Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Partition of Africa: A Scramble for a Mirage?

1993; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1459-9465

Juhani Koponen,

African history and culture studies

The issue of the causes of the late nineteenth-century European partition of Africa continues to puzzle historians. Although the rough outlines of the European colonization of Africa also known as 'the scramble for Africa' are well-known at the level of events, there is no even remotely discernible consensus concerning its basic nature as a historical process or its driving forces. All agree that the partition was an extraordinary surge of European imperialism. In no more than two decades at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers expanded out from the few strongholds they had along the African coastlines and divided the vast mass of the continent between them. But this is about as far as the agreement extends. The ability to account for the partition has been proclaimed an acid test of theories of imperialism, and conflicting arguments have been put forward with great vehemence. It has become a minefield of rival claims and opinions which an empirically-oriented historian enters only with hesitation. The degree of vehemence generated in the debate may be explained by the fact that there are several major questions involved and the different answers to them inform radically different views of historical relations between Europe and Africa. The question which occupies pride of place concerns the relationship between the European partition of Africa and the development of capitalism in Europe. With some oversimplification one can claim that much of the debate has been a battle between those who see a more or less direct link from the development of capitalism to the partition of Africa and those who deny such links, although it is true that there are wide disagreements of opinion on both sides of this issue. Secondly, and overlapping with this, is a question concerning the nature of the process involved. Was it a 'big bang', something that the European powers undertook suddenly by a deliberate decision, as the familiar image of the map of Africa being drawn in a conference room in Berlin suggests; or was it rather a much more unplanned and haphazard matter, in which half-reluctant powers dragged themselves from one emergency situation to another, as more recent imperial historiography maintains? Underlying such substantial issues is the crucial theoretical and methodological question about the extent to and the manner in