The scramble for Africa

In 1884-85, Bismarck hosted the Berlin Conference, where representatives of European powers sat around a table and divided almost the entire African continent into colonial territories -- without a single African ruler or representative present. Borders were drawn largely with rulers and a map, not with attention to existing ethnic, linguistic, or political boundaries on the ground, splitting some unified peoples across different colonies while forcing longtime rivals into the same one. By 1914, only Ethiopia (which you will see defended itself successfully, next week) and Liberia remained independent African states; the rest of the continent was under European control.

Nowhere were the human costs of this scramble clearer than in the Congo Free State, which King Leopold II of Belgium ruled as his own personal property, not as a colony of Belgium itself, from 1885 to 1908. Leopold's agents forced Congolese villagers to harvest rubber under brutal quotas, and failure to meet them could bring mutilation -- including the severing of hands -- or death; historians estimate that violence, forced labor, and resulting famine and disease killed as many as 10 million people. Journalists and activists, especially the British campaigner E. D. Morel and the diplomat Roger Casement, whose 1904 report documented the atrocities firsthand, exposed the horror to the world and built international pressure that forced the Belgian government to take over the territory directly in 1908, ending Leopold's personal rule -- an early landmark in international human-rights activism, even as colonial rule itself continued.