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.
Memory is always contentious. The question of what events need to be remembered and why rarely elicits a simple answer. Even events whose impact resonates across centuries and affects the lives of billions don’t always get recalled, and when they are, their meaning tends to be shifted by tides of history.
One such event is the three-and-a-half-month Berlin West Africa Conference which took place 140 years ago and where fifteen countries – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States of America, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden and Norway, and Turkey – conspired to determine how they would take for themselves the land and resources of the Africans.
Perhaps the historic nature of the gathering can be garnered from the fact that, in the words of one American observer, “every important state of Europe, with the exception of Switzerland and Greece, was represented; and, for the first time in history, a delegation from the United States took their seats with those of European powers at a diplomatic conference in Europe.” It was also the first ever international conference on Africa and set the tone for future conferences where the fates of Africa and Africans would be decided by others.
Despite all this, the conference is perhaps more remembered for what it represents rather than what it actually did. The popular idea of the conference as a bunch of bearded and moustachioed white men drawing lines on a map representing territory they had no idea about is apocryphal. The conference did not actually partition the continent. In fact, at first glance it seems to barely deserve notoriety. In one of the early histories of the Conference published in 1943, Sybil Crowe avers that it failed in every one of its stated objectives, from the establishment of free navigation of the Congo and Niger rivers, the creation of an internationalised free trade zone across the centre of the continent, to the improvement of the moral and material well-being of the native population.
Even the notion that it succeeded in establishing a regime to regulate the future acquisition of territory on the continent in order to prevent conflict between the European powers doesn’t appear likely to pass the smell test. As Crowe points out, “the rules laid down concerning effective occupation, applied only to the coasts of West Africa, which had already nearly all been seized”. And three decades after the conference, when Europe convulsed into ethnic war, the colonial possessions were quickly drawn into the conflict.
However, things are not always as they seem. Matthew Craven argues that it might be uncharitable to look at the conference as a purely cynical exercise and that the goals it set out fell victim to the means set out to achieve them. Therefore, rather than an ineffectual failure, the conference’s General Act “had an important effect upon the future of Africa [but] it was not an effect to be conceptualised in conventional terms.” For example, though it intended to establish a free trade regime, the structures it established led inexorably to the horror that was the Congo Free State. Similarly, as Godfrey Uzoigwe observes, it was through the operation of pre-existing concepts of doctrines of spheres of influence and hinterland that the rules governing acquisition of territory along the coast were extended inland. The conference’s true innovation, the doctrine of effective occupation, militarised the process and imbued it with violence, especially when faced with the inevitable African resistance.
Still, popular memory does not handle complexity well.
In 2017, addressing the Humanitarian Congress Berlin , then ICRC Operations Coordinator, Mamadou Sow, began his remarks by noting “I am from Africa. And it’s very interesting to be in Berlin for a Congress”. The joke fell flat. He would later comment on X that it was the day he “realised that the majority of educated Europeans know little about their colonial history”.
It is perhaps not unexpected that European memories of their imperial pasts are selective and many times mistaken. After all, there have been concerted efforts by their governments to erase, hide or completely rewrite these histories. However, it is among Africans themselves that amnesia about the impact of the conference is most surprising.
Though the conference did not actually partition the continent, it did set up the regime that within a decade led to its conquest and the parcelling out of its territory. However, it did something even worse – it formalised and legitimised the idea of Africa, as described by Joanne Yao, as “conceptually empty and ready to be remade by European models”. Africa became the new wineskin into which Europe poured its old wine.
Yao writes of the Berlin Conference that “it is not that Europeans believed [Africa] had no population centers or organized societies; instead … diplomats understood this geography to be empty of political authorities that mattered in international diplomacy and the central work at Berlin.”
At Berlin, it was not just European institutions that were transplanted to Africa. It was also the European imagination. Africa was transformed from a continent of nations into a patchwork of territories, its people were infantilised and made wards of the Europeans, and its resources were internationalised. This act of reimagination and the subjugation that followed were then reinforced by what Professor Terence Ranger described as the “systematic inventions of African traditions – ethnicity, customary law, ‘traditional’ religion. Before colonialism Africa was characterised by pluralism, flexibility, multiple identity; after it, African identities of ‘tribe’, gender and generation were all bounded by the rigidities of invented tradition.”
Nearly one-and-a-half centuries after the end of the conference, that European conceptualisation continues to influence how the people of the continent think of themselves and of their continent. It is not as a continent of peoples but a continent of colonies that became countries. At the global level, it has been Africanised – its people transformed into an undifferentiated mass of “natives” sharing a mystical cultural unity and uniquely “African” values borrowed from Victorian England – while locally those same people have been tribalised for the purposes of ruling them.
This is not to take away the agency of the people who became Africans. Despite being locked out of the conference, on the ground they resisted, collaborated and entrepreneured their way around the systems imposed by the colonial regimes, just as they had done in the past. Yet the overarching framework of European imagination remained though the act itself was largely forgotten. Berlin is today remembered by many solely as an exercise in map-making.
Another idea that was grafted onto the African consciousness is that of “development”. While the conference was in effect a land grab, it was dressed up in the language of humanitarianism, with German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who convened it, stating in his opening statement that its key aim was to “bring the natives of Africa within the pale of civilisation”.
This construction of African natives as primitive and uncivilised was based on a European conception of a single developmental track for all mankind with the West ahead of everyone else. In this imaginary, Africa was, as Georg Hegel had infamously declared six decades before, “the land of childhood,” which now needed the mature, developed, and benevolent guiding hand of the European.
Many Africans will recognise this framing, not only from the oft-repeated fact that the continent boasts the youngest population on earth, but also the peculiar penchant among European visitors to take photographs with or even adopt African children. More seriously the idea of Africa as “underdeveloped” implies the need to ape the path and outcomes of “developed” Europe. It is no coincidence that visions of “development” on the continent always feature stuff that exists in Western cities such as skyscrapers and elevated highways. It appears that Africans have accepted Bismarck’s conflation of Westernisation with both civilisation and modernisation.
In tandem with this is acceptance of the idea that the African has little to learn from his supposedly Hobbesian history prior to colonisation. And that suffering on the continent has little to do with the colonial experience and legacy, or being trapped in international systems of extraction that are sucking the continent dry. It is all to be blamed on the African native’s supposed backwardness and innate tribal savagery and corruption.
The failure of the popular imagination to trace the impact of colonisation back to the conference necessarily limits Africans’ options when it comes to addressing problems on the continent. It keeps them on the treadmill of “development” and trapped within international institutions that, like those established by the General Act, function in ways that frustrate the lofty ideals and philanthropic intentions proclaimed by their Western creators. If Africa is to free itself, it will have to learn to remember, and through remembering begin to imagine a future whose parameters are not dictated by people outside the continent.
This piece is part of limited series dedicated to mapping the ongoing legacy of the 1884 Berlin Conference on the underdevelopment of the African continent.
Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist and political cartoonist based in Nairobi. He is currently the Senior Editor for Inclusive Storytelling at The New Humanitarian and was previously curator-in-chief of The Elephant.
