The Berlin Conference, also known as the Berlin West Africa Conference, was held between November 1884 and February 1885. Imperial powers, notably Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, met to thrash out their competing claims for control of certain territories across the African continent. The conference, although it did not actually divide the continent, provided a framework by which Africa could, in the future, be partitioned into European areas of effective control and so is widely considered the beginning of a distinct acceleration in imperialist acquisitions known as the 'Scramble for Africa'. Imperialism in Africa long pre-dated the Berlin Conference, but the rest of the 1880s and 1890s would see imperialist powers move from the coasts to inland territories so that by 1914, the whole continent of Africa, with the exception of Abyssinia and Liberia, came under European control.

What sparked the Berlin Conference was the increasing ambition shown by European powers in Africa from the late 1870s. In particular, the more powerful European powers, who for centuries had been involved in one way or another in Africa's coastal trade, began to show much more interest in what lay in the continent's interior. Palm oil, ivory, coffee, rubber, and gold were just some of Africa's resources that European states coveted.

British ambitions in Africa were spurred on by two key events: Diamonds had been discovered at Kimberly in Southern Africa in 1867, and the explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841 to 1904) had sailed from Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, all the way to the sea on Africa's eastern coast in 1877, showing that the continent's interior was not inaccessible thanks to its great rivers. In 1879, France sent an expedition from Senegal to claim rights along the Upper Niger and Congo – two of Africa's most important waterways and then signed treaties with local rulers. Germany reacted by sending its own representatives to the region in 1884, and it made similar claims over the Sultanate of Zanzibar and East Africa. Britain was keen to maintain its own influence in all three of these regions, too, but had so far limited itself to diplomatic channels and the rather vague idea of 'spheres of influence.' Much more active in Egypt, Britain took control of that country in 1882, much to the annoyance of France, which was concerned about who controlled the Suez Canal. The latter country was additionally put out by Italian interest in Tunisia, another area France claimed rights over.

Deepest, darkest Africa, as the Europeans saw it, was quickly becoming a little more accessible and a little less intimidating to European minds as they pushed their way further inland and away from the coast; a shift helped by developments in medicine like quinine, which provided protection against many of Africa's most deadly diseases. Greater accessibility brought greater competition. Simply grabbing territory with spurious claims, such as historic trade ties or having missionaries operate there, had become a seemingly legitimate form of foreign policy. Clearly, as more and more pieces of the African puzzle were coveted by two or more imperial powers, some sort of thrashing out of general rules of conduct for just how European imperialism would progress in Africa was required to avoid the great powers going to war with each other.

Otto von Bismarck (1815 to 1898), the chancellor and prime minister of Germany, acted on an idea first proposed by Portugal and, after sounding out the interests of various other powers, invited delegates from Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Portugal, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, the United States, and several other European countries to meet in Berlin to decide diplomatic rules regarding Africa. Several European powers, as we have seen, already had competing claims to territories on the continent. Of particular interest to the main delegates was the question of who would control Central Africa, especially the basin of the Congo River. Portugal and Belgium both sought control of this region. Another important topic for discussion in Berlin was who should control certain vital trade areas at various points of the continent's coast and along vital rivers like the Congo and Niger. Finally, Britain sought, rather unconvincingly, to justify its control over Egypt as merely a restoration of order following the nationalist uprising of 1881.

Preliminary discussions began in Berlin on 15 November 1884, and the debates ran on until 26 February the next year. In all, 14 states were represented in Berlin. There were no representatives from the African kingdoms, states, and cultures whose territories were about to be exposed to one of the greatest land grabs in history. That is not to say African powers were entirely passive in the Scramble for Africa, since many local rulers had been, and in the future would continue to be, all too willing to favour one imperialist power in order to keep another one out or to use foreign military and trade connections to bolster their own positions of power against local rivals.

The major result of the Berlin Conference was the General Act of Berlin, which had six main clauses. The Congo River basin was henceforth to be considered under the authority of King Leopold II of Belgium (reign 1865 to 1909), but free access for trade and shipping there was to be extended to all nations. Accordingly, the Congo Free State (État indépendant du Congo) was created. Both the Congo River and the Niger River were to be left open to all powers for trade use. Leopold's essentially private empire was a curious case of a constitutional monarch acting beyond his powers and the wishes of his own government, which wanted no part in any African empire. King Leopold, though, was determined to grab for himself a slice of what he described as "this magnificent African cake" (Oliver, 164). The Belgian government might have shied away from imperialism, but Belgian financiers certainly did not, and Leopold was not short of backers for his private enterprise. Leopold's mini-empire in the heart of Africa at first wore a mask of decency by pretending to favour scientific and humanitarian objectives, but in reality, its brutality sought only to extract as much wealth as possible from the Congo basin, principally in the form of rubber and ivory.

The Berlin Conference reached other important decisions. Article VI of the General Act of Berlin did otherwise consider African peoples and promised some consideration for their wellbeing:

All the Powers exercising sovereign rights or influence in the aforesaid territories bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material wellbeing, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the Slave Trade.

(Chamberlain, 114)

These lofty ambitions largely failed to materialise into a reality, but they do indicate some explanation of why European leaders felt they had every right to intervene in Africa without consulting Africans, an attitude difficult to comprehend today. Statesmen believed their industrialised economies gave them the power and, therefore, the right to intervene. This was seen and explained as a sort of Social Darwinism, that more 'evolved' nations had a right to interfere in 'backward' nations. In addition, Europeans also felt a moral superiority and obligation to act since they perceived themselves as superior agents who could 'improve' and 'civilise' African peoples they considered 'primitive' and 'savage'. Article VI contains the very phrase "bringing home to them the blessings of civilization" (ibid).

