The Scramble For Africa

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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.” Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford, is known simply as Thomas Pakenham. He is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of Victorian and post-Victorian British history and trees. He is the son of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, a Labour minister and human rights campaigner, and Elizabeth Longford. The well known English historian Antonia Fraser is his sister. Readers of Mostafa Minawi's The Ottoman Scramble for Africa are in for a treat. What starts out as the genealogy of a powerful Damascene Arab notable family evolves into a fascinating tale of Ottoman global ambitions in Libya and central Africa in the 1890s. With an engaging story, well-grounded in a number of archives, this book is a welcome piece of the puzzle surrounding late Ottoman colonialism." I loved this book. Park comes from a pre-racist Europe, and he’s travelling along the 16th parallel – the sort of watershed between ‘Animus’ Africa and Islamic Africa. And a lot of the cultures he moves through, in terms of literature and mathematics and astrology, are equal to or more advanced than what he’s used to at home. It was a very interesting period.

After graduating from Belvedere College and Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1955, Thomas Pakenham traveled to Ethiopia, a trip which is described in his first book The Mountains of Rasselas. On returning to Britain, he worked on the editorial staff of the Times Educational Supplement and later for ,i>The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer. He divides his time between London and County Westmeath, Ireland, where he is the chairman of the Irish Tree Society and honorary custodian of Tullynally Castle. 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. The 'door-closing-panic' Torschlusspanik, that seized the German electorate in the Spring of 1884 and began to make the scramble a reality...”

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At times the book reads like an adventure story but told from the colonisers point of view. At others the detailed politics can be quiet tedious. The immense suffering caused to the local population and the legacy we have left behind is largely ignored, apart from a couple of chapters at the end. As a result, millions of people died under the brutal rule of King Leopold II. Many historians estimate that as many as 10 million people were killed, though the actual figure may be higher. 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."

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. 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 around20 years during which European powers carved up the continent with little or no consultation of its inhabitants. 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. Yes, the Treaty of Berlin and the scramble that that set off. It is the set text on that most vital and defining period in terms of the West’s engagement with Africa. He writes beautifully and it’s massively encyclopedic in its breadth of scholarship. You can’t understand anything about contemporary Africa without reading that book.

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: 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. 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. Chamberlain hoped to create a new British dominion by uniting the two British colonies, Cape Colony and Natal, in a federation with the two Boer republics. To unite all South Africa under the British flag would be Britain's crowning achievement in the Scramble, the culmination of the twenty-year struggle for mastery from Cairo to the Cape.” 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.