Which African countries were not colonies. Colonization of Africa

It has many millennia, and according to some scientific hypotheses, it was in Africa that the first people appeared, who subsequently multiplied and populated all other lands of our planet (well, except for Antarctica). So, according to these hypotheses, Africa is the cradle of mankind. And it is not surprising that many people were drawn to this continent and returned, sometimes as explorers and sometimes as conquerors, such is our human nature.

The first European colonies in Africa began to appear at the beginning of the 15-16th century. The British and French showed genuine interest in North Africa, and especially in one of the cradles of human civilizations - Egypt with its majestic pyramids and the mysterious Sphinx. The Portuguese were the first to penetrate West Africa, creating their colonies there. Subsequently, representatives of other European countries also joined them: Holland, Belgium, Germany.

The greatest peak of colonialism in Africa came in the 19th century, here is an interesting fact: at the beginning of the century before last, only 10% of African territories were European colonies, but at its end, 90% (!) African lands were European colonies. Only two African countries managed to maintain full independence: and Eastern Sudan. All the other countries were under someone's heel, so many countries of North Africa belonged to France: Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, in each of them French domination was established by force. For some other countries, such as, say, the already mentioned Egypt, there was even a desperate military struggle between France and England. The latter was also not opposed to taking possession of this tidbit, but in Egypt the British had to meet a strong and talented enemy, the famous General Napoleon Bonaparte, who would soon become the French emperor, conquer all of Europe and reach right up to Moscow. Although further military defeats by Napoleon reduced the influence of France in North Africa, Egypt did, in the end, go to the British.

The Portuguese, thanks to their brave navigators and cartographers, were the first to reach West Africa, where they entered into numerous contacts with the local population and founded their colonies, Angola, a huge African country, whose area is several times larger than the area of ​​small Portugal, became the largest Portuguese colony in West Africa. .

The British also did not catch crows, and in addition to Egypt, they founded many colonies, both in West and East and South Africa. Subsequently, representatives of other European states also came to Africa: the Germans managed to capture part of the territory of West Africa: Cameroon, Togo and Namibia (the latter country still strongly resembles Germany with its cozy cities built by the Germans themselves).

The Belgians, since by the time they appeared the African coast was already occupied by other Europeans, decided to move deep into the African continent, where they founded their colony in the country of Congo (Central Africa). The Italians received land in eastern Africa: the countries of Somalia and Eritrea became their colonies.

What attracted Europeans to Africa? First of all, numerous natural resources, as well as human resources - that is, slaves, into which the Europeans actively turned the local population. Further, the slaves were taken to the New World for hard work on local sugar plantations. In general, the slave trade is one of the darkest pages of African history, about which there will be a separate article on our website.

Returning to colonialism, in addition to its clearly negative consequences, there were some positive aspects. So the Europeans brought a certain civilization, culture to Africa, built cities, roads, Christian missionaries went along with the soldiers who wanted to convert the local population to Christianity (whether it be Protestantism or Catholicism), they did a lot to educate Africans, built schools taught African natives European languages ​​​​(primarily English, but also French, Spanish, Portuguese, German) and other sciences.

THE DECLINE OF COLONIALISM

Everything comes to an end sooner or later, and the end came to colonialism in Africa, the decline of which began in the 60s of the last century. It was at this time that active socio-political movements for the declaration of independence began in various African countries. Somewhere it is possible to gain independence peacefully, but somewhere it was not without armed struggle, as, say, in the same Angola, where a real war of independence against Portuguese rule took place, which, however, after that turned into a civil war between Angolans who were carried away by communist ideas (the MPLA party) and those who wanted to build communism in Angola and the Angolans, who did not like it, but that's another story.

Also, the negative impact of colonialism after its collapse was the fact that some newly created African countries contained a heterogeneous cultural and even hostile population. Sometimes this led to real civil wars, as, say, it was in Nigeria, a former English colony, where, after the declaration of independence, the Ibo and Yoruba tribes were hostile to each other in one country. But again, that's another story...

North Africa

At the beginning of the XIX century. most of the North African states belonged to the Ottoman Empire. But the collapse of this empire was already beginning, and the place of the Turkish authorities was gradually taken by European ones. Thus, France subjugated Algeria, followed by Tunisia and Morocco. Here is shown an episode of an attack by warriors of an African tribe living in the desert on a French fort, which is defended by soldiers of the famous Foreign Legion. The ruler needed money and therefore sold his stake in the Suez Canal to Great Britain, which thus could influence the internal affairs of Egypt and completely subordinated it to its power. Egypt, in turn, dominated the Sudan. In 1883, a Muslim preacher led an uprising there against Egyptian rule. British troops were sent to suppress it, but they were defeated near Khartoum.

