The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912

I have had this book for years, but could not get into it before. Recently however I have studied Victorian politics and now the book makes more sense. Many reviewers complain that Pakenham concentrates too much on the British role in Africa. Well he does but this is an incredibly complex book. It is beautifully written, with passion and a laconic humour, but each chapter is a separate story and it takes some getting through. The author must have researched the histories of many countries to make sense of the story. The story of colonisation only makes sense in the light of European politics as repeatedly African colonies were traded as pawns in the European balance of power.

One reviewer felt that the Brits and maybe the French came off as the good guys in a story in which brutality and greed play major roles. If they do its by a narrow margin. Pakenham's take on the history of South Africa is chastening reading, kicking off with Kitchener's callous disregard for the lives of Boers confined in camps during the Boer war, of whom 20,000 died because he couldn't be bothered to provide sanitation. Then the Germans drove the natives into the desert to starve in one territory, and working up an appetite for this strategy in East Africa wiped out about two hundred thousand with a burn and starve policy. But in general, apart from political strategy, the overwhelming motive for colonisation was economic and all European countries fundamentally enslaved Africans, or wiped out large or small pockets of them, or both, in the interests of their bank balances.

An interesting vignette is Churchill as a liberal scampering round Africa as a member of Asquith's government before the First World War apoplectic with indignation but in the end, with his boss Lord Elgin, unable to do anything effective because he gradually became aware that the endemic cruelty of colonial life was bound to political and economic 'imperatives'.

This being the case as I finished this astonishing book I felt the story was like Hamlet, only with a cast of millions instead of about twenty, an incredible tragic spectacle.

A final point about this book, it is apart from Thompson's 'Making of the English Working Class', the only history book I have read which combines understanding of the policymakers with the experience of the people, and this is achieved with real perspective and some panache.

A great book to read, but have some background in Victorian politics first.

This really is a great book. No matter where you are in the book, you can go back to the title page of each chapter and get the exact dates that the chapter is covering.

The author does an outstanding job moving the story along chronologically, literally in some places month-by-month, but never getting bogged down.

This is not dry history; Pakenham brings the characters to life: Livingstone, Stanley, Brazza, Gordon, et al. Really, really well done.

Every so often, while reading, one has to step back and look at big picture, and the author provides great opportunities to do so. Occasionally one has to recall history before 1876 to make sense of the European interest in Africa.

1. Portugal needed west Africa to supply slaves for sugar cane industry in Brazil.

2. England needed strategic sites in Africa for commercial interests/maintain British Empire: Suez Canal, around the Cape, and to some extent, down the west Coast.

3. France, little interest in colonial activity, but reluctantly forced into it to counter Britain.

4. Germany, got in a bit late, but under Bismarck, the late years, the Germans panicked, thinking the "door to Africa" was closing.

Pakenham does a great job explaining why/how the division of Africa occurred. Once the colonies devolved into independence in the modern era... well, that's a completely different story.

But if you want to see how/why the borders of today's African nations developed, this is a great book.

I recommend the softcover, available at discount book stores, and carry it with you on your flights, reading a chapter a day, but making marginal notes to remind you of the big points when you start up reading again the next day.

Most fun: reading this in light of post 9/11 -- Africa was the frontier for pan-Islamism, and explains much of the current world issues.

This was first published in 1991. By that time, the Cold War was waning, and the Mideast and Islamic issues were taking center stage. It makes me think that the 2000 - 2008 American government having a Russian specialist as SecState resulted in the missteps the US might have taken during the past decade.

By the way, reading this history (especially the early chapters on west Africa) after having just read Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter," really made the latter that much more interesting.

Although not as well known or prolific as his sister Lady Antonia Fraser, Thomas Pakenham (the 8th Earl of Longford) is also an accomplished popular historian. THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA is his lengthy and detailed account of the frenzied peak of European conquest and colonization of the African continent between 1876 and 1912. It is an entirely satisfactory history of the period (I don't know of another "popular history" of equal merit), and reading it helps one's understanding of how and why so much of contemporary Africa is the godforsaken and seemingly intractable morass it is. In the course of its many pages, one encounters such legendary people, places, and events as David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, King Leopold II of Belgium and ruthless exploiter of the Congo, Charles Gordon and the Mahdi and Khartoum, Cecil Rhodes, Fashoda, Edmund Morel, Major-General Kitchener and his "concentration camps", and the German near-extermination of Herero tribesman in German South-West Africa (one of the early incidents of genocide in the 20th Century).

