ABSTRACT

African resistance to European conquest did not end with the loss of African sovereignty in the 1880s and 1890s. Africans were forced to build infrastructure, taxation compelled them to become wage-workers or cash-crop producers and in some areas they lost their land to white settlers. This oppression incited African rebellions. The first of these conflicts happened in the late 1890s in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Sierra Leone but similar events continued into the early twentieth century, including in German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904–7, German East Africa (mostly now Tanzania) in 1905 and Natal (now part of South Africa) in 1906; and some rebellions happened as late as the 1930s. In Southern Africa’s Boer Republics, northern Nigeria, Morocco and Libya, the initial European invasion was delayed until the early twentieth century. Ethiopia, the only African state to have successfully defended itself during the “Scramble for Africa,” was occupied by Italy in 1935. While new military technology such as the machine-gun enabled the European conquests of the 1880s and 1890s, it was even more important during the colonial wars of the early twentieth century when motor vehicles, aircraft and poison gas were used to suppress African resistance. The guerrilla nature of some of these conflicts meant that civilians in South Africa, Namibia, French Equatorial Africa and Libya were confined to concentration camps, which foreshadowed the atrocities of World War II and late twentieth-century counterinsurgency campaigns.