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

by Thomas Pakenham

The Scramble for Africa is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in history. In 1880 most of the continent was still ruled by its inhabitants and was barely explored. Yet by 1902, five European powers--Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy--had grabbed almost all of its ten million square miles, awarding themselves thirty new colonies and protectorates, and 110 million bewildered new subjects.

The sudden race for African territory swept the political masters of Europe off their feet. The British colonial secretary protested this "absurd scramble." The German Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, complained that he was being led into a "colonial whirl." The French Prime Minister call it a "steeple chase into the unknown."

Ironically, the provocation for this massive display of greed on the part of the European powers came from the heroic death in 1873 of the missionary-explorer David Livingstone, who had exposed the horrors of the African slave trade then in progress. His call for Africa to be redeemed by the "three C's"--Commerce, Christianity and Civilization--was aimed at the conscience of the civilized world. However, the initial response cam from rival colonial enthusiasts in Europe. There were journalists like Henry Stanley, mariners like Pierre de Brazza, soldiers like Edward Lugard, pedagogues like Karl Peters, and gold-and-diamond tycoons like Cecil Rhodes. from the front flap

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, World History, Politics, European History, 19th Century

738 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford, is known simply as Thomas Pakenham. He is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of Victorian and post-Victorian British history and trees. He is the son of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, a Labour minister and human rights campaigner, and Elizabeth Longford. The well known English historian Antonia Fraser is his sister.

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.

Thomas Pakenham does not use his title and did not use his courtesy title before succeeding his father. However, he has not disclaimed his British titles under the Peerage Act 1963, and the Irish peerages cannot be disclaimed as they are not covered by the Act. He is unable to sit in the House of Lords as a hereditary peer as his father had, due to the House of Lords Act 1999 (though his father was created a life peer in addition to his hereditary title in order to be able to retain his seat).

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

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.
It is an inevitable frame of reference in several other ways, firstly that pattern of the quest to find a 'lost' white man deep in Africa is repeated several times, secondly the contrast between the idealism and cynicism of the mother country with the breakdown, improvisation and struggle in Africa itself it also a constant, thirdly that for all the technology the conquest of Africa by Europeans is achieved through (or on, or by, or with) Africans, as manpower or by Europeans piggybacking off African empires and trading networks.

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 .
Since Pakenham's book runs over a longer time scale we do not get so familiar with the characters as we do in Tuchman. Tuchman's literary tick was to make a point of mentioning if somebody was a bachelor, this was so frequent that I felt she was on the brink of writing a queer history of the beginning of WWI, Pakenham's at least for the first half of the book is to make a fuss of describing any pair of blue eyes, I wondered about this as I did about the occasional precise statement of an African leader's height and weight which left me with the impression of imperial adventures travelling not only with food, trade goods and guns but also measuring sticks and weighing machines: 'and before you sign the treaty we just need to weigh and measure you'. Once when all the European officers on an expedition were allegedly killed and eaten I wondered - if they were all eaten then how was word brought back that they were killed and eaten? was this fact or newspaper sensationalism? Similarly when in an east African revolt, the rebels apparently believed that the white man's bullets would turn to water - was that really the case or was it already a trope that rebellious natives would believe that?

Pakenham gives us a lively narrative, it has perhaps too much emphasis on action and leaping around to where the next big adventure was happening rather than providing a continuous narrative, in one of the Congo chapters I could not see how that colony had got from barely being able to send a few men inland past the rapids to being able to send armed columns of hundreds of men up to the Great Lakes, a lot was apparently happening off the page and between the chapters.
Pakenham is not particularly interested in the whys of imperial expansion, and the occasional sentence he gives to motivation can be partial - like blaming the 'public' in an era before universal male suffrage which only raises further questions: which public, and why did they care. There have been studies of the men who volunteered from Britain to fight in the (second) Boer war, these were disproportionately younger men in clerical or retail jobs, from towns and cities this lead to Boer war veteran Baden-Powell to found the Boy-Scouts as he was upset by all these city slickers being unable to pitch a tent, start a fire, or sit around and sing songs , educated enough to read newspapers like the Daily Mail suggesting that in Britain at least interest and engagement with empire was only penetrating parts of the population. Aside from a couple of such examples across Europe it is hard to get much sense of who, or even if 'the public', were interested in empire towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is plain that empire only made sense economically if diamonds or gold were discovered or once there had been considerable investment in infrastructure. Even with a monopoly, as with the British company running much of Nigeria at the time, success was not guaranteed as the businessmen succeeded in glutting the world market with palm oil and causing the price to crash.

I think as an introductory book giving the reader an overall idea of why French is spoken in one part of Africa, but English in another it is a fine book there is a splash of caricature in the story telling: the British are best (even if they do bungle), the French have big ideas, are a bit flashy and have mistresses, the Germans also have mistresses and are brutal as well, the Belgians in the Congo are the most brutal (apart from the French in Gabon who are also the most brutal for the same reason, because they relied on violence to persuade people to tap rubber for them - at the time only growing wild and not in plantations , Black people tend to be either savage, or loyal but dim, and when Britain, Italy and Ethiopia are poised to seize Egyptian territory, the two European powers are 'lions', while the African is a 'jackel'. Leopold II in his palace at Laeken comes over mostly as a Bond villain and Pakenham implies more consistency to him and his plans for the Congo than might be warranted. In a few places Pakenham tells us what certain historical figures were thinking which struck me as a bit dubious. One of the very few women to be named in the text - the pioneering campaigner Emily Hobhouse who reported on and condemned conditions in the concentration camps during the Boer war is described or dismissed simply as 'dumpy'Hobhouse is probably too dead to care if Pakenham finds her physically attractive, but beyond the implication that if a woman (alive or dead) does not appeal to Pakenham's eye then she does not deserve of consideration, it's a serious lapse because Pakenham's opens the book with David Livingstone, and the subtext of the book is about Livingstone's humanitarian heirs - the critics of colonialism in practise like Roger Casement, the last of those critics in this book was Hobhouse, naturally since she was criticising the British concentration camps and the suffering of Boer women and children she is far better known in South Africa than in her native Britain., my guess is that some of this stems from Pakenham's education, some from his sources, when he sits back in his final postscript chapter which deals with decolonisation he is strikingly more sympathetic to the colonised than he is when narrating the process of colonisation - that at times felt as though this book was inspired more by Alexander Korda than by his own reflections and sensibilities - apart maybe from his mentioning of Mimosa trees.

