The Scramble That Screwed the World
It was 1884. Some European leaders or what could be described Leaders from the leading European nations met in Berlin, Germany.
They were drunk on power, maps,
and on the idea that the world was theirs to cut like meat on a butcher's slab.
There were no Africans in the room. It was the scramble for the African
continent and territories must carved for each country or empire at the
conference.
I can picture fire crackling in
that stately room. Men in waistcoats leaning over a map of Africa they've never
set foot on. You could hear heated voices in German, French, and English.
Quills scratching borders that bled through sand and jungle. They called it
diplomacy, others called it order. Was it? Whatever it was called to sound
nice, it was theft and the beginning of a wound that still hasn’t healed.
The Berlin Conference was
supposed to bring peace among European empires. What it brought instead was a
century of chaos for the people they carved up. The Berlin Conference of
colonial powers didn’t just draw lines, they engineered conflict.
They didn’t ask the Yoruba in
present day Nigeria, if they wanted to be neighbours with the Hausa. Britain
forcibly united 250 ethnic groups with only two things in common: deep-seated
tensions between them and the oil beneath their land. The devastating Biafra
War of 1967 claimed 3 million lives, yet today, Shell continues to profit from
the region's resources. The company is
shifting focus to its deepwater oil and gas projects in the region after sales
of its stake in Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in March 2025 to a
local firm.
Belgium didn’t care that the
Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda had histories older than their empires. They just
drew. Lines. Hard ones. Straight ones. Ones that cut through tribes, families,
rivers, religions. The conference was on borders built not on culture,
language, or kinship, but on greed.
And then they left. Left behind
states that had never been states. Countries born in conference halls, not in
the hearts of their people.
This isn’t ancient history.
It’s the air we breathe. It’s why Somalia bleeds. The reason Congo cries. And
the cause Nigeria, big, boiling Nigeria, still strains under a mask it never
asked to wear.
You want to understand modern
conflict? Follow the lines. The lines that shouldn’t be there. The lines that
divide a man from his cousin because one ended up in Sudan, and the other in
South Sudan. The lines that tell a Somali in Kenya that he’s foreign in his
grandfather’s house. The lines that tell a Tuareg he must be Malian, or
Algerian, or Nigerien, depending on what side of the desert he camps in.
Did the carving of borders end
war. If you think, you are wrong. They seeded it. Because when you draw a
country like a schoolboy draws a box, you trap people. You cage their stories.
And worse, you pretend the cage is natural.
But
it gets darker.
Because the moment those
borders were drawn, the colonial powers needed someone to hold them. To play
warden. And so they picked favourites and there was where it really began to
get messy. The idea propped up one tribe and rushed another. Promoted a
language at the same time erased another. It empowered one group with guns and
chains the other. It was divide and rule, in ink and blood.
In Rwanda, the Belgians turned
neighbours into enemies by stamping ethnic identity cards and feeding
resentment. They turned Tutsis and Hutus into racial categories, which was
never the case before they came. In 1933, Belgian colonial rulers introduced
ethnic identity cards, a move that hardened once-fluid social divisions into
strict racial hierarchies, deepening tensions for generations to come. By 1994, those cards became death
warrants.
Years later it led to one the
deadliest conflict in the region. Those cards of 1933 became death warrants in
1994. You remember the Rwandan genocide in 1994? That wasn’t tribal. The sad
and unfortunate incident was colonial arithmetic catching fire. The numbers
adding up to slaughter.
In Nigeria, the British handed
the north to the emirs, the west to the chiefs, the east to the missionaries.
Three countries, one name. They called it unity. Some say it was a time-bomb.
In the Congo, King Leopold II
of Belgium didn’t even bother pretending. He didn’t just colonise it. He owned
it. Like a man owns a mine. He carved off hands like they were twigs. Ten
million Congolese died under his savage grip of the country. King Leopold was
out to main, kill the wealth and resources of Congo.
Ask
yourself this: how do you build a country out of that?
The answer is, you can’t. Not
easily. Not quickly. Not when your borders are scars. Not when your identity
was forged in someone else’s fire.
And yet, the West loves to
blame Africa for her problems or crises they intentional created. Why can’t
Africa get its act together? Why all the coups, the rebels, the corruption?
You hear statements like; it’s
lazy. It’s dishonest. But it’s like blaming a house for falling after you built
it on broken ground.
I keep imagining this scenario.
