The Berlin West Africa Conference - A Timely Centenary?

Centenaries can prove contentious occasions. When Professor Imanuel Geiss of the University of Bremen proposed to commemorate the fourteen-power Conference which, between November 15th, 1884, and February 26th, 1885, discussed African problems in Berlin, he unexpectedly – if not wholly unpredictably – aroused fierce controversies. Patriotic Africans, believing that the Conference not only symbolised but actually launched the colonial partition of Africa, suspected an intention to celebrate a victory of European imperialism rather than to mourn the loss of African independence. At the time of writing it seems likely that three or four separate commemorative conferences may take place. While the German Historical Institute in London, and a group of French historians, are organising rigorously academic deliberations in West Berlin, the Societe Africaine de Culture has been planning a meeting in Brazzaville, more committed scholars from the Federal Republic hope to meet African colleagues in the former German colony of Togo, and on the other side of the Berlin Wall East German historians have published a somewhat polemical volume of Marxist studies.