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The 'Scramble for Africa': everything you wanted to know
00:42:45
Professor Richard Reid explains what happened when European imperial powers made land grabs across the African continent between the 1870s and the First World War
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Richard Reed
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- [02:05]
Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Between the 1870s and the First World War, European colonialists set their sights on Africa, making territorial land grabs that consumed nearly the entire continent. To find out more about how this so called scramble for Africa played out, and to explore its immense impact on Africa and its peoples, I spoke to Richard Reed, professor of African History at the University of Oxford and the author of the African A Long history of the 19th century. Thanks for joining me, Richard. To talk today about the scramble for Africa, before we go any further, let's start with that term itself. What do we mean by the scramble for Africa?
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Richard Reed
So this is the term that's used to describe the European partition of the continent, which conventionally is regarded as spanning the mid-1870s and just before the First World War. And it's pretty much the entire continent kind of parceled out amongst a bunch of European powers.
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Host
So we've got a huge amount to cover in this episode. Obviously we're talking about the history of an entire continent and there's so many different stories within that, but hopefully we can give people an introduction to this topic and they can go out and find more if they want to. Let's just talk for a moment about that term then. Deal. Gaboy on Instagram has asked when the term scramble for Africa, because it's quite distinctive, was coined, was it part of the discussion around this at the time?
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Richard Reed
It was. I mean, we think it was coined in the mid-1880s. So just as the whole thing was really escalating, Some of the earliest literature on the phenomenon refers to the partition of Africa, which is the other phrase that's often used. But yeah, the term scramble has been around really from that point and it was subsequently used by other parts of the world, South America, China and so on. But it begins in the mid-1880s.
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Host
And do you think it sums up what happened?
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Richard Reed
Well, it's useful, it's a useful way into the topic and I think probably more significantly, it's an interesting concept in terms of outsiders views of the continent. So recently we've had the new scramble for Africa, for example, which is a term beloved of journalists covering, for example, China's recent involvement in the continent, and also India and the Gulf states and so forth. So it conjures up this idea that the continent is there to be scrambled for. And that's really been part of the, the external discourse since the late 19th century, I guess.
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Host
So before we get into this period itself, can you give us some historical context? I mean, clearly it's impossible to summarise for a whole entire continent, but broadly, what was happening in Africa on the brink of the so called scramble? How much European influence was there on the continent at that time?
- [05:13]
Richard Reed
Well, it depends how we define influence, but certainly the European presence was mostly confined to a few coastal possessions. There's only a couple of areas where there was a significant European settler presence and they are at opposite ends of the continent. One is in obviously South Africa, Cape Colony and what were then known as the Boer Republics. So Afrikaner entities in the South African interior. And the other was Algeria. Everywhere else Europeans are confined largely to the coast. There's a bit of missionary work going on. There's some exploration happening from the middle decades of the 19th century onwards. But Africa itself is undergoing enormous change. Economic and political states reforming themselves, new states appearing, new types of polity. And it's an era of very intense global engagement between Africans and outside economic interests. So it's an era of enormous turbulence. And in many ways Europe is a very fundamental part of that.
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Host
You mentioned exploration there. And one of the questions we've had in on Instagram from Max Quigley was when did European exploration turn to exploitation?
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Richard Reed
I think that it sort of morphs by the 1860s, 1870s. I mean exploration is rarely in the second half of the 19th century. It's rarely just for the sake of discovering mountains or the source of the Nile or whatever. Increasingly it does have a commercial edge to it. And a lot of that is to do with the changing economic relationship between Europe and Africa in the course of the 19th century. So one important thing to emphasize for your listeners is the transition from the era of the slave trade toward the era of what we call legitimate commerce. That should be in scare quotes. And legitimate commerce basically involves agricultural produce, raw materials rather than human beings. And that kind of commerce required in the European mind, greater knowledge of areas of population, areas of production. Whereas the slave trade Europeans just sat back at the coast and waited for slaves to be delivered to them, took them across the Atlantic, that was it. But this new commerce requires certain types of knowledge. So exploration was often driven by that desire for commercial knowledge. And with that often came political and cultural curiosity as well.
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Host
Can you tell us a bit more about what was happening back in Europe at this time and nations imperial ambitions? So why did European powers look to Africa and think, right, this is a place where we can live out these imperial ambitions.
