By 1905 most of Africa had been shared out among half a dozen countries in Western Europe: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium (in the person of its king), Italy and Portugal; Spain had a few toe-holds. In 1908 Belgium acquired the Congo Independent State from Leopold II; in 1912 Morocco and Libya were taken over by France and Italy respectively. Nonetheless, Britain was clearly the most important imperial power in Africa, and not only in terms of land and population; in 1907 its territories accounted for four-fifths of African trade south of the Sahara. Two African countries had remained independent. The ancient empire of Ethiopia had preserved and indeed extended its sovereignty, while on the other side of Africa a different kind of black imperialism was exercised in Liberia by the descendants of freed slaves from the USA. In the far south, in 1910, former Boer republics and British colonies joined to form the Union of South Africa, a virtually autonomous Dominion of the British Empire. With these exceptions, final responsibility for governing Africa had been transferred to European capitals. South of the Sahara, major efforts of armed resistance had been suppressed in German South West Africa, German East Africa and Natal, between 1904 and 1907. In tropical Africa, there were signs of a shift away from the ‘rip-off’ economies so common in the later nineteenth century and towards more systematic and far-sighted methods of tapping the wealth of Africa. Its manpower, once exported for use overseas, was now being applied to production within Africa. The hunting and gathering of ivory or wild rubber yielded to the husbandry of pastures, fields and plantations.