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The 19 century m'zuŋ u scramble for Africa
"Veni, Vidi, Vici"

By 1840, European powers had established small trading posts along the coast, but they

seldom moved inland, preferring to stay near the sea. They primarily traded with peoples
of the continent. Large parts of the continent were essentially uninhabitable for
Europeans because of their high mortality rates from tropical diseases such as malaria.

In the middle decades of the 19th century, European explorers had mapped areas of East
Africa and Central Africa.

Even as late as the 1870s, Western European states controlled only ten percent of the

African continent, with all their territories located near the coast. The most important
holdings were Angola and Mozambique, held by Portugal; the Cape Colony, held by the

United Kingdom; and Algeria, held by France. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained
independent of European control, and Liberia had strong connections to the United

States. "

"Scramble for Africa." 66
Wikipedia

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“ Prior to the conference, European diplomats approached governments in Africa in the

same manner as they did in the Western Hemisphere by establishing a connection to
local trade networks

***
Stanley's charting of the Congo River Basin (1874–1877) removed the last terra incognita
from European maps of the continent, delineating the areas of British, Portuguese,

French and Belgian control. These European nations raced to annex territory that might
be claimed by rivals.

***
France moved to take over Tunisia, one of the last of the Barbary states, using a claim of
another piracy incident. French claims by Pierre de Brazza were quickly acted on by the

French military which took control of what is now the Republic of the Congo in 1881 and
Guinea in 1884.

***
In 1882, realizing the geopolitical extent of Portuguese control on the coasts, but seeing
penetration by France eastward across Central Africa toward Ethiopia, the Nile, and the

Suez Canal, Britain saw its vital trade route through Egypt to India threatened. Under the
pretext of the collapsed Egyptian financing and a subsequent mutiny in which hundreds