Colonial Rule in Africa - Essay Example

The Portuguese entered into the continent with divergent aims. These aims were not only scientific but commercial as well. However, it should be underlined that other aims were purely religious and military as long as Portugal itself was seeking to subdue the Muslim enemy and to assess its strength. In his book titled Colonial Africa, A. J. Christopher claimed that “ the European penetration of the continent was not one monolithic movement but made up of several different nationalities who were in competition with one another”1, adding that “eleven European countries established bases on the African continent, while seven took part in the final scramble of the 1880s and 1890s.

”2 For this alone, many scholars and historians contend that the European colonial rule of Africa was structured as a form of dictatorship because the military machine was doing its job in finding a way how to pacify the African subjects and therefore maintain a state of order. While Britain, for example, made all the decisions concerning its colonies from Britain, France was ruling Morocco and Algeria from France, appointing chiefs and residents to abide by the new European norms and lifestyles and blindly adopt them.

Hence, many millions of lives had been lost as a result of military fights. On the other hand, a large array of nationalists, notably political and religious figures were repressed and excluded from their countries. Worse than that, a policy of discrimination and segregation was carried out in Africa; the British used to favor some specific ethnic groups in Africa over all the colonized others. The former were supported because they served the ends of Britain. Probably nowhere was the European-African conflict bloody and tragic as it was in Libya.