Everything about The Association Internationale Africaine totally explained
The
Association Internationale Africaine was an organization created by
King Léopold II of
Belgium to further
humanitarian projects in the area of
Central Africa that was to become the
Congo Free State and subsequently today's
Democratic Republic of the Congo.
History
The organization was created at the 1876
Brussels Geographic Conference to which Leopold invited nearly forty well-known experts, mainly they were schooled in the geographic sciences or were wealthy
philanthropists. They hailed from a number of European countries. As a result, the Association was originally conceived as a multi-person, scientific, and humanitarian assembly but it quickly became dominated by Leopold and his economic interests in
Africa. Originally, the stated goal of the group was to 'discover' the largely unexplored Congo and civilize its natives. The Association was intended to be a joint effort on the parts of all
European countries present at the Conference, however, each nation formed its own national committee for exploration which would, in theory, share information with the whole of the Association, hence, a cooperative effort. However, national economic interests quickly took precedence over the group's supposedly philanthropic ideals. Each of these committees organized nationalized expeditions into the African interior and there was very little sharing of information, resulting in each nation claiming certain portions of African land for themselves.
From
1879 to
1884 famed explorer
Henry Morton Stanley returned to the Congo, this time not as a reporter, but as an envoy from Leopold, and under the guise of the Belgian Committee, with the secret mission to organize a Congo state. At the same time, the French marine officer
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza traveled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded
Brazzaville in
1881. Portugal, which also claimed the area due to old treaties with the native
Kongo Empire, made a treaty with Great Britain on
February 26,
1884 to block off the Congo Society's access to the
Atlantic.
At the same time, various European countries tried to acquired a foothold in Africa. France occupied
Tunisia and today's
Republic of the Congo in 1881 and
Guinea in 1884. In
1882, Great Britain occupied the nominally
Ottoman Egypt, which in turn ruled over the
Sudan and parts of
Somalia. In
1870 and 1882, Italy took possession of the first parts of
Eritrea, while Germany declared
Togo,
Cameroon and
South West Africa to be under its protection in
1884.
The large number of competing interests caused the Association to fracture and disintegrate over each member state's national interests. The Association's break-up eventually forced the
Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, effectively ending what became known as the
Scramble for Africa. Despite the failure of the initial committee, the Belgian Committee that the Association generated continued to sponsor 'humanitarian' missions into the bush. In 1878 the
International Congo Society was also formed, having more economic goals, but still closely related to the former society. Leopold secretly bought off the foreign investors in the Congo Society, which was turned to imperialistic goals, with the Association serving primarily as a philanthropic front. By these means, Leopold morphed the organization's "ideology from 'national philanthropic association' to 'private commercial enterprise.' As well as from a 'commercial plan to a political reality: the Congo Free State' (Wesseling 89)". The Belgian Committee and the Association are well documented as fronts for shaping Leopold's exploitive and oppressive Congo regime.
Further Information
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