North Africa
At the beginning of the 19th century. Most of the North African states belonged to the Ottoman Empire. But the collapse of this empire was already beginning and the place of the Turkish authorities began to be gradually taken by European ones. Thus, France subjugated Algeria, followed by Tunisia and Morocco. Here is an episode of an attack by warriors of an African tribe living in the desert on a French fort, which is defended by soldiers of the famous Foreign Legion. The ruler needed money and therefore sold his share of the Suez Canal to Great Britain, which could thus influence the internal affairs of Egypt and completely subordinate it to its power. Egypt, in turn, dominated Sudan. In 1883, a Muslim preacher led a revolt there against Egyptian rule. British troops were sent to suppress it, but they were defeated at Khartoum.
Trade with Europeans in West Africa
These gold items were made by Ashanti craftsmen, a people who lived in western Africa. The Ashanti state became rich by selling gold and slaves to Europeans. For several years the Ashanti fought against Britain, which sought to conquer them, and in 1901 they were defeated and their state ceased to exist.
Zimbabwe
This was the name of the capital of a wealthy state in southeast Africa. It was destroyed during a war with rival tribes. The surviving ruins, such as the remains of the temple depicted here, indicate that the city was once built by very skilled craftsmen.
South Africa
In 1652, the first Dutch settlers arrived in South Africa. The settlement they founded at the Cape of Good Hope was called the Cape Colony. Most of them began to engage in farming, and the colonists were given the name Boers (from the Dutch word “boer” - farmer). By international treaty concluded in 1814, the Cape Colony became a British possession. In 1835-1837, many Boers, who were unhappy with living under British rule, abandoned their homes and farms and, loading their belongings into wagons, moved north from the Cape to find a new place to settle, free from British rule. This episode went down in South African history as the Great Boer Migration.
Cecil Rhodes made a huge fortune from gold and diamond mining and founded the British South Africa Company, one of whose goals was to build a railway connecting British possessions in the south with the diamond mines north of the new Boer settlements. In 1895, the entire territory received the name Rhodesia.
The Boers began to have armed clashes with the Zulus - the most warlike tribe that lived next to the new Boer settlements. British troops, entering the war on the side of the Boers, helped to finally defeat the Zulus in 1879. Gradually, Britain increased its influence in those areas where the Boers lived. In 1886, gold was found in one of them, which caused a new influx of British people who decided to settle in these places.
Division of Africa by Europeans
In 1880, most of Africa was still independent from any European countries. But between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, European powers one way or another divided almost the entire African continent among themselves.
In 1889, war broke out between the Boers and the British. At first, the advantage was on the side of the Boers, who rode beautiful, fast horses, knew how to track down the enemy and knew the area where the battles were taking place. British troops destroyed Boer farms and their livestock, and the Boers they managed to capture, including women and children, were placed in special prisoner camps. As a result, in 1902 the war ended with the surrender of the Boers.
Colonization of Africa
On the eve of European colonization, the peoples of Tropical and Southern Africa were at different stages of development. Some had a primitive system, others had a class society. It can also be said that in Tropical Africa a sufficiently developed, specifically Negro statehood did not develop, even comparable to the states of the Incas and Mayans. How can we explain this? There are several reasons, namely: unfavorable climate, poor soils, primitive agricultural technology, low level of work culture, fragmentation of a small population, as well as the dominance of primitive tribal traditions and early religious cults. In the end, highly developed civilizations: Christian and Muslim differed from African ones in more developed cultural and religious traditions, that is, a more advanced level of consciousness than that of Africans. At the same time, remnants of pre-class relations persisted even among the most developed peoples. The decomposition of tribal relations most often manifested itself in the exploitation of ordinary community members by the heads of large patriarchal families, as well as in the concentration of land and livestock in the hands of the tribal elite.
