The Berlin Conference of 1885 and Portugal's lost Congo mouth

On Thursday 26 February 1885 the diplomats met for the last time in the conference hall of the Reich Chancellor's palace at Wilhelmstrasse 77, in Berlin. They had been coming there since November. Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, summed up their work, praised the spirit of conciliation and wished well to the enterprise of King Leopold II of the Belgians in Africa. The Italian ambassador, Count de Launay, replied with praise for the chancellor and thanks, on behalf of all, for the emperor's hospitality.2 sources2 sources

Before the session closed, Bismarck announced a document in which Leopold's International Association of the Congo adhered to what the conference had agreed. Then the plenipotentiaries signed the General Act and pressed their seals into red wax. For Portugal the signatures were those of the Marquis of Penafiel, its minister in Berlin, and António de Serpa Pimentel, a councillor of state.2 sources2 sources

Penafiel's report to Lisbon the next day was flat. Neither Bismarck's speech nor the reply, he wrote, had contained anything particularly remarkable. The hard part had happened twelve days earlier, when Portugal signed away the north bank of the Congo, on a coast Lisbon said had belonged to its crown for centuries.1 source1 source

In the early 1880s Portugal was a constitutional monarchy under King Luís, and its African empire was mostly a matter of coastal towns and forts. Portuguese explorers had crossed the interior without occupying any of it. North of Luanda, Lisbon claimed the whole coast between latitudes 8° and 5° 12' south, from Ambriz past the mouth of the Congo, which the Portuguese called the Zaire, to Cabinda and Molembo.4 sources4 sources

The claim rested on discovery, on centuries of dealings with the kingdom of Kongo and on old treaties. Britain, which policed the Atlantic against the slave trade, had refused since 1846 to recognise Portuguese rights north of the river Loge. Portugal answered by moving troops north: it occupied Ambriz in 1855, Bembe in 1856 and São Salvador, the Kongo capital, in 1858, though the fort it began there was abandoned in 1866.2 sources2 sources

Kongo still had its own king, the ntotila, who lived in São Salvador. Lisbon called the kingdom a vassal of its crown, as Penafiel was still doing in 1885. The archaeologist Bruno Pastre Máximo points out that Kongo's own envoy to Madrid had said in 1607 that his king was under the protection of the Iberian crown but not directly its vassal.2 sources2 sources

The pressure grew in the 1870s. The Lisbon Geographical Society, founded in 1875, became the centre of Portuguese colonial thinking, and in 1883 it published a memorandum on the Zaire question and Portugal's rights that gathered its arguments in one place. Its secretary, Luciano Cordeiro, listed the kinds of proof that should count: public acts, political occupation and trade, prolonged occupation, repeated acts of sovereignty, claims and reservations of rights, and documents, ruins and traditions.3 sources3 sources

Corvo, who had left the colonial ministry in 1877, proved right about the expeditions. By the early 1880s Henry Morton Stanley was signing treaties with chiefs along the river for Leopold II, whose private body was renamed the International Association of the Congo in 1882. In November 1882 France ratified the treaties that Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza had made on the north bank.2 sources2 sources

Britain, worried that France would close the river to free trade, reopened talks with Lisbon in 1882. On 26 February 1884, exactly a year before the Berlin Act, Earl Granville, the British foreign secretary, and Miguel Martins d'Antas, Portugal's minister in London, signed a treaty on the Congo and the Zambezi.3 sources3 sources

Britain recognised Portuguese sovereignty over the coast between 8° and 5° 12' south and up the Congo as far as Noqui. In return Portugal promised free navigation, a low tariff and a joint Anglo-Portuguese commission to regulate traffic on the river. Another clause said Portugal's claims on the Shire, a river far away in east Africa, would not extend beyond its meeting with the Ruo.2 sources2 sources

The treaty satisfied almost no one else. On 18 March France's minister in Lisbon delivered a note of objections. Bismarck refused to recognise it. Leopold II, Dutch traders at Banana and the merchants of Manchester, who feared Portuguese customs officers, all campaigned against it, and even the British press was unfavourable.3 sources3 sources

In May London told Lisbon it could not ratify without first satisfying the other powers. José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage, Portugal's foreign minister, telegraphed Portugal's legations on 12 May that the treaty would not be debated in the Cortes that session. The same day he wrote that a conference seemed the only way to reach a workable result, and said he had suggested one to the British minister. On 13 May he floated the idea in a circular to the legations.2 sources2 sources

Bismarck took up the idea that summer, in agreement with the French government of Jules Ferry. On 12 October 1884 the German minister in Lisbon delivered the invitation. Germany and France proposed to settle three points: freedom of trade in the basin and mouths of the Congo; free navigation of the Congo and the Niger; and the formalities that would make new occupations on the coasts of Africa count as effective.2 sources2 sources

The conference opened at two in the afternoon on 15 November 1884 in the chancellor's palace. Penafiel reported that the plenipotentiaries sat around the table in the alphabetical order of the powers they represented. Fourteen states took part: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden and Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. No African was present, although the borders being negotiated on the side ran through the lands of Kongo and of the Cabinda rulers.7 sources7 sources

On 19 November Penafiel read Portugal's declaration. Lisbon, he said, had perhaps been the first to propose such a meeting, in Bocage's circular of 13 May, and fully accepted free trade and navigation on the Congo. He pointed to the recent occupation of Kakongo and Massabi, north of 5° 12', by the governor of Angola.1 source1 source

The talks on borders happened outside the formal sessions. Britain, France and Germany were agreed that Portugal must not control both banks of the Congo mouth, which they feared would threaten the free-trade zone. Leopold's Association, meanwhile, was collecting conventions of recognition, signed with the United States in April 1884, Germany in November and Britain on 16 December.2 sources2 sources

