Thomas Pakenham > Quotes

“Atrocities were commonplace during the first phase of occupation by the Powers. When German brutality in South West Africa provoked a revolt by the Hereros, the German general, Lothar von Trotha, issued a Vernichtungbefehl (‘extermination order’) against the whole tribe, women and children included. About 20,000 of them were driven away from the wells to die in the Omaheke desert.”
― Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble For Africa

“Ten million black Africans are reckoned to have been exported like cattle on the hoof, or crates of chickens, during the three centuries after the Portuguese discoveries. It was the greatest migration ever recorded by Europeans, and the most terrible. Then Europe became conscience-stricken. First the slave trade, then slavery itself was banned by successive nations, led by Britain in 1807 and 1834 respectively. America reluctantly followed suit. With the rise and success of the anti-slavery movement came the discovery in the New World that sugar and cotton could, after all, be grown profitably without importing fresh slaves.”
― Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble For Africa

“National prestige was identified with the size of an empire, so painting the map red or blue had now become an end in itself, irrespective of the productive capacity of the land or its strategic value. To the old school, it might seem an irrational throw-back to the time when only land had conferred prestige, and all the richest and most powerful men in the Western world were owners of great estates. But politically it made sense in the 1890s. The new mass electorates welcomed each colonial acquisition with a bourgeois pride, and did not bother to ask whether it would bring either commercial profit or strategic advantage.”
― Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912

“All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich
blessing come down on every one, American,
English or Turk, who will help to heal this open
sore of the world.’ David Livingstone’s last words inlaid in brass on his
tomb in Westminster Abbey”
― Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble For Africa