In different centuries, both during the Middle Ages and in modern times, various state formations arose in Africa: Ethiopia (Axum), which was dominated by the Christian Monophysite church; a kind of confederation called Oyo arose on the Guinea coast; then Dahomey; in the lower reaches of the Congo at the end of the 15th century. such state entities as Congo, Loango and Makoko appeared; in Angola between 1400 and 1500. A short-lived and semi-legendary political association, Monomotapa, emerged. However, all these proto-states were fragile. Europeans who appeared on the coast of Africa in the 17th-18th centuries. launched a large-scale slave trade here. Then they tried to create their own settlements, outposts and colonies here.
In southern Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope, a site for the Dutch East India Company was established - Kapstadt (Cape Colony). Over time, more and more immigrants from Holland began to settle in Kapstadt, who waged a stubborn struggle with local tribes, Bushmen and Hottentots. At the beginning of the 19th century. The Cape Colony was captured by Great Britain, after which the Dutch-Boers moved to the north, subsequently founding the Transvaal and Orange republics. European Boer colonists increasingly explored southern Africa, engaging in the slave trade and forcing the black population to work in gold and diamond mines. In the English zone of colonization, the Zulu tribal community led by Chaka in the first third of the 19th century. managed to consolidate and subjugate a number of Bantu tribes. But the clash of the Zulus, first with the Boers, and then with the British, led to the defeat of the Zulu state.
Africa in the 19th century became the main springboard for European colonization. By the end of this century, almost the entire African continent (with the exception of Ethiopia) was divided between Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Belgium. Moreover, the first place in the number of colonies and native population belonged to Great Britain, second to France (mainly north and south of the Sahara), third to Germany, fourth to Portugal and fifth to Belgium. But little Belgium inherited a huge territory (about 30 times larger than the territory of Belgium itself), the richest in its natural resources - the Congo.
European colonialists, having done away with the primary proto-state formations of African leaders and kings, brought here forms of a developed bourgeois economy with advanced technology and transport infrastructure. The local population, experiencing a cultural “shock” from meeting with a civilization that was fabulously developed at that time, gradually became familiar with modern life. In Africa, as well as in other colonies, the fact of belonging to one or another metropolis immediately manifested itself. So, if the British colonies (Zambia, Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, Southern Rhodesia, etc.) found themselves under the control of economically developed, bourgeois and democratic England and began to develop more quickly, then the population of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea (Bissau) belonging to the more backward Portugal, more slowly.
Colonial conquests were not always economically justified; sometimes the struggle for colonies in Africa looked like a kind of political sport - to bypass an opponent at all costs and not allow oneself to be bypassed. Secularized European thought during this period abandoned the idea of spreading the “true religion” -Christianity, but she saw the civilizing role of Europe in the backward colonies in the spread of modern science and enlightenment. In addition, in Europe it became even indecent not to have colonies. This can explain the emergence of the Belgian Congo, German and Italian colonies, which were of little use.
Germany was the last to rush to Africa, but nevertheless managed to capture Namibia, Cameroon, Togo and East Africa. In 1885, on the initiative of German Chancellor Bismarck, the Berlin Conference was convened, in which 13 European countries took part. The conference established rules for the acquisition of still independent lands in Africa, in other words, the remaining unoccupied lands were divided. By the end of the 19th century, only Liberia and Ethiopia retained political independence in Africa. Moreover, Christian Ethiopia successfully repelled the attack of Italy in 1896 and even defeated Italian troops in the Battle of Adua.
The division of Africa also gave rise to such a variety of monopolistic associations as privileged companies. The largest of these companies was the British South African Company, created in 1889 by S. Rhodes and which had its own army. The Royal Niger Company operated in West Africa, and the British East Africa Company operated in East Africa. Similar companies were created in Germany, France, and Belgium. These monopolistic companies were a kind of state within a state and turned the African colonies with their population and resources into a sphere of complete subjugation. The richest African colony was South Africa, which belonged to Britain and Boer colonists from the Transvaal and Orange Republics, because gold and diamonds were found there. This led the British and Boers from Europe to start the bloody Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, in which the British won. The diamond-rich Transvaal and Orange republics became colonies of the British. Subsequently, in 1910, the richest British colony, South Africa, formed the British Dominion - the Union of South Africa.
