7th grades scramble for and colonization of Africa

Over the past week the 7th grade was been studying decolonization in its humanities class, International Conflict and Cooperation in the 20th century. While we studied the colonization on a global level, we focused primarily on Africa and our case study for decolonization was Algeria. Last week, we did an activity where I split the class into two parts, one side was to represent Africans and the other side Europeans. Both sides were given a map of Africa. The Africa team was required to come up with different kingdoms or empires to represent within Africa, to choose one enemy, and split up Africa making sure to not share a border with their enemy. The European team was to split of Africa as they pleased as well but in the name of their home countries. They each represented different countries that were actually a part of the colonial scramble for Africa: Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Holland. At first they split the continent into 6 equal pieces, and then were allowed to go to war (simulated by rock paper scissors shoot) with each other country once over half or less of each other's territory.

The African countries found it a little difficult at times to keep from having borders with their enemies but in the end, worked it out pretty nicely. The European groups often found themselves in a frenzy of war, and while both classes pointed out the inefficiency of the constant warfare, the Europe group second class actually moved to start making treaties and conferencing about what to trade which was great to see.

Here are the maps made by both classes

First class maps


second class maps


After both groups finishing making their maps, we discussed the differences between the African map and the European map and I told the African group that unfortunately their map was being destroyed in favor of the European group. The students in the africa group unanimously declared my actions unfair. As one student said "we worked so hard on our map too, why is theirs being kept?". They also were distressed that because of the scattered nature of the European empires, they were often now placed in the same empire and one of their enemy would they had sought to avoid. They saw that these new matches could potentially cause civil wars and other internal conflicts in the future, which is unfortunately what has actually happened in many countries in Africa at one point or another.

The European group talked about the chaos of war, and both classes said that they would have tried to organize a conference to make treaties instead of fighting all the time. They also noticed that they didn't talk to the Africa group at all during their activity, which they noted was particularly weird given the fact that they had split up their continent for themselves. I then explained to the students that their activity was essentially what occurred before the Berlin Conference of 1884; before the Conference African peoples and nations had their own map and then Europeans, on their own, without talking to Africans to figure out where the natural borders lay, made their own empires and country lines, creating 70% of the borders that now exist in Africa. The next day we covered The Berlin Conference in more depth and studied the colonial era and Africa and many students said the activity from the day before had helped them better understand the material from the following day.

Ms. Wantchekon
7th grade Humanities