The Scramble For Africa

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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 crippled army of the Emir withdrew as the city caught fire. Goldie had lost eight dead and nine wounded. In due course he signed a treaty with the Markum. The Emir was deposed, and the Markum succeeded him. Goldie was still too weak to impose direct administration, but he initiated a form of indirect rule that would later become the pattern for northern Nigeria. The new Emir would govern Nupe, but 'conform to such directions... as the representatives of the Company may give him from time to time'." 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." The 'door-closing-panic' Torschlusspanik, that seized the German electorate in the Spring of 1884 and began to make the scramble a reality...” Even recently we’ve had tribal violence in Kenya. Is that the sort of thing that he was predicting?

Many people tried to resist, but Leopold’s personal army ended these rebellions and punished people who resisted severely. 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. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.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. Considers the historiography of the topic, taking into account Marxist and anti-Marxist, financial, economic, political and strategic theories of European imperialism 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.

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. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. 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: The independence of a Boer republic, bursting with gold and bristling with imported rifles, threatened Britain's status as 'paramount' power. British para- mountcy (alias supremacy) was not a concept in international law. But most of the British thought it made practical sense government in South Africa. Boer independence seemed worse than absurd; it was dangerous for world peace.”

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.

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

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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. That final chapter opens with the independence ceremony for Zimbabwe, where in recent years thee has been some coverage of farmers displaced by veterans of the independence struggle and the consequent disruption of agriculture. I was amused to realise that this was in fact a direct repetition of how the country - then Rhodesia - had originally been colonised with the veterans of the first occupation seizing the lands they wanted and driving off any inhabitants or forcing them to become tied labourers. Likewise the modus operandi of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda was exactly the same as that of the Egyptian garrison when they finally withdrew from their positions at the head waters of the Nile - press-ganging sex slaves and porters (possibly recruits too) from the communities which they marched through. Violence between Kikuyu and their neighbours in Kenya reminded me of news from Kenya's recent election years.