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.