I have three principal reservations concerning the book. First, it was written for a British readership, and hence it discusses British colonization efforts in greater length than those of its European rivals (principally France and Germany and King Leopold II, acting for himself, but also to a much lesser extent Italy and Portugal). Second, the book might have been shortened by a quarter or even a third had Pakenham not devoted so much attention to the contemporaneous internal and external politics of the competing European powers. (On the other hand, it is instructive to see how a country's actions, or inactions, in one arena (Africa) are influenced, shaped, maybe even determined by events in other arenas, both foreign and domestic.) Third, the book is a tad over-written. In this regard, I note that the phrases "volte-face," "cri de couer", and "turned a Nelson Eye" all are used at least three times too often.

In reading THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA, I was struck by the obvious and sad parallel to the conquest of the American West and the displacement and exploitation of the American Indians. One of the striking similarities between the two movements was the pattern of entering into "treaties" with the leaders of native tribes and then reneging on or breaching those compacts in short order and seemingly with negligible compunction. Near the end of his book, Pakenham writes "That Africans could hardly be worse off than under their own rulers had always been the optimistic assumption of Europeans, from Livingstone onwards. Now, as the Powers began to administer the thirty new colonies and protectorates, * * * all that talk of 'commerce, Christianity and civilization' began to have a hollow ring." The Europeans ultimately abandoned most of Africa (unlike North America). And the scramble OUT of Africa ended up being even more frenzied than the initial scramble FOR Africa had been. After 75 years of exploitation and destruction of native cultures and ways of life, the European imperialists compounded their sins by leaving the continent so precipitously, without sufficient (in many cases, without any) education and training in self-government. Were the natives of Africa better or worse off in 1970 than the Native Americans of North America were in 1900? What about today? Consideration of those questions might make for an interesting and provocative book.

This is a very industrious, detailed work on colonial occupation of Africa between 1876 and 1912 with an emphasis on the British contributions. The book is enriched with maps and contemporary drawings or photos.
It is not the first full scale study of that special episode in history, but one of the few which cover the whole of Africa and all 5 colonial powers who fought and raced for spreading their protecting, absolutely unselfish shield over the peoples of Africa.
It began with the explorers and the claims in the name of Christianity ( I mention the least concerning at first), Colonization and Commerce - I recognize: the three great "C"s - in fact the latter was the most important reason for conquest, at least for Britain, - "it was in Protestant Britain, where God an Mammon seemed made for each other", for Germany the reason was foremost to have reserves in political actions and a field for the America bent emigrants, for Belgium exploitation, for France the ideology of La grand nation, for Italy the revival of the Roman Empire, for Portugal the trade. And rivalry for all of them, especially between France and Britain.
In the 19th century 10 million square miles with more than a hundred million people who mostly lived in smallest political units if at all, had to be taken into custody. Great challenge! Great performance to follow!
But how embarrassing in retrospection! Who could say today that the civilized nations had an obligation or even moral right to do what they have done, set a foot on African soil and trample down what stood in the way? The memories of the African people deny that the whole affair was very blessing. They could have gone without it. The funny thing is that the only African people who foster some colonial traditions with positive attitude towards the gone colonial power are the blacks in Tanzania and Namibia, former German colonies. It could be right to assume that the reason for this is that their masters had not so much time to exercise their blessings on them. They had to go after WW I. It is apparent, what followed - British rule - was no betterment.
Livingstone called Africa an open sore. The Arabs had overdrawn the continent with slave trade, not only for the own market, but also in service for the white people who build the glorious United States of America with the tears and blood of western African slaves.
It is safe to say that the activities of the colonial powers after Livingstone did not really heal the wounds. The Belgians in the Congo enslaved and tortured the blacks (the "enigmatic individual and self-styled philanthropic" controller of the heart of the continent: King Leopold II), the British in South Africa founded concentration camps for not cooperating Burs and ignored the rights of the independent Zulu nations, the French ruled with hard fists the proud desert tribes in North Africa, the Germans broke with merciless violence the resistance of self-determinate Herero tribes in the Southwest, not to speak of the Italian atrocities for the Christian nation of Abyssinia.
This all is described in the book. But also heroic enterprises, the brave undertakings of those who came first and went last. Who is not impressed by the struggle of General Gordon with his opponent the Mahdi in Sudan!
At that time "Africa" was in anybodies mind. The negligence of the European powers in the centuries before only enforced a hasty race for supremacy of African territories. In the first half of the explorers century Africa beyond its shores was a unique mystery, but "Suddenly, in half a generation, the scramble gave Europe virtually the whole, continent".

