Europe dominated the entire world in several centuries since they began to travel to other continents. The dispute between the different empires (English, Portuguese, French ...) unleashed the 'discovery' of new worlds in the midst of an imperialist wave. The world was a board on which these powers competed to dominate territories, so much so that history also knows that period as that of the 'African distribution'.
In this matter, we usually remember the African continent for having been taken and explored by Europeans in the Imperialism of the 19th century. But it really was not like that, because Africa was not totally dominated and two countries escaped colonization: Ethiopia and Liberia.