Fourteen European powers, zero Africans in the room: the meeting that wrote the rules for colonizing a continent — and drew the borders still bleeding today.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 was the meeting at which fourteen European powers — and not a single African — drew the ground rules for colonizing Africa. Convened by Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, it formalized the “Scramble for Africa”: within thirty years, European empires would claim the entire continent except Ethiopia and Liberia.
