IV.

Final Stages (1891-1912)

The early years of the Scramble were accomplished with minimal bloodshed, but that would not be the case in the 1890s and afterward. Some of the most powerful African states put up strong resistance, requiring Europeans to send in well-armed forces. Massed African armies with outdated weapons defeated European forces on occasion, but more frequently modern weaponry won out, producing some of the most one-sided battles in the history of warfare.

France and Britain speeded their conquests in West Africa. France united footholds on the coast with vast holdings of interior grasslands and desert by the century’s end. The major delay for the French was caused by the Mandinka hero Samory Touré. Touré united peoples around the headwaters of the Niger and Volta rivers and fought a guerrilla war until he was captured and exiled in 1898. The British overcame the Ashanti Kingdom in the Gold Coast by 1896 and established protectorates in western and eastern Nigeria. They also allowed the chartered Royal Niger Company to administer northern Nigeria until the company’s forces encountered the advancing French on the middle Niger and came into conflict with the powerful northern Sokoto caliphate. In 1900 the British government took over the control of the territory of Nigeria from the company. By 1903, Britain had conquered the Sokoto caliphate.

Across the rest of the Sudan and into East Africa, resistance was greater and tensions higher. French forces occupied the rest of the central Sudan. These forces met resistance in present-day Chad from Muslim forces of Rabih al-Zubayr until Rabih was killed in 1900. Britain had its hands full taking the upper Nile because of the large Sudanese state created by the Muslim holy leader, Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi. In 1885 the Mahdi’s forces had taken Khartoum and killed British general Charles George Gordon. By the 1890s the Mahdist state was among the strongest in Africa. The British sent in troops under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, and in 1898 they met the Mahdist forces at Omdurman, near Khartoum. Kitchener won a decisive victory, killing almost 11,000 Africans and wounding 16,000 while the British forces suffered only 430 casualties. In the battle’s wake, Kitchener learned of a French force at Fashoda, about 600 km (about 400 mi) south of Khartoum, which was claiming French possession of the Upper Nile. The Upper Nile was nominally Egyptian territory, and since Britain occupied Egypt, it had been considered British. However, France claimed that Britain had failed to achieve “effective occupation” in the Upper Nile as required by the Berlin Conference. Kitchener and a contingent of British troops immediately traveled down the Nile for a standoff that brought the countries to the brink of war. However, the French government, struggling with internal political problems, backed down rather than start a war, and Britain took control of the entire Sudan. In the meantime, the Sultanate of Zanzibar, a former slave and ivory trading power, saw much of its mainland territory seized by Britain and Germany. In 1890 the sultanate submitted to a British protectorate over Zanzibar. The British declared a protectorate over Uganda in 1894, over Kenya in 1895, and completed a railroad from the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria in 1901. The only resistance to European takeover that was successful over the long run occurred in Ethiopia. Here the forces of Emperor Menelik II soundly defeated an invading Italian army at the Battle of Ādwa in 1896.

Two events in the early 1900s served to stifle enthusiasm for colonial takeover in Africa. One was the exposure of atrocities in Leopold’s Congo Free State. Here, colonial agents and private companies were forcing Africans to gather raw rubber without payment and killing or maiming those who failed to meet quotas. In the end, international pressure forced Leopold to cede his private colony to Belgium, and in 1908 the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo. The other event was the Boer War (1899-1902) in southern Africa, which pitted whites against whites. Discovery of gold in the Transvaal in the mid-1880s had brought wealth to the Afrikaner republics in southern Africa. When Afrikaner governments taxed foreigners heavily and stifled foreign profit-taking, British imperialists sought to take over the region. Cecil Rhodes’s 1895 plot to stage a revolt in the Transvaal failed. Tensions between the mighty British government and the small, white-ruled republics escalated until war broke out in 1899. Following early Afrikaner success, the war settled into a brutal guerrilla struggle, putting off ultimate British victory until 1902. In 1910 the various British colonies at Africa’s southern tip were joined into the Union of South Africa, a dominion of Britain.

North Africa was the scene of the Scramble’s final events. After years of rivalry that sometimes verged on open hostilities, Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale in 1904. This “friendly agreement' quietly gave France a free hand to take Morocco while it officially removed the obsolete Egyptian “dual control” system and left Egypt to Britain. France, Spain, and Germany quarreled over Morocco until 1912, when France and Spain divided the territory. The same year, Italy seized what is now Libya, the last vestige of Ottoman territory in Africa. (The Italians were opposed by Muslim groups in the interior until 1931.)