The Scramble For Africa

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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. 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.

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. 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. 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.” Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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Many people tried to resist, but Leopold’s personal army ended these rebellions and punished people who resisted severely. Even recently we’ve had tribal violence in Kenya. Is that the sort of thing that he was predicting? 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.

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. 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. 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?

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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 .