Trade with Europeans in West Africa

These gold items were made by Ashanti craftsmen, a people who lived in western Africa. The Ashanti state became rich by selling gold and slaves to Europeans. For several years, the Ashanti fought with Britain, who sought to conquer them, and in 1901 they were defeated and their state ceased to exist.

Zimbabwe

This was the name of the capital of a wealthy state in southeast Africa. It was destroyed during the war with rival tribes. The surviving ruins, such as the remains of the temple depicted here, indicate that the city was once built by very skilled craftsmen.

South Africa

In 1652, the first Dutch settlers appeared in South Africa. The settlement they founded on the Cape of Good Hope was called the Cape Colony. Most of them became engaged in farming, and the name of the Boers (from the Dutch word "boer" - farmer) was assigned to the colonists. Under an international treaty concluded in 1814, the Cape Colony became a British possession. In 1835-1837 many Boers, who did not like living under British rule, left their homes and farms and, having loaded their property into wagons, moved north from the Cape to find a new place to settle, free from British domination. This episode entered the history of South Africa as the Great Migration of the Boers.

Cecil Rhodes made a huge fortune mining gold and diamonds and founded the British South Africa Company, one of whose goals was the construction of a railway connecting British possessions in the south with diamond mines north of the new Boer settlements. In 1895, the entire territory was named Rhodesia.

The Boers began to have armed clashes with the Zulus - the most warlike tribe of those that lived in the neighborhood of the new settlements of the Boers. British troops, having entered the war on the side of the Boers, helped to finally defeat the Zulus in 1879. Gradually, Britain increased its influence in those areas where the Boers lived. In 1886, gold was found in one of them, which caused a new influx of British people who decided to settle in these places.

Partition of Africa by Europeans

In 1880 most of Africa was still independent of any European countries. But in the period from 1880 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the European powers one way or another divided almost the entire African continent among themselves.

In 1889 war broke out between the Boers and the British. At first, the advantage was on the side of the Boers, who rode fine frisky horses, knew how to track down the enemy and knew the area where the fighting was going on. British troops destroyed Boer farms and their livestock, and the Boers they managed to capture, including women and children, were placed in special prisoner camps. As a result, in 1902 the war ended with the surrender of the Boers.

Contrary to popular belief, the Europeans did not begin to conquer it from the first second of their stay on the African coast in the same way as they did in America. Africa met the first colonists with dangerous diseases, centralized states and numerous, albeit poorly armed, armies. The first attempts at aggression against the African kingdoms showed that it would not be possible to conquer them with a detachment of 120 people, as Pizarro did with the Inca Empire. As a result, for almost four centuries after the appearance of the first Portuguese fort of Elmina in Africa (1482), European powers had practically no opportunity to control the deep regions of the mainland, content only with colonies on the coast and in estuaries.

Many European countries managed to participate in the colonization of the Black Continent. As the first "masters" of Africa, which was granted to them by a special bull of the Pope, the Portuguese extremely quickly, literally during the lifetime of one generation, managed to capture or establish strongholds in West, South and East Africa. At the beginning of the XVI century. The Ottoman Empire took over North Africa. Only a century later, in the 17th century, these two empires were followed by young colonial lions - England, the Netherlands, France. Their colonies in Africa in the XVII century. had Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Brandenburg and even Courland, a small Baltic duchy, which for some time owned an island and a fortress at the mouth of the Gambia River, where landless Latvian peasants were settled by colonists.

Europeans preferred to buy or rent land from local rulers rather than fight for it. In Africa, they were not interested in land, but primarily in goods: slaves, gold, ivory, ebony - and these goods could be bought relatively inexpensively or taken as tribute. In addition, the belief prevailed in Europe at that time that the climate in the depths of the continent was unbearable for a white man, and this was true: malaria, schistosomiasis and sleeping sickness significantly reduced the life of a European in Africa. The Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique and the Dutch colonists in South Africa advanced more than others, but on the whole the map of European possessions on the continent in 1850 differed little from that of 1600.

In the 1720s Peter I decided to equip an expedition for the development of the island of Madagascar by Russia. It was not destined to take place, but the archives preserved a letter from the Emperor of All Russia to a certain non-existent "King of Madagascar", where Peter calls himself his "friend": "By the grace of God, we, Peter I, are the Emperor and Autocrat of All Russia, etc., etc., and so on, to the most venerable king and ruler of the glorious island of Madagascar, our congratulations.Because we have deigned to send to you our Vice-Admiral Wilster with several officers for some business: for your sake, we ask you, in order to admit them inclined to yourself, to give free stay, and in that they will offer you in our name to give you full and perfect faith, and with such a inclined answer to let them go to us again, we deigned, what we trust from you, and stay with you, friend. of the year".