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Richard Reed
All sorts of things are going on. But I guess, I mean this is just as this is an era of great turbulence for Africa, it's also an era of enormous transformation for Europe. And you've got individual countries like France who look at Africa as a place to compensate for their relative loss of power inside Europe. That was following the Franco Prussian War, for example. Germany and Italy itself, relatively new nations of course in the 1870s, very interested in asserting themselves on the world stage. Britain, with long standing areas of influence and commercial interest, particularly around the Nile Valley, for example, and that was seen as being linked to the security of India and so forth. So Africa was a place onto which it seemed relatively straightforward to project imperial ambitions and kind of national anxieties really.
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Host
So we've got this patchwork of motivations going on. You've mentioned a few countries there and Ren Boki on Instagram has asked about which European powers were involved. They've specifically name checked Portugal, but is there anyone else we should know about?
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Richard Reed
Pretty much everybody in Western Europe was involved. So the biggest players are Britain and France, as I mentioned, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Spanish a little bit, and of course Portugal. Portugal has the longest presence of anyone in Europe on the African coast. Portuguese presence goes back to the sort of 16th century in parts of Central Africa. And on the other side, Mozambique, or what becomes Mozambique. So, yeah, pretty much everyone. I guess the only countries or empires that aren't involved or minimally involved, the Austro Hungarian Empire, very minimal involvement, little bit of Russian presence much later in the 19th century. But those are the main actors.
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Host
And which areas of Africa were most affected?
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Richard Reed
The whole place? There's only a couple of exceptions, places that avoided falling under European colonial rule. One is famously Ethiopia, which warded off an Italian invasion in the 1890s. The Italians of course, do come back in the 1930s. And the other was Liberia. But Liberia, even Liberia was very much under American economic influence at that time. But everywhere else was carved up in the process of the scramble.
- [10:27]
Host
Well, that leads us on nicely to a question from Andracito83 and they've asked what determined the different areas that different powers tried to take.
- [10:38]
Richard Reed
Various influences were involved in that. I mean, in many ways I mentioned Britain earlier. So Britain had a long standing interest in, for example, the area of the Nile, which of course encompasses Egypt, Sudan all the way down to Uganda. That wasn't really of interest in and of itself, but it was seen as providing the British with a secure link via the Red Sea to India. So a lot of that was particularly around from 1869 onwards, which was when the Suez Canal was opened. And so that very much drove British policy in that particular area. But the British also had long standing commercial interests in West Africa, around the Niger Delta, for example. So lots of European actors, it depended where they already had a little bit of a footprint. And frankly in some places it depended on what was kind of left over. Which sounds like a horrible way to put it, but I mean, you know, for example, the Italian interest was firstly in Libya, you know, geographical proximity to Italy itself. But the British, for example, made sure there was a little bit of space in the southern Red Sea for Italian interests, but the British simply wanted to keep the French out. You know, there was an Italian influence in what became eritrea from the 1880s onwards. So a lot of it depended on, you know, where there was an opening. And European governments would often make the argument, well, we have explorers or missionaries on the ground, or we have long standing commercial interests, and therefore this place should be ours. And that was one of the basis of something that I'm sure we'll come on to, which is the Berlin Conference of the middle 1880s.
- [12:20]
Host
Yep, we definitely will come on to that. I mean, there's a lot going on here. As you say, some places are tactically important, others are commercially important. What about resources? I wonder if you could talk about that for a minute. How cognizant were Europeans of where certain resources were and targeting those areas?
- [12:38]
Richard Reed
We shouldn't underestimate the level of European ignorance about this. They really didn't know very much. What they did know by the last quarter of the 19th century was that certain places seemed to be quite profitable. So, for example, West African palm oil had lubricated the British industrial revolution for decades. So there was this idea that there were commodities in Africa that could be of great value later on. You know, in the area of Congo, you get things like rubber. From the late 1860s onwards, there's diamonds in South Africa, then there's gold. So there's an indication of resource being available. But in many ways it was driven by conjecture. The actual scramble was driven by speculation that there was more and more wealth in the interior. And often that proved to be wildly unrealistic. You know, so the French ended up with a vast part of what became French West Africa, but of course, mostly that's the Sahara. And they had dreamt of kind of, you know, replicating the British in India, and there wasn't really anything there. So a lot of it was about the possibility, the untapped potential supposedly of the continent. And that often drove people to bankruptcy. You know, private companies kind of getting involved in the scramble as kind of actors for empire, but ending up finding that there were no resources that they could use.
- [14:04]
Host
So something you mentioned a minute ago was the Berlin Conference. So let's return to that now. What was it, when was it, and why was it significant?
