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The European scramble to partition and occupy African territory is often treated as a peripheral aspect of the political and economic rivalries that developed between the new industrial nations in Europe itself and that were particularly acute from about 1870 to 1914. Its opening has commonly been taken to be either the French reaction to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 or the Congo basin rivalry between agents of France and of Leopold II of the Belgians that led to the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85, both of which are seen as being exploited by Bismarck for purposes of his European policy.
Effect of local conditions
In western Africa, however, it seems fair to say that the beginnings of the scramble and partition were evident at least a generation before the 1880s and that they were determined by the local situation as much as or more than they were by European domestic rivalries. Already during 1854–74, the logic of the situation in western Africa had led France and Britain to take the political initiatives of creating formal European colonies in Senegal, in Lagos, and in the Gold Coast. All along the coast, in fact, the traditional African political order was becoming ineffective in the face of European economic and social pressures. For most of the 19th century these pressures had been predominantly British, but in the 1870s French companies began to offer effective competition to the British traders not only in Upper Guinea, where they had always been strong, but also on the Ivory Coast, in the ports immediately to the west of Lagos, and even in the lower river and delta of the Niger. An unstable situation was developing in which the European traders were likely to call for further intervention and support from their governments, and especially so if the terms of trade were to turn against them. Low world prices for primary produce during the depression years from the 1870s to the mid-1890s certainly caused difficulties for Europeans trading to western Africa and led them to think that an increase in European control there would enable them to secure its produce more cheaply.
The changing balance of power in western Africa was not confined to the coastlands. By the 1870s formal French and British armies had already ventured into the interior and had inflicted defeats on such major African powers as those of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar and Asante. In 1879 Faidherbe’s heirs on the Sénégal River had launched the thrust that was to take French arms conquering eastward across the Sudan to Lake Chad and beyond.
By the end of the 1870s France and Britain, therefore, were already on the march in western Africa. The principal effect of the new forces stemming from domestic power rivalries in Europe itself—the most dramatic of which was the appearance in 1884 of the German flag on the Togoland coast, between the Gold Coast and Dahomey, and in the Cameroons—was to intensify and to accelerate existing French and British tendencies to exert their political and military authority at the expense of traditional African rulers.
French areas of interest
There can be no question but that, by the end of the 1870s, the advance of the British interest in western Africa had been more rewarding than the advance of the French interest. Devoting their attention primarily to the active economies of the Niger delta, the Lagos hinterland, and the Gold Coast, British traders had secured $24 million of business a year, compared with the French merchants’ trade of $8 million, three-quarters of which was concentrated on the Sénégal River. Initially, therefore, the French had much more incentive for expansion than the British.
Britain was already in political control of the Gold Coast, and the arrival of the German treaty makers in Togo and in the Cameroons in 1884 hastened it to declare its protectorate over most of the intervening coastline on which British traders were active. The gap left between Lagos and Togo was swiftly filled by the French, and from 1886 they also established formal authority over all other parts of the coastline that were not already claimed by the governments of Liberia, Portugal, or Britain. In this way the baselines were established from which France subsequently developed the colonies of Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, and French Guinea.
France’s advance inland from these southern coasts was subsidiary, however, to the main thrust, which was eastward from the Sénégal region through the Sudan. The glamour of its past had persuaded the French that the Sudan was the most advanced, most populated, and most productive zone of western Africa. Once they had reached the upper Niger from the Sénégal (1879–83), the French forces had a highway permitting them further rapid advances. By 1896 they had linked up with the troops that had conquered Dahomey (1893–94) to threaten the lower Niger territories which British traders had penetrated from the delta.
British areas of interest
The rapid French advance across western Africa from the Sénégal River had denied the British any chance of exploiting the commercial hinterland of the Gambia River and had severely restricted their opportunities from Sierra Leone. Government and mercantile interests nonetheless were able to agree on the need for British action to keep the French (and also the Germans from Togo and from the Cameroons) out of the hinterlands of the Gold Coast, Lagos, and the Niger delta. Asante submitted to an ultimatum in 1896 (the real war of conquest was delayed until 1900–01, when the British had to suppress a widespread rebellion against their authority), and a British protectorate was extended northward to the limits of Asante influence.
On the Niger, British interests were first maintained by an amalgamation of trading companies formed in 1879 by Sir George Goldie to combat French commercial competition. In 1897 the British government agreed to support Goldie’s Royal Niger Company in the development of military forces. Three years later, however, it recognized the foolishness of allowing the company’s servants and soldiers to compete for African territory with French government officials and troops and to enforce its monopolistic policies on all other traders within its sphere. The company was divested of its political role, and the British government itself took over direct responsibility for the conquest of most of the Sokoto empire. Thus, although the French eventually reached Lake Chad, they were kept to the southern edges of the Sahara, and most of the well-populated Hausa agricultural territory became the British protectorate of Northern Nigeria. In 1914 this was merged with the Yoruba territories, which had been entered from Lagos during the 1890s, and with the protectorate over the Niger delta region to constitute a single Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria.