The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Determined to ward off the French, Leopold established a new front organisation, the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC), and ordered agents in the field to obtain new treaties assigning it sovereignty. ‘The treaties must be as brief as possible,’ Leopold demanded, ‘and in a couple of articles must grant us everything.’ To back up the Association’s presence on the ground, he also began to set up a private army, sending Stanley a thousand rifles, a dozen Krupp field guns and four machine guns.

  Returning to Europe in June 1884 at the end of his five-year contract, Stanley took with him as many as 400 treaties. ‘We have a comparatively continuous territory from Vivi to Stanley Falls,’ he wrote in his diary. Stanley himself had obtained only a few treaties. The rest had been obtained by agents.

  The text of the treaties and the payments made for them varied. At Isangila, Stanley recorded that he had been able to purchase land by providing local chiefs with ‘an ample supply of fine clothes, flunkey coats, and tinsel-braided uniforms, with a rich assortment of marketable wares . . . not omitting a couple of bottles of gin’. A treaty drawn up for the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela in April 1884 stated that in return for ‘one piece of cloth per month’ for each of the chiefs, they promised:

  freely of their own accord, for themselves and their heirs and successors for ever . . . [to] give up to the said Association the sovereignty and all sovereign and governing rights to all their territories . . . and to assist by labour or otherwise, any works, improvements or expeditions which the said Association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories . . . All roads and waterways running through the country, the right of collecting tolls on the same and all game, fishing, mining and forest rights, are to be the absolute property of the said Association.

  In August 1884, Stanley was called to Leopold’s seaside summer residence at Ostend for a series of meetings. Presented with a map of Africa and a red pencil, he was asked to draw an outline of the territory now said to belong to the AIC. As the king watched, Stanley obligingly drew an outline that extended far to the north and south of the equator and stretched from the Atlantic coast to Lake Tanganyika. In the centre lay the frail thread of the Congo stations, seventeen in all. They were no more than pinpoints in the forest, a few buildings with thatched roofs and shady verandas, sheltered by palm trees, with the AIC flag – a blue standard with a single gold star – flying from a pole. Around them lay a million square miles of unexplored African territory. This was the land that Leopold was determined to turn into his personal empire.

  The claims made in Belgium and France to rights over a vast swathe of the Congo Basin prompted a chain reaction in other European states. France’s ratification of the Makoko Treaty in November 1882 persuaded Britain to support Portugal’s claims to both banks of the Lower Congo as far north as Cabinda. Portugal’s claims were based largely on the exploits of its explorers in the fifteenth century, notably its dealings with the old kingdom of Kongo, and its possession of trading posts on both sides of the Congo estuary. But Portugal was too weak a state to make much of an argument on its own and turned to Britain for support. By backing Portugal’s claims, Britain hoped to deny the French control of the Lower Congo and keep the river open for free navigation. But Britain’s support for Portugal’s claims was in turn opposed by Leopold and by Germany’s chancellor, Bismarck. Leopold saw Britain’s negotiations with Portugal as a conspiracy to keep powers other than Britain and Portugal away from the Congo. Bismarck viewed Anglo-Portuguese negotiations as an attempt by Britain to use Portugal as a puppet to further its own interests. Bismarck was also averse to the idea of giving protectionist France control of the Congo region; he therefore supported Leopold’s claims: little Belgium and its king’s private venture presented no threat to German interests. France, meanwhile, was opposed to any British intervention.

  But the burgeoning row over the Congo set off by Leopold’s quest for ‘a slice of this magnifique gâteau africain’ was but one aspect of a growing European clamour for African territory.

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  SPHERES OF INTEREST

  Over a period of five years, from 1880 to 1885, and beyond, Africa became the target of growing European rivalry. ‘When I left the Foreign Office in 1880 nobody thought about Africa,’ Britain’s Lord Salisbury remarked. ‘When I returned to it in 1885 the nations of Europe were almost quarrelling with each other as to the various portions of Africa they could obtain.’

