The Scramble For Africa

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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." France also competed strongly with Italy. Italy was miffed about Tunisia, and sought to extend its Eritrean colony into the valuable hinterlands of Somalia and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, Italy was roundly defeated by the Ethiopia King Menelik, supplied with modern weapons and artillery by France. Italy was extremely humiliated, and furious at the French, eventually joining the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in retaliation. Italy eventually grabbed Libya (and Rhodes in Greece) from the Ottoman's in 1911, and sought territorial concessions from Britain and France in Somalia in exchange for diplomatic concessions in Europe (they betrayed the Triple Alliance in WWI, and joined the British Allies). France lost most of its claims in Eastern Africa, being left with the valuable port of Djibouti, and the islands of Madagascar. As an aside, Spain eventually gained territory in northern Morocco, parts of the Sahara coast below Morocco, and Equatorial Guinea as political concessions by France and England. 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 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.” 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.

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. 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. 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.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." 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.” Many people tried to resist, but Leopold’s personal army ended these rebellions and punished people who resisted severely. 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. Considers the historiography of the topic, taking into account Marxist and anti-Marxist, financial, economic, political and strategic theories of European imperialism

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.

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. 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. 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.