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Richard Reed
So this was a very long conference. Most conferences are pretty hard work. This one must have been particularly hard work. So it lasted over the winter months of 1884 into 1885 in Berlin, and it was called by Bismarck. And the idea was to kind of regulate what was beginning to happen in the continent. So there was a fear that things were getting a little bit out of hands. European powers were beginning to assert themselves somewhat aggressively in certain spheres of influence in Africa. So the idea was to set some ground rules, really. And there was a whole bunch of things that were agreed. But the most important things really were first of all, that the Congo, what becomes the Congo free state would be just that, a free state. So it was under the broad tutelage of Leopold of the Belgians, but it was a free economic zone, so anybody could operate there, which led to some of the worst atrocities, in fact, of the scramble for Africa, period. And the other principle was the principle of effective occupation. So you couldn't just randomly say, I want Tanzania. You had to prove that you had some kind of presence there. And this was Bismarck's attempt to kind of counter the older British idea, which was sort of loose spheres of influence. And so lots of European governments claimed that they had treaties with local rulers, that they had a significant missionary presence on the ground and so forth. And that was a kind of principle that was established going forward that you couldn't just lay claim to a chunk of territory. You had to prove that you already had a meaningful presence there already.
- [15:54]
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Host
And I'm guessing it goes without saying that this was a conference in Europe purely for Europeans. There were no African representatives there, is that right?
- [16:32]
Richard Reed
Oh, gosh, yes. No, I should sort of emphasize that. That's right. It was by white people, for white people. There were no African representatives whatsoever.
- [16:40]
Host
So we've talked quite broadly about this subject from a top level view. I wonder if we could speak about how it played out on the ground a bit more now. So these territorial land grabs in general, obviously each one is different, but how were they carried out? Was it always a military operation or were there other stuff going on as well?
- [16:58]
Richard Reed
It wasn't always military. No, I mean, obviously there are lots of instances where armed force is used. I mean, that's very clear. And the whole colonial enterprise in Africa, particularly between the 1880s and the First World War, was characterized by a great deal of violence. There's other instances where the continent is kind of carved up. And you see straight lines on maps appearing. And it was basically meaningless because there was no european presence or no meaningful European presence on the ground. So, you know, famously, big chunk of what becomes french equatorial Africa, There wasn't really a french presence there for years and years. But if you look on a map, it's nice and kind of french colored, you know, and it seems a very solid kind of colonial possession. And in other areas, there was kind of. There were local treaties. So it wasn't necessarily overtly violent. The violence could be kind of threatened or implied. But you often had treaties with particular areas. You know, paramount chiefs would sign treaties, and that bit would become, you know, part of a british protectorate and so forth. There are instances, a handful of instances, Where African rulers actually requested European protection For their own very specific reasons. Famously, what is now lesotho, for example, Requested british protection back in the late 1860s. But that was mostly to kind of protect against white south African incursions and also attacks from the zulu and so forth. But there's no doubt that military campaigns were common. And it wasn't always desirable for Europeans, from europeans point of view, because military campaigns are expensive. And they rarely deployed Large numbers of european troops. They made use of african soldiers.
- [18:53]
Host
I'm interested in what you said about those treaties with local leaders. So you mentioned protection being kind of offered. Was anything else offered to these local leaders for signing these treaties, or should we think of it as a kind of forced hand?
- [19:07]
Richard Reed
It's difficult sometimes to know what the motives were of individual african rulers, Simply because we don't have their accounts of that. We do in some cases, but very often we don't. We can assume. I mean, in addition to protection, There is the idea of bolstering local rulers position. So if I can use an example from uganda, the predominant local kingdom there, after which the country was named, the kingdom of buganda, Signed a treaty with the british that bolstered A kind of recently converted to christianity elite that believed that it bolstered their position. We see a similar case in northern nigeria, where ruling elites believed that a kind of partnership, as it were, with european powers Would actually strengthen their positions. And sometimes there were kind of commercial incentives Or a perceived economic benefit.
- [20:03]
Host
So it's kind of exploiting specific local circumstances. What about resistance? How Much resistance was there from different African peoples. And what did that resistance look like?
