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Map of West Africa, ca. 1736, "explaining what belongs to England, Holland, Denmark, etc."

The colonization of Africa has a long history, the most famous phase being the European Scramble for Africa of the nineteenth century.

North Africa in particular experienced colonization from Europe and Asia Minor in the early historical period.

The city of Carthage was established in what is now Tunisia by Phoenician colonists, becoming a major power in the Mediterranean by the 4th century BC. Over time the city changed hands, falling to the Romans after the Third Punic War, where it served as the capital city of the Roman province of Africa. Gothic Vandals briefly established a kingdom there in the 5th century, which shortly thereafter fell to the Romans again, this time the Byzantines. The Ancient Egyptian civilization also fell under the sway of the Greeks, later passing to the Romans. The whole of Roman/Byzantine North Africa eventually fell to the Arabs in the 7th century, who brought the Islamic religion and Arabic language (see History of Islam).

Main article: European exploration of Africa

Main article: Scramble for Africa

Established empires, notably Britain, Portugal and France, had already expropriated vast areas of Africa and Asia, and emerging imperial powers like Italy and Germany had done likewise on a smaller scale. With the dismissal of the aging Chancellor Bismarck by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the relatively orderly colonization became a frantic scramble. The 1885 Berlin Congress, initiated by Bismarck to establish international guidelines for the acquisition of African territory, formalized this "New Imperialism". Between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War, Europe added almost 9 million square miles (23,000,000 km²) — one-fifth of the land area of the globe — to its overseas colonial possessions.

Main article: Decolonization of Africa

The main period of decolonization in Africa began after World War II. Growing independence movements, indigeneous political parties and trade unions coupled with pressure from within the imperialist powers and from the United States ensured the decolonization of virtually the whole of the continent by 1980. While some areas, in particular South Africa, retain a large population of European descent, only the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the islands of Réunion, the Canary Islands and Madeira remain under European control.

• European exploration of Africa
• Colonialism
• New Imperialism
• Neocolonialism
• Third world
• White African

• Germany Refuses to Apologize for Herero Holocaust - from Africana.com
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