For a long time, East Africa had made few moves in West Africa. Its only colony there was Togoland, purchased from Germany.
The fundamental reason East Africa had expanded so slowly in West Africa lay in its strategic choices. Before 1935, East Africa's two primary targets had been the South Seas and South America.
After entering the 1930s, East Africa had largely secured its advantages in the South Seas and South America, and its development there had reached a bottleneck. Only then did it begin to turn its guns toward other regions.
Northwest Africa was one of the world's key resource-rich regions. Its petroleum held an important place among global energy minerals. Besides regions with astonishing oil potential like Nigeria, many other areas, such as Niger and Mauritania, also possessed great potential for oil development.
Next came Northwest Africa's iron ore. Guinea, Mauritania, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire all possessed enormous potential. Not only were their reserves vast, but the quality of their ore was high as well.
Although East Africa did not lack iron ore, gaining control over Northwest Africa's iron ore resources in the future would further elevate East Africa's international standing and influence.
Finally, there were Northwest Africa's bauxite resources, which were especially important to the development of the electrolytic aluminum industry on East Africa's West Coast.
Because of rivers such as the Congo River, East Africa's West Coast was the region with the greatest hydropower potential.
If the hydropower of northern Angola, Gabon, Cameroon, and other places could be combined with Northwest Africa's bauxite, it would greatly consolidate East Africa's position in the global aluminum industry.
Of course, another condition in Northwest Africa was highly attractive to East Africa: these resource-rich nations were basically distributed along the Atlantic Ocean coast. With the extremely low cost