By Chidi Odinkalu & Chepkorir Sambu
Described by one scholar on its centenary as “perhaps the greatest historical movement of modern times”, the Berlin West Africa Conference began shortly after noon on 15 November 1884. Interrupted only by a short break at the end of the year and the beginning of the next, historian, Adu Boahen, records that the conference ended on 31 January 1884.
On 26 February 1885, the powers gathered at the conference ratified the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which embodied their agreements. The week before the ratification of the General Act, according to historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, the Lagos Observer newspaper lamented that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale.”
Among the six goals identified
by the General Act, the over-arching provisions set out “rules for future
occupation of the coast of the African continent.”
Of the 15 countries that
attended the conference, 14 were European: United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal,
Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). All the European powers
signed on to the General Act. The United States of America was the only
non-European country at the table and also the only participating country that
did not officially ratify the resulting treaty.
From Africa, the Sultan of
Zanzibar had equally sought representation at the conference but had his
ambition derisorily blocked by the United Kingdom.
Otto von Bismark, Chancellor of Germany which attained unification only 13 years earlier in 1871, hosted the Berlin Conference. Six years earlier, he had similarly played host to the Congress of Berlin called to stabilize the Balkan Peninsula at the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878.
There was an irony to the fact that the same venue
was to serve as the site of a conference to balkanise a distant continent of
about 30,302,861 square kilometres. For context, this is territory big enough
to contain all of the USA., India, Europe, Argentina and New Zealand combined
with some room to spare.
The Scramble for Africa preceded
the Berlin Conference but the conference crystallised rules and doctrines that
would govern the colonial occupation of Africa in its wake. In opening the
conference, Bismark hoped that it would agree rules to regulate “the terms for
the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa”; assure
free navigation of the Rivers Congo and the Niger; anticipate and avoid
disputes as to new acts of territorial occupation in Africa and “further the
moral and material wellbeing of the native population.”
The aftermath is controversial
for predictable reasons. The continent lives with the consequences of decisions
in which it did not participate and whose records are also outside its control.
While the lingering consequences of Berlin continue to be debated, a few
deserve to be highlighted.
First, as is evident from Bismark’s stipulations, the conference objectives and outcomes infantilized Africa and its peoples and habituated the world to the continent as lacking in agency and its territories as lacking in history or civilization prior to the occupation that followed in the wake of Berlin. These ideas were to be subsequently embodied in doctrine, jurisprudence and treaty law.
The Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council ruled in 1918 that African territories were “so
low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of
rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal
ideas of civilized society.” The court offered no authority or support for this
decision; there was none. This jurisprudence made its way into the provisions
of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant which referred to these
territories as being “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves
under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”
Second, the logic of colonial occupation made atrocity inevitable and the traumas from that has assumed an inter-generational dimensions. Looking back at the period preceding the conference, however, Adu Boahen recalls that Africa “was far from being primitive, static, and asleep or in a Hobbesian state of nature.” The rules of the conference precluded any items on sovereignty whether of the European states or of the African territories.
Yet the outcome created a logic that encouraged adverse
assertions of sovereignty over African lands and peoples. John Kasson, the lead
US delegate to the conference had argued that the establishment of “productive
labour” in African territories “can only be arrived at through the permanent
establishment of a peaceful regime.” The idea of permanent establishment of a
peaceful regime over other peoples’ lands could only occur through occupation
and rapine.
This is exactly what ensued in
the aftermath of the doctrine of effective occupation consecrated by the
General Act of the Berlin Conference embodied in the obligation assumed by the
parties in Article 35 of the General Act “to insure the establishment of
authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African
continent sufficient to protect existing rights, and, as the case may be,
freedom of trade and of transit.” Seven of the 14 countries present at the
Berlin Conference went on to become occupying powers in Africa, namely: France,
Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy and Spain. Their campaigns of
occupation were accompanied by violence which has been described as “brutal and
deadly.”
In the quarter century from the
end of the conference to 1910 when the period of active territorial occupation
occurred, nearly every affected African country experienced a fall in
population. The signal case was King Leopold’s Congo Free State about whom it
has been said that the population crashed from “20 million in 1891 to only
8,500,000 in 1911. In other words, the King’s system resulted in the death of
between 10 and 11.5 million Congolese as ‘a very conservative estimate.’”
Contemporary movements for acknowledgement and reparations barely scratch the
surface.
Third, as Ali Mazrui points out,
the Berlin Conference ultimately saddled Africa with twin crises of both state
legitimacy and governmental legitimacy. Governed as they were by logics of
arbitrary and convenient externalities, colonial territorialization made no
effort to foster legitimate political communities. The methods of divide and
rule and of Indirect Rule which defined colonial administration, instead
encouraged adversiarialism instead of coexistence within countries. As colony
yielded to post-colony, these left legacies of political unrest, regime
instability, and conflict.
Fourth, the boundaries created in Berlin have proved durable but not necessarily stable. To head off this problem, the Organisation of African Unity, OAU, at its second Summit in Cairo, Egypt, in 1964, pronounced the continent’s borders at independence as a “tangible reality” to be respected by all member states. The reality has been a lot less sanguine. The continent’s borders are notoriously arbitrary and porous and many are disputed.
One scholar has counted over 100 border disputes in the
continent as well as “approximately 58 potential secessionist territories in
29” African countries championed by “at least 83 political associations and
pressure groups.” A cottage industry in territorial dispute resolution exists,
with 13 of 18 contentious cases submitted to the International Court of Justice
from Africa being about inter-state boundaries.
The legacies of the Berlin Conference in and on Africa endure. The response of the continent’s leadership has until recently been lacking in coherence and urgency. The deepening of regional integration in the African Union which was supposed to address the colonial atomization of the continent has stalled.
In parts of the continent,
it is experiencing reversal or now confined only to trade in goods. Similarly
efforts to address atrocity violence through transitional justice around Africa
confine themselves to post-colonial violence, without recognizing or addressing
the lingering traumas from colonial era violence.
While the movement for
reparations for colonial atrocities, including the repatriation of pillaged
African arts, gathers pace, it faces renewed resistance from the emergence of
illiberal governments in the capitals of perpetrator states who were at the
Berlin Conference. On the 140th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, these
trends underscore the need for renewed attention to an event whose consequences
for both Africa and international law were seminal but not always
constructive.
*Odinkalu
teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University,
Medford, MA
*Sambu is a lawyer and researcher focusing on conflicts and peace processes in Eastern Africa.
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