Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1991.
This book comes in 738 pages long (if you read the index). I knew right away I wasn’t going to finish it. What I didn’t realize is that I didn’t even want to start it.
This is everything you want to know about the background of Africa’s beginnings from 1878 to 1912. In a very comprehensive and detailed prose Pakenham uncovers the early “scramble” Europeans made to conquer the unknown “dark” territory. In just under 30 years most of the continent was claimed and “civilized” by five different greedy European powers.
Reason read: July is the best time to visit Africa…or so the travel sites say.
Author fact: According to the author page in Scramble for Africa Pakenham lived in a “crumbling castle” in Ireland. How cool is that?
Book trivia: Scramble for Africa won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and the Alan Paton award.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Africa: Today and Yesterday” (p 9).
~*LunaSea*~ 