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.

The book begins with Livingstone who sought to end slavery with the three 'C's of Christianity, commerce and Civilisation. But what I sense between the lines of Pakenham's account is above all continuity, and while as Churchill said it was a " technical inexactitude" to speak of slavery he was speaking in relation to the condition of Chinese labourers shipped in to service the South African mining industry commerce and civilisation as practised by the colonisers was impossible without a huge variety of unfree labour even if' technically' these were not slaves. And some of the patterns of exploitation seem to have been much the same as they were before colonisations simply on a much larger scale.

Hilare Belloc, I believe, wrote somewhere "we have the Maxim gun/ and they have not", and it is true that this is in part a technological story - of steamboats, the telegraph, and slowly chugging up the line - the train. But on one occasion the British found both their maxim guns jammed when they were confronted by a crowd of Ugandan converts to Catholicism, however they found that disciplined and sustained rifle fire was quite sufficient to massacre them Battle of Mengo, 1892 . Grim, sweeping and occasionally questionable there is a lot packed into the seven hundred pages of this book.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912, is a fascinating book on the European division of African territory, known as the Scramble for Africa. In this competition for territory, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Spain all carved territories out of the African continent, for various reasons. Spreading the "three C's" (Christianity, Civilization, Commerce) was an important motivation for many European explorers, General's and Politicians to get involved. Overt racism was another. Naked competition and greed were also major factors.

The Scramble got under way for a few reasons. First, France annexed Tunisia, nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire, in a bid to extend the security and profitability of their neighbouring colony in Algeria (annexed formally in 1834). The British similarly became involved in financial scuffles in Egypt, also nominally Ottoman, but controlled jointly by French and British financial interests. Tunisia was outright annexed to France, which ticked off Italy, which had many colonists and financial interests in the area. Britain decided to covertly submit Egypt to vassalage, and jointly flew the British and Egyptian flag over Egypt and Sudan (controlled by the Khedive as various provinces). The animosity of the annexation of Tunisia between France and Italy, and French and German annoyance at Britain's heavy hand in Egypt, led to an increasingly rapid scramble for territory all over Africa, and increased tensions, leading Europe to the brink of war on multiple occasions over pieces of swamp and dessert with little commercial value. Public opinion in France and Germany demanded colonial possessions, and Italy was game as well. Britain, however, was reluctant for a long while to join the game, and only started taking land so it would not fall to its rivals.

The spoiling factor of this all was King Leopold of Belgium, who really wanted an African Empire to rule over, and couched his desires in humanitarian language, fooling much of Europe into cooperation, and bullying or playing off rivals in France, Germany and the UK against each other. His Machiavellian maneuvers allowed him to annex the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the literal heart of Africa, where the Congo and Nile river deltas spill, and a treasure trove of ivory, rubber, mineral resources and many other valuable goods. Leopold would not be satiated with just this, however. He dreamed of a Nile Empire, and came very close to grabbing both modern Uganda and chunks of Sudan to join to the Congo colony by playing off tensions between France and Britain, and utilizing Chancellor Bismark of Germany as his patron. He used explorers and adventurers like Stanley, the British explorer who carved a bloody path through the Congo, and narrowly lost taking the entire Congo basin for Belgium. Later on, Belgian soldiers and politicians created the "Free State of the Congo", a fantastical "state" nominally controlled by King Leopold and formally annexed to Belgium at a later date. This colony was brutally exploited, showing Leopold's overtures to free trade and humanitarianism to be farcical tools for expansion. Leopold ran one of the worst colonies the world has ever seen, killing millions of his subjects, mutilating many more, and brutally exploiting slave labour, stamping out independent Kingdoms and tribes, and exploiting resources.

Britain, as mentioned, was a reluctant colonial regime at first. Britain's most profitable colonies were its Dominions, first Canada, and then Australia and New Zealand. These colonies brought profitable trade goods, were white and Christian, and nominally politically independent. Britain gained all of the profits of a colony without the headache of having to pay for garrisons or politicians. This led to a dream of Dominion in South Africa. Britain controlled the Cape and Natal regions of South Africa early on, and soon extended dominion over Zululand after the Zulu Wars. Machiavellian politicians also existed in Britain. Cecil Rhodes sought to create a diamond and gold Empire in South Africa by "painting the map red". He dreamed of a corridor from Egypt to South Africa, all British. He acted on these dreams with brutal political acumen. Zululand was conquered, and covert wars were started against the Dutch republics in Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Rhodesia was annexed from its King, and modern Botswana eventually became a British colony. Dominion status was achieved eventually, but bloody wars, incompetent politics, and internal disputes made a mess of it. Native Africans were brutally exploited, and Afrikaans (Dutch settlers) fought wars of independence and struggle against encroaching British interests, which led to some of the most expensive wars in British history.

Britain also sought to extend its borders in East and West Africa, and over the Nile. Competition between British trading interests in the Niger region and Cameroon led to conflict with France and Germany, and almost to war on multiple occasions. France sought to paint West Africa Blue, and pushed into the Niger territory nominally claimed by Britain. The northern borders of Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria were in dispute, although eventually worked out politically. The French also sought territory in the Nile regions of Eastern Africa. French expeditions to Fahsoda and southern Sudan sought to annex territory to France, and Uganda was fought over by Germany, France and Britain through exploratory expeditions and missionaries. Britain lost control over Sudan to the Mahdi revolution, which sought an Islamic state in Northern Africa, and fought for independence for Sudan from Egypt/Britain. The Mahdi state expanded into modern Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia, but was eventually stamped out by Britain. France was beaten back politically, though this conflict over Fashoda, a swampy wasteland, almost led to war between France and Britain. Instead, detente was achieved.

