After dinner, Joy led Professor Richthofen to the Crown Prince's study early.

Professor Richthofen's students were asked to wait outside the door to receive the necessary summons after spreading out the huge map on their desks. Joey, on the other hand, was lying on the map, on the two geological zones of the map, carefully watching the signs and descriptions of the relevant mineral deposits.

Richthofen came late in the afternoon, and basically didn't see Joey's wonderful performance at the salon, so he watched in amazement as Joey looked at the map and thoughtfully jotted something down in a notebook.

"Dear Professor Richthofen." Joey suddenly broke the silence and asked, "Do you know that in the two geological belts, those places belong to the spheres of influence of those countries?" ”

"Well, I know Joey." Professor Richthofen replied, "I can point it out for you now." ”

"Dear Professor Richthofen, please wait for me, I will prepare something, and please help me mark it." Joey said as he ran out of the Crown Prince's study.

When Joey knocked on the door of the Crown Prince's study again, Professor Richthofen was having a lively discussion with the Crown Prince about the transformation of German patent protection.

Joy pasted several pieces of paper of different colors with writing on them in the blank space of Professor Richthofen's map, and then held a handful of colorful notes in his hand, standing next to the map and quietly listening to his father's exchange with Professor Richthofen.

After a while, Professor Richthofen noticed Joy next to the map, and the professor raised his hands slightly, shook his head, and said, "Look at me, I just had a good chat with His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, and I forgot the most important thing tonight." With that, he led the crown prince to the map.

"Dear Professor Richthofen, have you forgotten what European countries are in Africa right now, and you need to help me point them out first?" Joey asked with a smile.

"I almost forgot, come on Joey, I'll point it out for you." Professor Richthofen then pointed out on the map whose powers belonged to those places.

According to Professor Richthofen's instructions, Joy also inserted different colored strips of paper in the corresponding positions with pins, and each color represented a country. An intuitive map of Africa's mineral resources and power distribution is presented in front of Crown Prince Frederick and everyone.

Professor Richthofen looked at his map and dressed up with Joey's colored notes, which made it more intuitive and vivid, and couldn't help but look at Joy twice, and said, "Joey, your method is good, and it is really more intuitive to display it with color." ”

Joey smiled and didn't speak, but he thought of his past life in his heart, "For those of us who sit in the office, the most simple and intuitive report template when reporting to the boss and customers is the color block segmentation graphic, which is really nothing. ”

This map of 1879 is already a bit of what the European powers in Africa looked like at the time of the Berlin Conference in September 1884.

The North African winners are France, represented in blue, which occupies Algeria; Ottoman Turkey, represented by gray, occupied Libya; The British, represented by red, occupied Sudan and Somalia. This was also mixed with the Spanish strongholds in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, Egypt in 1879 was still under the red and blue Anglo-French condominium, and the Azores and Madeira were in the hands of the green Portuguese.

The situation in East Africa is better than in North Africa, with Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya and Tanzania on the coast and Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda on the land, remaining blank, except for Somalia with the red Britain and the Seychelles with the blue France.

Although Central Africa is still a large undeveloped virgin land, such as Chad, Central Africa, Cameroon, Gabon, and Congo have not yet entered the eyes of Europeans, the Spaniards and the Portuguese still rely on the first-mover advantage in the Age of Discovery, and have captured two strongholds in Central Africa, Equatorial Guinea is occupied by Spain, and Sao Tome Principe is in the hands of the Portuguese.

West Africa was probably the most thoroughly carved up by European countries (and even distant Americans) in 1879. The yellow Spaniards occupied Western Sahara and the Gallina Islands; The green Portuguese own the islands of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde; The blue French got Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire and Mauritania; The red British have the most territory, including Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria; And the Americans also secretly got Liberia after the Civil War more than ten years ago.

Except for the inland areas of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, which have not yet been taken by the French, the Germans have been left with a landing base on the coast of West Africa: Togo and Benin.

As for the southern African states, which were basically dominated by the red British, including South Africa, the jewel in the crown of the British in the future, of course, South Africa controlled by the British in 1879 was not the same as today's South Africa, which at that time consisted of the British Royal Dominion of Cape Town, the Transvaal Republic and Basotho (Lesotho).

In addition to South Africa, the future jewel in the British's crown, the British controlled Zambia and Mauritius, and Eswatini was under their protection; The green Portuguese controlled Angola and Mozambique; The blue French control the islands of southern Africa, Madagascar, Comoros, Reunion and St. Helena. In the whole of southern Africa, there are only a few empty spaces left: Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, and Zambia.

And, of course, there was the inland German colony of Nyasaland (Malawi), a small colony close to the Boers. Without this small bright spot in the African colony, Germany before 1879 would have been a blank slate.

Looking at the map of African forces marked by Professor Richthofen, Joy couldn't help but be dumbfounded. In later generations, many experts on the so-called German Empire strongly criticized Bismarck for not wanting to make progress in the African colonies and not opening up the colonies.

Joey looked at this map and said, "If you look at the map of Africa in 1879, how much territory is left for the Germans along the coast of Africa?" In the Age of Discovery, the Spaniards and the Portuguese relied on the first-mover advantage of the Golden Triangle trade to get the best land in Africa; Then the British and French, relying on the rise after the first industrial revolution, once again reaped a second fertile land in Africa. In the coastal zone of Africa, there were few plots of land left for the Germans.

What's more, after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the Germans achieved the first real national unity, a Germany that was beaten to the ground by the French decades ago, and demanded that it surpass the old colonial powers Britain and France in less than ten years of statehood, and have a large number of colonies in Africa... Are you experts or bricks?!

Although the French shouted that colonies were everything after the Franco-Prussian War, the actual start of the African territory grabbing began only after the greedy Belgian King Leopold II explored the Congo River in 1879.

So much so that in 1878, Prime Minister Disraeli of the United Kingdom claimed that the African colonies were a millstone around the neck of the empire, because before the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa in 1884, South Africa was just a barely self-sufficient livestock colony, and India was the crown of the empire for the British Empire.

So in 1872, Chancellor Bismarck shouted that the African colonies were more like a Polish nobleman without a shirt in the summer, with a soft black mink coat draped over a vest, which was good-looking, but in addition to being good-looking, it was stuffy and heavy.

Before 1880, countries did not pay attention to Africa, Africa is the origin of black slavery in the traditional thinking of Europeans, as the first to put forward the idea of abolition of Europe, has long been without the economic income brought by the slave trade, before the discovery of a large number of mineral deposits and raw materials, poor African natives did not have any economic ability, can consume European industrial products. An Africa that does not bring any benefits, of course, is disliked by all the famous European statesmen of that era.

Otherwise, according to the greedy nature of the Russians for the land and the personality of the thirst for warm seas, they rushed to Africa during the time of Peter the Great, and there would have to wait until a few hundred years later during the Red Empire to fight and kill in Africa for spheres of influence.

If Africa was really so good before 1880, since Austria-Hungary could be instigated by the French to take the throne of Mexico in 1864, it is impossible not to have a reason not to build an African colony before 1870.