The Berlin Conference was a meeting of fourteen colonial powers, convened by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck at the request of Belgium's King Leopold II, that sat in Berlin from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 and set the rules for European colonisation of Africa. Its General Act confirmed the holdings of Leopold's International Congo Society in the Congo Basin, made the Congo and Niger rivers free to shipping, declared free trade across the Congo Basin and required any power taking African coastline to notify the others and establish "effective occupation". No African ruler was invited. The conference itself fixed few lines on the map, but it set the rules for the treaty-making that produced most of Africa's borders, and the clearest way to see its legacy is at the places where people cross those borders today.
No. 77 Wilhelmstrasse: fourteen delegations and a wall map
The delegates met in Bismarck's official residence at No. 77 Wilhelmstrasse (now No. 92) in central Berlin. Thirteen European states attended, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden-Norway, together with the United States. Each had a single vote whatever the size of its delegation, and the United States reserved the right to accept or decline the conclusions.
The one African head of state who asked to take part, Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar, was refused. The immediate trigger was a quarrel over the lower Congo. Henry Morton Stanley, working for Leopold since 1878, had been collecting treaties along the river; the French officer Pierre de Brazza was doing the same on the north bank; and Portugal, citing centuries-old claims, had signed a treaty with Britain on 26 February 1884 to shut Leopold's organisation out of the Atlantic. Germany, a newcomer to Africa, joined France in pressing for a strict test of effective occupation that would have limited Britain's loosely held protectorates.
Six of the fourteen, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden-Norway and the United States, went home with no African territory at all. The real business was between Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and Leopold, and much of it was settled in side agreements rather than in the conference hall. For the wider land grab that followed, see our guide to the Scramble for Africa.
Pool Malebo: the ferry between Brazzaville and Kinshasa
The border the conference cared most about is a stretch of water. Pool Malebo, formerly Stanley Pool, is a lake-like widening of the lower Congo about 35 kilometres long and 23 wide, just above the Livingstone Falls. Brazza's expedition secured its north shore: the Tio king Iloo I signed a treaty placing his lands under French protection, and from October 1880 to May 1882 a small squad under the Senegalese sergeant Malamine Camara held the site that became Brazzaville. On the south shore Stanley built the station that became Léopoldville, now Kinshasa.
At Berlin the powers confirmed that the lands held by Leopold's International Association of the Congo, including the south bank and the vast basin behind it, belonged to it. On 1 August 1885 the territory was renamed the Congo Free State, about 2.3 million square kilometres ruled personally by Leopold, a man who never visited it, until the Belgian parliament annexed it in 1908. The General Act defined the free-trade Congo Basin by its watersheds, bounded by the Ogooué, Chari and Nile basins to the north and the Zambezi basin to the south, and opened the river itself to ships of every flag.
Apart from Rome and Vatican City, which touch, the two cities are the closest pair of national capitals on Earth, facing each other across the river. Kinshasa had more than 10 million people in 2014 and Brazzaville about 1.7 million, yet there is still no bridge. People cross by boat, and the flight between them, which operates twice a week, takes only about five minutes. Our Congo River guide follows the river the conference opened to trade.
Banana and the Cabinda gap at the Congo's mouth
Downstream, the Berlin settlement left a strip of coast that still shapes the map. Portugal's claim to Cabinda, north of the river mouth, was recognised, but Portugal gave up a short section of coast to the Congo Free State so that Leopold's state could reach the Atlantic. That cession cut Cabinda off from the rest of Angola. In February 1885, while the conference was still sitting, Portuguese envoys signed the Treaty of Simulambuco with the princes and chiefs of Cabinda, placing their territory under Portuguese protection. A treaty of 25 May 1891 then described the Cabinda frontier in detail.
