Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.

When Africa’s leaders gather in different global capitals these days, whether as props for summits of the G-7 or ostensible partners of their hosts in Beijing, Brussels, Moscow or Washington DC, it is easy to forget that the foundations of contemporary multilateralism were laid 140 years ago at a meeting in Berlin which had the continent as the sole course on the menu.

Described by one scholar on its centenary as “perhaps the greatest historical movement of modern times”, the Berlin West Africa Conference began shortly after noon on 15 November 1884. Interrupted only by a short break for Christmas at the end of the year and another to mark the New Year in 1885, historian Adu Boahen records that the conference ended on 31 January 1884. The following month, on 26 February 1885, the powers gathered at the conference ratified the General Act of the Berlin Conference, the Treaty which embodied their agreements. The week before the ratification of the General Act, according to historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, the Lagos Observer newspaper lamented that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.”

Among the six goals identified by the General Act, two concerned the basin of the Congo River; two others were addressed respectively to the navigation of the Congo and Niger rivers; one concerned the slave trade and the overarching provisions set out “rules for future occupation of the coast of the African continent.”

Of the 15 countries that attended the conference, 14 were European: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). All the European powers signed on to the General Act. The United States of America (USA) was the only non-European country at the table and also the only participating country that did not officially ratify the resulting treaty. From Africa, the Sultan of Zanzibar had equally sought representation at the conference but had his ambition derisorily blocked by the United Kingdom.

Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany which attained unification only 13 years earlier in 1871, hosted the Berlin Conference. Six years earlier, he had similarly played host to the Congress of Berlin called to stabilize the Balkan Peninsula at the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. There was an irony to the fact that the same venue was to serve as the site of a conference to Balkanize a distant continent of some 11.7 million square miles or about 30.37 million square kilometres. For context, this is territory big enough to contain all of the USA, India, Europe, Argentina and New Zealand combined with some room to spare.

The onset of the Scramble for Africa preceded the Berlin Conference but the conference crystallized rules and doctrines that would govern the subsequent carve up of the continent. In opening the conference, von Bismarck captured the terms for its deliberations. It was to regulate “the terms for the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa”; assure free navigation of the Congo and Niger rivers; anticipate and avoid disputes as to new acts of territorial occupation in Africa and “further the moral and material wellbeing of the native population.”

The aftermath remains controversial for predictable reasons at the levels of individuals, communities, states and inter-state relations in Africa. The continent lives with the consequences of decisions in which it did not participate and whose records are also outside its control. While the lingering consequences of Berlin continue to be debated, a few deserve to be highlighted.

First, as is evident from Otto von Bismarck’s stipulations, the conference objectives and outcomes infantilized Africa and its peoples at best. It also originated a disposition that arguably habituated the world to the continent as lacking in agency and its territories as lacking in history or civilization prior to the occupation that followed in the wake of the Berlin Conference. These ideas were to be subsequently embodied in doctrine, jurisprudence and treaty law. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, as the highest court of the United Kingdom for its colonial territories and protectorates was called, for instance, ruled in 1918 that African territories were “so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society.”

The court offered no authority or support for this decision because there was none. The pillaging of the continent’s art and creativity, which occurred in the period preceding this judgment, in fact provides evidence to the contrary. Yet, this jurisprudence made its way into the provisions of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant which referred to these territories as being “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”

Second, the logic of colonial occupation made atrocity inevitable. The traumas from that have assumed inter-generational dimensions in Africa. Looking back at the period preceding the conference, however, Adu Boahen recalls that Africa “was far from being primitive, static, and asleep or in a Hobbesian state of nature.” The rules of the conference precluded any items on sovereignty whether of the European states or of the African territories. Yet the outcome created a logic that encouraged adverse assertions of sovereignty over African lands and peoples. John Kasson, the lead US delegate to the conference had argued that the establishment of “productive labour” in African territories “can only be arrived at through the permanent establishment of a peaceful regime.” In actuality, the idea of permanent establishment of a peaceful regime over other peoples’ lands could only occur through occupation and rapine.

This is exactly what ensued in the aftermath of the doctrine of effective occupation consecrated by the General Act of the Berlin Conference. This was embodied in the obligation assumed by the parties in Article 35 of the General Act “to insure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and, as the case may be, freedom of trade and of transit.” Seven of the 14 countries present at the Berlin Conference went on to become occupying powers in Africa, namely: France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Their campaigns of occupation were accompanied by violence which has been described as “brutal and deadly.” In the quarter century from the end of the conference to 1910 when the period of active territorial occupation occurred, nearly every affected African country experienced steep decline in population. The signal case was King Leopold’s Congo Free State about whom it has been said that the population crashed from “20 million in 1891 to only 8,500,000 in 1911”. In other words, the King’s system resulted in the death of between 10 and 11.5 million Congolese as “a very conservative estimate.”‘ In many other locations, including South-West Africa (Namibia); Tanganyika; and South Africa, the colonial occupation was attended by unspeakable atrocities. Contemporary movements for acknowledgement and reparations barely scratch the surface.

Third, as Ali Mazrui points out, the Berlin Conference ultimately saddled Africa with twin crises of both state legitimacy and governmental legitimacy. Governed as they were by logics of arbitrary and convenient externalities, colonial territorialization made no effort to foster legitimate political communities. The methods of divide and rule and of indirect rule, which defined colonial administration, instead encouraged adversiarialism instead of coexistence within countries. As colony yielded to post-colony, these left legacies of political unrest, regime instability, and conflict.

Fourth, the boundaries created in Berlin have proved durable but not necessarily stable. To head off this problem, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) at its second Summit in Cairo, Egypt, in 1964, pronounced the continent’s borders at independence as a “tangible reality” to be respected by all member states. The reality has been a lot less sanguine. The continent’s borders are notoriously arbitrary and porous and many are disputed. One scholar has counted over 100 border disputes in the continent as well as “approximately 58 potential secessionist territories in 29” African countries championed by “at least 83 political associations and pressure groups.” A cottage industry in territorial dispute resolution exists, with 13 of 18 contentious cases submitted to the International Court of Justice from Africa being about inter-state boundaries.