INTRODUCTION:

Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic
pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization. At the same time, African
societies put up various forms of resistance against the attempt to colonize their countries and
impose foreign domination. By the early twentieth century, however, much of Africa, except
Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonized by European powers.
The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by three main factors like political,
social but mainly economic. It developed in the nineteenth century following the collapse of the
profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the
European capitalist Industrial Revolution. The imperatives of capitalist industrialization—
including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets
and profitable investment outlets spurred the European scramble and the partition and
eventual conquest of Africa. Thus the primary motivation for European intrusion was economic.

The Scramble for Africa

But other factors played an important role in the process. The political impetus derived
from the impact of inter-European power struggles and competition for preeminence. Britain,
France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were competing for power within
European power politics. One way to demonstrate national preeminence was through the
acquisition of territories around the world, including Africa. The social factor was the third
major element. As a result of industrialization, major social problems grew in Europe:
unemployment, poverty, homelessness, social displacement from rural areas, and so on. These
social problems developed partly because not all people could be absorbed by the new
capitalist industries. One way to resolve this problem was to acquire colonies and export this
"surplus population." This led to the establishment of settler-colonies in Algeria, Tunisia, South
Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, and central African areas like Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Eventually the overriding economic factors led to the colonization of other parts of Africa.
 Thus it was the interplay of these economic, political, and social factors and forces that
led to the scramble for Africa and the frenzied attempts by European commercial, military, and
political agents to declare and establish a stake in different parts of the continent through inter-
imperialist commercial competition, the declaration of exclusive claims to particular territories
for trade, the imposition of tariffs against other European traders, and claims to exclusive
control of waterways and commercial routes in different parts of Africa.

This scramble was so intense that there were fears that it could lead to inter-imperialist
conflicts and even wars. To prevent this, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened a
diplomatic summit of European powers in the late nineteenth century. This was the famous
Berlin West African conference (more generally known as the Berlin Conference), held from
November 1884 to February 1885. The conference produced a treaty known as the Berlin Act,
with provisions to guide the conduct of the European inter-imperialist competition in Africa.
Some of its major articles were as follows:

The Principle of Notification (Notifying) other powers of a territorial annexation

The Principle of Effective Occupation to validate the annexations

Freedom of Trade in the Congo Basin

Freedom of Navigation on the Niger and Congo Rivers

Freedom of Trade to all nations

Suppression of the Slave Trade by land and sea

This treaty, drawn up without African participation, provided the basis for the subsequent
partition, invasion, and colonization of Africa by various European powers.

The African Resistance

The European imperialist designs and pressures of the late nineteenth century provoked
African political and diplomatic responses and eventually military resistance. During and after
the Berlin Conference various European countries sent out agents to sign so-called treaties of
protection with the leaders of African societies, states, kingdoms, decentralized societies, and
empires. The differential interpretation of these treaties by the contending forces often led to
conflict between both parties and eventually to military encounters. For Europeans, these
treaties meant that Africans had signed away their sovereignties to European powers; but for
Africans, the treaties were merely diplomatic and commercial friendship treaties. After
discovering that they had in effect been defrauded and that the European powers now wanted
to impose and exercise political authority in their lands, African rulers organized militarily to
resist the seizure of their lands and the imposition of colonial domination.

This situation was compounded by commercial conflicts between Europeans and

Africans. During the early phase of the rise of primary commodity commerce (erroneously
referred to in the literature as "Legitimate Trade or Commerce"), Europeans got their supplies
of trade goods like palm oil, cotton, palm kernel, rubber, and groundnut from African
intermediaries, but as the scramble intensified, they wanted to bypass the African
intermediaries and trade directly with sources of the trade goods. Naturally Africans resisted
and insisted on the maintenance of a system of commercial interaction with foreigners which
expressed their sovereignties as autonomous political and economic entities and actors. For
their part, the European merchants and trading companies called on their home governments
to intervene and impose "free trade," by force if necessary. It was these political, diplomatic,
and commercial factors and contentions that led to the military conflicts and organized African
resistance to European imperialism.

African military resistance took two main forms: guerrilla warfare and direct military
engagement. While these were used as needed by African forces, the dominant type used
depended on the political, social, and military organizations of the societies concerned. In
general, small-scale societies, the decentralized societies (erroneously known as "stateless"
societies), used guerrilla warfare because of their size and the absence of standing or
professional armies. Instead of professional soldiers, small groups of organized fighters with a
mastery of the terrain mounted resistance by using the classical guerrilla tactic of hit-and-run
raids against stationary enemy forces. This was the approach used by the Igbo of southeastern
Nigeria against the British. Even though the British imperialists swept through Igboland in three
years, between 1900 and 1902, and despite the small scale of the societies, the Igbo put up
protracted resistance. The resistance was diffuse and piecemeal, and therefore it was difficult
to conquer them completely and declare absolute victory. Long after the British formally
colonized Igboland, they had not fully mastered the territory.

