The Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference

By 1870, European powers held only a thin fringe of African territory, mostly coastal trading posts and settler enclaves such as the Cape Colony and Algeria; the interior remained largely unmapped by Europeans. That changed rapidly after the Belgian king Leopold II, who held no African colony of his own, organized the Brussels Geographical Conference of 1876 and founded the International African Association, ostensibly a philanthropic and scientific body dedicated to ending the slave trade and opening Central Africa to "civilization." Leopold then financed the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, already famous for locating David Livingstone in 1871, to return to the Congo basin between 1879 and 1884 and establish a chain of stations along the river under the banner of the International Association of the Congo, a vehicle that was in practice Leopold's personal instrument rather than a genuine international body.