830 Ch. 21 • The Age of European Imperialism
agreement signed between Britain and Portugal recognizing mutual inter
ests. The Berlin Conference divided up the territory of the Congo basin
between the Congo Free State (Leopold’s private territory) and France (the
French Congo), while declaring the Congo River open to all. French mer
chants penetrated Dahomey and the Ivory Coast, with French troops
reaching the ancient trading town of Timbuktu (now in Mali) in 1894.
In 1885, Bismarck agreed to protect Peters’s commercial enterprises in
Tanganyika, which became German East Africa. Germany also established
several coastal trading stations and the colony of Angra Pequena in German
Southwest Africa, which merchants had portrayed with unerring inaccu
racy as a territory of untapped wealth just waiting to be extracted.
To placate Britain, Germany recognized British interests in Kenya and
Uganda and the protectorate status of Zanzibar in 1890. In exchange, Ger
many received a small but strategically important island naval station in the
North Sea. The German colonial lobby was not happy: “We have exchanged
three kingdoms for a bathtub!” moaned Peters. Nonetheless, by 1913, Ger
man colonies in Africa, including German East and Southwest Africa,
Togoland, and the Cameroons, occupied over 1 million square miles, five
times the size of Germany.
Italy was the last of the major European nations to enter the colonial
fray. Its ravenous hunger for empire led Bismarck to note sarcastically that
it proceeded “with a big appetite and bad teeth.” In 1882, Italy established
Assab, a small settlement on the Red Sea, and three years later it occupied
Massawa, which in 1889 became the capital of the new Italian colony of
Eritrea. Italian merchants hoped to force the adjacent African state of
Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) to trade through Eritrea. In 1889, the Abyssinian
emperor signed a treaty with Italy which the Italian government took to
mean that Abyssinia was now an Italian protectorate. When the French
began building a railroad that would link Abyssinia to French Somaliland
and the Abyssinians attempted to cancel the treaty, Italian troops launched
a war in 1894. The result was a disaster. In 1896, a general without ade
quate maps marched four badly organized columns of Italian troops into
battle. The Abyssinians, some 70,000 strong, with Russian artillery advis
ers and French rifles, routed the Italian army in the hills near the coast at
Adowa. Six thousand Italian soldiers were killed—many more than in the
various wars that had led to Italy’s unification—and several thousand were
captured. The Italians became the first European army to be defeated in
the field by Africans. Under the Treaty of Addis Ababa that same year, Italy
was forced to renounce Abyssinia as a protectorate, although it kept the
territory of Eritrea on the Red Sea.
Standoff in the Sudan: The Fashoda AffairIn 1898, the Anglo-French rivalry in Africa culminated in the standoff
between French and British forces at Fashoda on the Nile River in the