History Has It That Both Ethiopia And Liberia Were Also Colonized

Other answers here have pointed out the example of both Ethiopia and Liberia Were never colonized , In fact, both were colonized and there isn't a single country in Africa that didn't see some colonial efforts at some point in its history.

Ethiopia was colonized only very briefly. The Italians successfully conquered the Ethiopian Empire in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935-1936) and incorporated its territory into Italian East Africa. This colony lasted until 1941, when the Italians were kicked out - although Italian guerrilla efforts kept going until 1943. Although this period of colonization was brief and came about twenty years after the Scramble for Africa is generally agreed to have ended, it did take place.

It is also worth noting that, even if one ignores this period of time, Ethiopia was not merely nominally an empire and therefore the region had been experiencing imperialism for about eight hundred years - it simply was that Europeans weren't the imperialists.

Like Ethiopia, Liberia also managed to maintain its independence during the Scramble for Africa. This is because it had been colonized in the 1820's, declared independence twenty years later and was already effectively a US protectorate when the Scramble began in the 1880's.

The colonization of Liberia was undertaken by the appropriately named Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, more commonly called the American Colonization Society. Founded in 1817 by Robert Finley, a white man, the ACS supported returning freedmen to Africa. There were a variety of motives for the supporters of the ACS, but the two big ones were fears that freedmen would not be able to achieve equality in American society and simple old fashioned racism.

The ACS received $100,000 from Congress in 1819, a year in which the federal government spent about $22.6 million - 0.44% of the budget. By comparison, in 2012, NASA received 0.48% of the US government's expenditures. You get the idea: this was pretty much an official US government policy, and there's a reason Liberia's capital, Monrovia, is named for then-President James Monroe.

Most of the colonists of Liberia were freedmen - African-Americans. Most were not first generation slaves and the overwhelming majority did not trace their ancestry to Liberia. The colony's first twenty years were spent under white governorship, and the first nonwhite governor, Joseph Jenkins Roberts,[1] was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and according to the racial terminology of the time was classified as an "octoroon" - one of his great-grandparents was of full African descent. It would take until Liberia's eleventh president, Hilary R. W. Johnson, before the country's president had been born in Liberia, and he was a second generation immigrant.

Now, yes, the colonists were primarily of African descent, but Africa is a big place populated with loads of different ethnic groups, and the vast majority of the settler population had no real ties to the indigenous peoples of the region. Additionally, the settlement efforts were funded primarily by people of European descent. And indeed, Americo-Liberians - the settlers and their descendants - would remain the ruling class until the overthrow of the True Whig Party in 1980. Bottom line: Liberia was colonized and indeed, remained independent during the Scramble for Africa only because it had been colonized.

[1] Subsequently the first president of Liberia, following Liberia's independence referendum in 1847. Seriously, there was a referendum for independence - how is this not a colony?