Contrary to popular belief, Europeans did not begin to conquer it from the first second of their stay on the African coast in the same way as they did in America. Africa greeted the first colonists with dangerous diseases, centralized states and numerous, albeit poorly armed, armies. The first attempts at aggression against African kingdoms showed that it would not be possible to conquer them with a detachment of 120 people, as Pizarro did with the Inca Empire. As a result, for almost four centuries after the appearance of the first Portuguese fort of Elmina in Africa (1482), European powers had virtually no ability to control the interior of the continent, being content only with colonies on the coast and at the mouths of rivers.
Many European countries managed to participate in the colonization of the Dark Continent. As the first “masters” of Africa, which was granted to them by a special bull of the Pope, the Portuguese extremely quickly, literally within the lifetime of one generation, managed to capture or establish strongholds in Western, Southern and Eastern Africa. At the beginning of the 16th century. North Africa was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Only a century later, in the 17th century, these two empires were followed by young colonial lions - England, the Netherlands, France. Their colonies in Africa in the 17th century. had Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Brandenburg and even Courland, a small Baltic duchy that for some time owned an island and a fortress at the mouth of the Gambia River, where landless Latvian peasants were settled by colonists.
Europeans preferred to buy or rent land from local rulers rather than fight for it. In Africa, they were not interested in land, but primarily in goods: slaves, gold, ivory, ebony, and these goods could be bought relatively inexpensively or taken as tribute. In addition, in Europe at that time the prevailing belief was that in the interior of the continent the climate was unbearable for a white man, and this was the absolute truth: malaria, schistosomiasis and sleeping sickness significantly shortened the life of a European in Africa. The Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique and the Dutch colonists in South Africa were the ones who moved deeper into the continent, but overall the map of European possessions on the continent in 1850 was not much different from 1600.
In the 1720s. Peter I decided to equip an expedition for Russia's exploration of the island of Madagascar. It was not destined to take place, but the archives preserved a letter from the All-Russian Emperor to a certain non-existent “king of Madagascar”, where Peter calls himself his “friend”: “By the grace of God we, Peter I, are the Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia, etc., etc., and so on, to the highly venerable king and ruler of the glorious island of Madagascar, we have decided to send you our Vice Admiral Wilster with several officers for some matters: for your sake, we ask that you be inclined to admit them to us, to give them free stay, and to that in our name they will offer you complete and complete faith, and with such a willing answer they have deigned to release them back to us, which we trust from you, and we remain your friend. Given in St. Petersburg on November 9, 1723. year".
As for the map of the African interior before the European conquest, it is usually presented as a continuous blank spot. It is easy to see that this is not so: in the middle of the 19th century. there were at least two dozen fairly developed states on the continent, with which Europeans for the time being maintained very close and relatively friendly relations.
Everything changed literally overnight in the last quarter of the 19th century, and there were several reasons for this. Europe learned the properties of quinine, produced from the bark of the South American cinchona tree and capable of treating malaria, which was no longer so terrible for European settlers. Europe developed the technology of rifled weapons, which had enormous advantages over the smoothbore musket with which the most advanced African armies were equipped. Europe has accumulated enough information about inner Africa thanks to a whole cohort of glorious travelers who successfully passed through the jungles, swamps, deserts and proved that the sun there does not burn a person alive, as the ancient authors believed. Finally, Europe had experienced the Industrial Revolution and was in dire need of new markets for manufactured goods, which were being produced at unprecedented speed and in large volumes. To start the colonial race, all that was needed was to fire the first shot. It was destined not to be done by the great powers, but by little Belgium.