  A major factor behind the tide of European encroachment in Africa was the rising might of Germany in the European arena. Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 and its unification as an empire in 1871 produced a new balance of power which the German chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was determined to maintain in Germany’s favour. Bismarck at the time had no interest in establishing German colonies in Africa, but he used the territories that other European states claimed there as pawns in his own game of diplomacy in Europe.

  In 1878, Bismarck hosted a conference of European powers in Berlin designed to deal with the ramifications of Turkey’s disintegrating empire. African territory was of only minor interest. As a means of placating France, he proposed in secret that Tunisia, nominally subject to Ottoman suzerainty, should be handed to the French. Salisbury, on behalf of Britain, concurred. According to a French account, Salisbury told them: ‘Do what you like there.’ France made no move there for the next three years. But when Italy showed signs of wanting to appropriate Tunisia in 1882, the French mounted an invasion from Algeria. Although the bey of Tunis was kept in post, Tunisia became, in effect, a French protectorate.

  The next round of rivalry occurred as a result of Britain’s unilateral occupation of Egypt in 1882. The French were furious to be excluded from ‘Dual Control’ of Egypt and sought ways to counter British activities in west Africa and extend French influence there. After procrastinating for two years, French politicians were galvanised into ratifying the Makoko Treaty that Brazza had obtained in the Congo in 1880. In 1883, the French government signed a treaty with King Tofa of Porto Novo on the Dahomey coast, re-establishing a French protectorate abandoned twenty years before. The French also annexed Cotonou and several other ports on the same coastline, driving a wedge between Britain’s sphere of influence at Lagos to the east and its Gold Coast settlements to the west. The French even sent a gunboat to cruise along the Niger Delta and the Oil Rivers, another British preserve, hoping to acquire commercial treaties there. French trading houses too began to challenge British firms on the Niger River. In 1880, there was not a single French trading post between Brass on the coast and the inland kingdom of Nupe; by 1882, there were more than thirty.

  Watching Anglo-French rivalry over Africa unfold, Bismarck remained resolute in ridiculing the idea of ‘overseas projects’. He could see no advantage, only cost and complications. His main concern was to prevent any other power in Europe from gaining ascendancy in Africa. But German trading firms operating in Africa began agitating for government assistance.

  In 1883, a Bremen merchant, Adolf Lüderitz, gained cession of a small harbour on the barren coastline of south-west Africa called Angra Pequena, 150 miles north of the Cape Colony border, and pressed Bismarck for a monopoly of trade in the area and the ‘protection’ of the German flag. Bismarck made enquiries with the British government in London to ascertain the status of German traders in south-west Africa, suggesting that Britain itself might like to extend its ‘protection’ to them. The British had previously taken possession of Walfisch Bay, 200 miles to the north, the only significant harbour between the Cape Colony and Portuguese Angola, but otherwise they regarded the coastline as worthless desert. British officials replied that, although they considered the area to be part of the British ‘sphere of interest’, they had no official rights there and were not inclined to offer protection. Bismarck duly instructed the German consul in Cape Town to accord Lüderitz all ‘assistance’ and to extend consular ‘protection’ to Angra Pequena.

>   Prompted by German commercial interests and a surge of public opinion in Germany in favour of colonial expansion, Bismarck began to adopt a bolder approach. In the autumn of 1883, he sent a series of increasingly strident dispatches to London asking for an unequivocal statement on the status of any British rights to Angra Pequena and its adjacent territory. But the replies he received, as before, were vague. Infuriated by months of obfuscation and delay, Bismarck became convinced that the British were preparing to thwart Germany and steal Angra Pequena for themselves and decided to take unilateral action. His plan was to establish a system of German protectorates in African territories where German traders were already active and confer the right to run them on chartered companies. On 24 April 1884, he declared a Reichschutz giving Lüderitz’s commercial company the right to govern Angra Pequena under imperial charter. Much to the delight of German politicians, he told the Reichstag in June that it was their duty to found a colonial empire in Africa.

