The Scramble For Africa

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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. 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 . The 'door-closing-panic' Torschlusspanik, that seized the German electorate in the Spring of 1884 and began to make the scramble a reality...” 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 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'." 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.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. Many people tried to resist, but Leopold’s personal army ended these rebellions and punished people who resisted severely. 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.

Elected politicians throughout Europe were consistently opposed to empire building in Africa. Right-wing politicians were opposed because it was irrational; that is to say, the revenues to be derived from the trade in ivory and other tropical goods would never be enough to pay for the costs of administering and defending the colonies. Left-wing politicians were opposed because the empires could only be acquired through dishonest diplomacy and massacres of the local populations. 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. Considers the historiography of the topic, taking into account Marxist and anti-Marxist, financial, economic, political and strategic theories of European imperialism 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.” 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:Even recently we’ve had tribal violence in Kenya. Is that the sort of thing that he was predicting?

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. 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. 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."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. 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. When children are being treated in this way and dying, it is simply ranging the deepest passions of the human heart against British rule in South Africa ... it will always be remembered that this is the way British rule started here ... the method by which it was brought about.”