The Berlin Conference: Avoiding War in Africa

In the late 1800s, various European nations were eager to explore Africa. To prevent these expeditions from getting out of control, a major international gathering was held in Berlin.

Many different countries sent representatives to this meeting. They made agreements so that the competition between the European nations remained moderate.

This ended the fear that rivalry between different groups of European settlers could turn into war. (Four centuries earlier, in 1494, an agreement between Spain and Portugal prevented war in South America, where both of those nations had settlers.)

Beyond preventing war, the Berlin Conference help establish some other regulations for Africa. The treaty which contained these agreements was called the “General Act” of the Berlin Conference. As historian Andrew Zimmerman writes,

The General Act guaranteed a free flow of commerce along the African coast and in the Congo and Niger Rivers and their tributaries. The signatories also vowed to fight slavery in Africa; “watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being”; guarantee “freedom of conscience and religious toleration” for foreigners and Africans alike; and protect “Christian missionaries, scientists and explorers.”

While the treaty avoided a war between the European nations, and ensured the welfare of the Africans, it created tensions with the Ottoman Empire. Egypt and the Sudan, along with other regions of northern and eastern Africa, were still part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans operated a thriving slave trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Although slavery had been eliminated in Europe and North America, it still existed in many areas in the Middle East.

The slave traders from the Ottoman Empire were concerned that the Europeans in Africa would prevent them from capturing Africans and sending them to be sold in the slave markets of Istanbul or Arabia. This led to frictions between Ottoman representatives and European governments.

The Berlin Conference: Fighting Slavery

What was the net effect of European colonization in Africa? Was this activity merely the expression of greed for power and greed for materials? That is the story often presented. Is there another side to this narrative?

The documentation of the Berlin Conference, at which the various European powers organized territory in Africa, offers a glimpse into a different set of motives.

The agreements made in Berlin committed the Europeans to reducing and eventually eliminating slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Although slavery had ended in the United States in 1863, it continued in Brazil until 1888, and in the Ottoman Empire, slaves were publicly bought and sold until 1908.

At the time of the Berlin Conference, then, slavery was still a very real problem in the world. As historian Andrew Zimmerman writes,

The European partition of Africa, given formal sanction at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885, is often treated as an expression of exuberant nationalism in which each nation, vying for what Germans would come to call a “place in the sun,” sought to outdo the others in sticking their flags in far-flung territories. In fact, it was an expression of exuberant humanitarianism, guaranteed by such state power as the signatories of the General Act of the Berlin Conference were willing to provide.

Not only did the Berlin Conference seek to end slavery and the slave trade in Africa, it worked also to promote religious freedom, and to preserve the native cultures of the tribes in its territories.

This led to increased tension and conflict with Muslim lands, because Saudi Arabia and Qatar were still importing African slaves well into the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia, along with Yemen, didn’t formally make slavery illegal until 1962. In Qatar, slavery is still legal, as recently as 2017.

After the Berlin Conference, in the early 1890s, caravans of slaves were still transported through Ethiopia on their way to the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, the signatories to the Berlin Conference were able to largely reduce, but not entirely eliminate, slavery and the slave trade in Africa.