- [20:15]
Richard Reed
There was indeed a great deal of resistance. And, you know, very broadly, what you sometimes find are wars which are fought at the point of initial invasion. So a good example would be the British invasion of the Zulu kingdom at the end of the 1870s, which involves direct combat, fields of pitched battle and so forth. Or Ethiopia, as I mentioned earlier, in the 1890s. In some places, there are uprisings once it becomes clear to African populations that in fact they have been partitioned. And Europeans show up demanding tax. And actually the request for tax is often the first sign that they have been conquered. And then you get sort of uprisings against embryonic colonial administrations. But resistance, of course, in some ways is a problematic term. I mean, people tend to think of the Zulu kind of charging down the hill in the face of European machine guns and so forth. And that does happen. But resistance comes in other forms where you get sort of African political elites trying to shape the system from within. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that we can't underestimate European ignorance. Europeans very much relied on knowledge, the information that Africans were providing for them. So Africans very much tried to shape the colonial order in very subtle ways. And it's not all about charging down machine guns.
- [21:44]
Host
And what about conflict between European powers? Because that was also significant, wasn't it?
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Richard Reed
Yes. So there's a great deal of rivalry going on. You know, the British and the French nearly came to blows over a tiny little place in Sudan, Fashoda, and then everybody calmed down in the mid-1890s. But, you know, that was a flashpoint. Often you get European expeditions kind of bumping into each other. And that was happening a decade after the Berlin conference. So there was still the risk of people not quite understanding which bits had been demarcated and which bits hadn't and so forth. So there was constant competition between European powers. I mentioned earlier what's sometimes described as France's defensive imperialism as a way of sort of out flanking Bismarck's Germany by getting, you know, chunks of Africa, or, you know, the Portuguese trying to kind of assert great power status by claiming that they have this massive empire in Angola and Mozambique and so forth. So European competition is very much behind it. But it's important, you know, to remember that it is quite a Eurocentric argument, because some of the older scholarship suggested that African agency doesn't really exist. This is all about European power plays and so forth. And that's simply not the case. Europeans are very much sucked into what is happening in the continent itself. But there's no doubt that European rivalries play a huge part.
- [23:16]
Host
To stay on that for one moment longer, did rivalries on the continent ever threatened to, you know, ignite conflict in Europe, or was there a sense of what happens in Africa stays in Africa?
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Richard Reed
Nicely put. Yeah, I think it very much was the case. What happens in Africa stays in Africa. I've never thought about it in those terms before. That's right. I mean, even. I mean, if you think about 1914, when the First World War broke out, and of course, you had German and British colonies next to one another. And very, very briefly, right at the start of the first world war, there was a kind of, you know, an exchange between German and British administration, saying, look, should we just have a local truce here because it isn't good for Africans to see us fighting? It will kind of undermine the idea of European racial supremacy and so forth. That doesn't work out. Those discussions don't go anywhere. But certainly there is no indication that there's any risk of a conflagration inside Europe. Having said that, of course, you know, in studies of the root causes of the first world war, colonial tensions are often sort of flagged up as being a very long fuse going back to the 1870s, 1880s. So I guess you might argue that very indirectly, 1914, you know, one of the fuses leading to it is lit in sub Saharan Africa.
- [24:44]
Host
We've spoken a lot about institutions and states and nations, but are there any significant individuals that we should mention bring into this story, or should we view it as a kind of larger thing that was beyond any one person?
- [24:59]
Richard Reed
Oh, I think it's a larger thing beyond any one person. I mean, clearly there are significant individuals in all of this. You know, I've mentioned Bismarck a few times. Bismarck, of course, was very skeptical about the value of African colonies and was kind of sucked into it because he didn't want the British and the French getting all, all the best land. Leopold of the Belgians was very key. He drove forward that big operation in central Africa, what becomes what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo. Essentially, under the guise of humanitarianism. There are significant explorer types, people like Henry Mortenstein, Stanley, who is a very damaged individual, very much a product of the age. He's Welsh, he comes from an impoverished background, but, you know, finds himself able to realize some kind of masculinity in Africa and so forth. And he asserts himself as he kind of goes on his explorations. So there are always individuals, But I very much see this as a much larger phenomenon that's wrapped up in what's happening in the continent. It's about racial pseudoscience, it's about European sense of anxiety and competition and so forth.
- [26:14]
Host
To pick up on your point there about racial pseudoscience, this is something that we need to talk about. And one of our Instagram users has asked about the excuses, in their words, that the Europeans used back home for what was going on in Africa. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about European attitudes towards Africa and Africans at this time and how that facilitated this.