It was the age when Europe was at the peak of power and influence in the world, the modern age was to begin, industrialization, the military underwent a tremendous development which made the Europeans superior to all potential adversaries. The Maxim gun - not trade or the cross - became the symbol of the age in Africa (though in practise the wretched thing jammed).
The Whites could perform whatever they wanted. They were the masters and felt like masters. They stole from the Africans the rest of their self- consciousness. It was at the same time that the Wild, West of Northern America was "civilized" by wiping out the bison and whipping the Red Indians without remorse.
A great chance, a divine task for somebody like Livingstone! But he was no politician. This book brings to live the memory of many who responded to Livingstone`s call in their own fashion. They were all possessed by some sort of romantic nationalism, sailors, journalists, soldiers, pedagogues, missionaries, gold and diamond tycoons who poured into the inner country. Real men were needed. Many of them were outsiders of one kind or another. All with an imperialistic zeal to serve their country "Not only would they save Africa from itself. Africa would be the saving of their own countries". Then it became more a political playfield. Brutalities were commonplace during the first phase of occupation by the Powers. "Europe had imposed its will on Africa at the point of a gun. It was a lesson that would be remembered, fifty years later, when Africa came to win its independence."
The author decided to embrace the whole final hectic phase of the partition, beginning with the prelude in 1876 with King Leopolds crusade and ending in 1912 with the Italian invasion into Libya at the evening of WW I. In between the chapters contain the opening of the paths into dominating Africa - from Zululand to Tunis, support of the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, the Belgian "philanthropic" enterprise, the change of mind of Bismarck; the emerging and introduction of the rights to conquer and rule, staring with the loss of Gordons head to the end of the Mahdi; the resistance and reforms that foreshadow the acknowledgement of granting self-determination and independence, the final curtain not being Leopolds death.
The Epilogue gives an outlook to the modern times when the conditions in Africa have become worse than ever. Questions arise if the Europeans left too soon. Left alone! Be that as it may, their advent was ruthless, there stay not much better, so what do you expect of the powers that usurped the vacant chairs? Europe had a chance. They failed.
Rhodesia was the last to get free - and dead, the land which Rhodes and his men had grabbed from Lobengula. "The scramble out of Africa in the eleven years from 1957 to 1968 was pursued at the same undignified pace, taking the world as much by surprise, as the scramble into Africa more than half a century earlier."
"Door-closing-panic" seized the ex-colonial powers, first they hastened to get in and finally they hastened to get out, leaving a disappointing half century in desolate places behind them. The British did not even manage to build a railroad from Cairo to Capetown, although all dominated territory. Gone was the empire building but not blessing alliance of "God and Mammon" that had helped to launch the scramble.
"Both the men of God and the men of business had begun to see that formal empire was counter productive". Colonies were becoming unfashionable. Even before the First World war. India became more interesting for Britain, because the Indians were more industrious and more promising consumers for the trading nation.

After all, these haphazard blocks old scrub and desert, peppered with ill-matched tribes, had neither geographical nor political unity. Many had been kept divided, the better to control and rule them. The British also missed to educate the people to get a capable and efficient elite. They did not want to have intelligence and they got it. This was a grave miscalculation.
In desperation Britain and France launched a crash programme in nation-building. The French war in Algeria had a scale and horror hardly matched by anything the other Powers experienced, although Britain had a hard fight during the rebellions in Kenya.
Meanwhile white business men have continued to make their fortunes in Africa. The new world is neo-colonialism. It is almost as in the beginning centuries ago when the Portuguese sailed along the African coasts to set up trade stations.
Whether Europe succeeded at least to transform an idea of freedom and human dignity, as the author wishes, who believes in the humanitarian ideals of Livingstone (which were rather Christian ideals) to the people of Africa, is something very much to be doubted, because these ideas are exactly what Europe refused Africa such a long time! Africa is the most violent place in these days.

I read this good book, here in Brazil.This book has many excellent parts, such as:
1-Page 433:"Their dominant themes were the threat to the lives of the Christian missionaries, the need to maintain the supression of the slave trade, and the damage to Britain's honour if the country reneged on her pledges.It was an old familiar crusade, the one for wich Livingstone and Gordon and Bishop Hannington had died - the crusade against Mulslim slave traders."
2-Page 439:"Impressed by his exploits in battle, Tippu Tip gave him back his freedom.Then for several years he served as Tippu's lieutenant in the upper Lomani, hunting slaves and ivory, like others loyal to the Arabs, with a pack of obedient cannibals.(Troublemakers were distributed as rations)".
Such as another reviewer wrote, the big problem of this book is to be very biased.It is very biased and focused in England's imperialism.About Portugal and Spain imperialism in Africa, there's almost nothing.
As I show above, this book writes the true about XIX Century's african slavery:an islamic business.At the same time, in one page, this book when talking about blacks in South Africa, describe they as "servants", not slaves, the real condition of them.
Even with these failures, this book is a good choice to learn, about the Scramble for Africa.