On November 15, 1884, the Berlin Conference began. Until the end of February 1885, Chancellor Bismarck invited emissaries from the imperialist powers of Europe, the United States and the Ottoman Empire, who had come to the German capital to monopolize raw materials from other continents. and ensure strategic support… without consulting the populations concerned, particularly in Africa.
Roots of Africa: Margaret Ekpo
Arranged truth
The Berlin Conference remains one of the emblems of Western colonization policy. For a long time, the image conveyed was that of a conference during which Westerners shared the African continent and its resources.
But the reality is more complex than that. This is what historian Camille Lefèbvre (Institut des mondesafricaines) explained in 2010 on our network:
“The Berlin conference is what we could call a myth”, the researcher then explained to Carine Debrabandère’s microphone. “That is to say, since the 1880s, we have constructed the idea that we had shared the entire African continent during this conference. However, this is not at all true if we look at the texts and the reality of what happened at the time: there was no partition of Africa during the Berlin conference.”
No borders in Berlin, therefore. It was later, over the years, that Western powers made agreements with local leaders and ratified bilateral agreements to define the boundaries of their spheres of influence.
Organize the hoarding of wealth
But the Berlin conference clearly lays the groundwork for a pernicious mechanism of appropriation of wealth and then land.
In the same archive as the one cited above, Jakob Vogel, a professor who then taught history at the University of Cologne, detailed the process in these terms: “We first give a private company or merchants a special right which allows them to work, to trade with this or that region. And it is only over time, in the 1880s or 1890s, that that European states have increasingly taken control, with their own military, with their own administration, of private colonies.”
The primary objective of Chancellor Bismarck, in 1884, was above all to organize the balance between the European powers, to avoid war against a backdrop of rivalries in Africa.
Thus, the general act ratified in Berlin stipulates that any European power installed on a coast, in Africa, has the right to continue its expansion towards the interior of the continent… until encountering another sphere of influence (implied : western).
Memory of humanity
And this story of “collective aggression against the people of Africa and Asia”, it must be taught, in the opinion of Alexandre Kum’a Ndumbe III, of Yaounde I University, in the program by Carine Debranbandère mentioned above.
Benin bronzes return home
“I believe that the European strategy was to ensure that African memory is erased and is only oriented with European pseudo-references. Pseudo-references since they do not live in Europe”he specifies.
“For us, the fundamental work is towork to ensure thatThe African recovers his memory, but the European too. Because the European has erased a good part of his memory too. The European doesn’t even know what we did in his name.”
140 years after the Berlin Conference, historical and political debates continue on colonization. In particular those which relate to the extent of the “debt” contracted by the colonizers with the colonized peoples – and to the terms of its repayment.
Svenja Schulze, the German Minister for Development, also calls, in 2024, to confront colonialism and its legacy, to learn lessons to establish equitable relations and a true partnership with Africa.
