The Scramble For Africa

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But he saw nothing to recommend a war over Fashoda. Apart from the fact that France would lose, his task was to unite a nation that had lost its government, and was being torn in half by the Dreyfus Affair. Fashoda would only add to those wounds. France, unlike Britain, could not agree that to defend a swamp in Central Africa was a vital national interest. On the contrary, the country was as divided on Fashoda, and on similar lines, as on the Affair. The Left condemned imperialism as roundly as it supported Dreyfus." Moving on 100 years, we’ve got The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham. He’s writing about the turn of the 19th century, is that right? The 'door-closing-panic' Torschlusspanik, that seized the German electorate in the Spring of 1884 and began to make the scramble a reality...”

And, where to from here? I plan to finish last year’s Journey Around the World in 2019-2020. My next read is in South Africa, and will be a much faster book. So, hold on to your seats as the train departs the station for the rest of the journey. In 1870 barely one tenth of Africa was under European control. By 1914 only about one tenth – Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Liberia – was not. This book offers a clear and concise account of the ‘scramble’ or ‘race’ for Africa, the period of around 20 years during which European powers carved up the continent with little or no consultation of its inhabitants. Minawi is to be commended for bringing his considerable linguistic and archival skills to work on reframing our understanding of Ottoman imperialism in the age of the Scramble. His work...provides As I progress, it is all too easy to see the results of artificial boundaries set by Europeans for their own purposes (natural resources, primarily) has set the stage for the present conflicts and unrest in Africa.Mostafa Minawi's book on Ottoman imperial presence in Africa constitutes an important intervention in the study of European colonialism. This is, indeed, an important book that greatly advances our understanding of the global implications of Europe's Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. It will be of great interest to scholars of colonial Africa and the Middle East, as well to those with an interest in the global ramifications of European empire building." Considers the historiography of the topic, taking into account Marxist and anti-Marxist, financial, economic, political and strategic theories of European imperialism Minawi writes with passion and precision, and he has produced an accessible and thought-provoking book, having found in Azmzade an auspicious narrative hook. This is an ambitious book that casts light on hitherto unknown aspects of Ottoman history, the view from the perspective of the empire's outlying regions at the turn to the twentieth century."

I started this for the oddest of reasons: the author is from my hometown (sort of). Thomas Pakenham is the 8th Earl of Longford, whose family seat is Tullynally Castle, a few kilometers west of Castlepollard, Co. Westmeath. Besides being an internationally renown historian, he's also an arborist and brother to the novelist Antonia Frasier. They would keep the Khedive dancing to their tune, that strange dance of the 'veiled' protectorate in which a flimsy piece of Khedival silk concealed naked English power.” He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. The impact of British rule can also be seen in these countries’ styles of government and education systems, which in many ways are similar to the British systems of government and education. This was a result of British systems of government and education replacing those of the indigenous people before colonisation. Many of these systems were lost, and the indigenous people were given no choice but to comply with the newer systems.Many people tried to resist, but Leopold’s personal army ended these rebellions and punished people who resisted severely. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. And, there is ample info at the end to provide closure, while giving you a glimpse of what came next, even at the distant date of writing. By the time I finished the book, I wanted to do more research to see how the financial shape of each former colony today lines up with their history. Maybe I can do that soon. This is a book like Tuchman's the Guns of August that aims to sweep the reader along in a grand narrative, Pakenham does not have her acid tongue, and he is trying to juggle far more disperate events over a longer time scale. He has the same desire to contain his narrative by forcing it into geographic silos and for me this worked as poorly as it does in Guns of August as different events are happening in different places at the same time, the politicians in Europe were dealing with them all at once along with their European political concerns and their personal lives, jumping in and out of any one region over simplified the narrative I assume Pakenham saw there was a problem with this approach because the book contains a table of parallel events so you can see what was happening in different parts of Africa at the same time .

One of my favourite movies is ‘Zulu’ but what you don’t learn in that movie but will from this book is that the Zulus weren’t the aggressors - the Boers and British were. Like so much of history, the past has been rewritten by the victor and much of relevance has been left out or is barely known. Even recently we’ve had tribal violence in Kenya. Is that the sort of thing that he was predicting? Even more historical context is given by your second book, Travels into the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park. Now this was two journeys in 1795 and 1805.As I begin the section on the Belgian Congo and the Rubber Trade, I can already see the seeds for the present chaos and despair the the DRC. I must say, I really enjoyed Pakenhams handling of substantial material and complicated subject matter into an enjoyable, easy to read narrative. Reading this book put me in mind of Heart of Darkness, I too was journeying up river, dense walls of small print prose on either side of me, or was I already at the destination, sitting in a hut, surrounded by trade goods, quite insane waiting for the end? It was hard to be sure, perhaps I was both. At certain points in history, parts of Africa that were colonised have had to deal with the effects of a lower population, which include a smaller workforce and the breaking up of communities, due to the following events: