The Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference

The Berlin Conference did not divide Africa. That is the first thing to get straight, because the image of diplomats drawing borders across a map in one meeting is both the most repeated account of the Scramble for Africa and the least accurate.

What the conference produced was the General Act, signed on 26 February 1885 — a real agreement, with a real date, setting rules among European powers about trade, river navigation and the recognition of claims. The partition itself was carried out over the following decades by treaty-making with African rulers, by chartered companies, and by war. Attributing it to a single conference simultaneously exaggerates what a meeting can do and conceals how much killing the actual process required.

Sequence first: what happened in what order

European coastal footholds in Africa were centuries old and mostly shallow. The rapid extension inland belongs to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The conference at Berlin sat in the middle of that process, not at its start — and its General Act regulated relations between the European claimants rather than allocating land.

Conquest followed. Boundaries between colonies were fixed in a long series of bilateral agreements between European governments, generally in Europe, frequently from poor maps, and with the requirements of inter-state agreement taking priority over anything on the ground. That is the origin of borders that cut across existing polities and trade systems, and it is why the resulting map tells you more about European diplomacy than about Africa.

Separating the conference from the partition is not pedantry. It changes who is responsible for what: a set of treaties negotiated in European capitals, and a set of military campaigns fought on African soil by soldiers who were frequently African themselves.

The Congo, documented by its own museum

The most striking evidence about the Congo Free State now comes, in part, from the institution founded to commemorate it. The Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren states plainly that a large part of Africa's material heritage sits in Western museums and private collections, and that some of it was obtained by violent or unlawful means.

Its published provenance research names cases. A Luba mask taken in 1896 by the troops of Oscar Michaux. An Nkisi Nkonde statue seized by Alexandre Delcommune after a punitive raid in 1878. Objects assembled by colonial military officers including Émile Storms and Léon Rom. The museum also notes its own constraint: the collections legally belong to the Belgian federal state, so decisions about ownership rest with a government minister rather than with the museum, within a restitution framework approved in 2020.

An institution documenting the looting in its own catalogue is unusual and worth taking seriously as evidence. It is also, by itself, an incomplete account of the Congo Free State, whose system of rubber extraction under Leopold II is the subject of a large and contested historical literature. The provenance record shows the mechanism at the level of individual objects; the demographic consequences are argued over separately and should be cited to the specific studies that produce the figures.

Namibia, 1904–1908

German colonial forces in South West Africa, now Namibia, killed Herero and Nama people in campaigns between 1904 and 1908 and in the camps that followed. The German federal government's own statement gives an estimate of about 100,000 deaths from these population groups, attributing them to violence, thirst, or conditions in the camps, and recognises Germany's moral, historical and political responsibility. In May 2021 Germany and Namibia initialled a joint declaration on addressing the colonial crimes, with further talks continuing. Namibia has since established 28 May as Genocide Remembrance Day, first marked nationally in 2025.

Berlin's statement also calls this "the first genocide of the 20th century." That designation is widely used, including by scholars, but it contains an ordering claim — that nothing earlier in the century qualifies — and that ordering is debated rather than established. The safe formulation is the one much of the literature uses: the Herero and Nama genocide is widely regarded as the first genocide of the twentieth century. The recognition of it as genocide is not in doubt; the sequencing superlative is a separate claim.

It also matters that descendant communities have positions of their own on the 2021 declaration, including on whether they were adequately represented in the negotiations. Presenting a state-to-state agreement as closure would misdescribe the situation.