2025 marks the anniversaries of some of our most empowering moments as a people.
It is the 160th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment, which only partially abolished enslavement. Freedom fighters today continue to work to abolish prisons so that enslavement can truly be eradicated. 2025 also marks the 65th anniversary of the Greensboro, NC, student sit-ins and Ruby Bridges’ attendance at an all-white elementary school, and the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
2025 also marks the anniversaries of some of the most challenging moments in our history. 70 years since the murder of Emmitt Till, and 60 years since the assassination of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and Bloody Sunday. There’s another difficult moment in our collective history that “celebrates” an anniversary that we often fail to consider. That is the Berlin Conference held on November 11, 1884, better known as the “Scramble for Africa.”
The Scramble for Africa
This scramble for the continent of Africa was a race for resources and riches among colonizing and imperialist European nations. These nations included France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden/Norway, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Belgium, as eventually the United States. Each of these countries viewed Africa as a continent to be conquered, primarily for the purpose of expanding European industry and establishing new markets worldwide.
In their efforts to extract resources from the continent, African lands were allocated at this meeting, with France taking much of West Africa, Great Britain taking much of the south and east, and King Leopold II of Belgium taking the heart of Africa: the Congo. Leopold would be the second king of Belgium, succeeding his father in 1865. While watching a parade in Berlin, Leopold remarked to the German emperor, “There is really nothing left for us kings except money,” and therefore decided that the best way to acquire riches would be by establishing a colony in Africa.
Leopold’s “philanthropic” syndicate, the International Association of the Congo (AIC), hired U.S. journalist Henry Morton Stanley to go to the Congo and “secure a slice of this magnificent African cake” for Leopold, as the king put it. Leopold’s pitch at the Berlin Conference was the promise of civilization and goodwill in the Congo; and they believed him. Leopold was granted 2 million square kilometers (770,000 square miles) to establish a personal colony where he was free to do as he liked. He named his new fiefdom the Congo Free State.
Sadly, what Leopold promised his colonizer contemporaries—humanitarian and philanthropic aims to improve the lives of Africans—didn’t match what he delivered to the people of the land, which was devastation and exploitation. The Congo Free State quickly became a brutal, exploitative regime that relied on forced labor to cultivate and trade rubber, ivory, and minerals.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, records that in twenty-three years of Leopold’s rule, an estimated ten million people died as a consequence of brutality and executions; this amounted to 50% of the population. Leopold made exhibits of the Congolese in human zoos, kidnapped children, forcing them to either work or be soldiers, and chopped off the limbs of the colonized people. By 1908, Leopold’s rule was deemed so cruel that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, condemned it, and the Belgian parliament forced him to relinquish control of his fiefdom.
Leopold died in 1909. But the memory of his terror did not die with him. According to Adam Hochschild:
“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator … From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets … A village [that] refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [a] soldier… then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river … Rubber causes these torments; that’s why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”
The “scramble” continues today because Africa remains desirable due to its vast natural resources. Africa is richly endowed, with an estimated 20% of global copper reserves, about the same for aluminum raw materials, 50% of manganese and cobalt, 90% of platinum group metals, 36% of chromium, as well as reserves of lithium, uranium, gold, and rare-earth elements.
Many of the minerals sought after in Africa are used in our everyday lives. For example, platinum group metals (PGMs) are primarily used in automotive catalytic converters, fuel cells for hydrogen-powered vehicles, specific medical devices, and hard drives. Thus, Western nations (European nations and the United States) are competing with the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Ethiopia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa) for these resources. Like in 1884, the Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is caught in the middle.
The general assumption is that mismanagement, political rivalries, ethnic tensions, and corruption are at fault for the ongoing military conflict in the DRC. The truth is, the West largely fomented those factors through its imperialist meddling at the dawn of the Congolese independence movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The meddlers responsible were the U.S. government, which was at the very least aware of—if not outright responsible for—the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and approved the 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
The people couldn’t be trusted, as far as the West—namely the United States—was concerned, because there was no guarantee that African independence would acquiesce to American influence. Lumumba desired a truly free Congo and that meant the West no longer having access to the Uranium used by the U.S. to make the atomic bomb. Therefore, many of our comrades and kinfolk were cut down to allow for the RICH (racist, imperialist, capitalist, and hegemonic) agenda to happen.
The Modern Scramble for the Black Mind
Like the people of Congo, Black people of the global diaspora haven’t been allowed to self-determine their own lives.
Our communities have been bombed and decimated, from Greenwood Avenue to Osage Avenue. Our culture has been exploited for profit and pleasure. Our students continue to be treated as lab rats with their schools closed and curricula hijacked. In America they’re criminalized from birth, often damned to poverty because of misdiagnosed behaviors and performance scores—all rooted in racism.
Black people all over the world wish to be left alone to be fruitful and in community with one another. What world would the Congolese have had if Lumumba and the people had had the chance to determine their fate versus the West determining it for them? Where would our students be if they weren’t meddled with. If they were allowed to learn their history, with materials reflective of who they are. If they were taught in a culturally responsive way, by teachers who looked like them. What would the community be for us, and what would the future hold for them? On this 141st anniversary of the Scramble for Africa, let’s acknowledge the scramble for the battle for the Black mind, as Dr. Karida Brown would say.
Let’s work to protect young Black minds by incorporating the work of resistance into what we teach, how we teach it, and by encouraging our community to engage in that work, so that we can fend off neo-colonizers in our continued scramble for liberation.
