Berlin hosted one more important, albeit far less grand, diplomatic meeting during the Bismarckian period—the West Africa Conference, which ran, on and off, from November 15, 1884 to February 26, 1885. The purpose of this meeting was to resolve disputes stemming from the “Scramble for Africa,” that mad rush for colonial acquisitions in the so-called Dark Continent. Of course, Great Britain, France, and Portugal had already established major holdings in Africa, but at the beginning of the 1870s large sections of central and western Africa were still up for grabs. In the brief period between 1870 and 1900 this hitherto unclaimed part of the continent, along with sizable parts of Asia and the Pacific, were added to the Europeans’ imperial domains.
Bismarck’s Germany emerged in the mid-1880s as an unexpected player in the frenetic imperial contest. The Reich’s participation was unexpected because Bismarck had initially shown little interest in colonial ventures, save for supporting a beleaguered German trading outpost in Samoa. In general the chancellor took the position, as he put it during the Franco-Prussia war, that “for us Germans, colonies would be exactly like the silks and sables of the Polish nobleman, who has no shirt to wear under them.” Shortly after unification he told his aide, Baron Holstein, that “so long as I’m chancellor, we shan’t pursue a colonial policy.” When German explorers began to take an interest in Africa, and urged Bismarck to join in the rush for colonies there, the chancellor pointed to a map of Europe and said: “Here is Russia and here is France, with Germany in the middle. That’s my map of Africa.” In the three-year period between 1884 and 1886, however, Bismarck acquired a colonial domain five times the size of the Reich itself. The man who supposedly had no interest in expanding German territory put far more land under the German flag than did Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, as we shall see, spoke grandly of Weltpolitik and a German “day in the sun.”
How does one explain the chancellor’s sudden conversion to colonialism? There has been an extensive debate in the scholarly literature over this issue, with some commentators emphasizing domestic considerations, others the traditional “primacy of foreign policy.” In the end, it seems, Bismarck was animated both by domestic and foreign political concerns, which in fact were related. He unquestionably came to see the colonial contest as an integral part of the larger game of Grosse Politik, which pitted the latecomer Germany against established imperial powers like Britain and France. As far as the Scramble for Africa was concerned, Bismarck hoped that by throwing his hat into this ring he could put London and Paris on notice that they could not continue to expand their colonial holdings on the Dark Continent without taking account of Berlin. Germany, after all, was a Great Power too. Why should it be left out? By stealing a march on the world’s greatest imperial power, Britain, Bismarck hoped not only to display the Reich’s mettle on the world stage but also to deal a blow against some of his antagonists at home. The rivalry with England was likely to generate a wave of anglophobia in Germany, which would be useful in combating the influence of Crown Prince Friedrich and his English-born wife Vicky, who favored the kind of liberal agenda that the chancellor had come to loathe. The liberal camp as a whole, in fact, might be weakened by a well-publicized colonial campaign, since, as a result of the exploits of explorers and missionaries like Dr. David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, the African bug had infected Germany along with the other European nations. By the early 1880s, Berlin harbored an Africa Society and a German Colonization Society, whose members included the country’s leading industrialists, bankers, and academics. Imperial crusaders like Dr. Carl Peters, the moving spirit behind Germany’s empire in East Africa, spoke of colonization as a vital test of the nation’s virility. Berlin’s nationalist newspapers warned that if the Reich did not immediately join the race for territory in Africa there would be none left to grab. Berlin and the rest of Germany were gripped in a Torschlusspanik (door-closing panic)—a desperation to act before it was too late. Bismarck reasoned that he could use this colonial fervor as a stick with which to beat the liberals in the Reichstag elections of 1884. This helps to explain the timing of his sudden leap into the imperial scrum. At the beginning of that year he started to amass the Reich’s African empire by seizing control of southwest Africa.
This ploy indeed proved effective with the voters, and on the international front it very definitely got the attention of Britain, which was not pleased to see a German colony next door to its own empire in South Africa. As a South African colonial official told Lord Salisbury: “My Lord, we are told that the Germans are good neighbors, but we prefer to have no neighbors at all.”
Britain, along with France and Portugal, had designs as well on the Congo Basin in western and central Africa, a vast region that was thought to contain great wealth. Here they ran into a new and extremely resourceful competitor, King Leopold II of Belgium, who dreamed of gaining control over the whole area so that he could corner the lucrative ivory trade there (later he switched his focus to rubber). Of course, Leopold was careful not to announce the precise nature of his plan; rather, he cloaked his rapacious design in the mantle of scientific inquiry, humanitarian improvement, and Christian uplift. Although the king won some allies with his pious verbiage, he knew he needed the help of a major power to realize his dream. Through tireless diplomacy and well-placed bribes he won the backing of the United States, whose white Southern senators hoped to use Leopold’s domain as a dumping ground for American blacks. America, however, was not a major player in the African contest and could do the king only limited good. He therefore turned his attention to Bismarck’s Germany, which he knew was anxious to throw its own weight around on the Dark Continent.
In the initial phase of his campaign to win German backing for his project, Leopold focused on Bismarck’s influential banker, Bleichröder, whom he had met at the fashionable Belgian resort of Ostend. The banker was no fool, yet he seems to have believed in the nobility of Leopold’s mission, and, more importantly, he thought that Germany’s own economic interests in the Congo region would be best served through an alliance with the Belgian king. To help promote Leopold’s project, Bleichröder conveyed a 40,000 franc contribution from the king to Berlin’s Africa Society.
Leopold had less success, at least initially, in his attempt to win the backing of Bismarck himself. The chancellor immediately saw through the king’s humanitarian pose. In the margins of a royal letter outlining the Belgian’s grand plan, Bismarck penciled the word “swindle,” and he told an aide that “His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.” However, as Britain, France, and Portugal began to press into the Congo region, threatening to divide it up among themselves, Bismarck came around to Bleichröder’s conviction that Leopold’s plan would be beneficial to Germany, since the Reich’s trade interests in the area were more likely to find protection under the Belgian king than under any of his rivals. In November 1884, therefore, Bismarck secretly recognized Leopold’s so-called “Congo Free State.” To help the king gain official recognition for his enterprise, Bismarck agreed to host an international conference on the question in the German capital.
Like the Congress of Berlin seven years earlier, the West Africa Conference took place in Bismarck’s Chancellery building on the Wilhelmstrasse. The chancellor was not the official chairman, but, as in the Berlin Congress, he personally guided the proceedings. This time his paunch did not hang over the conference table because he had finally agreed to go on a diet and even to cut his alcohol consumption to a measly two bottles of wine a day, which of course made him more surly than ever. It did not help his disposition that the participants at this conference were not political heavyweights, as in the Congress of Berlin, but mere ambassadors. There was not a single African in attendance, which is hardly surprising, since the European colonizers considered the native Africans no more capable of defining the future of their own lands than American whites believed the Indians were entitled to settle the fate of the American West.