The European attitude and its racist vocabulary were reinforced and repeated by contemporary European historians and scholars who regarded Africa's long history as being completely empty of anything noteworthy, and by religious institutions and leaders convinced that their duty was to spread the message of Christianity and sweep away competing indigenous religions and cultures. All of these attitudes are encapsulated in the ideals of what was popularly called the '3 Cs' of imperialism: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization.

Article VI was, at least, the first weak glimmer of an international conscience that imperial powers had some obligation to indigenous peoples as a price to pay for the wealth they extracted from Africa. It was not until the establishment of the League of Nations after the First World War (1914 to 18), though, that this issue of how African peoples and their cultures should be treated and protected was addressed with any serious purpose.

Perhaps most significantly of all for the immediate future of Africa, the Berlin Conference formulated an agreement that major powers seeking to extend their control of African territories would abide by an agreed framework of acquisition and recognition, a process which would settle competing claims. If one state claimed authority over new territory, then the other signatories to the General Act of Berlin had to be informed and give their approval. In essence, "the claims of a European government to a particular region would only be recognized if the European power in question was already effectively in control of that region" (Reid, 153). This was a far from clear definition of colonial rights as the imperialist powers saw them. Further, what exactly constituted effective control or occupation was much debated.

Effectively, the vague phrasing and informality of the agreement in Berlin that all of Africa was now up for grabs only meant imperialist powers were now obliged to actually have a presence in an area of Africa, rather than merely point their diplomatic finger at it on a map and say, "that bit's mine." This consequence contains some irony since the leaders who convened in Berlin had hoped merely to control present colonial activity in Africa, call into question rather vague historical claims (particularly by Portugal), and limit future activity to trade, but they had, as time would tell, only succeeded in accelerating, widening, and deepening the process of territorial acquisition. European powers were now all too keen to demonstrate 'effective occupation' by whatever means necessary. After what has been described as the "loaded pause" of the Berlin Conference, the military, economic, and political conquest of Africa began in earnest from 1886.

Although the Berlin Conference is often considered as a starting point for the 'Scramble for Africa', the process of European domination on the continent had, in reality, already begun. The decisions made in Berlin did certainly accelerate colonialism in Africa as European powers, through the 1890s, raced to grab the best remaining parts of the continent. The strategy was typically for a state to be represented by a trading company which was backed, either on paper or in reality, by that state's military. In short, a formal presence was now essential to back a state's claim to sovereignty over any African region. A region need not be a full colony but could be a 'protectorate,' a rather vague title which indicated which major power considered itself the dominant one in that area, but not exactly what that meant in practical reality. A protectorate also allowed rival powers to have some, albeit limited, influence on that state. This was particularly important for states containing something vital to everyone, such as a major river or the Suez Canal in Egypt.

Through the 1890s and finishing in 1914, European powers carved up Africa and managed to avoid going to war with each other. This was, perhaps, the achievement, if such a word is here appropriate, of the Berlin Conference. In terms of international law or recognition, treaties were now taken as the strongest indicator of a right to control a particular region. Treaties were signed between local rulers and a single European power, or they were signed between two European powers, conceding to each other sole control of specific areas. Examples include the Franco-Portuguese Treaty and the German-Portuguese Treaty, both of 1886 and which dealt with Angola and Mozambique; the Anglo-German Treaties of 1890 and 1893 which dealt with the Upper Nile; the Anglo-Italian Treaty and the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty, both of 1891; the Anglo-Congo Free State Treaty of 1894; the Anglo-French decision to divide West Africa in the Say-Barruwa Agreement of 1890 and the Niger Convention of 1898; and the Anglo-French Convention of 1899, which settled the Egypt question.

The scramble had been such a frantic one that the only two African kingdoms left independent were Liberia and Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). The dominant and most aggressive powers were Britain, France, and Germany. The first two, in particular, grabbed the lion's share of protectorates and colonies, as each tried to create a connecting band of territory; the French from West Africa to the eastern coast of Africa, and the British from Egypt in the north to South Africa at the bottom end of the continent. Naturally, this objective, when achieved, could only come at the expense of the other imperialist power, and so certain regions, where the two lines crossed, became particularly contested, notably Egypt and Sudan.

Straight line borders were created, which completely ignored not only the challenges of local geography but also the traditional territorial rights of indigenous peoples, common languages, and deeply-rooted cultures. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and following a host of bloody invasions, wars, treaties, and the establishment of huge private trading companies, most of Africa was in the hands of just six European powers: Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy. African armies could not match the machine guns of the imperialists, although there were some notable reversals, such as the Zulu defeat imposed on the British Army at Isandhlwana in 1879 and the Abyssinians against the Italian Army at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. In addition, local resistance continued in many states in the form of rebellions against colonial rule.

WWI saw European powers fight each other on the continent to protect their African acquisitions, a situation repeated in the Second World War (1939 to 45). It would not be until 1957 and beyond that African states finally began to gain their independence, but the divisions artificially created by the 'Scramble for Africa' continue to influence the continent's politics today, with all too many areas still subject to intense disputes and stubbornly enduring conflicts.