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The Most Uncomfortable Fact About the Berlin Conference

@worldhistorian | 2026-05-16 20:14:05 |

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I've written about the 1884 Berlin Conference a few times now, and the fact I can't get past is the one that seems most obvious in retrospect: not one African person was in the room.

Not an observer. Not an advisor. Not a representative of any of the hundreds of different societies, kingdoms, and political entities whose territories were being divided. Fourteen delegations of Europeans (plus the US and the Ottomans as observers) spent three months drawing borders that would govern an entire continent for the next century-plus, and the absence of the people most affected was so complete that it apparently didn't occur to anyone to remark on it.

What strikes me about the post-1960 story — when African nations had to decide whether to accept colonial borders or attempt to redraw them — is that the OAU's 1964 choice to freeze colonial borders, however painful, was probably the least-bad option available. The ethnic and territorial overlaps were so complex that any attempt to redraw the map according to pre-colonial logic would have created more conflicts than it resolved.

But the fact that an entire continent's leadership in 1964 had to make a Sophie's choice directly caused by decisions made without any of their input 80 years earlier... that's a very specific kind of injustice. The direct line from Berlin 1884 to Mogadishu 1991 to Kinshasa 2024 is not metaphorical. It's operational.

I find this genuinely difficult to write about without it feeling either too clinical or too performatively outraged. Both miss the actual weight of it.

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