This was because Britain was also in competition with Germany. Bismark stealthily annexed Cameroon, Togo, and Namibia, taking Britain and France completely by surprise. He also extended dominion over much of East Africa (modern mainland Tanzania) and came close to grabbing modern Kenya and Uganda as well. Bismark disliked the colonial drive, but this crafty advocate of Realpolitik sought to use German colonies as bargaining chips for eventual European concessions, successfully trading his claims in East Africa for the important naval base in Heligoland with Britain, and wishing to use territory to get France to renounce its claims in Alsace-Lorraine, taken during the Franco-Prussian War in 1872. German public opinion was strongly pro-colony, but Bismark saw them as worthless tracts of land. However, he joined the scramble with gusto, never one to pass up an opportunity to strengthen Germany's position. His was a much more Euro-focused colonial expansion. Every move was calculated to play France off against Britain. He closely supported Afrikaans independence in southern Africa, supported Italian claims in Ethiopia, and allowed Leopold in Belgium to make his moves. All was done to strengthen the German alliance system in Europe, and to try and get either France of Britain to move away from Russian support, and to keep France and Britain away from detente. His retirement from politics saw this end, and eventual French and British detente did come to fruition, and directed against the German state.

France had different motivations. They had been humiliated politically in recent years, and the state had been in flux ever since to fall of Napoleon and the Franco-Prussian war. France had lost territory in Europe, and sought to extend its prestige by grabbing large tracts of land, regardless of its worth. They competed early on with Belgium over the Congo, and grabbed the northern chunk (modern Republic of the Congo). They extended the borders of Senegal, and gained control over huge swathes of "light land" in West Africa and the Sahara Dessert. Competition with the British was fierce, and Anglo-phobia strong in French politics and within the public sphere. However, the danger of Germany proved greater, and the German annexation of Togo and Cameroon, both nominally in France's West African sphere, and bordering her colonies, alarmed France to a great extent. As competition with Belgium and Britain dried up in the Congo and West Africa/Nile region, France was able to focus on Germany, and eventually joined with Britain in the alliance that has seen it through two World Wars. France also coveted much of Northern Africa, with historical claims on Egypt (Napoleonic era) and interests in protecting its valuable Algerian colony. Tunisia, as mentioned, was annexed, Morocco joined as a vassal and Germany out competed in the region. France also extended deep into the Sahara Dessert, with an interest in creating rail links through the region to its little jewel in Senegal (never happened).

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.

The Scramble was a blur of names and land grabs. Rhodes, Salisbury, Chamberlain, Gordon and Kitchener, to name a few, sought to paint the map red, compete for political influence and resources with Britain's other colonies, and end the slave trade in Africa, while keeping shipping lanes through the Suez Canal and around the Cape of Good Hope open to British ships. France's explorers, like Brazza, cut deep into the jungles of the Congo, and sought to grab as much territory for France as a way to reverse the humiliations of the past. Leopold baldly sought money and power in a new African Empire. Bismark sought pieces for his European chess game. Italy and Spain, as smaller powers, sought to tag along like Belgium, but had difficulty competing with the big powers. In a period of less than 50 years, every piece of Africa (save, for a time, Ethiopia) became portions of small European nations who were after resources, power and prestige. The scramble often seems like an afterthought, and indeed, less than a century later, these areas would gain independence once again, although to this day, legacies of colonial abuse, lack of resources, and unfavourable contracts with Western Nations plagues Africa.

This has been a long review so far. Suffice to say Pakenham has written probably the definitive text on this blistering period of land grabbing. The naked greed and racism that came with this Scramble is plain to see, and Pakenham does not even attempt to go beyond what actually happened; there is no need to do so. No narrative is needed, save for the speeches, pieces of text and actions of those who conquered an entire continent, and to those who were conquered. Pakenham does a wonderful job showing the thought processes of both sides. Many African Kings and politicians sought modern weapons to extend their own dominions, and tried to play sides off against each other, often successful for decades. King Menelik of Ethiopia was the only one who would succeed, and at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, and the destruction of much of Ethiopia. I could go on and on, but I will leave off by saying this book has a well deserved reputation as being one of the best history texts every written. It looks at a relatively small period of time, where massive world changes occurred, and Empires that boggle the mind were carved out willy-nilly for reasons varying from promoting trade, to protecting sea lanes, to just wanting more land. This was a serious and silly time of exploitation, imperialism and opera bouffe which cost the lives of millions of innocent Africans, used as European pawns, slaves, porters and cannon fodder. This is truly a wonderful history text, and it is easily recommended for anyone interested in this period of time.

['Aussie Rick' · Rating 5 out of 5]

This massive book (738 pages plus photos & maps) offers the reader an interesting and enjoyable account of the European powers race to 'civilize' the African continent. The book covers the great explorers, the numerous battles and conflicts (between the European powers and the natives and between the European powers) and many other interesting items during this 'scramble for Africa'. I found this book to be a great read, very enjoyable and although the size may be daunting it never got boring. The author covers the period from 1876 through to 1912 in 37 chapters of interesting reading. "Whatever happens, we have got the Maxium gun, and they have not!" about covers it!

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa chronicles the high point of European imperialism: the rush to claim colonies out of unoccupied (by other European powers) Africa in the last quarter of the 19th Century. Pakenham's book, although relatively limited in time, entertains an impressive scope: we see familiar dramas like the Exploration of the Nile, General Gordon's doomed stand at Khartoum (and Kitchener's war of reconquest), the Anglo-French confrontation at Fashoda and the Zulu victory at Isandlwana, alongside more obscure campaigns like France's conquest of Chad and Tunisia, Italy's botched invasion of Ethiopia and Germany's genocidal war in Southwest Africa. Pakenham's account makes clear that imperialism advanced from a tangle of motives, often contradictory, sometimes putatively idealistic, others merely cynical. Some, like Cecil Rhodes, desired naked capitalist exploitation; others entertained sincere, paternalistic ideas of ending the slave trade and Christianizing the natives (without of course considering how the "natives" might feel about those things); some, like Belgium's King Leopold, built empires largely from vanity and personal ego. It's to Pakenham's immense credit that he not only balances these different events and motivations, but also makes an effort to include African perspectives, showing that the continent had its own racial and ethnic divisions (in Egypt and Sudan, particularly, the resentment generated by Arab control of the slave trade among Black Africans) which the Europeans gladly exploited; but that shrewder African leaders, like Ethiopia's King Menelik, were equally adept at playing imperialists against one another. Occasionally Pakenham jumps on a hobbyhorse, like his contention that Lord Milner was to blame for the Boer War (the thesis of his later volume on that conflict) or that the Scramble of Africa was largely the doing of Leopold, seeking to bolster his reputation as a "humanitarian" with his slave regime in the Congo, and Otto von Bismarck, seeking to distract continental rivals from revanche against Germany. On the whole, it's hard to quibble with his combination of fluid writing, expert analysis and skillful perspective. Narrative history as it should be written.