The result is the Democratic Republic of the Congo's tiny shoreline, anchored by the port of Banana, which sits on a creek behind a sandspit about three kilometres long on the north bank of the Congo mouth. Cabinda's border with the DRC runs about 225 kilometres from the Atlantic to the tripoint with the Republic of the Congo. Angola has governed Cabinda since independence in 1975, when MPLA forces took the territory after a separatist group proclaimed a "Republic of Cabinda"; separatist movements have kept that claim alive, but most members of the Organisation of African Unity refused to recognise it. In 2022 work began on a US$1.2 billion project to turn Banana into the DRC's first deep-water port.
Kazungula: the Zambezi crossing Germany's strip created
The Berlin rules sent the powers off to trade territory with each other, and one of those trades produced one of Africa's oddest junctions. Under the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1 July 1890, Britain gave Germany the North Sea island of Heligoland and a long panhandle of land reaching east from German South West Africa to the Zambezi, in return for German recognition of British authority over Zanzibar. The strip, named after chancellor Leo von Caprivi, was meant to give Germany a river route to its East African colony. It never worked, because Victoria Falls lies about 65 kilometres to the east.
The Caprivi Strip, now part of Namibia, is 32 to 105 kilometres wide. At its eastern tip the borders of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe almost meet at a quadripoint: instead there are two tripoints joined by a line about 150 metres long, which is the whole of the Botswana–Zambia border, in the middle of the Zambezi. For decades the only direct link across that sliver was the Kazungula ferry, and in 2003 an overloaded truck capsized one of its pontoons, drowning 18 people.
The replacement opened in May 2021. The Kazungula Bridge is 923 metres long and cost about US$259 million, including one-stop border posts on each side. It carries a road, footways and a single railway track, and it uses that short Botswana–Zambia border, curving in plan to avoid the nearby Namibian and Zimbabwean borders. A treaty drawn in Europe in 1890 still decides the shape of a bridge built 131 years later.
Farafenni and the Senegambia Bridge
In West Africa, Britain and France settled their rival claims along the Gambia River in a convention signed on 10 August 1889, which extended British Gambia upstream as far as Yarbutenda. The line follows the river at a distance of roughly 10 kilometres on each bank before turning to the coast, producing a 749-kilometre border that wraps almost entirely around The Gambia. Pillars were set on the ground, with further demarcation in 1911 and 1925, and the two countries agreed minor adjustments in 1976.
Because the river runs through the middle of The Gambia, it also separates Senegal's northern heartland from its southern region of Casamance. Travellers on the Trans-Gambia Highway near Farafenni used a ferry that could leave them waiting 10 to 20 days; the alternative was a 400-kilometre detour east. A bridge was first proposed in 1956, and construction finally began in 2015. The 1.9-kilometre Senegambia Bridge opened to light vehicles on 21 January 2019. In July 2026 the two governments reached a definitive agreement to clarify the demarcation of the line, 137 years after it was first drawn. Our Gambia country guide covers the country the 1889 line created.
Articles 34 and 35, and the 1964 choice to keep the lines
The rules that made all these crossings were short. Article 34 of the General Act required any power taking a stretch of African coast to notify the other signatories, and Article 35 required "effective occupation" for a claim to be recognised. Britain resisted anything stronger, a Belgian proposal obliging occupiers to keep the peace was dropped after British and French opposition, and the powers accepted that a coastal base was enough to anchor a claim to an undefined hinterland. Empires met the minimum cheaply, often with telegraph lines, and settled the interior by bilateral bargaining.
Historians still argue about how much Berlin itself decided. A 2024 study found that the only borders set at the conference were those of the Congo region, later revised, and that most African borders took their final form more than twenty years afterwards. Yet when African states became independent, they chose stability over redrawing: in 1964 the Organisation of African Unity agreed to keep the borders inherited from colonial rule. That is why the ferry at Pool Malebo, the bridge at Kazungula and the crossing at Farafenni still follow lines drawn by diplomats who never saw them, a pattern traced across the continent in our guide to colonial legacy borders.