An Assessment of the Partition and Scramble of Africa and the Effect of Slave Trade in the Continent

Abstract

The scramble and Partition of African countries began in earnest with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, and this was the cause of the most of Africa’s borders today. The conference was called by German Chancellor Bismarck to settle how European countries would claim colonial land in Africa and to avoid a war among European nations over African territory. All the major European States were invited to the conference which includes the Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain were all considered to have a future role in the imperial partition of Africa. The United States was invited because of its interest in Liberia but did not attend the conference because it had no desire to build a colonial empire in Africa. Also invited were Austria–Hungary, Sweden–Norway, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, and Russia who all were considered minor players in the quest for colonizing Africa, though Italy has claim some colonial possessions in Northeast Africa. Most notably there were no Africans present at that conference, nor were any Europeans present to ensure that native Africans had any say in the proceedings. This paper has adopted secondary source of data in the process of data collection. The findings of the paper have revealed that partition in Africa has led to emergence of colonialism, slave trade and other related contemporary imbalance that led to for present African underdevelopment. The paper recommended that African countries needs to be allowed to run its affairs as an independent sovereign countries to manage both their mineral and human resource to compete with every continent of the world interterms of development dynamism and African countries should develop an approach that will help them to fight social menace of poverty, corruption, insecurity and unemployment.