruga and other mobile warriors consequently became mercenaries-for-hire. This pattern of state, or kingdom, finance was difficult to maintain as their survival depended on continual warfare and plunder, which is inherently fragile.
Africa’s state of war made it easier for European powers to forge opportunistic military alliances across the continent. Moreover, both the continent’s militarisation and its external, export-driven orientation were partially baked into the nature of colonial rule that then unfolded. The latter is best described by Frederick Cooper’s concept of the ‘gatekeeper state’, in which colonial and postcolonial governments maintain privileged control over resources, power, and trade rather than deep authority over society. Aspects of it lingered even as the first African countries decolonised, starting with Sudan in 1956 and Ghana in 1957.
Within the economic and social history of both Sudans, which I specialise in, each country remains highly predatory and coercive as a partial consequence of this overarching approach to colonisation exemplified by the Berlin Conference. Though there have been valiant attempts to introduce new forms of rule in these countries, particularly among Sudan’s civic activists that managed to overthrow Omar el Bashir’s authoritarian rule, these types of colonial legacies endure. As the Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò significantly urges in Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, African leaders have long had the choice to overturn these patterns of rule – but far too often readily embraced the opportunity to become ‘big men’ themselves. Big men, particularly in the form of performatively masculine military rulers, have often legitimated their supposed importance by starting wars to one day enjoy ruling so as to extract or ‘eat’ the spoils acquired through privileged access to the state.
Crucially, the main thing able to fight this militarized looting is not more violence – as this only reproduces cycles of war-making on the continent – but civic pressure – as we have powerfully seen in Sudan in its still unfolding revolution. The world’s increasingly authoritarian turn is worryingly not so different from what much of Africa experienced under colonialism and after it decolonized. We should take inspiration from Sudanese civic activists. Overthrowing Bashir seemed impossible for most of his repressive rule. Yet, just as dismantling absolute monarchy in early modern Europe once appeared unthinkable, Sudanese activists accomplished it.
As we see a return to dynamics that are reminiscent of the those during the Berlin Conference in President Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine and other countries such as Greenland, I urge us not to sit back in dismay and smug reproach. Nor should we turn to imagined histories of Africa’s pre-colonial past to somehow ‘Make Africa Great Again’. These types of efforts risk all too quickly sliding into dangerous ethno-nationalist claims and other potentially violent ‘solutions’ that only affirm colonization-induced constraints of the mind and of maps rather than rupture with them. Instead, we must actively rebuild international solidarity with African civic movements to create more just and inclusive societies. Only through international solidarity can we begin to dismantle colonialism’s long shadow that has shaped our world and remains deeply woven into our many personal histories.
Dr Matthew Sterling Benson is a social and economic historian of Africa in the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he is also the Sudans Research Director and affiliate staff in LSE’s Department of Economic History. Matthew is currently writing a book examining the history of revenue and different forms of often coercive rule in the Sudans.
