Scramble for Africa

Question 1

What were the main colonial powers, present in Africa?

Answer 1

France and Britain. Portugal, Belgium, Germany (until 1918), Italy, and Spain had some stake

Question 2

What facilitated and what caused increased European activity in East and West Africa in 1860s/70s?

Answer 2

New technologies (weapons and steamboats)
Better medicine (quinine)
Access to capital

Search for new resources e.g. ivory, diamonds, gold, rubber
Trading e.g. weapons, alcohol

Question 3

Why was there an increased European interest in Africa?

Answer 3

Humanitarian concern - anti-slavery movement
Christian mission societies
Exploration (last white spot on map)

Question 4

Who was Henry Morton Stanley?

Answer 4

A Welsh-American journalist explorer (1841-1904)

Promoted his quest to find David Livingstone. He was the epitome of a Western gentleman.

Question 5

What was the age of ‘high imperialism’?

Answer 5

Period between 1880 and 1914

Question 6

When was the Suez Canal opened?

Answer 6

1869

Question 7

What can be thought of as the trigger for the Scramble for Africa? (Think of Egypt)

Answer 7

Competition between French and British for control over Egypt, competing influence. Control over Egypt would command economic, political and military influence. Anglo-Egyptian war in 1882

Question 8

Explain European Imperial competition.

Answer 8

Increased nationalism, chauvinism, and competition between the Great Powers

Question 9

When were the German states unified?

Answer 9

1870

Question 10

What was the International African Society?

Answer 10

1876- Philanthropic, humanitarian, and scientific society. Essentially a private holding company

Question 11

What was the Congo Free State?

Answer 11

Taken over in 1878 by Belgium (privately owned by King Leopold II)

Question 12

What was the Berlin conference 1884/1885?

Answer 12

Bismarck hosted it, was meant to prevent war between the European powers. 14 countries participated, but there was no representation for Africa.

Question 13

What was ‘effective occupation’?

Answer 13

Military presence, economic investment, treaties with local rulers.

Question 14

What did the prohibition of the slave trade, effective occupation, and free trade in the Congo basin do to the Scramble for Africa?

Answer 14

Increased the Scramble for Africa

Question 15

THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS:

What is the metropolitan approach?

Answer 15

Focus on motivations of each European power (metropole) and their reasons to join the partition of Africa (Hobson, Lenin, Schumpeter, Cain and Hopkins)

Question 16

THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS: What is the peripheral approach?

Answer 16

Perspective from Africa and reasons as to why developments ‘on the spot’ in Africa (periphery) triggered intervention by European powers (Gallagher and Robinson)

Question 17

THEORETICAL EXPLANATIONS: What is the international relations approach?

Answer 17

Looks at the partition of Africa, within a global framework, particularly the issue of rivalry (A.J.P Taylor, Kennedy)

Question 18

How did Europeans implement their rule in Africa?

Answer 18

Military conquests. Creation of ‘new elites’ - soldiers and civilian rulers. Transformations of the economy- agriculture, taxes, forced labour

Question 19

What were some of the cultural and social consequences of European rule on African Societies?

Answer 19

Increased missionary activity, spread of Christianity, marriages, nuclear family structures. More western schools and education, language, consumption, and fashion. Influx of European settlers meant there was increased racial boundaries

Question 20

What was the impact of colonialism in Europe?

Answer 20

Introduced an Imperial Culture which promoted Empire at a private and state level. Popularisation of racist theories and practices:

• popular sciences
• colonial exhibitions and human zoos
• toys and games
• fictions, press, films

Question 21

Why was Africa referred to as a place of darkness?

Answer 21

Despite the Victorians explorers, missionaries and scientists illuminating the continent. There was still a lack of understanding: ‘light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of savage customs in the name of civilisation

Question 22

What does Bratlinger mean when he says power was self-validating?

Answer 22

He is referring to many Victorians (upper and middle classes) as they were dominant over a working class majority at home and increasing numbers of inferior people abroad

Question 23

What does Williams argue that was essential to Britain’s industrial take-off?

Answer 23

The slave trade. They could only afford to legislate against it after it helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial take-off

Question 24

Between the 1790s and the 1840s what sort of literature surrounded Africa?

Answer 24

Mainly abolitionist propaganda
Antislavery writing involves the revelation of atrocities- the constant association of Africa with inhumane violence did much to darken its landscape

Question 25

Why did antislavery literature ultimately not benefit Africans?

Answer 25

It Romanticised Africans and presented them to be child-like. “The negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but n the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave’. Because of this, British people began to see themselves as the saviours of Africans.

Question 26

How did the Niger expedition have an impact on how Europeans viewed Africa?

Answer 26

Most people contracted malaria, this added to the darkening of the continent

Question 27

Which famous writer negatively contributed to the image of Africa?

Answer 27

Charles Dickens- described Africa as a continent not fit for civilisation, best left in the dark
- the British view shifted and began to see Africa as a centre of evil, possessed by a demonic barbarism

Question 28

What impact did Livingstone have?

Answer 28

His book was widely read - regression of image as vulnerable to savage (the myth of cannibalism) He also advocated the opening up of Africa by commerce and Christianity

Question 29

There was a popularisation of ethnic ‘science’. What impact did this have?

Answer 29

It was implied that Africans were not suited for freedom or are genetically doomed to a life no higher than that of beasts of burden. Thought to be the missing link between apes and civilised white mankind- eugenics was very dangerous

Question 30

What did missionaries often express a fear of?

Answer 30

Going native and regressing to heathenism

Question 31

What did the British feel that Africa provided an ideal setting for?

Answer 31

Training ground for boys to become men, men to behave like boys.

Question 32

What is creolisation?

Answer 32

In the earliest contact between Portugal and West Africa, it was used to refer to the language that was born out of the interaction between Portuguese mercantile settlers who resided among the natives in Guinea-Bissau soon after the first contact in 1446. Also came to refer to mixed-race peoples or indigenous peoples. It is in this context of European encounter that creolization as a process of cultural interactions, exchange and intermixing with non-European people, and West Africans in particular, that the critique of Hegel’s dialectic is paramount.

Question 33

What does Ashcroft mean by hybridity?

Answer 33

Ashcroft writes: ‘Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third, ‘‘hybrid’’ species’

Question 34

How does Young challenge Ashcroft’s meaning?

Answer 34

His challenge does not arise from hybridity as a process which destabilizes and blurs cultural boundaries of fixity, but in the history of the term which has been a negative one in connoting Eurocentrism; legitimating Western social and cultural privileges. He argues that by using hybridity we maintain a sense of status quo and remain locked in the past. To use the term hybridity would be to claim the ideology of the colonial past, an ideology which postcolonial discourse seeks to dismantle. On one hand, argues Young, hybridity comes to stand for the violence of the past that issues from the forced relationship based on a power imbalance. However, to allow such a rationale is to imply that Europeans have always assumed positions of power in their relations with Others