The Scramble for Africa

"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. It’s really devastating. He’s the first guy that I’m aware of who really put the hatchet into King Leopold of Belgium, for whom the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is now, was a private estate until the Belgian government took it off him in 1909. It was literally his private property. And the estimates vary, but he murdered the most gigantic numbers of people in forcing them to grow rubber. Thomas’s book covers the despotic evil of people like Leopold, and the sort of contemptuous arrogance of Rhodes – who conquered Rhodesia partly by introducing smallpox-infected blankets as gifts to the Matabele [now Ndebele]. The book brilliantly deconstructs the personalities of these people, and it is, of course, meticulously researched. It’s also a compelling read, like an absolutely gripping novel."

"I first went to South Africa in an extraordinary, tumultuous time, just before the end of apartheid. It was May 1993, and no one was quite sure what way the country was headed. So my first year there was spent covering the very traumatic final year of white rule and the rise to power of the ANC, and then I stayed on for another four years covering Mandela’s presidency as a foreign correspondent. I then left and was away for most of the decade, I went back once in the intervening nine or ten years before I returned in January 2007 for a second stint of correspondency for the Financial Times. I was then there for two years with my family, covering the end of the first chapter of the post-apartheid story, the last two years of the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor and the rise of Jacob Zuma. I found it was a very interesting and unexpected second chapter, I hadn’t expected to go back. I was in a good position to see how the country had changed and hadn’t changed, whereas people who had been living there all along watching this incremental change had lost sight of some of the things that were happening. Well I suppose it was partly pulled together by the British and by the Afrikaners. The British played a major role in the 19th century when the colonial powers were starting to carve up the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. The pivotal event that occurred for South Africa was in the 1860s when they discovered diamonds and then ten, fifteen years later they discovered gold and it suddenly became clear that this was not just another dusty African country, but an immensely wealthy one. In a sense that sealed the fate of the country thereafter, there was this intense struggle for those resources between the Brits and the indigenous people and the Afrikaners who were also trying to carve out a patch of South Africa for themselves. So certainly one can’t deny the role that Britain, and lately the Afrikaners, played in creating South Africa, in creating the boundaries and of course in moving the African people around willy-nilly to suit the interests of the white Africans. Pakenham’s book is just an amazing account of, as you say, how extraordinarily rapid the annexation of an entire continent was. It happened over about 20 years, between 1880 and 1900, when Britain and France in particular but also Belgium, Portugal to a lesser extent, and latterly Germany, divided a continent. One moment, in 1880, there was a large part of the continent that was pretty much unknown territory and the next it had all been annexed, and the local chiefs or ruling councils had all been pushed out of the way. I mean, it’s a fairly shabby story, but also a remarkable one. It had pretty calamitous consequences for large parts of Africa, and the debate over the legacy of colonialism continues to rage. While sadly it’s become perfectly clear that some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, like Somalia for example, were better governed under colonial rule than they are now, the fact remains that for most black Africans the advent of the colonial powers was a psychologically traumatizing experience and you can see the consequences of that, I think, still. Certainly in South Africa today the past has not been forgiven nor forgotten."