The Scramble for Africa - Thomas Pakenham

The dark continent. Before the rivers and lakes were charted, before trading routes were hacked through the bush, before maps became filled with lines and the blank spaces were seen to contain numerous tribes, Africa was a foreboding darkness suggesting both untold dangers, and undreamed of possibilities. Between Cairo and the Cape, was a vast hinterland. While missionaries and explorers led the way, bringing back news and rumor, Europe's colonial powers played their diplomats and colonial offices against one another - parsing out vast tracts, with only a cursory appreciation for what the land contained. Though hoped-for fields of gold, ivory, and palm oil could titillate the dreams of men like Stanley and Brazza, European dreams of African promise were often left to colonial administrators; men whose charge was rationalizing and managing a wilderness. Behind Livingstone's banner of the "three C's" - commerce, Christianity, and civilization - colonial rhetoric often traded on the possible future of a continent to be manged without the yoke of a past.

Pakenham's work provides a single-volume account of the transition from the years of exploration, through the period of colonial wrangling, and into the early forays of Africans trying to assert their right to self determination. These years of the so-called "Scramble for Africa" saw some of Europe's most famous, and infamous, 19th century statesmen contesting with one another to extend their nations' claim to empire and African hegemony. Here we witness Disraeli and Gladstone, Bismarck and Leopold, extending empires and contending with foes, both foreign and domestic. While the careful reader might find that Pakenham gives short shrift to the untold millions of Africans who became, some knowingly, most unknowingly, dispossessed of their homelands, his approach is one which clearly prizes the political and diplomatic character of the period. In essence, the streets of London, Berlin, Rome, and Paris, the political whims of European peoples and governments, encroached upon African villages and people, many of whom had never seen a European. As the fingers of empire reached deeper into the continent, European political and military action was broadly manifest. Attempts at control and custodianship of African lands often pivoted-upon political and diplomatic relationships far away. In the hands of the few, the livelihoods, homes, and freedom of many unaccounted for - primarily black - faces were bandied about and, all-so-often, overlooked. As commerce, Christianity, and civilization illuminated Africa, Africans themselves increasingly became a part of a globalized world in which their concerns were given scant consideration.

Pakenham's work is a triumph for weaving together the colonial and metropolitan experiences which spanned both continents. By placing these numerous colonial stories into a single volume, disparate places are brought into stronger contrast and conversation with one another. While this cannot but short-change indigenous peoples, it provides an overview of the continent as it was conceived in the halls of power: a vast blank territory, ripe for the taking.