[John Farebrother · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the ultimate book on the colonisation (read occupation) of Africa by mainly European powers in the latter quarter of the 19th century (the only country to resist the tsunami and remain independent was Ethiopia). Readers unfamiliar with Africa might assume, as I did, that the conquest of Africa took place at the same time as imperial adventures in the Americas and elsewhere in the world, but in fact most of it happened much later, in a short but intense burst of European megalomania and kleptomania. The book tells this story in all its component parts, and as such explains why the map of Africa is what it is today. It also explains many other aspects of present-day Africa, which after being the battleground for a devastating proxy war during the Cold War, is still being looted of its natural and human resources by outside interests today, if anything with even greater efficiency and ruthlessness. The author has taken a comprehensive and extremely thorough approach to his vast subject matter. The book is also very readable, and hard to put down.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Pakenham has neither the flair nor the predilection for writing about sex the way that his more famous sister Antonia Fraser does. Somehow Pakenham manages to devote 200 pages of his “Scramble to Africa” to King Leopold II of Belgium without once mentioning his taste for underage prostitutes. The closest Pakenham comes is to acknowledge that Leopold’s second wife Christine Lacroix was indeed working in the sex trade and a mere 16 years old when Leopold had his first encounter with her. In contrast Adam Hochschild in “King Leopold’s Ghost” discusses Leopold’s practice of preying on teenage girls in great depth. Similarly, Pakenham does not attempt to quantify the number of lives lost through the forced labour system deployed by Leopold in his Congo rubber plantations. Hochschild puts forward the rather fanciful number of 10 million. (The 1904 Casement report commissioned by the British parliament put the number at 3 million which was not cited by Pakenham.) Pakenham simply concedes that there were atrocities and that the Bishop of Brussels was quite right to order his priests not to administer extreme unction to Leopold on his death bed. In brief, Pakenham presents a balanced and restrained account of one the most shameful episodes in European history. The events however were so extraordinary that his book reads like an adventure novel.
Pakenham’s “Scramble for Africa” would have seemed at least 30 years out of date when it was published in 1990. He makes no mention of any of the psychological or historical analyses of colonialism that had been taught at universities since the 1960. In his introduction he mentions the theory of John Hobson which appeared in his 1902 book “Imperialism” and which was subsequently adopted by Lenin in “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism” but only to sneer at it. Pakenham spends 700 pages scrupulously documenting one atrocity after another while resolutely refusing to attribute them to any historical, sociological or economic model. The European governments simply lacked the will power to compel their citizens and agents to act in an honorable and humane fashion in Africa.
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.
Events however were driven by the ambitious industrialists, missionaries, discoverers, administrators and military men in the field who ignored the directives of their metropolitan governments. They explored, preached and invaded without authorization presenting the politicians with faits accomplis that required the institution of formal colonies. Built of the shakiest of foundations, the African empires of the European powers evaporated in less then 20 years following the end of WWII.
Pakenham’s book which most certainly seemed passé when it first appeared is aging well. It is indeed Eurocentric but in fact Africa was dominated by Europeans during the Scramble. This is much easier to acknowledge in 2020 when Africa has been ruled by Africans for the preceding 60 years than in 1990 when the memories of the colonial regimes were very fresh. Similarly, the Marxist, sociological and psychological analyses of colonialism have not stood up well to the recent criticism.
Thomas Pakenham’s “Scramble for Africa” is a wonderful book and well worth the considerable effort required to read it.

[Malette Poole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive look at how Africa became colonized. The surprising part is how late in the 19th Century it actually happened. Another is how Belgium, created as a "buffer state" between France and Germany and ruled by one of Victoria's favorite uncles, became a major player. The events in this book lead to actions and reactions that are still being played out on the continent of Africa.

As I progress, it is all too easy to see the results of artificial boundaries set by Europeans for their own purposes (natural resources, primarily) has set the stage for the present conflicts and unrest in Africa.

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.

When finally finished, I see the Domino Effect, the result of this Scramble for Resources in the late 19th and early 20th century, affecting the lives of millions of Africans today. Artificial borders, artificial 'democracies' and neo-colonialism continue to keep Africans in poverty, disenfranchised and helpless in the face of commerce. If there is any reason for Europe to be particularly ashamed, it is for what it allowed in the Congo at the beginning of the 20th Century, and what it allowed to continue right through the 'independence' movement. Belgium has much to pay for yet.

[Ammara Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my third attempt to read The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham and turns out third time really is the charm. Based on the stellar reviews, I had high hopes for this book but for me it has been a frustrating experience. For the most part my unhappiness stems from the fact I wanted this to be a comprehensive history of Africa and how the colonisation shaped the continent. However, this is a book about Europeans realpolitik, ‘great’ white explorers and ‘brave’ military men from the west. The problems of alterity and robbing the native Africans of their voice, however, become even more exasperating owing to the writer’s prejudice against anyone who wasn’t British. The book is written from the perspective of different European men and, more often than not, overly simplifies their characters depending on their country of birth. Brits are all noble but sometime they bungle despite their honourable intentions. The French are overtaken with the fever for imperialism and would go to any lengths to expand their imperial interests. The Germans are conceited and will do anything to protect their financial interests.The Italians are misguided and don’t know what’s good for them. The Ottomans are only ever mentioned indirectly as highly inconsequential despite the fact that many African regions were under ottoman control, no matter how precarious. The Muslims are barbaric slave traders. There is no room for what the Africans made of this ‘scramble’. But weirdly enough the writer claims to know what different people were thinking or feeling. How a respected academic could make such wild claims is beyond me!
These are some of the issues I had with this book but I cannot deny the tremendous research that must have gone into writing a book of this scope. It might not teach you that much about Africa but you’ll surely have a much deeper understanding of the complex politics and diplomacy of the European imperial powers.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the only book on my "read" shelf that i actually never finished. i got about two thirds or so into it and gave up.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great work, it's just so insanely detailed that a person can't hope to retain enough info to make the read worthwhile.

