Man, I never really thought much about history stuff after college, right? You read the textbook, you get the grades, you move on. The Berlin Conference was just some old meeting where some old white guys carved up a map. Didn’t feel relevant to my day-to-day work, which usually involves trying to figure out why supply chains break.
Until last year. I got involved in this tiny little export thing. Trying to move specialty goods—handicrafts and some raw materials—out of this spot in Eastern Africa, near the Great Lakes region. Sounds simple. Get the stuff, put it on a truck, ship it to the nearest port city, load it onto a container ship. Easy, right? Wrong.
The Mess That Kicked Off The Research
I swear, I spent four months trying to figure out why a shipment had to travel 700 miles through three different countries, dealing with three sets of customs officials who barely spoke the same language, just to reach a port that was geographically only 250 miles away if we could have gone straight. It made zero goddamn sense.
The most efficient path was blocked or degraded. The infrastructure was ridiculous. The main rail lines were built like spokes on a wheel, all connecting deep inland areas directly to a few specific coastal cities that were once colonial administrative hubs. If you wanted to move goods across the region—say, from one neighboring country to another—there were virtually no good roads, just tracks that turned into mud pits during the rainy season.
Every single step was bureaucratic quicksand. We tried moving things through Country C’s roads, but they only accepted documentation validated in the capital of Country A, which was 500 miles away. Then, because the infrastructure only led to the historic colonial port, we had to double back 200 miles just to hit the main artery heading toward the sea. It was like the whole system was set up to deliberately prevent regional trade and force everything through specific, expensive, old bottlenecks.
I remember sitting there with my local logistics manager, slamming my laptop shut, asking, “Why? Why did they build the roads like this? Why are the tariffs designed to punish regional cooperation? Why don’t these neighboring countries just make a deal to use the fastest route?”
He just sighed, pointed at the map, and said, “They didn’t build them for us to trade with each other. They built them to take things out. And the borders are just lines from Europe.”
Lines From Europe. That hit me hard. I wasn’t battling modern corruption; I was battling 1884 cartography. I had to figure out what the hell happened in that meeting to screw up logistics this badly over a century later.
What I Dug Up About That Old Meeting
So I started digging deep into the Berlin Conference. I didn’t grab fancy books. I went looking for maps—the actual maps the diplomats used. I needed to see the original treaties and boundary descriptions. I wanted to trace those lines myself.
Here’s the ugly truth I realized: they weren’t drawing borders based on where people lived, or where natural economic areas were, or even where the major water sources were. It was a game of Tetris for European diplomats.
- The British wanted
contiguous control over major rivers and ports
, often drawing lines that sliced through existing kingdoms.
- The French basically said,
“We want everything in this big rectangle,”
resulting in massive, often unmanageable land chunks that spanned wildly different climates and cultures.
- They drew
straight lines using rulers and pencils
across deserts and mountains, often splitting communities like the Somali people or the Maasai, ensuring that conflict over resources and identity would be inevitable once they left.
My absurd logistics problem suddenly made horrifying sense. The roads and rails I was dealing with were absolutely not designed to connect African market to African market. They were constructed to suck resources (like my raw materials) efficiently down a straight shot to the European power’s designated port. Everything flowed out, not across. My attempts to move things laterally across modern country lines were fundamentally fighting infrastructure that was designed solely for extraction.
I spent weeks overlaying old colonial economic maps onto modern conflict maps and infrastructure deficit maps. The correlation was spooky. The areas that were forced into monoculture economies back then—focusing only on rubber, or only on diamonds—are often the poorest and most unstable today. That economic structure, set in stone by the colonial powers, created a vulnerability that never went away.
The Real Impact I Learned To See
The Berlin Conference didn’t just draw borders; it installed a dysfunctional economic and political operating system. It created states where the capital city often wasn’t the natural center of population or trade, but just the easiest spot for the colonial overseer to manage exports.
It’s why my simple logistics trip turned into a massive, expensive, multi-border bureaucratic nightmare. Every customs post, every weird tariff, every poorly maintained lateral road is a direct inheritance of a system built to separate people and prioritize European coffers.
I had to pull out of that specific shipping route eventually. Too much friction, too much cost baked into a system that I, a small-time operator, couldn’t possibly overcome. But trying to beat the system is what made me finally understand the damn history. It wasn’t just abstract classroom knowledge anymore; it was the invisible hand choking my business plan.
I still get pissed thinking about the time and money we wasted fighting against those century-old pencil lines. But now I know exactly why the map looks like that, and why moving things around is such a pain in the butt. It wasn’t my incompetence; it was 1884 incompetence that was hardwired into the infrastructure, and we are all still paying the price for it.