- [26:34]
Richard Reed
Yes, absolutely. So there is a hardening sense of racial supremacy in the course of the 19th century. And that's very much. It's a very significant factor in all of this because African culture is seen as fundamentally inferior. And there's. From the 1850s, 1860s onwards, there is a very sharp sense within Europe that the only way to save Africa from itself is through direct intervention. And that is a very important shift from earlier in the 19th century when it was believed that once the slave trade had been abolished and you moved into simply doing trade with Africans around palm oil and things like that, that Africans would naturally improve. Simply being exposed to commerce with Europe would somehow improve their condition. Once that project doesn't succeed, because in fact, slavery expands within the continent, that is seen as an indictment of African culture. And so what you get is a hardening sense of racial superiority that becomes wrapped up in this idea of a civilizing mission. So one of the. We talked earlier about key figures in this period. One of the big celebrities from a British point of view, but also across Europe, is David Livingstone, who was the missionary's missionary, really, even though he was a terrible missionary, he didn't convert anybody, really. But he becomes a martyr to this idea of the civilizing mission, that Africa is kind of lying prone, crying out for humanitarian intervention. And that is one of the key justifications that's used in Europe itself by the sort of 1870s, 1880s. It is our moral duty, in other words, that we go to the continent and civilize it because Africans are childlike, they're infantile, they're primitive, etc, etc, and the only way that they can be saved on behalf of humanity is if we directly intervene.
- [28:35]
Host
And did the European public buy into this idea? Did they support the scramble for Africa? That's a question from Julia on Instagram.
- [28:44]
Richard Reed
That is a very good question. I mean, it's quite hard to know what European publics thought about this. We know that from studies of the domestic reception of empire generally There was a great deal of jingoism, obviously, and racial attitudes were common. It's very hard to know how much ordinary people, if there is such a thing, believed in the benefit of African colonies. Certainly the penny press would have run stories about heroic confrontations with savage African armies and so forth. And that kind of thing got a lot of newspaper attention. But beyond that, you know, kind of music hall type receptions of empire. We don't really know what people thought about the scramble for Africa. We know that it had its critics, famously, people like JA Hobson, who was a very anti Semitic writer for the Manchester Guardian. He was a critic of imperialism, believing of course it to be a great kind of Jewish conspiracy. But those folks, of course, belong to a kind of an educated elite. And it's very hard to know how much other people really read that stuff.
- [30:00]
Host
Something I really want to get into now is the impact of all of this on African lives and African populations. I mean, this is such a massive question. I wonder if there are maybe any, you know, case studies or examples that might help us get a sense of the impact it had.
- [30:19]
Richard Reed
It's really dependent on where we're talking about. And as I mentioned earlier, there are bits of the continent where there's no European presence for a long, long time. And it's only later on when you get kind of economic concessions given to private companies that go in and suddenly there's a demand for labor and tax and so forth. So for millions of Africans, actually the first sign of new colonial order is in the request for tax and their need to actually earn money to pay tax. And they're kind of being forced into a wage labor force. I mean, if we take an example from Uganda, again, just as an area that I've personally done quite a bit of research on, there you get the expansion of the Christian church, for example, and people using Christianity as a way of both getting ahead and as socio political leverage. So fundamentally changing lives in that way. For many Ugandans, the biggest transformation really of colonial rule is the commercialization of land. So a key British economic policy is the introduction of cotton cultivation. And that changes fundamentally Ugandans relationship with the land and their relationship with global markets. So for many, that's the fundamental shift. In addition, of course, to those areas that experience quite extreme violence. So in German East Africa, what is now Tanzania, there's a major uprising in 1905 against German rule called the Maji Magi uprising. And so brutal is the German response, including kind of scorched earth tactics. So the burning of harvests, things like that, that upwards of 50,000 Africans died mostly from famine. And studies done in the 1930s revealed that female fertility, for example, had plummeted in the area. So that's a generation later. So in some places you do get these very long term impacts of colonial violence. In other places, just to mention a final scenario, if there are white settlers, again, the experience will be different again there you've got the expropriation of land. So Africans actually being kicked off land or being reduced to kind of squatter status on land that was once theirs and is now legally not. And you get that in what is now Zimbabwe, in Kenya, South Africa, Algeria. So it depends on the type of colony, what the specific experience is for millions of Africans.
- [32:54]
Host
So it's basically a patchwork of war, financial impact, labor impact, and impact on land. Is that a fair assessment?