This shot rang out in 1876 in Brussels, when the Belgian King Leopold II announced the creation of the African International Association to promote scientific and humanitarian projects in the Congo Basin. Throughout Europe, this move was perceived as the beginning of the Belgian conquest of Central Africa, and so it actually was. Having landed at the mouth of the Congo, Belgian soldiers and the black militia armed by them headed deep into the continent, forcing local leaders to sign enslaving treaties with King Leopold on the “alliance”, which actually gave the land for next to nothing into the hands of the Europeans. Many leaders simply did not understand what they were putting their signature or fingerprint on. Dissenters were killed or imprisoned, and uprisings were suppressed with unprecedented cruelty. Western journalists were aware of cases of how policemen hired by the king not only killed, but also ate their victims among the civilian population, primarily children. The cruelty of the exploitation of the local population on rubber plantations, mines, and road construction organized by the Belgians was unprecedented in the history of Africa. People died in tens of thousands, and at the same time repression and plunder remained uncontrolled, because the “Congo Free State,” as this huge territory was called with terrible cynicism, was not governed by the Belgian state, but was the personal property of Leopold. This unique lawlessness continued until 1908.
Belgium was immediately followed by England, France, Portugal and Spain, and a little later the young great powers Germany and Italy, who also dreamed of their own colonial empires, joined the division of the African pie that had suddenly become so fashionable.
The race acquired a hurricane speed. Everywhere in Africa, where it was possible to come to an agreement with tribal leaders or break the resistance of local principalities, the European flag was immediately hoisted, and the territory was considered annexed to the empire. At the Berlin Conference of 1885, where the division of Africa was legalized, the great powers called on each other to behave in a correct, civilized manner, but, as always happens during division, clashes were difficult to avoid. One of the most famous “incidents” occurred near the Sudanese town of Fashoda in 1898, when Marchand’s French detachment, coming from West Africa, came face to face with Kitchener’s English expedition, which was also busy planting flags. Intensive negotiations and numerous concessions were required to avoid war: the French withdrew to the south and Sudan moved into the British sphere of influence.
It cannot be said that this lightning-fast division of the continent cost the colonialists without losses. The British had to go through several bloody battles to capture the Ashanti Confederacy in Ghana and the Zulu state in South Africa, while the French overcame the desperate resistance of the Fulani emirates and the Tuaregs of Mali. For two years, German troops had to suppress the Herero uprising in Namibia, which ended in a large-scale genocide of Africans.
Although by 1900 the African continent had turned into a kind of patchwork scarf painted over with the colors of European empires, Tanganyika (the territory of present-day Tanzania) was subjugated by Germany only in 1907, and France secured control over West Africa no earlier than 1913. The liberation struggle of the Libyan tribes against the Italians continued until 1922, and the Spaniards managed to pacify the warlike Berbers of Morocco only in 1926.
Only one state created by Africans managed to maintain independence - Ethiopia. At the end of the 19th century. the Ethiopian Negus Menelik II even managed to take part in the division of Africa, more than doubling the borders of his state at the expense of various tribes in the south, west and east.
The history of Africa dates back thousands of years; it is from here, according to the scientific world, that humanity originated. And here many peoples returned, however, only in order to establish their dominance.
The proximity of the north to Europe led to the fact that Europeans actively penetrated the continent in the 15th and 16th centuries. Also the African West, at the end of the 15th century it was controlled by the Portuguese, they began to actively sell slaves from the local population.
Other states from Western Europe followed the Spaniards and Portuguese to the “dark continent”: France, Denmark, England, Spain, Holland and Germany.
As a result of this, East and North Africa found themselves under European yoke; in total, more than 10% of African lands were under their rule in the mid-19th century. However, by the end of this century, the extent of colonization had reached more than 90% of the continent.
What attracted the colonialists? First of all, natural resources:
- wild valuable trees in large quantities;
- growing a variety of crops (coffee, cocoa, cotton, sugar cane);
- precious stones (diamonds) and metals (gold).