Portugal's quarrel with the Association moved from Paris to Berlin at the end of January 1885. On 31 January the French ambassador, Baron de Courcel, acting as mediator, brought Penafiel a proposal that gave the Association the north bank and the coast from the Chiloango river to the Congo, Cabinda included. Penafiel called it completely unacceptable. A second offer, on 2 February, left Portugal Cabinda and Molembo but reduced them, in his words, to proportions that were simply derisory.1 source1 source

Then the great powers wrote. Sir Edward Malet, the British ambassador, told Penafiel on 7 February that London wanted the north bank and the coast up to the Chiloango to go to the Association, except for Cabinda and Molembo, and that Portugal should take the rest of the coast south to Ambriz.1 source1 source

On 10 February Lisbon answered that it would give up the north bank, but not Banana, the port at the river mouth. Its people had just asked for Portuguese rule, Bocage argued, and it was one of only three trading ports on the river. On 13 February Germany, France and Britain each replied in writing that Portugal should not insist. Lisbon gave way, and sent its orders to Penafiel by telegram.1 source1 source

On 14 February 1885, at the French embassy, Penafiel signed the convention with Colonel Strauch, president of the Association, with Courcel signing as mediator. Portugal recognised the Association's blue flag with a gold star as that of a friendly government.2 sources2 sources

Penafiel called the loss of Banana painful. He also passed on what other delegates were telling him: that unlimited resistance to the will of those who ruled the world by the size of their armies and fleets would have been dangerous. Bocage had Portugal's minister in Paris thank the French prime minister, Jules Ferry, for France's part in the settlement.1 source1 source

Most of the Act dealt with trade. It declared complete freedom of trade for all nations in a conventional basin of the Congo, which on the Atlantic ran from latitude 2° 30' south to the mouth of the Loge. Portugal's new northern district lay inside it. Other chapters condemned the slave trade, offered neutrality to the territories of the basin and opened the Congo and the Niger to the ships of every nation.1 source1 source

The part that mattered most to Portugal was the short sixth chapter. Article 34 said any power that took possession of land on the African coasts outside its existing possessions, or declared a protectorate there, must notify the other signatories so they could raise any claims of their own.1 source1 source

For Portugal, the historian Nuno Severiano Teixeira argues, this was the conference's gravest consequence. The new colonial law put effective occupation first and left historic rights only a supporting role. Britain wanted the rule applied to the whole continent; the other powers refused, so it covered only the coasts, and inland the race turned to claiming spheres of influence.1 source1 source

In Lisbon the episode left a grudge. The British desertion of the Congo treaty and the passive role of Britain's delegation in Berlin left many Portuguese politicians resentful, according to the diplomat and historian José Calvet de Magalhães, and inclined to look to France and Germany instead.1 source1 source

Bocage, close to the Geographical Society, wanted to join Angola to Mozambique. He opened talks with France and Germany, which his successor, Henrique de Barros Gomes, concluded. In a convention signed in Paris on 12 May 1886, which also fixed the northern border of Cabinda and the borders of Portuguese Guinea, France recognised the King of Portugal's right to exercise his sovereign and civilising influence in the territories between the two colonies, saving rights already acquired by other powers. Germany said the same in a declaration of 30 December 1886.3 sources3 sources

A map coloured that belt pink, and the plan became known as the Mapa Cor-de-Rosa. Britain had signed nothing of the kind, and the clash it produced over the Shire and Mashonaland, ending in the British ultimatum of 11 January 1890, is told in our article on the ultimatum. In the 1891 treaty that followed, Britain kept the lands between the two colonies.3 sources3 sources

Berlin's rule, and the appetite of Britain, Germany and the Transvaal for lands Portugal claimed, changed what Portuguese governments asked of their soldiers. In Mozambique, as a study for the Caixa Geral de Depósitos archive puts it, Portuguese authority before then ran to ports, islands and a few posts up the Zambezi along about 2,400 kilometres of claimed coast. Officers such as Eduardo da Costa, using the language of the conference, argued that without prior military occupation there was no effective rule and therefore no colonisation.1 source1 source

Lisbon sent thirteen military expeditions to Mozambique between 1891 and 1901, with about 7,000 men in all. The campaign of 1895 against Gaza, an African kingdom founded about sixty years earlier that ruled much of southern Mozambique, ended on 28 December, when Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque seized its ruler, Gungunhana, at Chaimite.1 source1 source

In Angola the borders were drawn on paper first. Treaties with France and Germany in 1886, with the Congo Free State in 1891, the Barotse arbitration award of 1905 and an agreement with South Africa in 1926 fixed the lines, according to the Angolan historian Edmar da Silva Paím.3 sources3 sources

The deal struck at the French embassy in February 1885 is still on the map. Angola has two separate pieces: Cabinda, about 7,270 square kilometres, and the rest of the country, divided by a strip of land about 60 kilometres wide that belongs to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leopold's old corridor to the sea. Paím, who takes these figures from H. Mbunga's 2014 study of Cabinda, notes that the treaties also divided the Bakongo between Angola and the two Congos.2 sources2 sources

Simulambuco has a second life. Cabindan independence movements have cited the 1885 treaty, which made Cabinda a protectorate rather than a part of Angola: the AREC, founded in 1958, asked Lisbon for independence in 1960 and called for an end to the Simulambuco protectorate, and the FLEC, founded in 1963, and other separatists still invoke it. The researcher Eugénio Costa Almeida points out that no document is known in which the king of Portugal authorised Capelo to sign it, nor any ratification by the queen of Ngoyo.1 source1 source