Evaluate the range in African responses to European
imperialist actions.
Answers
Explanation:
African Responses to the Scramble for Africa. Africans exhausted all options in responding to European imperialism. ... Others formed alliances with European powers often in an attempt to play one European country off another or to find protection against local adversaries. Still others offered armed resistance
Explanation:
Europeans come from Europe. Africans come from Africa. That's human geography 101. So, how did Europeans end up in Africa? There's actually a complex history here. From the 15th through 20th centuries, European nations measured their success in terms of the number of places they colonized. It was a pretty competitive political environment, as each nation raced to expand their empire.
By the late 19th century, only one inhabited continent remained that had not seen substantial colonial presence: Africa. In 1884-1885, European nations met at the Berlin Conference to divide Africa amongst themselves and lay claims to various parts. The result was roughly 30 years of intense colonial invasion called the Scramble for Africa. Europeans were now in Africa, but the African peoples weren't about to just let that happen.
Overview
When talking about European colonialism in Africa, it's important to remember that we're talking about a number of European nations and literally hundreds of African kingdoms, empires, and ethnic groups. Colonialism was never a simple matter of Europeans versus Africans, and we need to keep in mind that Africans at the time had no sense of pan-African identity. Rivalries between Europeans and rivalries between Africans played a large role in this. The experiences of colonialism are as diverse and varied as the countless people impacted by it. Still, with that in mind, we can look at a few major trends through some exemplary case studies.
The Mandinka Resistance
Let's start by looking at a group with some of the longest interactions with Europeans. In West Africa, around what is now Mali, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast, was the Mandinka Empire. The Mandinka people were descendants of one of the greatest African trading empires of the medieval era, and had been in contact with Europeans since the Portuguese arrived in West Africa in the 15th-16th centuries.
They had dealt with Europeans before, but in the late 19th century the French arrived with a new tenacity. The Mandinka ruler at the time, Samory Touré, conducted himself like an emperor and fought the French through both military and diplomacy. Not only did he negotiate with the French, he also struck tentative alliances with the British to fight the French together. Touré is remembered for the range of methods he used to fight French colonialism, from manufacturing his own firearms to using European colonialism as an opportunity to expand his own empire. However, the French allied with rivals of the Mandinka, attacking Mandinka trade routes and towns. The Mandinka fought back successfully for a long time, but Touré was captured in 1898, ending the resistance.