Contra: The Congress of Berlin

The Congress of Berlin, 1878, was a European effort to carve up the world for their benefit and for colonial expansion.

The languages of Africa were not an issue, instead it was the efforts of adventurers. However, even at this time, the term Southeastern Europe appears, which might have been called "European Turkey" in earlier times. The term "seems to have initially been used mainly by schoalrs interested in comparative linguistics"1 At some level, the languages spoken by the original populations made an impact on the spread of colonial power. Swahili, a trade language that spread over a large area of eastern Africa, was leveraged by the early colonialists, explorers and missionaries, much the way that Nahautl, Mayan, Guarani and others were used by the Spanish in the Americas.

Here is a map showing the relatively random paths of the explorers compared to the linguistic map of the various Bantu language families of southern Africa (indicated by the large green letters A-S). Please excuse the map fusion, they were obviously of different scales. The original for the partition map is here and the original linguistic map is here . In all of the area of the map, there are no borders that match any stretch of the linguistic border, in the late 1800s or now.