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Leopold won by being more ruthless: when the sixty-year-old Msiri drew his sword against a Belgian lieutenant named Omer Bodson, he shot and then beheaded the warlord, shouting, ‘I’ve killed a tiger! Vive le Roi!’ Msiri’s guards then killed Bodson. But Msiri’s adopted son Mukanda accused Maria of betraying Msiri to the Europeans. Pushing her to her knees, he beheaded her with a machete. ‘I’m Mukanda who walks over enemies!’ he said, but he had lost his independence: Leopold got Katanga.

Bismarck accepted lesser prizes, ranging from Cameroon to South West Africa^* – while Peters, broad-hipped, soft-skinned and pasty, sporting self-designed military gear and bearing an array of guns, tried to seize Uganda from the kabaka of Buganda, and Tanganyika from the sultan of Zanzibar. He was successful in Tanganyika, where as Reichskommissar, known as Mkono wa Damu – Bloodsmeared Man – he ruled murderously. When his favourite concubine slept with his manservant, he hanged both and liquidated their villages, shocking even the Germans, who recalled Hangman Peters and sent troops to crush the resulting rebellion.^*

The lion’s share of Africa was secured by Britain and France, the Third Republic proving every bit as hungry for empire as the Napoleons. The era of popular nationalism that doomed pure monarchy and aristocracy fostered both bourgeois values and increasingly representative government at home, but security, profit, and prestige demanded empire abroad. In 1873, France – with a monarchist majority in the Assembly – offered the throne to the comte de Chambord (grandson of Charles X), who lost the crown by refusing to accept the tricolour flag. In the absence of a monarchy, the army came to symbolize stability, Catholicism and l’ordre moral – against the other France, secular, liberal, socialist. The army was the unifying symbol of a divided country, the empire its consolation.

‘The higher races,’ said the premier Jules Ferry to the Assembly on 28 March 1884, ‘have a duty to civilize the inferior races.’ Ferry, a heavily bewhiskered lawyer, annexed the last Barbary State, Tunis, and expanded Indo-China, taking Cambodia, Laos and the rest of Vietnam, though the latter absorption was challenged by China. Ferry defeated the Chinese, a war that helped discredit the premier – but not the empire. While killing many thousands in an endless war to subjugate Algeria, the French military were spearheaded by their cosmopolitan vanguard, the Foreign Legion, with its cut-throat cult of victory. ‘You, legionnaires, became soldiers to die,’ their general Oscar de Négrier told them as they seized more of Vietnam, ‘and I’m sending you to do just that!’

In west Africa, France crushed the Wassoulou kingdom in Mali and Guinea, then turned on Dahomey. Its king, Glele, son of Ghezo, had maintained power through military raids, using slaves to work his palm-oil estates, but his granting of the towns Cotonou and Porto-Novo to France undermined his authority. The Berlin conference granted Dahomey to Paris. After Glele was assassinated, his son Kondo, taking the regal name Béhanzin, became a warrior king in the Dahomean tradition, propagating his image in the form of wooden statues decorating Abomey. In 1889, he returned to slaving in French territory, using his female vanguard, the Minon, as slave raiders. In 1892, the French invaded, commanded by a tough colonel of mixed French, African and Amerindian descent, Alfred-Amédée Dodds, who had fought at Sedan and in Indo-China. At Adégon, King Béhanzin was routed by Dodds, and 400 of his female fighters killed. In January 1894, as Dodds closed in, the king burned Abomey, and was exiled to Martinique. France seized massive territories using its harsh Armée d’Afrique, composed of Berber and Arab cavalry – the Spahis – and cameleteers from the Maghreb, along with 200,000 west African sharpshooters, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais, and Tirailleurs from Indo-China and Madagascar. These troops helped to conquer a French empire from southern Congo to Chad and most of north-west Africa.