Causes of the Scramble for Africa

First of all, there was an important economic motivation for Europeans to colonise Africa because the continent is rich in raw materials and resources such as ivory, diamonds, gold, coffee, rubber, tea, cotton, palm oil, coco beans and many more. All this products were luxury goods. For example diamonds were discovered at Kimberley in 1867, and in 1886 gold was discovered in the Transvaal. And also due to the end of the slave trade, the Europeans needed a new kind of trade to supply the industries in Europe. They used Africans as a forced labour to go and get these material and sell then to them. They used force and brutality.

Even more, different persons like Stanley, Peters, Rhodes, Faidherbe or Leopold II saw the colonisation as an occasion to increase their influence and power. Cecil Rhodes was a financier, a statesman, and a empire builder of British South Africa. He became prime minister of Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896 and organizer of the giant diamond-mining company De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. In 1888. The Belgian King Leopold II he was the personal owner of a area 80 times the size of Belgium, The Congo Free State. He had a main agents: Henry Morton Stanley a British American explorer of central Africa, famous for his rescue of the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone and for his discoveries in and development of the Congo region. He was knighted in 1899. In 1908 the Congo became part of Belgian kingdom. Louis-León César Faidherbe was the governor of French Senegal from 1854 to 1861 and from 1863to 1865 and a major founder of France's colonial empire in Africa. He founded Dakar, the future capital of French West Africa. European Christians believed that it was their duty to convert the none believers.

Furthermore European power like Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium were rivals. Each wanted to conquer Africa to be able to prove that they were a great nation. At first only