State of Africa - introduction

As the haggling in Europe over African territory continued, land and peoples became little more than pieces on a chessboard.

“We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were,” Britain’s prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked sardonically to a London audience.

When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad of traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed on the ground.

Hitherto Europeans had known Africa more as a coastline than a continent; their presence had been confined mainly to small, isolated enclaves on the coast used for trading purposes; only in Algeria and in southern Africa had more substantial European settlement taken root.

The state of Africa

Introduction
During the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent.