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Here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by the conference at

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Berlin a conference full of excitement thrills laughter games and.. why even [people gathered at a Berlin conference]

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bother describing it just look at those joyful smiling faces take a look

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at this super happy image right there none of those Berlinians they're a hoot

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well here's question the results of the conference in Berlin Illustrated above

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included the provision that no country could take ownership of a territory in

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Africa unless it what.. and hear your potential answers...well you know when you

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go to a potluck dinner and someone brings a salad and someone else brings a [women placing different salad dishes on a table]

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potato salad and someone else brings a pasta salad and someone else brings a

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fruit salad yeah you know we've been there and when everything is looking

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really dire and you're starting to wonder if you could trade all those [man upset at having all those salads]

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salads for just one potato chip well some amazing soul shows up with a giant

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pizza and everyone rejoices and then when there's only one slice left and [people jumping for the last slice of pizza]

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everyone madly scrambles for it well that long-winded diatribe wasn't just to

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tell you to stop bringing cruddy and lazy store-bought salads to potluck's [Man holding a box of bobby's]

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seriously stop doing that it was also to explain what was going on in Europe at

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the time however instead of fighting over pizza it was a fight to colonize

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Africa and so the conference in Berlin was called the set a few ground rules on [People in the conference discussing African ground rules]

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the whole thing because if you're going to occupy and forcefully take control of

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other people's land you might as well try and be a little civil about it right [Two men discussing occupying foreign land]

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but what did the meeting ultimately establish? was it that the colonizers

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needed to provide supplies to the inhabitants no, of course not basic

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supplies like food and clothing weren't really a concern to the Europeans because

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when we said they were being civil we meant to one another not to the people [Jeeves delivering a platter to a European man]

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whose lives that were being actually affected and destroyed basically so

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don't be silly and of course they didn't care about protecting the populace they

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just wanted to control it again the whole not actually being civil thing [man thinking about population management]

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that being said the Europeans didn't explicitly set out to destroy the native

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culture and tradition they just didn't really care if that did happen which it

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did time and time again as a result of European occupation in case you haven't [Builder demanding a McDonalds and Starbucks are built on a foreign land]

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totally gotten the picture here the Europeans were kind of being massive

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jerks here, to put it ever so mildly. What was established in the conference was that

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countries needed to demonstrate effective control over a territory

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before their ownership was recognized by the rest of the world they couldn't just [Men pointing to locations they want to occupy]

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walk around claiming territories on a win by sticking the flag in the sand

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well except for the fact that that's more or less exactly what they did but [Two men fighting in the street]

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they did it civil-ly except not at all so yeah we got nothing okay except for a

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ton of salad we got so much salad yum [boy stood at the table with lots of salad]

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