The Dark Continent - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 347

increase its military capability by applying the fruits of the Industrial Revolution to the mil-
itary sector, and thus developing larger, more menacing and greater numbers of weaponry
and by also increasing the speed by which this expanded arsenal and its men could be trans-
ported across greater and greater distances. This required overseas military land and naval
bases, which, in turn, could be filled by colonies throughout the globe. Local natives in
these colonies could also serve as a source of new military recruits, and at a far lower price
than the colonial powers' own citizenry. And what was the last great landmass left to be
conquered? The answer was easy―Africa.
DRIVE FOR COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
The watershed event was the Berlin Conference of 1884. Here the European colonial
powers arrogantly agreed on the rules of the game for the conquest and partitioning of the
African continent. From then until the outback of World War I in 1914, European powers
were in a race with one another for as large a piece of Africa as possible. Overarching this
struggle was another competition, a series of military arms races to see who would be the
greatest military power on the European continent. Both the arms races and the series of
crises created by the push for larger and larger empires finally reached a breaking point, in
August 1914, when an assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian national earlier
in the summer resulted in the European countries finding themselves in a long drawn-out
war, which would last four years and would change the landscape of Europe and its co-
lonial empires. The first crack in the system of European imperialism had appeared but it
would pale in comparison to the next crack created by another great war, World War II.
SOME BENEFITS OF COLONIAL RULE
“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of for-
eign thievery and foreign goodwill.” ― Barbara Kingsolver , The Poisonwood Bible
Colonial rule did produce some benefits. Martin Meredith suggested three important ones:
a system of schools, medical services, and a transportation infrastructure. But the extent to
which these positive steps impacted large numbers of the local populations is very prob-
lematic. Social indicators throughout the continent suggest that the extent to which these
benefits reached a significant percentage of people fell far short of what might have been
expected by the colonial powers or local leaders. To cite one example, transportation routes
focused on moving raw materials from their original sources to coastal ports for shipment
to the colonial power, not on a system of intra-country roads that connected the far corners
of the country. And almost all economic activity remained tightly controlled by and in the
hands of foreign corporations with their own foreign nationals in charge.