The notion of a Scramble for Africa, as the late-nineteenth-century push by Europeans to lay imperial claim to virtually every part of the continent is called, is one of the most powerful images that the public retains of African history, and for good reason. It left an enduringly debilitating legacy for the continent: a plethora of puny and scarcely functional states, with conflict among and between ethnic groups, and with some once coherent groups left pointlessly straddling borders and others with far less in common, just as illogically, jumbled together in an artificial confection.