As for the map of the interior of Africa before the European conquest, it is usually represented as a solid blank spot. It is easy to see that this is not so: in the middle of the XIX century. there were at least two dozen fairly developed states on the continent, with which the Europeans for the time being maintained very close and relatively friendly relations.

Everything changed literally in an instant in the last quarter of the 19th century, and there were several reasons for this. Europe learned the properties of quinine, produced from the bark of the South American cinchona tree and capable of treating malaria, which was no longer so terrible for European settlers. Europe developed the technology of rifled weapons, which had huge advantages over the smooth-bore musket, which was equipped with the most advanced African armies. Europe has accumulated enough information about inner Africa thanks to a whole cohort of glorious travelers who successfully passed through the jungle, swamps, deserts and proved that the sun does not burn a person alive there, as the ancient authors believed. Finally, Europe had experienced an industrial revolution and was in dire need of new markets for manufactured goods, which were being produced at hitherto unheard-of speed and in large quantities. To start the colonial race, it was only necessary to fire the first shot. It was not the great powers that were destined to make it, but small Belgium.

This shot was fired in 1876 in Brussels, when the Belgian King Leopold II announced the creation of the African International Association to promote scientific and humanitarian projects in the Congo Basin. Throughout Europe, this move was hailed as the beginning of the Belgian conquest of Central Africa, and indeed it was. Having landed at the mouth of the Congo, the Belgian soldiers and the black militia armed by them went deep into the continent, forcing the local leaders by force to sign enslaving treaties with King Leopold on an "alliance", which in fact gave the land for nothing into the hands of the Europeans. Many leaders simply did not understand what they put their signature or fingerprint under. Dissenters were killed or imprisoned, uprisings were suppressed with unprecedented cruelty. Western journalists were aware of cases when policemen hired by the king not only killed, but also ate their victims among the civilian population, especially children. In terms of its cruelty, the exploitation of the local population in the rubber plantations, mines, and road construction organized by the Belgians did not know anything like it in the history of Africa. People died in tens of thousands, and at the same time, repression and robbery remained uncontrolled, because the "Free State of the Congo", as this vast territory was called with terrible cynicism, was not controlled by the Belgian state, but was the personal property of Leopold. This unique lawlessness continued until 1908.

Belgium was immediately followed by England, France, Portugal and Spain, and a little later, the young great powers Germany and Italy, who also dreamed of their own colonial empires, joined the division of the African pie that had suddenly become so fashionable.

The race took on hurricane speed. Everywhere in Africa, where it was possible to negotiate with tribal leaders or break the resistance of local principalities, the European flag was immediately hoisted, and the territory was considered annexed to the empire. At the Berlin Conference of 1885, where the division of Africa was legalized, the great powers urged each other to correct, civilized behavior, but, as always happens in the division, clashes were difficult to avoid. One of the most famous "incidents" occurred near the Sudanese town of Fashoda in 1898, when the French detachment of Marchand, coming from West Africa, came face to face with the English expedition of Kitchener, also busy placing flags. It took intense negotiations and numerous concessions to avoid war: the French withdrew to the south, and the Sudan withdrew into the British sphere of influence.

It cannot be said that this lightning-fast division of the continent cost the colonialists without losses. The British had to go through several bloody battles to capture the Ashanti Confederation in Ghana and the Zulu state in South Africa, while the French overcame the desperate resistance of the Fulani Emirates and the Tuareg of Mali. For two years, German troops had to suppress the Herero uprising in Namibia, which ended in a large-scale genocide of Africans.

Although by 1900 the African continent had turned into a kind of patchwork scarf painted over with the colors of European empires, Tanganyika (the territory of present-day Tanzania) was subjugated by Germany only in 1907, and France secured control over West Africa not earlier than 1913. The liberation struggle of the Libyan tribes against the Italians continued until 1922, and the Spaniards managed to pacify the militant Berbers of Morocco only in 1926.

Independence managed to maintain only one state created by Africans - Ethiopia. At the end of the XIX century. the Ethiopian Negus Menelik II even managed to participate in the division of Africa, more than doubling the boundaries of his state at the expense of various tribes in the south, west and east.

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Colonization of Africa

On the eve of European colonization, the peoples of Tropical and Southern Africa were at various stages of development. Some had a primitive system, others had a class society. It can also be said that in Tropical Africa, a sufficiently developed, specifically Negro statehood did not take shape, even comparable to the states of the Incas and Maya. How can this be explained? There are several reasons, namely: an unfavorable climate, poor soils, primitive agricultural technology, a low level of labor culture, the fragmentation of a small population, as well as the dominance of primitive tribal traditions and early religious cults. In the end, highly developed civilizations: Christian and Muslim differed from African in more developed cultural and religious traditions, that is, a more advanced level of consciousness than Africans. At the same time, remnants of pre-class relations persisted even among the most developed peoples. The decomposition of tribal relations was most often manifested in the exploitation by the heads of large patriarchal families of ordinary community members, as well as in the concentration of land and livestock in the hands of the tribal elite.

