How Europe Drew Africa's Borders in a Room — The 1884 Berlin Conference Still Bleeds Today

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:08:41 +0200

In 1884, fourteen nations sat around a table in Berlin to divide a continent none of them owned. No African leader was invited. No African voice was heard. The borders they drew — through kingdoms, communities, and cultures — still define the map of Africa today. And they are still bleeding.
This is the story of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the room where Europe carved up Africa like a piece of property. From Otto von Bismarck's power plays to King Leopold's private horror state in the Congo, from the doctrine of "effective occupation" that launched the fastest land grab in history to the colonial identity cards that helped fuel the Rwandan genocide a century later — this video traces the full, devastating arc of how a few months of European diplomacy condemned an entire continent to generations of conflict, exploitation, and artificial nationhood.
Before Berlin, Africa was home to empires that rivaled anything in Europe. The Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Kingdom of Benin, the Ethiopian dynasty — these were not empty lands waiting to be claimed. They were civilizations with histories stretching back centuries. What happened in that room on Wilhelmstrasse was not development. It was theft on a continental scale.
The consequences are not history. They are headlines. Nigeria. Congo. Sudan. Somalia. Rwanda. The borders drawn by men who never set foot in Africa are still shaping who lives, who dies, and who profits.
If you want to understand why the modern world looks the way it does, you have to understand what happened in that room.
Sources and further reading:
— King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
— The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham
— General Act of the Berlin Conference, 1885
— Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, "The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa" (American Economic Review)
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