Antecedentes de la Investigación

The presence of the German Reich in Africa is often referred to as a belated attempt to participate in the “Scramble for Africa” as Bismarck was said to have had little interest in a colonial empire. However, the conference of Berlin (1884-1885) led to the regulation of trade and determined the rules of acquisition of territories even if it did not specifically carve out boundaries in

65 _{FO France 3662, n.109 secret, The Marquess of Lansdowne to Sir E. Monson, Foreign Office, 2}

March 1904 in Gooch and Temperley, British documents, p. 348.

Africa apart from the boundaries of the Free State of Congo.67 _{Before the First}

World War, the German Empire had acquired five territories in Africa. Witu was a 1600 km2 _{protectorate in modern-day Kenya, which was held between 1885 and}

1890 before being handed over to the British. The other territories were modern- day Namibia “Südwestafrika”, modern-day Tanzania without Zanzibar “Ostafrika”, modern-day Togo and a part of Ghana “Togo” and modern-day Cameroon with a stretch of territories in modern-day Nigeria, “Kamerun”.

The presence of the Germans in Africa can be explained by the competition between the British and French in Africa which led the British to favour the Germans in regions where French colonial power was too preponderant.68 _{This competition enabled the Germans to obtain a tract of land}

between the Bight of Biafra and Lake Chad as the British hoped that it would prevent the different French territories from being unified, as in the 1890s the French were trying to join their possessions in Western and Central Africa.69

Thus, the framework of the Kamerun boundaries can be partly explained by the competition between the British, the French and the Germans.

Moreover, the Germans had a previous scientific knowledge of the Chad region; German agents, before and after the creation of the German empire in 1871, were very active in the Chad region as travellers and scientists travelled through modern-day Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon in the second half of the nineteenth century.70 _{As seen in the previous section, Barth in 1850-1855 and}

Nachtigal in 1870-1871 had visited the kingdom of Borno. Thus, when the Germans signed agreements with the British in 1893 and the French in 1894, they had a scientific knowledge of the Chad basin. Despite the lack of consistency in their colonial policy, the German colonial powers hoped to secure a vast area in the Chad region. Their interest in the whole Sudan region was not restricted to

67 _{Simon Katzenellenbogen, ‘It Didn’t Happen in Berlin: Politics, Economics and Ignorance in the}

Setting of Africa’s Colonial Boundaries’, in African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits, and

Opportunities, ed. by Paul Nugent and Anthony Asiwaju (London: Pinter, 1996), pp. 21-34.

68 _{Especially after the expeditions led by a Frenchman, Louis Mizon, in Adamawa (1890-1892),}

see Anene, The international boundaries of Nigeria, 1885-1960, pp. 268–9.

69 _{Hirshfield, The diplomacy of partition, introduction.}

70 _{Olayemi Akinwumi, The Colonial Contest for the Nigerian Region, 1884-1900: a History of the} German Participation, Geschichte Mu nster: Lit Verlag, 2002).

future Kamerun but to future Nigeria as well. It was particularly hoped that the Benue River and the Chad Lake would offer trading opportunities equivalent to those of the Congo or Niger.

The framework of the Kamerun boundaries can also be explained by the partly failed colonial ambitions of the Germans in Western and Central Africa. More specifically, the belief that the water system of the new protectorate would offer trading opportunities was also responsible for the shape of their colony as the protectorate of Kamerun was declared in 1884. As Akinwumi puts it:

The Chad region was highly contested for by the three colonial powers. Central to the Chad project was the Adamawa emirate.71

This section will argue that the kingdom of Borno was also central to the Chad project and that the German perception of the northern boundaries of their colony largely relied on the nineteenth-century conception of Borno.

The first boundary agreement between Germany and the United Kingdom was signed in 1885 and delimited the boundary from the Bight of Biafra to the Cross River rapids. In 1886, the boundary was extended to Yola and on 15 November 1893, an agreement was signed so that the new boundary reached Lake Chad. Thus, from 1885 to 1893, within eight years, the eastern boundary of Nigeria was defined. However, the delimitation was far from being precise:

In the event of future surveys showing that a point so fixed assigns to the British sphere a less proportion of the southern shore of Lake Chad than is shown in the aforesaid map, a new terminal point making good such deficiency, and as far as possible in accordance with that at present indicated, shall be fixed as soon as possible by mutual agreement. Until such agreement is arrived at, the point on the southern shore of Lake Chad, situated 35 minutes east of the meridian of the centre of the town of Kuka, shall be the terminal point.72

71 _{Akinwumi, The Colonial Contest for the Nigerian Region, 1884-1900, p. 87.}

72 Edward Hertslet, The Map of Africa by Treaty (London: Harrison and Sons, 1896), p. 659.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Hertslet%2C%20Edward%2C%20S ir%2C%201824-1902%22 [accessed 14 December 2011].

Figure 9: “Map to illustrate the boundary between Great Britain and Germany in West Africa.”73

This agreement revealed how much these treaties relied on previous observations and the precision of maps. In the case of Borno, the maps were imprecise and the impossibility of exploring and demarcating Rabih’s kingdom in 1893 delayed the boundary demarcation commission to 1903. As seen on Fig. 9,

the pink area traditionally representing the British Empire, encompassed the most important towns south of the Sahara. This division of the Lake Chad basin symbolised the British ambitions to prevent the French from acquiring fertile territories north of Lake Chad.74

However, in 1893, the Germans and the British were only starting their expansion beyond the Atlantic coast.75 _{This boundary agreement totally ignored}

the geopolitical situation of the Lake Chad region located more than 1000 kilometres from the coasts and arbitrarily deprived Borno of its eastern borderlands.