In 1870 European states held only scattered footholds in Africa, mostly along the coasts, perhaps a tenth of the continent. Within a single lifetime almost all of it was conquered. By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent African states. Europeans called it the Scramble for Africa; Africans experienced it as wars, betrayals and rule by strangers.

Why and how

Motives mixed together: rivalry among European powers, national prestige, hopes for markets and raw materials, missionary zeal, and humanitarian language about ending the slave trade. What changed was the means. Quinine, used regularly against malaria from the 1850s, cut European death rates. Steamboats pushed up rivers. Above all, new weapons opened a gulf in firepower. The English writer Hilaire Belloc put the arrogance of the age into a mocking couplet in 1898: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not."

The Berlin Conference

In 1884 and 1885 the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted a conference in Berlin of European powers and the United States. No African attended. Contrary to a common belief, the delegates did not sit down and draw Africa's borders. The Berlin Conference set rules for claiming African territory, such as notifying other powers and showing effective occupation, which spurred a rush to plant flags and sign treaties. It also recognized the Congo Free State, a vast territory held as the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.

Leopold's Congo

When the bicycle and car tire booms of the 1890s made wild rubber valuable, Leopold's agents imposed quotas on Congolese villages. Soldiers of the Force Publique held women hostage until men brought in rubber and cut off hands as proof they had not wasted bullets. A shipping clerk, E. D. Morel, noticed that ships from Congo brought rubber and ivory but returned with mostly guns, and launched a campaign. A 1904 report by the British consul Roger Casement confirmed the abuses. Belgium took over the Congo from Leopold II in 1908, though forced labor continued in new forms. Colonial atrocities elsewhere were as grave, among them Germany's destruction of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia.

Resistance

Africans resisted everywhere, by war, flight, diplomacy and evasion. The most famous victory came in Ethiopia. At Adwa in 1896 Emperor Menelik II's army defeated an invading Italian army, preserving Ethiopian independence and inspiring Africans and people of African descent worldwide. In West Africa, Samori Touré fought the French for most of two decades until his capture in 1898. In German East Africa, the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905 was sparked by forced cotton growing; rebels used a sacred water, maji, that they believed would protect them from bullets. German forces answered with scorched earth tactics, and famine killed many tens of thousands.

Ruling on the cheap

Colonial governments were thinly staffed and had to rely on Africans as soldiers, clerks, police and chiefs. In Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard made a system of it. Indirect rule meant governing through existing local rulers, such as the emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate, who kept their courts while answering to British officers. Where societies had no chiefs, as among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, the British invented them. Warrant chiefs were chiefs the British created where none had ruled, and many abused their power. In 1929 rumors that women would be taxed set off the Women's War, a mass protest by Igbo women. France spoke of assimilation, turning Africans into French citizens, and a few, such as residents of four Senegalese towns, did gain citizenship; most remained subjects under separate, harsher laws.

Colonies were expected to pay for themselves. Hut taxes payable in cash were meant to push people into wage work and cash crops. Railways ran from mines and plantations to ports rather than between African regions. Borders drawn in Europe split peoples, such as the Somali, divided among five territories.

Defenders of the colonial record point to railways, hospitals, mission schools and the end of slave raiding. Critics answer that the infrastructure served extraction, that Africans paid for it in taxes and forced labor, that education was thin, and that colonial rule rested on a racial hierarchy denying Africans equal standing in their own lands.

Worked example: the Hut Tax War of 1898

In 1896 Britain declared a protectorate over the interior of Sierra Leone, behind the coastal colony of Freetown. In 1898 it imposed a yearly tax on every house, payable in cash. To people in the interior, paying it meant accepting that strangers now owned their land, and earning the cash meant selling crops or labor on someone else's terms.

The Temne leader Bai Bureh led an armed revolt in the north, and a separate rising broke out among the Mende in the south. British troops crushed both by the end of the year; Bai Bureh was captured and exiled to the Gold Coast. A royal commissioner, Sir David Chalmers, then blamed the tax and the brutality of the police who collected it. The Colonial Office rejected his findings and kept the tax. The episode shows how a tax could work as an instrument of conquest, and how even an official inquiry could be overruled when it questioned the system itself.