POLITICAL HISTORY, PAGE 7
Historians have employed the term "scramble for Africa" to describe what took place in the 1880s. Pierre De Brazza had the makoko's treaty tucked safely in his pocket. Henry Stanley had Ngaliema's. African chiefs had surrendered territory by treaty before, especially in West and South Africa, but these instances paled in comparison with what was to come. And what was to come depended ultimately on the rivalries among the great powers of Europe.
The three main players in the scramble, Great Britain, France, and Germany, were a scrapping lot. Germany humiliated France in the Franco-Prussian war, which saw the victors annex the French region known as Alsace-Lorraine. An entente between France and Britain had been strained by mutual suspicion ever since the Napoleonic Wars around the turn of the century. Besides that, France feared Britain's unsurpassed naval might, and the two powers were increasingly at odds over their dual control of Egypt. The British also had to contend with internal demands by Irish nationalists for home rule. Preoccupation with these rivalries, coupled with the reality that, so far, African adventures following abolition of the slave trade had been a drain on European treasuries, made the powers reluctant to grab for new colonies. The British, in fact, had rejected treaties Cameron presented to the government on his return from Africa in 1875.
But Livingstone's travels and the explorations of those who followed captured the imagination of the European press and public. More and more voices called for the white man to "civilize" the "dark continent." And here came Brazza and Stanley with their treaties from the Congo River. European politicians began to see in Africa, a continent about which they knew almost nothing, a place where they might play their power games with little or no risk. Those reluctant souls like the anti-imperialist Gladstone were swept along by events, sucked into endorsing policies in which they had little faith. Gladstone, Derby, and Granville of Britain, France's Gambetta, Freycinet, and Ferry, and German Chancellor Bismarck became the models for latter-day leaders—the Brezhnevs, Johnsons, and Kissingers—making policy to secure advantage over one another, disdainful and ignorant of the people who would bear the brunt of their adventures. (Ferry, Johnson, and Kissinger would later be linked more closely by their mutual turpitude in Indochina.) In the words of Thomas Pakenham, "The beauty of hoisting the [French] tricolour [or any other European flag for that matter] in Central Africa was that it would be cheap and easy and threatened no important vested interests. In fact it risked almost nothing—except the lives of heroes like Brazza."31 And there was Belgium's King Leopold too, despite his country's refusal to back him, scheming his way into the thick of the scramble like a party-goer without an invitation.
In September of 1882, Stanley delivered his pact with Ngaliema to Brussels. The French Chamber of Deputies ratified Brazza's makoko treaty early the next year. Both explorers returned to Africa to consolidate their positions through a new round of treaty negotiation and coercion. These activities alarmed the British who had extensive commercial interests along the Gabonese coast and the lower Congo River. Meanwhile the British were also sniffing around the Niger delta, and Germany, which for years had scoffed at any talk of colonies, shocked everyone in 1884 by claiming Togo, Cameroon, and South-West Africa. Clearly the scramble was becoming unseemly. To tidy things up, Germany's Bismarck proposed a conference of the competing powers be held in Berlin.
Fourteen countries, many of which had little or no stake in Africa, answered Bismarck's invitation. The U.S., Russia, and several smaller nations attended as observers while the major combatants, Britain, France, and Germany, haggled. Unseen in all this, but clearly felt, was the skillful hand of Leopold II, who manipulated the powers like a personal collection of marionettes. Leopold and his assortment of agents and intermediaries had been working for months before the conference, deceiving and dealing the powers one against another until each country's self-interest was revealed to correspond to Leopold's vision. He had reinvented his CEHC as the International Association of the Congo, characterizing it as a philanthropic organization dedicated to the suppression of slavery and the preservation of free trade for all nations in the Congo. With that line he won recognition for the Association from the United States. Next he maneuvered France into recognizing his venture by wisely explaining how such an act would keep their rivals, the British, out of central Africa. He even agreed to sell the Congo to France if the IAC failed. "Suddenly the other industrial Powers realized the danger," writes Thomas Pakenham in his masterful work The Scramble for Africa. "If Leopold failed to make a go of the Congo—and at this moment no one doubted he would fail—then France, the arch-protectionist, would take over a million and a half square miles of Central Africa, stretching from Gabon to the Great Lakes. This was unthinkable. At a stroke Leopold had created new allies of France's rivals, anxious to believe what he said, and to help him to succeed."32
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