The Scramble For Africa

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Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Readers of Mostafa Minawi's The Ottoman Scramble for Africa are in for a treat. What starts out as the genealogy of a powerful Damascene Arab notable family evolves into a fascinating tale of Ottoman global ambitions in Libya and central Africa in the 1890s. With an engaging story, well-grounded in a number of archives, this book is a welcome piece of the puzzle surrounding late Ottoman colonialism."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.” 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. 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 author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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. Even more historical context is given by your second book, Travels into the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park. Now this was two journeys in 1795 and 1805.

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As a result, millions of people died under the brutal rule of King Leopold II. Many historians estimate that as many as 10 million people were killed, though the actual figure may be higher.

Yes, the Treaty of Berlin and the scramble that that set off. It is the set text on that most vital and defining period in terms of the West’s engagement with Africa. He writes beautifully and it’s massively encyclopedic in its breadth of scholarship. You can’t understand anything about contemporary Africa without reading that book. Minawi writes with passion and precision, and he has produced an accessible and thought-provoking book, having found in Azmzade an auspicious narrative hook. This is an ambitious book that casts light on hitherto unknown aspects of Ottoman history, the view from the perspective of the empire's outlying regions at the turn to the twentieth century."

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I loved this book. Park comes from a pre-racist Europe, and he’s travelling along the 16th parallel – the sort of watershed between ‘Animus’ Africa and Islamic Africa. And a lot of the cultures he moves through, in terms of literature and mathematics and astrology, are equal to or more advanced than what he’s used to at home. It was a very interesting period.

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.” Mostafa Minawi's book on Ottoman imperial presence in Africa constitutes an important intervention in the study of European colonialism. This is, indeed, an important book that greatly advances our understanding of the global implications of Europe's Scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. It will be of great interest to scholars of colonial Africa and the Middle East, as well to those with an interest in the global ramifications of European empire building."He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. The 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.” 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. The impact of British rule can also be seen in these countries’ styles of government and education systems, which in many ways are similar to the British systems of government and education. This was a result of British systems of government and education replacing those of the indigenous people before colonisation. Many of these systems were lost, and the indigenous people were given no choice but to comply with the newer systems.