Berlin Conference

Between November 1884 and February 1885, diplomats from fourteen states met in Berlin to agree rules for European trade and expansion in Africa. Called by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the meeting produced the General Act of Berlin, which recognised King Leopold II's claims in the Congo basin and set out how colonial claims on the African coast were to be made. No African ruler took part. The conference has become a symbol of the Scramble for Africa, though historians debate how much of the partition it actually decided.

Until the later nineteenth century, European power in Africa was mostly limited to coastal trading posts. That began to change quickly. Leopold II of Belgium, acting privately through societies that presented themselves as scientific and philanthropic, employed the explorer Henry Morton Stanley from 1878 to secure treaties along the Congo River. France responded by sending Pierre de Brazza, who raised the French flag over what became Brazzaville. Portugal revived old claims to the mouth of the Congo and in February 1884 signed a treaty with Britain to shut Leopold's organisation off from the Atlantic. France was also expanding in Tunisia and West Africa, Britain had occupied Egypt in 1882, and Germany was launching colonial expeditions of its own. To calm the rivalry, Bismarck, acting on Portugal's initiative and with British support, invited the powers to Berlin.

The conference opened on 15 November 1884 in a building on Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse. Thirteen European states and the United States sent delegates, each with a single vote; the United States kept the right to reject the outcome. The Sultan of Zanzibar asked to send a representative but was refused. Six of the participants, among them Russia, Denmark, Sweden-Norway and the United States, would gain no African territory. After an adjournment, the General Act was signed on 26 February 1885.

The Act confirmed that the lands held by Leopold's International Congo Society belonged to it. A few months later, on 1 August 1885, the territory was proclaimed the Congo Free State, with Leopold as its personal sovereign. A wide zone around the Congo basin was declared open to free trade for all signatories, and shipping on the Congo and Niger rivers was made free. The powers also undertook to watch over the welfare of African peoples and to work to suppress slavery and the slave trade, pledges that helped win public support at home.

Most influential was what became known as the principle of effective occupation. A power claiming new territory on the African coast had to notify the other signatories and show real authority there, through treaties with local rulers, its flag and an administration. Britain, wary of the cost of governing its many protectorates directly, resisted a strict version, and the final wording was loose: a coastal base could be enough to support claims reaching inland.

In the years that followed, expeditions spread across the continent to win treaties from African rulers, by force when persuasion failed. France conquered much of the Sahara and Sahel; Britain advanced north from southern Africa and south from Egypt. By 1914 about 90 per cent of Africa was under European control, and only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.

For a long time historians treated Berlin as the moment Africa was carved up. More recent scholars stress that most borders were drawn in separate agreements between pairs of powers before and after it; a 2024 study found that the only frontiers fixed at the conference were in the Congo region, and these were later revised. The conference nonetheless gave colonial claims an agreed legal procedure, and the frontiers that emerged from the partition, often cutting across existing peoples and states, were inherited by African countries at independence.

Our 1880 map shows Africa just before the conference, with European holdings still mostly on the coasts; our 1900 and 1914 maps show the continent largely divided, including the Congo of Belgium's king and the German Empire's new colonies.