The Berlin Conference did not begin colonialism; it accelerated and codified what was already under way. By the late 1870s King Leopold II of Belgium's private "civilising association" in the Congo basin, France's advances in West Africa, and Portugal's old coastal claims had set the European powers scrambling to block one another. Bismarck — the statesman steering a unified Germany through a careful balance of powers — convened the conference precisely to prevent this rivalry from igniting war in Europe. The sessions that opened in the Berlin Reichskanzlei on 15 November 1884 brought together delegates from Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Spain, Sweden-Norway, Denmark, the Ottoman Empire and the United States.

The General Act produced by the conference did three things: it opened the Congo and Niger basins to "free trade"; declared that the slave trade would be suppressed; and made "effective occupation" — not flag-planting but actual administrative presence — the test of any territorial claim. That last clause pushed European powers to march inland, draw borders and sign treaties in haste. The Congo basin was institutionalised as the "Congo Free State," King Leopold's personal property, where the rubber-extraction regime of the following years would cost the lives of millions of Congolese. Not a single African sat at the conference table; the lines being drawn took no account of local peoples, languages, polities or trade networks.

What followed was what historians call the Scramble for Africa. Apart from Ethiopia, which defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896, and Liberia, with its special status, the entire continent was colonised. The borders drawn — those ruler-straight lines that still form the skeleton of the sub-Saharan map — answered to the balance of power around the Berlin table rather than to any geography on the ground. Railways, the telegraph and the machine gun let small European garrisons rule vast regions; mission, trade and administration moved together.

The shadow of the Berlin Conference shaped twentieth-century Africa. The wave of independence between 1957 and 1975 produced more than fifty new states — but their borders were largely the borders drawn in Berlin: artificial lines that compressed different ethnic communities under a single roof and split kin across separate countries. Many of today's conflicts, from Sudan to Nigeria, Rwanda to the Congo, can be traced to that table in Berlin where no African was seated. The conference remains one of the clearest historical examples of what it means for one part of the world to sit down and negotiate over another.