African Agency in the Scramble for Africa: Rethinking the Berlin Conference Through Indigenous Political Actors

This dissertation provides an original revisionist analysis of the Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, recentring African political agency in the partition process by systematically documenting how African rulers, kingdoms, and political organisations actively shaped, resisted, negotiated, and sometimes facilitated the colonial boundary-making process in ways that existing historiography has systematically underrepresented. The standard historiography of the Berlin Conference treats African political actors as passive objects of European partition rather than as strategic actors who brought sophisticated diplomatic calculations to the colonial encounter. The dissertation employs a comparative historical methodology drawing on primary sources in Arabic, Hausa ajami, and colonial European languages, including diplomatic correspondence between African rulers and European representatives, treaty negotiation records, and the political memoirs of African rulers' courts, supplemented by 150 secondary sources on the partition period published between 2018 and 2024. Critical African historiography, the Agency Theory in International History Framework, and the Subaltern Studies Approach provide the analytical anchors. The dissertation documents original evidence of deliberate African diplomatic strategies in the partition period from the Sokoto Caliphate, the Borno sultanate, the Benin Kingdom, and Yoruba city-states, proposing the African Partition Agency Model that categorises strategies into resistance, accommodation, alliance bargaining, and strategic compliance. Keywords: Scramble for Africa, Berlin Conference, African agency, colonial partition, revisionist historiography.