After hours of reading about literally hundreds of personalities here's what i retained:

* Livingston was a good man who unintentionally hastened colonization
* Stanley was a newspaper reporter made himself famous by attaching himself to Livingston
* King Leopold was insane
* Europeans really screwed up Africa and perhaps fought a proxy WWI in the process
* Braza should have a movie made about him (i don't remember who he is exactly but do recall enjoying his particular adventure story)

Put this one on the shelf next to your atlas and dictionary as a work of reference.

[Azra Šabovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must say, I really enjoyed Pakenhams handling of substantial material and complicated subject matter into an enjoyable, easy to read narrative.

The story contains multiple number of characters, where the most attention gets the Belgian King Leopold. His actions are costumed in virtuous humanitarianism showing that he is the catalyst for the motivation on the exploitation of Africa. Pakenham describes him as, "Leopold was a Coburg millionaire, a constitutional monarch malgre lui, a throwback from the age of absolutism, with the brain of a Wall Street financier and the hide of an African rhinoceros." He who saw a big chance in making a fortune, in the name of "3 Cs": Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization.

Now, don't get me wrong, many 21st cynics would think that the intervention in Africa is stimulated by the rapacious capitalists, and that's fine. However, more in depth, Pakenham insists that the aspiration in helping the continent with the enlightenment of the first C- Christianity was predominant component in decision for scramble. Having that said, commerce was also a big entice. Singularly, the beginning years of "the Scramble" seemed as a stock market sparkle persuading investors to join.

The book is well-written, and although it is long, it never gets boring, especially for people who enjoy history. It is in chronological order, between the actions of the Great (Britain, France, and Germany) and Minor Powers (mostly Belgium) in different parts of the continent. One of the favourite things i had about the book is the usage of maps. Customarily, history chronicles need an atlas by the hand. This one doesn't.

[Igor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Товста, сповнена деталей книжка, але це надзвичайно захопливі деталі. Тут і про експедиції вглиб Африки, коли троє європейських дослідників з сотнею місцевих носильників місяцями продираються через джунглі, долаючи голод, малярію та дизентерію; і про заплутані дипломатичні інтриги в європейських кабінетах, де вирішувалось, кому який шматок Африки віддати і за який починати війну. Я багато з цього знав як сухі факти, але тут вони "оживають" в десятках окремих історій з десятками надзвичайних персонажів (далеко не завжди позитивних, звичайно).

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The White Queen and the Black Kings

“Shall we play a game?!” Whether you caught my allusion to the computer AI protagonist in the movie War Games or not, I imagine you are questioning my choice of chess game metaphor as a suitable comparison for the Scramble for Africa, which was much more than a two sided game. Pakenham is a uniquely descriptive writer, and uses much expression and euphemism himself throughout this colossal work. It may not be as big in word count, nor page count as some of the other books I’ve read, but this scholarly work was definitely a huge burden for my reading list. The reasons are not so easy to explain.

The subject matter of this book is a burden mentally and emotionally. There is absolutely no way you can read it without feeling a range of emotions in every reading session. At times, I felt repulsed by everything. I don’t normally feel this way to such a degree from a book. But, it is even more disturbing than reading Conway’s Heart of Darkness. In order to keep reading such an account, I found it easier to spread it out generously, and intersperse it with things that were more… well… less gut-wrenching. Pakenham is British. He attempts to write from the British perspective. But, he also goes a long way toward total honesty. He does not flinch at pointing fingers in every direction. Some of the views may leave you wondering at first if he is trying to defend the protagonists. But, before too far into the book, his own opinions bleed through. But, his goal seems to be for you to see what the characters were thinking.

In this one book, Pakenham lays out the journey of Europe as the individual countries attempt to paint the map of the African continent in their own colors. It is written like a train ride, with various stops and starts along the path from ‘door opening’ to ‘door closing.’ The author moves lithely across the landscape, somehow tying it all in chronologically. I don’t think the reader can possibly feel confused about the timeline. But, this journey is filled with actual photos and political cartoons of the day that will enlighten the reader, regardless of your experience with the subject matter. I found myself asking from the beginning, ‘Could the book have been shorter?’ By the end, I concluded that Pakenham could have made it bigger. He writes with conciseness and often leaves the reader with a desire to know even more than he has covered.

Perhaps the most striking political cartoon included in the book is the skeleton figured Lady Britannia, walking among the mismatched rows and rows of graves, upon which the British Empire was built. Each Headstone reads in Latin, ‘Here lies…’ followed by names representing the various British colonies and territories of the world.
Pakenham covers hundreds of important historical people of the era, as well as the many colonizing countries and colonies themselves. As an American with little background in British history, I found myself looking up almost every figure in Wikipedia to get a toehold on the mountain of information, and follow along with the action. Then, there are the fascinating bits of new tech; like the Maxim gun. The account certainly begs to be read with the utmost attention to details.

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.

I began reading this book as my stop in Lesotho, which was county #39 on my Journey Around the World in 80 Books for 2019. As you can see, I was derailed by this book. But, not this book only. I started reading it mid-September. But, I had some surgeries last year that slowed me down quite a bit as well. By year’s end, November and December were a wash, as far as reading was concerned. That’s ok. We do what we need to pick up where we fall short. It was very important to me to finish this book, because it is such essential reading for anyone interested in Africa, or the world as it is today. So, this means that even if you read it slowly, with lighter material interspersed, you could still easily finish it in 4 months. Do not think my time to completion is any indication of how long the book will take.

I recommend this book highly for the student of Africa. It is textbook quality. It is also difficult to obtain. I got my hardback on Amazon cheaply enough, but I suspect that it was stolen from the Ealing Central Library in London, by unscrupulous third-party sellers. Go figure! I found myself thinking that one event after another was THE most remarkable in the book. But, then there was the next. So, rather than trying to summarize key events in a book of too many to summarize, I will leave you with a few quotes from this tremendous book.