Direct military engagement was most commonly organized by the centralized state
systems, such as chiefdoms, city-states, kingdoms, and empires, which often had standing or
professional armies and could therefore tackle the European forces with massed troops. This
was the case with the resistance actions of the Ethiopians, the Zulu, the Mandinka leadership,
and numerous other centralized states. In the case of Ethiopia, the imperialist intruder was
Italy. It confronted a determined and sagacious military leader in the Ethiopian emperor
Menelik II. As Italy intensified pressure in the 1890s to impose its rule over Ethiopia, the
Ethiopians organized to resist. In the famous battle of Adwa in 1896, one hundred thousand
Ethiopian troops confronted the Italians and inflicted a decisive defeat. Thereafter, Ethiopia was
able to maintain its independence for much of the colonial period, except for a brief interlude
of Italian oversight between 1936 and 1941.

Another example of resistance was the one organized by Samory Touré of the emergent
Mandinka empire in West Africa. As this new empire spread and Touré attempted to forge a
new political order he ran up against the French imperialists who were also trying extend their
territories inland from their base in Dakar, Senegal. This brought the parties into conflict. Touré
organized military and diplomatic resistance between 1882 and 1898. During this sixteen-year
period, he used a variety of strategies, including guerrilla warfare, scorched-earth programs,
and direct military engagement. For this last tactic he acquired arms, especially quick-firing
rifles, from European merchant and traders in Sierra Leone and Senegal. He also established
engineering workshops where weapons were repaired and parts were fabricated. With these
resources and his well-trained forces and the motivation of national defense he provided his
protracted resistance to the French. Eventually he was captured and, in 1898, exiled to Gabon,
where he died in 1900.

A Period of Change
 It is quite clear that most African societies fought fiercely and bravely to retain control
over their countries and societies against European imperialist designs and military invasions.
But the African societies eventually lost out. This was partly for political and technological
reasons. The nineteenth century was a period of profound and even revolutionary changes in
the political geography of Africa, characterized by the demise of old African kingdoms and
empires and their reconfiguration into different political entities. Some of the old societies were
reconstructed and new African societies were founded on different ideological and social
premises. Consequently, African societies were in a state of flux, and many were
organizationally weak and politically unstable. They were therefore unable to put up effective
resistance against the European invaders.

The technological factor was expressed in the radical disparity between the
technologies of warfare deployed by the contending European and African forces. African
forces in general fought with bows, arrows, spears, swords, old rifles, and cavalries; the
European forces, beneficiaries of the technical fruits of the Industrial Revolution, fought with
more deadly firearms, machines guns, new rifles, and artillery guns. Thus in direct encounters
European forces often won the day. But as the length of some resistance struggles amply
demonstrates, Africans put up the best resistance with the resources they had.

By 1900 much of Africa had been colonized by seven European powers—Britain, France,
Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. After the conquest of African decentralized and
centralized states, the European powers set about establishing colonial state systems. The
colonial state was the machinery of administrative domination established to facilitate effective
control and exploitation of the colonized societies. Partly as a result of their origins in military
conquest and partly because of the racist ideology of the imperialist enterprise, the colonial
states were authoritarian, bureaucratic systems. Because they were imposed and maintained
by force, without the consent of the governed, the colonial states never had the effective
legitimacy of normal governments. Second, they were bureaucratic because they were
administered by military officers and civil servants who were appointees of the colonial power.
While they were all authoritarian, bureaucratic state systems, their forms of administration
varied, partly due to the different national administrative traditions and specific imperialist
ideologies of the colonizers and partly because of the political conditions in the various
territories that they conquered.

 Colonial Domination: Indirect Rule

In Nigeria, the Gold Coast in West Africa, and Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika in East Africa,
for example, Britain organized its colonies at the central, provincial, and regional or district
levels. There was usually a governor or governor-general in the colonial capital who governed
along with an appointed executive council and a legislative council of appointed and selected
local and foreign members. The governor was responsible to the colonial office and the colonial
secretary in London, from whom laws, policies, and programs were received. He made some
local laws and policies, however. Colonial policies and directives were implemented through a
central administrative organization or a colonial secretariat, with officers responsible for
different departments such as Revenue, Agriculture, Trade, Transport, Health, Education,
Police, Prison, and so on.

The British colonies were often subdivided into provinces headed by provincial
commissioners or residents, and then into districts headed by district officers or district
commissioners. Laws and policies on taxation, public works, forced labor, mining, agricultural
production, and other matters were made in London or in the colonial capital and then passed
down to the lower administrative levels for enforcement.

At the provincial and district levels the British established the system of local
administration popularly known as indirect rule for economic benefit mainly. This system
operated in alliance with preexisting political leaderships and institutions. The theory and
practice of indirect rule is commonly associated with Lord Lugard, who was first the British high
commissioner for northern Nigeria and later governor-general of Nigeria. In the Hausa /Fulani
emirates of northern Nigeria he found that they had an established and functional
administrative system. Lugard simply and wisely adapted it to his ends. It was cheap and
convenient. Despite attempts to portray the use of indirect rule as an expression of British
administrative genius, it was nothing of the sort. It was a pragmatic and parsimonious choice
based partly on using existing functional institutions. The choice was also partly based on
Britain's unwillingness to provide the resources required to administer its vast empire. Instead,
it developed the perverse view that the colonized should pay for their colonial domination.
Hence, the choice of indirect rule.

