140 YEARS AFTER THE BERLIN WEST AFRICA CONFERENCE BY CHIDI ANSELM ODINKALU & CHEPKORIR SAMBU
140 YEARS AFTER THE BERLIN WEST AFRICA CONFERENCE BY CHIDI ANSELM ODINKALU & CHEPKORIR SAMBU Described by one scholar on its centenary as “perhaps the greatest historical movement of modern times”, the Berlin Conference West Africa Conference began shortly after noon on 15 November 1884. Interrupted only by a short break at the end of the year and the beginning of the next, historian, Adu Boahen,records that the conference ended on 31 January 1884. On 26 February 1885, the powers gathered at the conference ratified the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which embodied their agreements. The week before the ratification of the General Act, according to historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, the Lagos Observer newspaper lamented that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large ascale.” Among the six goals identified by the General Act, the over-arching provisions set out “rules for future occupation of the coast of the African continent.” Of the 15 countries that attended the conference, 14 were European: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). All the European powers signed on to the General Act. The United States of America was the only non-European country at the table and also the only participating country that did not officially ratify the resulting treaty. From Africa, the Sultan of Zanzibar had equally sought representation at the conference but had his ambition derisorily blocked by the United Kingdom. Otto von Bismark, Chancellor of Germany which attained unification only 13 years earlier in 1871, hosted the Berlin Conference. Six years earlier, he had similarly played host to the Congress of Berlin called to stabilize the Balkan Peninsula at the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. There was an irony to the fact that the same venue was to serve as the site of a conference to Balkanise a distant continent of about 30,302,861 square kilometres. For context, this is territory big enough to contain all of the U.S.A., India, Europe, Argentina and New Zealandcombined with some room to spare. The Scramble for Africa preceded the Berlin Conference but the conference crystallised rules and doctrines that would govern the colonial occupation of Africa in its wake. In opening the conference, Bismark hoped that it would agree rules to regulate “the terms for the development of trade and civilization in certain regions of Africa”; assure free navigation of the Rivers Congo and the Niger; anticipate and avoid disputes as to new acts of territorial occupation in Africa and “further the moral and material wellbeing of the native population.” The aftermath is controversial for predictable reasons. The continent lives with the consequences of decisions in which it did not participate and whose records are also outside its control. While the lingering consequences of Berlin continue to be debated, a few deserve to be highlighted. First, as is evident from Bismark’s stipulations, the conference objectives and outcomes infantilized Africa and its peoples and habituated the world to the continent as lacking in agency and its territories as lacking in history or civilization prior to the occupation that followed in the wake of Berlin. These ideas were to be subsequently embodied in doctrine,jurisprudence and treaty law. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled in 1918 that African territories were “so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society.” The court offered no authority or support for this decision; there was none. This jurisprudence made its way into the provisions of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant which referred to these territories as being “inhabited by peoples not…
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