A) AFRICA BEFORE THE BERLIN CONFERENCE
If the Berlin Conference was an essential event, it was however just the “summit” and the outcome of a process spread over time.
It is from 1815 that the European powers are closely interested in the African continent.
At this time, except the English colony of the Cap, the presence of Boers and those of Portuguese from Angola and Mozambique, deep Africa was still free and independent.
Between 1815 and 1884, everything was changing.
Admittedly, at the beginning, Africa was framed by a multitude of political sovereignties where tiny entities and territories broader than the European states together.
Then the Bantu world where a “parental democracy” was prevailing and where the necessity of a structured state organization wasn’t essential, the Sudanese world and South Africa where were prevailing at the same time, former nigger-driver states and new governmental bodies. The nigger-driver States were incidentally sclerosed, having lost their dynamism and having to disrupt quickly into independent casual principalities (Sene-Gambian Wolof and Mandingoes Kingdoms, Ashanti, Fon and Yoruba States of the Benin Golf, the oriental Coasts sultanates).
The new state bodies were constituted by very structured Islamic States in Occidental Sudan (Peul, Toucouleur States, Fouta Toro, Fouta Djallon, Macina) and Peul Haoussa, Mandingoes, Wolof, the Tcha empire where it existed a political transformation reflecting a territorial integration marked with a concentration of power and social and economic mutations. It was also the case of Samory Touré’s Mandingoes Empire, the Chaka Empire, the inter-lacustral Kingdoms Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, etc.).
These kingdoms and empires were very structured…
In spite of this, the African continent already showed the weaknesses which are fatal to it:
- First, the predations of four centuries slavery are far from being burnt off, Africa being exhausted and deprived;
- Then the political weaknesses: fights between families to get power, plots, betrayals;
- Demographical weaknesses due to endemic diseases, razzias, and conflicts between clans;
- Economic weaknesses: subsistence economy, abstract modern industries, dependence on Europe and Middle East.
These weaknesses would be very quickly exploited by the European Powers in two decisive phases.
The first phase went from 1815 to 1870: Colonies, control points emerged on the African coasts. French and English accelerated their actions (and in some measure Portuguese already present in Mozambique and in Angola in the conditions the casualty of which would be underlined by some participants).
The French colonies in the “South Rivers” belonging to the Senegalese colony made by Faidherbe to the disadvantage of El hadj Omar TALL, Nossi BE, Comoros, Mayotte and Algeria – It was the time when the English took Lagos (1861) then proceeded to the creation of the “Gold Coast” colony by repurchasing colonies from Danish and Dutch, -
Time when they annexed Natal, Transvaal, Orange and spread their protectorate on the Bechuanaland by possessing the Somali Coast (1852). Then in 1871, a real medical shield was established throughout Africa by the European Powers (England, France, Portugal and Spain).
The path was open for the second phase of the colonial expansion.
It went from 1876 to 1884. Influenced by the 1873 economic crisis, the resulting protectionism, the prevailing slump, under the guidance of racist ideologies promoting the white race superiority (Hegel, Nietzsche, Leroy-Beaulieu, Gobineau, covered by scientific associations (the geographical one will lead right away to Leopold II of Belgium’s African International Association) and multiplying annexed colonies.. The French reached Bamako located in the center of West Africa, established a protectorate on Fouta-Toro, took Guinea, Port-Novo Kingdom, went along and took the costal margin of Ivory Coast, Tunisia and Diego-Suarez. Savorgan de Brazza signed a protectorate treaty with Makoko. England occupied Egypt, looked after Sudan, spread its influence in South Africa. German religious missions were multiplied and protectorate treaties were signed in Togo, Tanganyika and in South West Africa. The European rivalries became numerous, Portugal claimed its rights on the Congo countries, and Berlin detonator would be right here in the depth of Africa.
The quick success of colonization could be compared but to the anarchy and the disorder it caused in the inter-European relations: It became compulsory to go beyond these rivalries and solve them. Someone, very shortly converted into a colonizer and whose ambitions grew fast, would take care of that: that man was Otto Von Bismarck.
Thereupon, at the historical Berlin Conference eve, the occupation and the division of Africa were already in good advance. It dealt from then with set up the rules of the games, to substitute from disordered actions a scientific occupation in Africa from the coasts, to establish influent zones, to solve the “Hinterland” problem.
Fourteen Powers interested in Africa met in the German Reich capital without any African participant. All of them were not colonial but they were all interested. They all asked to participate; was it because of avidity (contingent gains) or for prestige reasons (not to miss a great debate)? Anyhow, they were all conspirators of the Berlin Act even if they wouldn’t profit of it.
In Berlin, it was admittedly about the shipping and trade liberty in the Congo basin, liberty of navigation on the Niger River, Freedom for the slaves because it was about fighting
Slaves’ trade; it was also, about civilization because it was intended to settle the civilization standard concerning Central Africa. But Berlin will also deal with the “determination of the procedures to be observed to insure their validity to the future annexed territories in the African continent.”
Though Berlin conference could be considered as a great moment and a specific moment of world history about colonization, it will however be considered that Asia wasn’t concerned about Berlin; it results that the specificity of the phenomenon for Africa deserves to have the field delimited and to determine the nature.
Did the General Act of Berlin Conference share Africa?
Two readings could be proposed: a historical one, and a juridical one.
Lawyers can see in the Berlin act taken at face value the main features of the right to colonization of Africa by the internalization of the African public domain, establishing thus more a period in the division of Africa than the division itself.