  Bismarck’s first move was to dispatch a German consul, Gustav Nachtigal, in a gunboat to obtain treaties in two west African enclaves. Nachtigal stopped initially in the coastal town of Togo to sign an agreement on 5 July with King Mlapa III; he then proceeded to the harbour at Bell Town in Cameroon where local chiefs had given up their attempts to gain British ‘protection’ and were ready to accept German ‘protection’. Nachtigal signed a treaty with King Acqua and King Bell on 14 July – five days before the British consul, Edward Hewett, arrived on a Royal Navy ship with a British offer.

  Bismarck’s next move showed the scale of his ambition. On 7 August, Germany declared Angra Pequena to be its sovereign territory. It followed this with an announcement that it had annexed the whole of south-west Africa from the Orange River to the Kunene River, leaving out only the British enclave at Walfisch Bay. Within the space of six months, a small commercial outpost had ‘ballooned’ into a huge semi-desert colony. Britain, which had hitherto regarded Africa south of the Limpopo as its rightful sphere of interest, was now confronted, in Gladstone’s words, by the ‘German spectre’.

  In the Scramble for Africa that followed, seven European states competed vigorously for possession of African territory: France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium, in the guise of King Leopold. Their motives were mixed. All were driven in part by a sense of national prestige: empire-building abroad marked their status as a great power and gained popular support. All regarded themselves as bearers of a superior culture, bringing enlightenment to a benighted continent, providing justification for any action they saw fit to take. All feared being shut out of colonial markets by rival European states. Britain and Germany, as advocates of free trade, were alarmed by France’s protectionist instincts; both were determined to keep the Congo Basin open for their own trading houses. As newcomers to the scramble, the Germans also worried that the door to colonial expansion might be shut before they had even begun to take part. In the spring of 1884, a ‘door-closing panic’, the Torschlusspanik, galvanised the German electorate. Bismarck, in particular, was intent on ensuring that the weight of Europe’s African empires did not alter the balance of power he wanted to maintain in Europe to suit Germany’s interests. In the case of France, its humiliation in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, and the loss of French territory to Germany, left a military faction determined to revitalise French fortunes through colonial expansion in Africa. In the case of Leopold, he saw in the Congo a money-making opportunity.

  Bismarck continued to play a central role. In October 1884, he sent out invitations to every major power in Europe and an assortment of other states to attend a conference in Berlin to deal with a number of African issues. No African delegate was invited. The main item on the agenda was to settle the matter of navigation rights on the Congo and on the Niger, and, more broadly, to draw up an orderly scheme for the occupation of the coasts of Africa. Bismarck wanted the criteria for recognising territorial claims to include ‘effective occupation’ – in order to undermine British claims based on vague and informal ‘spheres of interest’.

  On 15 November, ministers and plenipotentiaries assembled around a horseshoe-shaped table in the music room at Bismarck’s official residence in Wilhelmstrasse to hear his opening address. With aplomb, Bismarck glossed over the mutual suspicions and rivalries rife among the delegates and dressed up the occupation of Africa with fine words:

  The Imperial Government has been guided by the conviction that all the governments invited here share the desire to associate the natives of Africa with civilisation, by opening up the interior to commerce, by furnishing the natives with the means of instruction, by encouraging missions and enterprises so that useful knowledge may be disseminated, and by paving the way to the suppression of slavery.

  By the time the Berlin conference concluded on 26 February 1885, delegates had resolved to maintain free navigation on the Congo and on the Niger and to keep the Congo Basin a free trade zone. They had also agreed new ground rules for European occupation of the coastline. Henceforth, any state wanting to claim African lands on any part of the coastline was required to notify in advance other states signing the Berlin agreement to enable them to make known any claims of their own. Furthermore, to be valid, all future claims had to be supported by ‘effective occupation’.