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.
Quotes:

"Troublemakers were distributed as rations."

'Appetite comes with eating.'

”The Bismarckian system, which he had made famous, was exclusively concerned with Europe. ‘Here is Russia and here is France,’ he later told a startled German explorer, ‘with Germany in the middle. That is my map of Africa.’”

”The 'door-closing-panic' Torschlusspanik, that seized the German electorate in the Spring of 1884 and began to make the scramble a reality...”

”On 25 May, in a paroxysm of rage, he had ordered all Christian ‘readers’ at court to be seized. Some were castrated; others hacked to death, their bodies left to the vultures. On 3 June, one large group – eleven Protestants and thirteen Catholics – was taken and burnt on a funeral pyre at Namgongo. What was most astonishing about these terrible events, astonishing even to the executioners, was that the young boys died singing and praising the white man’s God.”

”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.”

"Menelik had no compunction in dividing Tigre with the Italians. By the Treaty of Wichale, signed by Menelik on 2 May 1889, the new Emperor agreed to give Italy a small slice of the Christian high plateau – as far south as Asmara – and also the Muslim lowlands of Bogos to the north. In return, the Italians promised to feed, if not satisfy, Menelik's hunger for modern rifles. Already a shipment of 5,000 rifles had reached Addis Ababa, with ammunition carefully chosen not to fit them. More was to follow, bought by a two-million- lire loan guaranteed by the Italian government."

”By the end of the 19th century, European powers had carved up almost all of Africa after the Berlin Conference; only Ethiopia, the Republic of Liberia and the Dervish State still maintained their independence. Though not the first African nation to resist European conquest, it became a pre-eminent symbol of the pan-Africanism and secured Ethiopia's sovereignty for another forty years.”

"Lobengula rode away to the north, protected by the remnants of his Impis. His last bitter speech to his people has been preserved: 'You have said that it is me that is killing you: now here are your masters coming ... You will have to pull and shove wagons; but under me you never did this kind of thing ... Now you be joyful because here are your future rulers ... the white people are coming now. I didn't want to fight with them ... O, I am remembering the words of Lotsche ...'. At least Lobengula was spared the humiliation of being hunted down like Cetshwayo. He died like a king, taking poison with his chief counsellor when he heard that the last of his Impis had surrendered. His servants buried him sitting in a cave, wrapped in the skin of a black ox, his chief counsellor buried at his feet, along with his remaining possessions."

"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'."

"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."

”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.”

"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.”

”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.”

"Famine killed more than ten times the number that had ever taken up arms against the Germans - 250,000-300,000 according to the leading African historian of the revolt. The worst suffering was in the Highlands, where the famine persisted longest. Perhaps half the Vidunda, more than half the Matumbi, and three-quarters of the Pangwa died in the rebellion or its aftermath. When the famine ended, the survivors returned to a country which was almost unrecognizable. Miambo forests had begun to take over the maize fields and cotton plots, and soon these forests gave sanctuary to rhino, buffalo and elephant. In due course the hills of Ungindo, once teeming with people, became the largest game park in the world."

And, let’s not leave out this ironical statement by young Winston Churchill…

”…the chronic bloodshed which stains the West African season is odious and disquieting. Moreover the whole enterprise is liable to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and the stealing of their lands.” Minute by Winston Churchill as Under-Secretary for the Colonies, 23 January 1906

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tremendous example of scholarship, that is as good as Packenham's book on the Boer War. While this book is long, Packenham's writing drives the narrative along. He also organized the book extremely well. The chapters are chronological, moving from one part of Africa to another, so the narrative never drags. Additionally, Packenham fleshed out the main characters in this saga in a way that makes them more three dimensional than is usually found in narrative histories of this type. For me, the most compelling parts of this book were how the Germans acquired their pieces of the African continent and subsequently mismanaged their four colonies in a way which seems to foreshadow WW II. The other compelling narrative was the creation of the Congo Free State, and Leopold II's efforts to maintain personal control in the face of worldwide condemnation over Belgian abuses in exploiting the rubber trade. This was a truly monumetal narrative history, and my only complaint was that while Packenham included the abortive Italian efforts at acquiring a piece of the continent, he did not discuss the efforts of the Spanish (Rio Muni, Spanish Guinea) or the Portuguese (Mozambique Company, Angola). However, if he had, this would have turned he work into two volumes. This was hard to put down and I want to re-read it again.

[Gabriel Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I opened this heralded popular history of the "Scramble" to find out about the French Third Republic's "Forward Policy", and the supposedly reluctant imperialism of Liberal England (Gladstone) and Republican France. The author can certainly tell a story. But I experienced a deep aversion to the tone and style and methodology almost to the point of nausea, and put the book aside before even finishing that chapter. Regrettably, while this book is conscious (as it could not fail to be since it appeared in 1992) of the folly, cupidity and hypocrisy which drove the colonial powers, it nonetheless has a lineage to the boy's literature of the turn of the century. As a teenager I would have read this with excitement. Not anymore. All these thumbnail portraits of important men add up to a crippling shortage of of analysis and "teleology". Glaringly absent from the Tunis and Egypt narratives which open the book is the corporate aspect, the financial drivers. Do you really need to know that Gambetta is "as plump and supple as a dolphin"? You are glancingly told that he yields to the "forward policy" due to the "bond-holders". Who are these bond holders? That deserves most of the chapter. Also, you would have to reach back to 19th and even eighteenth century literature to find a comparable clutter of physiognomic cliches. This book was an acclaimed best seller, dealing with an historical subject of the first importance! It is as though a century of historical practice just never happened.

[Steffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a convenient sequel to my previously read book on ‘The Age of Empire’ but this time looking at the new imperialism of the late 19th century from ‘the other end’ aka Africa. Like, in 1870 less than 10 per cent of Africa were under formal western control, 40 years later only 10 per cent (Ethiopia and Liberia) were not. The ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1991) is a 700-page deep dive into these 40 or so years of the European powers’, mainly UK, France, Germany (and less so Belgium and Italy) dealing and wheeling, intrigues and partitioning of all parts of Africa. In contrast to Hobsbawm’s age of empire, this book doesn’t look at the political economy of the new imperialism, but is a very nerdy historian’s account through thousands of letters and diaries of the most eccentric explorers (Brazza, Stanley), entrepreneurs (Cecil Rhodes), colonial administration and political figures (King Leopold, Bismarck), missionaries and early ‘humanitarians’. Among the most interesting things is how Western Governments and imperialist lobbyists used the ‘fight against slavery’ and human rights as pretexts for imperialist expansion, warfare and exploitation. Looks like this part hasn’t changed at all (‘R2P’, ‘humanitarian wars’).