You’re born in a nation your ancestors never knew. You speak the language of
your coloniser better than your own. Your school teaches you about the British
Monarchs, Napoleon, among other Western leaders and nations but not about Shaka Zulu of South Africa, the fierce
military mastermind behind the rise of the Zulu Empire, and Nigeria’s Queen
Amina of Zazzau, whose unmatched blend of battlefield prowess and shrewd
diplomacy carved out a powerful kingdom. Yet somehow, we still forget to
mention Mansa Musa, the Malian emperor whose staggering wealth and legendary
generosity made him the richest man in history. More than just a symbol of
opulence, his visionary leadership and enduring legacy continue to inspire
wonder centuries later.
Your passport says you’re
Nigerian, Ivorian, Senegalese but your soul doesn’t know what that means. And
you’re told to be proud. To stand tall and be loyal to a flag that was stitched
by strangers’ intention.
That’s the colonial legacy. Not
just borders. But confusion that bred division and dislocation. A sense of
never quite belonging.
Let me tell you a story.
A friend of mine, a Ghanaian
teacher, once told me about his grandfather. The man spoke five languages. Had
lived under three different governments. Born a British subject, died a
Ghanaian. Never moved. His village stayed the same. But the flag kept changing.
"Borders?" the old
man laughed. "The white man’s joke. They tell us where to live, then
punish us for not living right."
He wasn’t wrong.
Even now, when conflicts flare
up, the map bleeds along those old lines; Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sudan and South
Sudan among others. The echoes of the Berlin Conference boom louder than any
gun.
But
here’s the twist.
The borders may be fake, but
the pain is real. People have lived, loved, fought, and died within them for
generations now. You can’t just erase them. You can’t undo a century of blood
and birth.
Look at the Middle East. Have
you ever wonder why Iraq, Syria, and Jordan look like they were drawn with a
wobbling crayon? That’s because they were. The British and French collaborate
on this on the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 was
basically two diplomats, Mark Sykes (British) and François Georges-Picot
(French), drunkenly sketching lines in the sand to carve up the Ottoman Empire
with a ruler, pencil and zero knowledge of local tribal affiliations muddling
Sunni, Shia and Kurd into one territory ceded to Britain.
Till date the Kurds has been
displaced without a common homeland just because two men outside Asia used a
pen to carve them into small parts in the other countries they never begged
for. It is commonly argued that that Britain deliberately left the Kashmir
issued unresolved to keep selling guns to both sides describing it as smart
business though evil intended. On profit basis from French rubber barons France
drew Vietnam’s borders around plantations.
The British government
appointed English Barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never
visited India or written about it ever in his professional life as a lawyer, to
draw the boundary lines dividing the Indian subcontinent into India and
Pakistan in 1947. The "Radcliffe Line," as it became known, was drawn
in just five weeks, leading to mass displacement and violence. The
Radcliffe Line did not address the status of the Kashmir region, which became a
source of conflict between India and Pakistan. In the real sense Kashmir should
have been a country on its own. Sir Cyril Radcliffe five weeks assignment has
resulted to generational conflicts and rising death tolls.
So
what do we do?
Let’s face the truth and no more pretending by
discarding neat narratives. We call colonialism what it was. A violent
rearranging of human life for profit. A theft that dressed up as civilisation.
And we stop judging African
states by the standards of European ones. They are not failed versions of
France or Britain. They are something else entirely. Something still becoming
and fighting to be born, properly this time.
We rethink borders. Not by
tearing them all down. But by softening them. Letting culture and trade move.
Letting people cross without fear. The African Union is trying. But it’s a long
road.
We teach the real history and
not the colonial one. Not the flattering one. The raw one. The one that hurts
to read. Because only then can healing begin.
And maybe we stop waiting for
the West to fix what it broke. That ship sailed with the last colonial
governor. It’s on us now. Africans. To build not just countries, but
communities. Not just governments, but identities.
I won’t lie. It’s hard and
messy. But what else is history if not hard?
The Berlin Conference didn’t
just screw Africa. It screwed the world. It taught power that it could be
ruthless and still wear a suit. That borders could be bought like land. That
people could be organised like furniture.
And now, in the age of walls
and immigration bans and refugee crises, we’re still playing that game. Still
treating borders as more sacred than lives.
Maybe it’s time we remembered
something old. Something older than Europe, and older than empire.
That the land doesn’t belong to
us. We belong to it.
And lines on a map? They’re
just that. Lines. Until we make them matter. Or choose to move past them.
History didn’t end in Berlin.
It began there. The question is, what story do we write next?
Because the ink is still wet.
And the world is still watching.
And Africa, wounded but
unbroken, is still rising.
Not in spite of the scars.
But with them.
So tell me.
What does your map look like
now?
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