  Leopold did well out of the conference. Although his Association Internationale du Congo was not directly represented in Berlin, not yet having the status of a state, Leopold had the support of Bismarck. When Leopold sent Bismarck the map that Stanley had drawn for him encompassing a vast area of the Congo Basin, Bismarck accepted it without demur. Leopold’s AIC was recognised as the legitimate authority in the greater part of the Congo Basin. But Leopold emerged from the conference with even greater gains. In the horse-trading that went on during the conference, despite Portuguese and French claims to land at the mouth of the Congo, Leopold managed to obtain a land corridor linking the port of Matadi to Malebo Pool, giving him access to the sea and a potential route for a railway past the cataracts into the interior. Furthermore, in exchange for giving up claims to the Loango region to the French, Leopold secured agreement for a massive southern extension of his borders to Katanga.

  The territory that Leopold now claimed as his personal empire was more than seventy times the size of Belgium itself, larger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. By royal decree, on 29 May 1885, he named his new domain the État Indépendent du Congo, the Congo Free State. Pondering a choice of title for himself Leopold at first considered ‘Emperor of the Congo’, but he eventually settled for the more modest ‘King-Sovereign’.

  East Africa

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  THE EAGLE AND THE LION

  Within days of the ending of the Berlin conference in February 1885, Bismarck swooped on another slice of the African cake, this time on the east coast. His opportunity came about as a result of the exploits of a 29-year-old German adventurer, Carl Peters. After studying British colonial policy during a visit to England, Peters returned to Germany in 1884 and founded a Company for German Colonisation (GDK). ‘I got tired of being accounted among the pariahs,’ he wrote later, ‘and wished to belong to the master race.’ With limited funds and no official backing, Peters and two companions set out for Zanzibar in October 1884 intending to lay the foundations for a new German colony on the mainland, hitherto regarded as territory belonging to the sultan of Zanzibar. Peters landed on the coast at Bagamoyo on 4 November and travelled westwards inland, persuading a group of twelve local chiefs to put their mark on what were said to be treaties conferring various rights to the GDK. Unable to read or write, the chiefs had little idea of the real nature of the treaties. In what was termed a ‘Treaty of Eternal Friendship’, Mangungu of Msovero offered Peters his territory for ‘the exclusive and universal utilisation of German colonisation’. After only six weeks in the field, Peters returned to Bagamoyo on 17 December and headed back to Berlin, taking with him his bundle of treaties covering four districts: Usagara, Ungulu,
Uzigua and Ukami, an area of 2,500 square miles.

  Impressed by Peters’ efforts, Bismarck decided during the closing stages of the Berlin conference to award his company an imperial charter but to keep the matter secret until it was over. On 3 March 1885, he duly issued a schützbrief announcing that the GDK had been authorised to establish a protectorate in east Africa. Armed with the charter, Peters now raced to extend his treaty-making and flag-raising to other areas, recruiting German agents and instructing them to act with speed, daring and ruthlessness. By July, the frontiers of his domain stretched for hundreds of miles on either side of the original four districts he had visited.

  Peters’ territorial claims represented a blatant intrusion into what had hitherto been considered Britain’s ‘sphere of interest’. The British had earlier toyed with the idea of establishing a protectorate on fertile land at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. But Prime Minister Gladstone had vetoed the project. Rather than confront Bismarck over the issue, the British decided to accommodate him.

  Zanzibar’s sultan, Barghash, was furious that Germany had moved into his own backyard, blocking the main trade routes between Zanzibar and the interior, but he was given short shrift. In answer to a protest note he sent to Berlin, Bismarck dispatched a squadron of five German warships to anchor in Zanzibar opposite the sultan’s palace. Britain advised him to yield to German demands. In December 1885, he signed a treaty with Germany accepting a German protectorate over parts of the mainland he had previously considered his own.