The Berlin Conference Attendee List: Three Sources, One Claim
You are marking a practice source-analysis essay for a 25-mark question: 'How useful are Sources A, B and C for an enquiry into whether African rulers influenced the boundaries agreed at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85?' Source A is a British Foreign Office memorandum dated December 1884. It lists fourteen participating states and states that no African ruler was invited. Source B is a 1962 nationalist pamphlet that says fifteen states attended and that African kings were 'consulted behind closed doors'. Source C is a 2010 article by a historian using Portuguese and Belgian archives; it argues that boundary decisions were shaped mainly by European commercial rivalries and that African intermediaries occasionally supplied local maps. A student writes: 'Source B is useless because it is biased; Source A is reliable because it is official.' The essay must reach a judgement, not just list provenance.
1. Explain how you would assess the student's claim that Source A is reliable because it is official. Use the content and provenance of all three sources.
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Reasoning
Official provenance is a starting point, not a guarantee. The memorandum was written by a British official during the conference, so it is likely to be accurate about the formal list of participating states and about the absence of African rulers from the table. But its purpose was to record and justify British diplomacy, not to describe African influence. It may therefore omit informal contacts, mapmaking by African intermediaries, or local treaties that shaped boundary choices.
Source B is biased, but bias does not make a source useless: a nationalist pamphlet may preserve a popular memory of African agency and may point to informal consultations that official records ignore. Its factual error about the number of states damages its reliability on detail, not necessarily on the larger claim. Source C, written later with Portuguese and Belgian archives, can test both: if it shows African intermediaries supplying maps, then Source A's silence is a limit of its purpose, not proof of no influence.
The best judgement is therefore comparative: Source A is strong for formal procedure, Source B for nationalist memory, Source C for archival reconstruction. The student's rule that official equals reliable is too simple.
2. Source B says fifteen states attended; Source A says fourteen. How would you resolve this discrepancy, and what does the discrepancy reveal about the limits of the sources?
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Resolving the discrepancy
The discrepancy matters because even a simple fact depends on definitions. 'Participating states' may mean states with plenipotentiaries, states that signed the final act, or states represented by observers. A nationalist pamphlet may count a fifteenth state to make the conference look larger, or may include a state that attended only part of the proceedings.
To resolve it, I would check the conference protocols and the final act, then compare Source C's archival references. If Source C supports fourteen, I would treat Source B's fifteen as an error. But I would not then dismiss the whole pamphlet. The error reveals the limits of a polemical source for precise detail; it does not disprove its claim about informal African consultation, which needs separate evidence.
The discrepancy also warns against treating Source A as transparent: official records may count only formal participants and exclude African rulers, intermediaries, or local delegations. In an essay, I would use the discrepancy to argue that the sources answer different questions: A is reliable for the official list, B is unreliable for numbers but useful for political memory, and C is useful for checking both.
3. To what extent does the absence of African rulers from the conference table prove that Africans had no influence on the resulting boundaries? Answer in a paragraph that uses at least two sources.
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Judgement
Absence from the conference table is not the same as absence of influence. Source A shows that no African ruler was invited to Berlin, so Africans had no formal vote in the drafting of the General Act. That justifies a strong claim about procedural exclusion. But the enquiry is about boundaries on the ground, and Source C suggests that African intermediaries sometimes supplied local maps and knowledge. Source B, despite its errors, preserves a tradition that African kings were consulted behind closed doors; that claim would need corroboration from treaties, correspondence, or later boundary commissions.
The sources therefore support a split judgement: Africans were excluded from the formal conference, but some may have influenced the information and local agreements on which boundaries were based. The absence of African rulers from Source A cannot prove that Africans had no influence, because an official memorandum records formal attendance, not the whole history of boundary-making. A strong answer would distinguish formal sovereignty from local agency and would ask for evidence about specific boundary lines, not just about who sat in Berlin.