They were struck by the similarity between Yalta myth and Berlin myth both born from the telescoping between the decisions of the diplomatic Conference and the resulting events.
According to them, Berlin general act, later confirmed by Brussels conference (1910) and Geneva Conference (1919) would devote “the missionary international law”.
Historians, recognizing that Berlin was the affirmation to the right to colonization, and the right to legitimization of colonization, the right for the powers to dispose of somebody else’s territory in a sense quite opposite to people’s right to dispose of themselves, committed to admit that the Conference was the act which will confirm the division already started in Africa by giving a new impulsion to the said sharing.
Beyond a nit-picking legalism, the fact is that the defendant belief of some organizers and participants to the Berlin Conference, the resulting actions and reactions, the unremitting rush which will fall on Africa, even on the world, the certainty that Berlin was of course the decisive act which impel the continent sharing.
Several experts attending the Brazzaville symposium insisted on the fact that a greater care should be taken to articles 34 and 35 of the general act.
But the fact of establishing this truth didn’t qualify pro-tanto the established act.
No doubt not meaning the definition the United Nations were giving it. But many experts of the symposium demonstrated that Berlin was a consequence of a historical moment of a development and economic phase from the Occident and could be analyzed as a free
aggression with, as a bound correlate, the right to compensation, even moral, when other points of view promoted that in that precise field, the best compensation is to make people emancipated by getting rid of the Berlin system.
The right to archives, the right to restitution of the cultural heritage of objects confiscated by the colonization abundantly underlined, just the right which could be used but not called upon to use the events of an armature liable to serve as a frame and justifications to these protests. The aggression, the misfortunes of the past, the common sufferings conscience, the sharing of a common present time lived as a worry had to lead to a real non-alignment according to many participants. But Berlin was always a denial, which is a reply, an immediate reply, first in the world and particularly in America where the black Diaspora would react vehemently against African people’s abstraction (Marcus Garvey), then even in Africa where resistances activated as a will to oppose the colonial conquest and superimposition.
B) RESISTANCES
These resistances are developed in all levels of the Afrian community. They require the establishment of a report.
In this case, four reflexion points were determined:
- Resistance as a will from Africans to oppose the colonial conquest and the superimposition, was a denial under all its forms (political, economic, social, cultural, religious, estethical and philosophical) to be confused with others. So, resistances were not only military, they also took passive or non violent forms...Were they unanimous? We need courage to demystify and demythicize History: if there were resitances there were also treaties, resistances and betrayals being linked in a dialectical way to Peoples and Nations History.
A periodization effort clearly shows that at the beginning of the colonial invasion, there were Africans welcoming colonisers as liberators and betrayals were quite frequent.
It was only in in the second period that a clearer and more accurate conscience of the colonial fact starts to emerge. The methods used by the coloniser (kluges, commercial baits, imposed treaties) often favoured the defections among the Africans with their debauched and emollient effects. If African rivalries undisputedly existed, it would be vain to try to evacuate them, but external Powers, however, aggravate the situation. The resistance, may it be military or civilian, passive or active, was often the aristocracy effect, populations had a common interest, but sometimes there were divergent or even opposed actions. Leaders, heroes, Great Captains materialized gathering people around them, but the initiative sometimes came from the basis.
Finally, it happened that the interests of the two social opposed levels and the European presence were used to resolve these contradictions. Anyway, the People-heroes dialectics must not lead to a deceiving Manichaeism. If History mainly keeps the heroes, it is now established that the resistance was most of the time all the people’s business. Resistance against penetration, against domination, Africans Diaspora’s resistance, non Africans’ resistance against the colonial project; what is going on nowadays in South Africa recalls the circumstances and conditions of struggle led by the peoples and African leaders.
Considered as a total phenomenon, the African resistances will often take the form of messianic tendencies, as kibanguism, though some of them thought to see through these forms alienation facts. Were resistances to colonial superimposition a failure? On the military field, it seems to be recognized; nevertheless, some thinkers have a more complex opinion, because this form of resistance will later ensure nationalism emergence. The causes of the failure relative to African resistances must not be limited to the naivety and incredibility of great African captains or of kings and chiefs, who welcomed, on behalf of a wrong hospitality, those who became their assailants, nor to their lack of awareness of “the imperialist phenomenon”. The methods used by the occupant played a role as well: kluge, treaties and submission act, Trojan horses use in a sophisticated way (Timeo Danaos and Dona Ferentes!).
At last the military weakness, the lack of cohesion and often the absence of peoples’ adhesion to the state systems which seemed strange to them. Most of the time the defeat incurred by the Heroes and the Great Captains was political and social before being military.
This survey led in the past, which, according to the participants’ wishes should be underlined in the African teaching programmes at all levels, would only have a purely political impact if the symposium didn’t worry about “drawing the consequences which resulted on the political, economic, socio-cultural fields so that African peoples and their leaders learn from this for the benefit of Africa today and in the future (...). This past is useful, not to harp on resentment and to flame hatreds, but for a clearer perception of new ways to the light of the lessons in the past, to better apprehend the future, thanks to experience, ours and others”. It’s anyway the sense given to the excellent message through which The Congolese head of State? His Excellency Mr. Denis Sassou-Nguesso opened the symposium.
It is in that spirit that the 3rd and 4th Commissions organized their debates, the objective of such a meeting dealing eventually with observing, considering and apprehending in what measure the remnants of Berlin Conference may be overcome, and to define the strategies to be implemented to read out Berlin conference.