In different centuries, both in the Middle Ages and in the New Age, various state formations arose on the territory of Africa: Ethiopia (Aksum), in which the Christian Monophysite Church dominated; a kind of confederation called Oyo arose on the Guinean coast; then Dahomey; in the lower reaches of the Congo at the end of the 15th century. such state formations as the Congo, Loango and Makoko appeared; in Angola between 1400 and 1500. there was a short-lived and semi-legendary political association - Monomotapa. However, all these proto-states were fragile. Europeans who appeared on the coast of Africa in the XVII-XVIII centuries. launched a large-scale slave trade. Then they tried to create their own settlements, outposts and colonies here.

In southern Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope, the site of the Dutch East India Company-Kapstadt (Cape Colony) was established. Over time, more and more settlers from Holland began to settle in Kapstadt, who waged a stubborn struggle with local tribes, Bushmen and Hottentots. At the beginning of the XIX century. The Cape colony was captured by Great Britain, after which the Dutch-Boers moved to the north, subsequently founding the republics of Transvaal and Orange. European Boer colonists increasingly developed southern Africa, engaging in the slave trade and forcing the black population to work in gold and diamond mines. In the English zone of colonization, the Zulu tribal community led by Chuck in the first third of the 19th century. managed to consolidate and subjugate a number of Bantu tribes. But the clash of the Zulus, first with the Boers, and then with the British, led to the defeat of the Zulu state.

Africa in the 19th century became the main springboard for European colonization. By the end of this century, almost the entire African continent (with the exception of Ethiopia) was divided between Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium. Moreover, the first place in terms of the number of colonies and the native population belonged to Great Britain, the second to France (mainly to the north and south of the Sahara), the third to Germany, the fourth to Portugal and the fifth to Belgium. But small Belgium got a huge territory (about 30 times larger than the territory of Belgium itself), the richest in its natural reserves - the Congo.

The European colonialists, having done away with the primary proto-state formations of African leaders and kings, brought here the forms of a developed bourgeois economy with advanced technology and transport infrastructure. The local population, experiencing a cultural "shock" from meeting with a civilization that was fabulously developed at that time, gradually joined modern life. In Africa, as well as in other colonies, the fact of belonging to one or another metropolis immediately manifested itself. So, if the British colonies (Zambia, Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, Southern Rhodesia, etc.) were under the control of an economically developed, bourgeois and democratic England and began to develop more rapidly, then the population of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea (Bissau) belonging to the more backward Portugal, more slowly.

Far from always, colonial conquests were economically justified, sometimes the struggle for colonies in Africa looked like a kind of political sport - by all means bypass the opponent and not let yourself be bypassed. Secularized European thought during this period abandoned the idea of ​​​​spreading the “true religion” -Christianity, but she saw the civilizing role of Europe in the backward colonies in the spread of modern science and education. In addition, in Europe it became even indecent not to have colonies. This can explain the emergence of the Belgian Congo, German and Italian colonies, from which there was little use.

Germany was the last to rush to Africa, nevertheless managed to take possession of Namibia, Cameroon, Togo and East Africa. In 1885, on the initiative of German Chancellor Bismarck, the Berlin Conference was convened, in which 13 European countries took part. The conference established the rules for the acquisition of still independent lands in Africa, in other words, the remaining still unoccupied lands were divided. By the end of the 19th century, only Liberia and Ethiopia retained political independence in Africa. Moreover, Christian Ethiopia successfully repelled the attack of Italy in 1896 and even defeated Italian troops in the Battle of Adua.

The division of Africa also brought to life such a variety of monopolistic associations as privileged companies. The largest of these companies was the British South Africa Company, established in 1889 by S. Rhodes and having its own army. The Royal Niger Company operated in West Africa, and the British East Africa Company operated in East Africa. Similar companies were created in Germany, France, Belgium. These monopolistic companies were a kind of state within a state and turned the African colonies with their population and resources into a sphere of complete subordination to themselves. The richest African colony was South Africa, which belonged to Britain and the Boer colonists from the Transvaal and Orange republics, since gold and diamonds were found there. This led the British and Boers from Europe to start the bloody Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, in which the British won. The diamond-rich republics of Transvaal and Orange became British colonies. Subsequently, in 1910, the richest British colony, South Africa, formed the British dominion, the Union of South Africa.