Kaiser Small Group Quotes

What followed was the aptly named “Scramble for Africa.” Starting in 1885, the nations of Europe convened at conferences in Berlin, Paris, London, and Brussels, where they pored over maps of Africa, carving out chunks for their own needs and arguing over who would get what. All of this was done with zero regard for the African people. Drawing arbitrary lines on inaccurate maps, the European powers took traditional kingdoms, tribes, and language groups that had existed for hundreds of years and randomly sliced them up or smashed them together, often on nothing more than the whim of some European monarch who’d never even set foot south of the French Riviera. Quite famously, Queen Victoria of England “gave” Mount Kilimanjaro to Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany as a birthday present, transferring a massive chunk of land from the control of one nation to another without the slightest thought for how it might affect the people who actually lived there.