The slave trade also gained momentum.
Egypt has long been drawn into the capitalist economy at the global level. After the Suez Canal was opened, England actively began to compete to see who would be the first to establish their dominance in these lands.
The English government took advantage of the difficult situation in the country, prompting the creation of an international committee to manage the Egyptian budget. As a result, an Englishman became the Minister of Finance, a Frenchman was in charge of public works. Then difficult times began for the population, which was exhausted from numerous taxes.
The Egyptians tried in various ways to prevent the creation of a foreign colony in Africa, but eventually England sent troops there to take over the country. The British were able to occupy Egypt by force and cunning, making it their colony.
France began the colonization of Africa from Algeria, where for twenty years it proved its right to rule by war. The French also conquered Tunisia with prolonged bloodshed.
Agriculture was developed in these lands, so the conquerors organized their own huge estates with vast lands on which Arab peasants were forced to work. Local peoples were convened to build facilities for the needs of the occupiers (roads and ports).
And although Morocco was a very important object for many European countries, it remained free for a long time thanks to the rivalry of its enemies. Only after strengthening power in Tunisia and Algeria did France begin to subjugate Morocco.
In addition to these countries in the north, Europeans began to explore southern Africa. There, the British easily pushed the local tribes (San, Koikoin) into uninhabited territories. Only the Bantu peoples did not submit for a long time. 
As a result, in the 70s of the 19th century, the English colonies occupied the southern coast, without penetrating deep into the mainland.
The influx of people into this region is timed to coincide with the discovery in the river valley. Orange diamond. The mines became centers of settlements, and cities were created. Formed joint stock companies have always used the cheap power of the local population.
The British had to fight for Zululand, which was included in Natal. The Transvaal could not be completely conquered, but the London Convention implied certain restrictions for the local government.
Germany also began to occupy these same territories - from the mouth of the Orange River to Angola, the Germans declared their protectorate (southwest Africa).
If England sought to extend its power in the south, then France directed its efforts inland in order to colonize the continuous strip between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. As a result, the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Guinea came under French rule.
The British also owned some West African countries - mainly the coastal territories of the Gambia, Niger and Volta rivers, as well as the Sahara.
Germany in the west was able to conquer only Cameroon and Togo.
Belgium sent forces to the center of the African continent, so Congo became its colony.
Italy got some lands in northeast Africa - huge Somalia and Eritrea. But Ethiopia was able to repel the attack of the Italians; as a result, it was this power that was practically the only one that retained independence from the influence of Europeans.
Only two did not become European colonies:
- Ethiopia;
- Eastern Sudan.
Former colonies in Africa
Naturally, foreign ownership of almost the entire continent could not last long; the local population sought to gain freedom, since their living conditions were usually deplorable. Therefore, since 1960, the colonies quickly began to be liberated.
That year, 17 African countries became independent again, most of them former French colonies in Africa and those under UN control. In addition to this, they also lost their colonies:
- UK - Nigeria;
- Belgium - Congo.
Somalia, divided between Britain and Italy, united to form the Somali Democratic Republic.
And although Africans mostly became independent as a result of mass desire, strikes and negotiations, in some countries wars were still fought to gain freedom:
- Angola;
- Zimbabwe;
- Kenya;
- Namibia;
- Mozambique.
The rapid liberation of Africa from colonists has led to the fact that in many newly created states the geographical boundaries do not correspond to the ethnic and cultural composition of the population, and this becomes the cause of disagreements and civil wars.
And new rulers do not always comply with democratic principles, which leads to massive dissatisfaction and a deterioration of the situation in many African countries.
Even now in Africa there are such territories that are governed by European states:
- Spain - Canary Islands, Melilla and Ceuta (in Morocco);
- Great Britain - Chagos Archipelago, Ascension Islands, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha;
- France - Reunion, Mayotte and Eparce islands;
- Portugal - Madeira.
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