10.3 DBQ 4: Imperialism in Africa

10.3 DBQ 4: Imperialism in Africa

*Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries, for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power, such as brokered influence.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suggested reading and writing time: 90 minutes

It is suggested that you spend 25 minutes reading the documents and 60 minutes writing your response.

Note: You may begin writing your response before the reading period is over.

AP: The Essay is due at the end of the class period. 100F Rubric

Honors: The Essay is due by Sunday night, March 21, at midnight.

Use this GoogleForm to self-assess your work after you are finished. 100F

Directions: The following documents have been edited for this exercise. In your response you should do the

following:

•Respond to the prompt with a historically defensible thesis or claim that establishes and maintains a line of

reasoning.

•Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt.

•Use at least one additional piece of specific historical evidence (beyond that found in the documents)

relevant to an argument about the prompt. EBD

•For at least three documents, explain how or why the document’s point of view, purpose, historical situation,

and/or audience is relevant to an argument. AR.

•Support an argument in response to the prompt using at least six documents. E2.

•Use evidence to corroborate, qualify, or modify an argument that addresses the prompt. E1.

During the period 1870 to 1915, Western powers began to seek sources of raw materials that could meet the needs of growing industries. The continent of Africa appealed as one available source.

To what extent did Western nations apply the ideologies* of Imperialism in their Scramble for Africa?

*Remember...if you get stuck on how to group sources for a thesis and your paper, you can always resort to the PIECES. Right? Power, Innovation/Technology, Environment, Culture, Economics, and Society.

Document A

The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885

The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 marked the climax of the European competition for territory in Africa, a

process commonly known as the Scramble for Africa. During the 1870s and early 1880s, European nations such

as Great Britain, France, and Germany began looking to Africa for natural resources for their growing industrial

sectors as well as a potential market for the goods these factories produced. As a result, these governments

sought to safeguard their commercial interests in Africa and began sending scouts to the continent to secure

treaties from indigenous peoples or their supposed representatives. Similarly, Belgium’s King Leopold II, who

aspired to increase his personal wealth by acquiring African territory, hired agents to lay claim to vast tracts of

land in central Africa. To protect Germany’s economic interests, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who was

otherwise uninterested in Africa, felt compelled to stake claims to African land.

Inevitably, the scramble for territory led to conflict among European powers, particularly between the British and

French in West Africa; Egypt, the Portuguese, and British in East Africa; and the French and King Leopold II in

central Africa. Rivalry between Great Britain and France led Bismarck to intervene, and in late 1884 he called a

meeting of European powers in Berlin. In the subsequent meetings, Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and

King Leopold II negotiated their claims to African territory, which were then formalized and mapped. During the

conference the leaders also agreed to allow free trade among the colonies and established a framework for

negotiating future European claims in Africa. Neither the Berlin Conference itself nor the framework for future

negotiations provided any say for the peoples of Africa over the partitioning of their homelands.

The Berlin Conference did not initiate European colonization of Africa, but it did “legitimize” and formalize the

process. In addition, it sparked new interest in Africa. Following the close of the conference, European powers

expanded their claims in Africa such that by 1900, European states had claimed nearly 90 percent of African

territory.

Source: Oxford University Online, 2021 (England), The Berlin Conference, at site

Document B

Cutting the Cake of Africa

Source: French caricature, 1885. German Chancellor Bismarck divides the African continent among the colonial powers.

Document C

The “Cape to Cairo Railway”

Imperialist and entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes was instrumental in securing the southern states of the [African] continent for the British Empire. He envisioned a continuous “red line” of British control from north to south which

he named the “Cape to Cairo Railway”. A railway would be a critical element in this scheme to unify the possessions, facilitate governance, enable the military to move quickly to hot spots or conduct war, help

settlement and enable the trade of goods both across Africa and to other continents. The construction of this

project presented a major technological challenge.

British interests had to overcome obstacles of geography and climate, and regional competition with the French

and Portuguese. In 1891, Germany secured the strategically critical territory of German East Africa, which along

with the mountainous rainforest of the Belgian Congo precluded the building of a Cape-to-Cairo railway,

effectively blocking the project’s completion.

The southern section was completed during British rule before the First World War and had an interconnecting

system of national railways. Construction started from Cape Town and went parallel to the Great North Road to

the town of Kimberley, through a part of Bechuanaland to Bulawayo. From this junction the link proceeds further

north to the Zambezi crossing. The Victoria Falls Bridge was completed in 1905.

Source: Journal of the North and South Rhodesia* and Nyasaland Study Circle, at site

Note: Rhodesia was named for Cecil Rhodes. The name was formally changed back to its historical African name of Zimbabwe in 1980.

Document D

Photograph of Congolese Man: Nsala

Source: Alice Seeley Harris. Don’t Call Me Lady: The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris, 1902. A Congolese man named Nsala looks at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members

of the Belgian-Congolese India Rubber Company militia, also called the Force Publique.

“He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot. Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too. And because that didn’t seem quite cruel enough, quite strong enough to make their case, they cannibalized both Boali and her mother. And they presented Nsala with the tokens, the leftovers from the once living body of his darling child whom he so loved. His life was destroyed…”

They had partially destroyed it anyway by forcing his servitude but this act finished it for him. All of this filth had occurred because one man, one man who lived thousands of miles across the sea, one man who couldn’t get rich enough, had decreed that this land was his and that these people should serve his own greed. Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty.”

Note: The Congo Free State was a corporate state in Central Africa privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium founded and recognized by the Berlin Conference of 1885. In the 23 years (1885-1908) Leopold II ruled the Congo he was indirectly responsible for the massacre of 10 million Africans by permitting his

state-sponsored Force Publique to cut off hands and genitals, flog natives to death, starve them into forced labor, hold children ransom, and burn villages.

Document E

The Belgian Force Publique

Under Leopold II the Force Publique was described as an "exceptionally brutal army". One major purpose of the

Force was to enforce the rubber quotas and other forms of forced labor. Armed with modern weapons and the

chicote - a bull whip made of hippopotamus hide—soldiers of the FP often took and mistreated hostages.

The militia was composed of native Congolese serving under Belgian and mercenary officers, tasked with

maintaining peace and maximizing rubber production. Any Congolese soldier who discharged their weapon was

required to provide the hand of their victim as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed

that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to

stockpile them for mutiny.

Source: Belgian Force Publique. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021, at site.

Document F

The “White Man’s Burden”

In this poem, Rudyard Kipling taps into the imperialist mindset and

what he, and others, saw as the “white man’s burden”: to bring western

“civilization” to the people of nations that were less advanced.

Kipling presents the reader with inherently racist images of

dominance, cast as “help” provided to native people.

Image: Christian Minister in South Africa, London Missionary Society, 1900.

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed--

Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild--

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain...

...Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less--

Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper,

By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples

Shall weigh your gods and you.

Poem Source: Rudyard Kipling. White Man’s Burden (excerpt). England, 1899.

Document G

Source: Gustave Freensen. In the German South African Army, 1903-1904. This story is by a soldier in the German army telling of his experiences in the campaign against the indigenous people of southwest Africa in 1903-1904.