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

Thomas Pakenham

Paperback | Pages: 800 pages

Rating: 4.15 | 1983 Users | 127 Reviews

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Original Title:	The Scramble for Africa
ISBN:	0380719991 (ISBN13: 9780380719990)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Charles George Gordon, Otto von Bismarck, Leopold II of Belgium, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley
Literary Awards:	WH Smith Literary Award (1992), Alan Paton Award (1992)

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

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 desperate 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 (view spoiler)[ 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 (hide spoiler)].
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, Pakenhams 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 (view spoiler)[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 (hide spoiler)], 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 n 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, the Belgians in the Congo are the most brutal (apart from the French in Gabon who are also the most brutal (view spoiler)[ 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 (hide spoiler)], 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 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 (view spoiler)[ who reported on and condemned conditions in the concentration camps during the Boer war (hide spoiler)] is described (view spoiler)[ or dismissed (hide spoiler)] simply as 'dumpy'(view spoiler)[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. (hide spoiler)], 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 it 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 (view spoiler)[ he was speaking in relation to the condition of Chinese labourers shipped in to service the South African mining industry (hide spoiler)] 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 - 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 (view spoiler)[Battle of Mengo, 1892 (hide spoiler)]. Grim, sweeping and occasionally questionable there is a lot packed into the seven hundred pages of this book

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

Title	:	The Scramble for Africa: The White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912
Author	:	Thomas Pakenham
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 800 pages
Published	:	December 1st 1992 by Harper Perennial (first published January 1st 1991)
Categories	:	History. Cultural. Africa. Nonfiction. Politics. World History. European History. Literature. 19th Century

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

Ratings: 4.15 From 1983 Users | 127 Reviews

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

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

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA: White Mans 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

A brilliantly constructed narrative that weaves together the many narrative threads of the various European powers grabbing pieces of Africa, occasionally coming into conflict with each other, or the local population. Provides valuable context on how the map of modern Africa developed, and a lesser known chapter in world history of the 19th century. Quite readable.

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

There are times when this book is like a long, endless slog through dense jungle with water and food running low and the natives looking unfriendly and most of the porters giving up and going home; but still the far distant waters of some undiscovered river beckons the fevered brain. It is dense with detail. There are two whole continents involved and this astonishing thirty years changes at least one of them into something unrecognisable, and all for reasons that were, initially at least,

The White Queen and the Black KingsShall 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

There are times when this book is like a long, endless slog through dense jungle with water and food running low and the natives looking unfriendly and most of the porters giving up and going home; but still the far distant waters of some undiscovered river beckons the fevered brain. It is dense with detail. There are two whole continents involved and this astonishing thirty years changes at least one of them into something unrecognisable, and all for reasons that were, initially at least,