- [33:04]
Richard Reed
Yes, yes, absolutely. And changes in social relationships. And, you know, in the longer term, you're looking at the, in some ways the consolidation of ethnic identities, because ethnicity then becomes a kind of resource through which to navigate the colonial order and so forth. So you get the hardening, I guess, of ethnic identities in places that have been particularly intensely impacted by colonialism.
- [33:33]
Host
Andrew Situ, 83, on Instagram, has asked about the end of the scramble for Africa. Can we pin down an end point of this?
- [33:42]
Richard Reed
I would argue not. I think that we need to understand the scramble not as a discrete moment so much, but as the intensification of a very long term process. But there's no question that I think conventionally it's sort of 1912, which is when Morocco become largely a French protectorate. But in many ways, the dynamics behind the scramble continue through the First World War. Borders are shifting a little bit, right down to the 1920s. And then, of course, in the 1930s, you get fascist Italy coming back and reinvading Ethiopia and so forth. So in some ways, you know, the obvious end point, yeah. Is that period just before the First World War. But that sort of assumes a kind of nice neat beginning, middle end to the scramble. And I'm not very comfortable with that kind of hermetically sealed period.
- [34:34]
Host
So if we reject that idea of a nice neat end, and we kind of see this as something that, you know, its impact lasted much longer. What was that impact and can it still be felt today?
- [34:47]
Richard Reed
Oh, yeah. I mean, the fundamental impact, I guess, is the drawing up of boundaries. Right. If you wanted a kind of tangible physical representation of the scramble, just look at a map of Africa today. Note, the nation states of the continent today are not in all cases exactly what colonies look like. As I mentioned, there's lots of boundary changes over the years, but essentially what the continent is left with, the legacy of this period, are the boundaries of the modern African nation state in different shapes and forms. African political elites have to make those nations work. And it's very notable that when the Organization of African unity, the OAU, was established in 1963, which was the first big continent wide organization, one of the principles of the founding charter was an acceptance that the boundaries that had been established during the scramble for Africa were sacrosanct and they would not be messed with because to do so would be to open, you know, decades of bloodshed and an endless kind of political unraveling. And where would you go back to, you know, 1870, 1850, what's a useful date before the scramble? So there was an understanding on the part of nation builders from the 1950s, 1960s onwards that this was the legacy of the scramble that they would have to live with. So in many ways, that is the largest and most tangible legacy before we even get into kind of long standing commercial relationships between Africa and the global north and so forth. Yeah.
- [36:25]
Host
And what about the economic and social impact?
- [36:28]
Richard Reed
Well, that's right. I mean, the economic impact is ongoing. I mean, we talked earlier about the idea of untapped wealth in the continent. And that is an idea that's still very much with us. I mentioned earlier that you've got this idea of the new scramble not so much involving the old colonial powers like, you know, the British or even any more the Americans so much, but involving China, India, the Gulf states, extending lines of credit to African governments, building infrastructure and so forth. And it really is about the extraction of resource from the continents. That's fundamentally what it's about. So in many ways a term I quite like. I think I've coined it. I'm not sure scrambleology. And scrambleology continues. And it's this idea that the continent is there to be grasped by greedy outsiders with the help of greedy insiders. And so that concept is still very much with us. And it's a narrative that's very much consolidated, I think, by the scramble.
- [37:29]
Host
And finally, Richard, we've covered a huge amount of ground here, but obviously there's so many different stories that people could go away and learn more about within this broader story. But is there anything that we haven't mentioned that you think is maybe, you know, lost from discussions around this that people need to remember or something surprising that people might not know about this era of history?
- [37:51]
Richard Reed
I think it's quite an important thing to remember that this is not a one way European imposition. I think what sometimes happens in discussions of coloniality and the scramble in particular is that Africans are sort of passive victims and all of this kind of sitting back waiting for things to happen to them. And I have a real problem with that. And I think if we really want to understand what's happening in the scramble, we need to understand what is happening inside Africa for much of the 19th century. And it's that kind of transformation, that turbulence, that political dynamism that I think sometimes gets lost in discussions of European colonialism. I would very much argue that there's a lot of African co option of Europeans. I've mentioned a couple of times the levels of European ignorance. They don't really know half the time what's going on. They quickly work out that there's ways of establishing influence and leverage within and between African communities. But they're often in a much weaker position than is understood. And I think I would encourage people to think more in terms of, you know, where is African agency in all of this? Because they are not passive.
- [39:10]
Host
That was Richard Reed. Richard is professor of African History at the University of Oxford and the author of the African A Long history of the 19th century. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.