How was Africa divided—and how did Africans resist?

Around 1870 direct European territorial control in Africa was still concentrated largely on coastal enclaves; a few decades later most of the continent had been incorporated into colonial empires. “Africa suddenly became weak” explains little. Industrial weapons, steam transport, quinine, finance and imperial rivalry met an already diverse and competitive African political world, creating a short and violent window of conquest.

What you will follow

This guided story moves the same world map through 13 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.

How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.

Related subjects on the map

• The Suez Canal
• The Scramble for Africa
• The Second Boer War

Sources used by this story

1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).
2. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
3. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
4. A. Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
5. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
6. Bill Nasson, The War for South Africa: The Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2010).
7. Elizabeth van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2013).
8. Czeslaw Jesman, The Russian In Ethiopia: An Essay in Futility (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963).
9. Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).