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Pakenham's sprawling story of the slicing up of a continent by European powers is fascinating, suitably large and well-written. "The Scramble for Africa" presents a panorama of villains and heroes, both white and black, but paints it with shades of gray.

Pakenham takes us all over the continent that the superpowers of the day despicably carved up at their whim with little thought about the human beings they were affecting. People being people and therefore capable of evil no matter who they are, the machinations of African leaders themselves also are shown, though it's decidedly (and understandably) a European viewpoint here. From Stanley to King Leopold and beyond, this is a fascinating journey for those who take the time. Still, from the point of view of American readers, Pakenham assumes too much knowledge of British history and its political system. There are a lot of names to keep track of, and there is an occasional lack of clarity as to what precisely is going on. Still, this is a strong, well-written, fascinating account of a strange period in world history.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another way to describe this book, which its author I do not believe would use, is an accounting of the stupidity, racism, idealism, greed, and both foreign and domestic political maneuvering interacting with the previous that led to the 19th century powers on the European continent turning their eyes to settling and exploiting parts of Africa that were not previously explored by any white people before all of these events.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given that the author is British, it is the British who come across as being the least of a shitty bunch over the course of this narrative. (Or perhaps this is just me giving them some credit for going to war against the Boers, the eventual progenitors of apartheid South Africa. Maybe they don't deserve much credit since they didn't fight proto-apartheid in any way after bungling this war.) Belgium's Leopold I is the worst of the lot; the German army was tending towards racist extermination decades before the Nazis ever came along; the French were kind of dumb and kind of greedy. One big picture takeaway I have from reading this account is that it is something of a miracle that there was never a shooting war that erupted in Europe (or even in a large scale in Africa) between the assorted European empires over all of this stuff. In particular, it is remarkable to consider that, given the tension between Britain and France through much of this period, the British eventually entered what we now know as World War I on the side of France (to protect Belgian neutrality, to be sure). It's also remarkable that Britain had any kind of functioning government in this period, given how frequently things were turning over, often but not always because of the way that flare-ups in Ireland - another imperial possession - cleaved the cobbled-together coalitions apart.

There is a lot of euphemism here in a way that I'm not sure whether Pakenham is using it ironically or if the is approvingly citing these things from distant memos. The phrase "forward policy" comes up a lot, and the gist is that when a white government started considering a forward policy, that was bad for the natives in whatever part of Africa those white people could reach before running out of money or dying of malaria or typhoid. Truly, what gave these buffoons the right to do all of this? Nothing except that they had the most guns and ships and the natives did not. On this comment about euphemism, a quote from a then-young Winston Churchill made the epigraph to a late chapter of the book, a minute written in 1906:

Moreover the whole enterprise is liable to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and stealing of their lands.

Winston, my man, let's be honest here. You know there was a lot of murdering of natives and stealing of their lands. You were a party to some of it! You knew some of the people doing more of it. There are some of these historical characters in whom Pakenham delights in skewering; he doesn't seem to think much of the era's Lord Carnarvon, witheringly dubbed "Twitters" by some contemporaries. It is more endearing when he is taking the piss out of dead lords in British government, or almost gleefully relating the sudden downfall of, say, Bismarck, than when he is describing an early 20th century woman who is chronicling the atrocities taking place at the time in West Africa as "a dumpy 40-year-old." It is one moment where this book - published in 1991 by a man who was already in his 60s - feels its age the most.

As I did not have much familiarity with what has come to be dubbed the Scramble, I found this informative to answering a lot of low-level questions about why the map of Africa is what it is today and what legacy these colonial powers left behind before World War II came along and direct empires went either out of fashion or became prohibitively expensive to maintain or both. The steps from the relatively innocent proselytizing expeditions of Dr. Livingstone to the more rapacious heirs like Stanley that eventually activated greedy, distant politicians (or at least the capitalists who held those people's ears) are fairly clear. From here, the narrative is a bit more garbled, and it's not always easy to determine what is happening in different parts of Africa at the same time since Pakenham's focus is generally on one imperial power's actions in one area for a length of time per chapter, rather than going in a linear fashion. But the basic themes I mentioned initially remain across all of them: Stupidity, greed, idealism, racism, and other things along those lines. What a mess they left for those who've come after. Some have tried harder than others to mitigate the worst of those aftereffects. The American government at the time of this writing is on the other side trying to make them all worse.

One thing you are not going to get a sense of in reading this is what is the history of Africa in this period as seen through the lens of the Africans. Pakenham does not evince a lot of interest in this up to perhaps the very final chapter, when he steps back and views what was, around the time of his writing the book, the independence of Zimbabwe and the approach of the end of apartheid in South Africa. Perhaps only so much of this history can be told because these societies were so thoroughly disrupted by the intrusion of the wider world on their existence. Even without the intrusion of the white people, there is still a lot of what seemed quite nasty in East Africa with Arabs invading and taking slaves. This in the late 19th century! It's not hard to see why the Europeans - at least the semi-well-meaning ones - could delude themselves into thinking all of their involvement was good, because for many the state of affairs was bad.

[Alice Malin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although lengthy, the level of detail was perfect. However, I have a preference for the politics / international relations / humanitarian side over the battle tactics.

More maps would’ve made it easier to follow the changing territories and different tribes.

Quite an odd pro-European ending that did not fit after outlining all the atrocities in Africa over 700+ pages. Also a mild obsession with Winston Churchill and his sources.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book back when it first appeared. It is a bit of a slog but I still remember the story today and I have not found an account of the enhanced colonial acquisition of Africa leading up to WW1 that surpasses this book, although there are fine accounts for particular people and regions. I remember few books as I do this one.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

The good: comprehensive, with adroit handling of high-level storytelling.

