9 - Colonial invasion

Summary

during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, European Powers swiftly and painlessly partitioned the map of Africa among themselves. To implement the partition on the ground, however, was anything but swift or painless. Widespread possession of arms, codes of military honour, and long hostility to governmental control made popular resistance to conquest more formidable in Africa than, for example, in India. In creating states in a turbulent and underpopulated continent, colonial administrators faced the same problems as their African predecessors and often met them in the same ways, but they had technological advantages: firepower, mechanical transport, medical skills, literacy. The states they created before the First World War were generally mere skeletons fleshed out and vitalised by African political forces. But European conquest had two crucial effects. As each colony became a specialised producer for the world market, it acquired an economic structure that often survived throughout the twentieth century, with a broad distinction between African peasant production in western Africa and European capitalist production in eastern Africa perpetuating the ancient contrast between the two regions. And the European intrusion had profound effects on Africa's demography.

PARTITION

The slow European penetration of Africa during the nineteenth century began to escalate into a scramble for territory during the late 1870s, for a complex of reasons. One was a French initiative in Senegal launched in 1876 by a new governor, Brière de l'Isle.