The system had three major institutions: the "native authority" made up of the local
ruler, the colonial official, and the administrative staff; the "native treasury," which collected
revenues to pay for the local administrative staff and services; and the "native courts," which
purportedly administered "native law and custom," the supposedly traditional legal system of
the colonized that was used by the courts to adjudicate cases.

In general, indirect rule worked fairly well in areas that had long-established centralized
state systems such as chiefdoms, city-states, kingdoms, and empires, with their functional
administrative and judicial systems of government. But even here the fact that the ultimate
authority was the British officials meant that the African leaders had been vassalized and
exercised "authority" at the mercy of European colonial officials. Thus the political and social
umbilical cords that tied them to their people in the old system had been broken. Some astute
African leaders maneuvered and ruled as best they could, while others used the new colonial
setting to become tyrants and oppressors, as they were responsible to British officials
ultimately.

In the decentralized societies, the system of indirect rule worked less well, as they did
not have single rulers. The British colonizers, unfamiliar with these novel and unique political
systems and insisting that African "natives" must have chiefs, often appointed licensed leaders
called warrant chiefs, as in Igbo land, for example.

Colonial Domination: Assimilation

The French, for their part, established a highly centralized administrative system that
was influenced by their ideology of colonialism and their national tradition of extreme
administrative centralism. Their colonial ideology explicitly claimed that they were on a
"civilizing mission" to lift the benighted "natives" out of backwardness to the new status of
civilized French Africans. To achieve this, the French used the policy of assimilation, whereby
through acculturation and education and the fulfillment of some formal conditions, some
"natives" would become evolved and civilized French Africans. In practice, the stringent
conditions set for citizenship made it virtually impossible for most colonial subjects to become
French citizens. For example, potential citizens were supposed to speak French fluently, to have
served the French meritoriously, to have won an award, and so on. If they achieved French
citizenship, they would have French rights and could only be tried by French courts, not under
indigénat, the French colonial doctrine and legal practice whereby colonial "subjects" could be
tried by French administrative officials or military commanders and sentenced to two years of
forced labor without due process. However, since France would not provide the educational
system to train all its colonized subjects to speak French and would not establish administrative
and social systems to employ all its subjects, assimilation was more an imperialist political and
ideological posture than a serious political objective.

In terms of the actual administrative system in its various African colonies—Algeria,

Tunisia, and Morocco in North Africa, and Senegal, French Guinea, French Sudan, Upper Volta,
Dahomey, and others in West Africa, and Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Ubangi-Shari in Central
Africa—the French used a system of direct rule. They also created federations in West Africa
and Central Africa. In the colonial capitals the governors were responsible to the minister of
colonies in Paris. Most laws and policies were sent from Paris, and the governors who ruled
with general councils were expected to enforce them in line with France's centralist traditions.
The colonies were also subdivided into smaller administrative units as follows: cercles under
commandant du Cercles, subdivisions under chef de subdivisions, and at the next level, cantons
were administered by African chiefs who were in effect like the British warrant chiefs.

While France tried to maintain this highly centralized system, in some parts of its
colonies where it encountered strongly established centralized state systems, the French were
compelled to adopt the policy of association, a system of rule operating in alliance with
preexisting African ruling institutions and leaders. Thus it was somewhat like British indirect
rule, although the French still remained committed to the doctrine of assimilation. In the
association system, local governments were run with African rulers whom the French organized
at three levels and grades: chef de province (provincial chief); chef de canton (district chiefs),
and chef de village (village chief). In practice, the French system combined elements of direct
administration and indirect rule.

In general, the French administrative system was more centralized, bureaucratic, and
interventionist than the British system of colonial rule. The other colonial powers— Germany,
Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and Italy—used varied administrative systems to facilitate control and
economic exploitation. However, no matter the system, they were all alien, authoritarian, and
bureaucratic, and distorted African political and social organizations and undermined their
moral authority and political legitimacy as governing structures.

Conclusion

Colonization of Africa was not a very easy one. The colonialists fought with the chiefs
and the African middlemen at the coast before they could penetrate into the hinterland or
interior. The reasons main economic reasons for the acquisition of colonies by the colonialists
as we have earlier mentioned include: the need for raw materials; the search for new market
for the metropolitan industries where their surplus manufactured products as a result of the
industrial revolution could be sold; the need to provide more food for the growing urban
industrial population; and the need to find a place where the surplus accumulated profit from
the industrial revolution could be invested to make more profit. The African colonies or
territories were grouped into different categories. There were colonies that were sources of
minerals; colonies for plantation crops; colonies for European settlement and colonies for
peasant production. The colonies under the first three categories include Congo, South Africa,
Zimbabwe, etc. The colonies under the last category which is peasant production include
Nigeria, Ghana, etc., also some of the colonies were selected as labour reserved while some
others were simply trading areas.
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