The bad: More than a few orientalist or racialist comments or farmings that erode my confidence in the tight, Eurocentric telling of Africa’s colonization.

There’s a lot more to learn, but I’m grateful to have gained this piece of the story.

[Sookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the articles, pieces of non-fiction that's scattered around are all put together under one dome. I am positive I have not retained everything I've read. But its given me enough to connect progress of various European countries and organizations.

[Annarosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Admittedly, the title didn’t age well. The rest did.

[Sarah Seele · Rating 4 out of 5]

And thus ends an attempt, OVER A YEAR in the making, by me to edumucate m’self and learn some history.

This guy’s a good writer and it’s really fascinating as context for WW1, so I regret nothing.

DESPITE THE FACT THAT I FIRST PICKED UP THIS BOOK HOPING IT WOULD GIVE ME SOME BASIC HISTORY ON FRENCH MOROCCO AND ALGERIA FOR A WIP AND IT BARELY EVEN MENTIONED THEM

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredibly detailed and sometimes very hard to push through read. It is rewarding if you have patience with it, and I imagine it feels much like an encyclopedia to someone who is more familiar with the subject. Would recommend to any proper history nerd.

[Nemanja Sh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a truly remarkable read. It's not an easy book, it's very long and each page contains a great deal of information. This lecture needs to be slow and thorough as through it you lay the foundations of the understanding of Africa.

Throughout these pages you start to understand what happens when corporations get detached from morality and when they get a free hand at running business as they please. However, the only reason why the book did not receive five stars is because of the last chapter. Naturally, the topic of post-colonial Africa is too extensive to fit into ten pages however there were some major flaws. The biggest in my opinion is the presentation of Mugabe, one of the most corrupt African leaders, as an educated leader who favored pan-Africanism. Nowhere did it mention his corrupt nature or how he expelled white settlers thus causing the economy of Zimbabwe to collapse. So the ending in a way is not only anti-European but anti-white as well. This disregard is especially dangerous as South Africa is planning on doing the same. They are repeating the mistakes which caused their neighbors dearly.

Maybe the biggest take from this book is the realization that almost seven decades since the launch of the decolonization process, most African nations have still not committed themselves to building a fully functional society. Most leaders have replaced the European extractive system with their locally grown one. So in the end, for most Africans, promises of a better life under self-rule did not live up to the expectations. As the royal British government rightly predicted, Africa and its modest elite, were not fully ready for self-rule and self-determination. However, in a funny twist of fate, today (2018) Ethiopia is once again emerging as a dominant political broker on the African continent. One major difference is that today they are not conquering new lands with their armies but rather with their companies.

In modern-day world, it's not longer the scramble for Africa but rather the scramble for the world. We will have to wait and see where Africa fits into this and if they will finally manage to defend their interests or will they give in and allow foreign nations to exploit them... again.

[David Canford · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

The book describes how Britain, France and Germany raced to carve up the African continent to enrich themselves. Belgium and Italy also joined in. They justified their actions by the three ‘C’s: commerce, Christianity and civilisation. Some saw it as a way to end the slave trade perpetuated at that time by the Arabs kidnapping people in league with local African tribal leaders to be taken to the Middle East, an evil which continued long after the abolition of slavery in the West.

At times the book reads like an adventure story but told from the colonisers point of view. At others the detailed politics can be quiet tedious. The immense suffering caused to the local population and the legacy we have left behind is largely ignored, apart from a couple of chapters at the end.

Still western corporations, and now China too, ruthlessly exploit Africa’s resources with locals working for a pittance under appalling conditions so we can have the materials needed to make our smartphones, etc. While a few corrupt officials at the top make a fortune, many Africans seek to escape the poverty and conflict and end up dying trying to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life, and if they survive have to work illegally under awful conditions for European agricultural producers or end up in Saudi and other Middle Eastern states being beaten and abused, often unable to leave and often not paid. What Europe and Arab countries unleashed upon Africa continues, and this book describes how it started.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

It looked to be a daunting read: it's almost as thick as it is wide. But it was brilliant. Pakenham is a great writer; witty as well as erudite, he personifies the populist historian. Very similar (in his own way) to David McCullough. End notes, not footnotes, to keep the narrative pace going. In very many ways, it read like a novel.

My only critique might be the overuse of certain clichés: "toss in the sponge" popped up over and over again. However in the course of nearly 800-pages, this is a quibble.

What's amazing to consider is that even at 800-odd pages, this is a gloss on the entire story; every chapter I'm sure could engender any number of equally interesting books.

Africa (to me, as one who has never been there) is a somewhat magical place, filled with mystery and misery and (again, to me) so much potential. I'd love to see a sequel; but that wouldn't be history. Yet.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent From 1876 to 1912. (1991). Thomas Pakenham.

I read this book, or parts of the massive work, in my thirties and it opened up thirty five years of shocking greed, colonialism, corruption and human rights abuse in a compelling, detailed and straightforward way that I haven't encountered in so much detail afterwards. Since then I still revert back to it from time to time and it never seizes to amaze me.

Thomas Pakenham's research ensured the survival of so many facts that would have been lost in the dark obscurity of the archives hidden somewhere deep below earth's surface. As so many excellent reviews of the book have been written here at Goodreads, I will not try to add anything more. This book, however, is an essential read, a must read, for those who want to get to know the African continent better. Brilliant!

[l · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pakenham is more story-teller than historian - going at the story of the scramble through the great man of history approach. He presents us with character portraits of the European explorers, African leaders etc involved - which helps explain why this book is accessible despite being 700 pages long and dealing with basically unfamiliar events (to me, at least). The problem with this approach is that Pakenham's writing often goes into bargain bin novelistic tendencies - whether it's just ridiculous prose, like describing someone with 'sapphire eyes', or invoking racist stereotypes (the obsequious but scheming Arab). There were moments that were distinctly uncomfortable - where he refers to a 'howling pack of wild Africans' etc.

[Jrohde · Rating 5 out of 5]

by far the best account of African history from mid 19th century to independence.. a must read - I liked it for the juxtaposition of historical events happening simultaneously - it gave a far better overview of the continent than the many books I have read on one country at a time. Read Meridith's State of Africa for a telling follow-on