Very interesting. I definitely need to read more about Africa, so this could be a good start.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 26/03/2015 10:44:42 PM
View original postOne of the other things that struck me about The Scramble for Africa is that many of the crises that beset the colonial powers in this era seem to be repeating themselves now. The Mahdi Rebellion in Sudan is eerily reminiscent of the Islamic State of today, complete with its penchant for beheadings and an apocalyptic spin on Islam. Tellingly, the European Powers just let them do their vicious and barbaric thing, ignoring their pseudo-state for eighteen years before sending Kitchener (and with him, a young Winston Churchill) to show the world just how many sword-waving lunatics can be killed with one properly sited Maxim Gun at virtually no casualties to the modern army. I can’t help but think the US should let the powers of the region deal with the Islamic State and not waste American lives or money on a totally useless war that the Iranians, Turks and Saudis are perfectly capable of fighting without us for the next eighteen years.
This is one of the few parts of African history I'm familiar with, as I wrote a paper on the Egyptian and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, obviously including the Mahdi rebellion as well. I certainly hadn't thought of it in IS terms yet... As for the Maxim gun thing, though, that's a kind of ironic statement considering that one of the main drivers for Kitchener's conquest, when it finally occurred, was actually the Italian humiliation at Adowa (not that the Mahdiyya state had anything to do with Adowa, but the Italians did put pressure on its southern borders while they were there, and the British felt that the departure of the Italians could give the Mahdiyya leadership more resources to threaten the Egyptian border areas).
Other than that, I should also point out in the Mahdi's defense that the Egyptians weren't necessarily the best administrators and did give the Sudanese plenty of reasons for wanting to rebel at the time.
What did actually remind me of the Mahdi rebellion in recent events was the burial of bin Laden after his killing, and the pains to which the Americans went to stress it had happened in the right Islamic way. Proving that the Western powers have in fact learned some things; when Kitchener conquered Khartoum, his troops decided to destroy the Mahdi's mausoleum, dig up his bones and toss them in the Nile.
View original postThe Scramble for Africa touches upon another point that I think people like Hochschild are loth to admit. Colonialism in Africa was, aside from South Africa, where the mines led to fabulous wealth, and Congo, where Leopold’s brutal monopolistic pseudo-slave state was able to maintain an unheard-of profit margin on rubber during the rubber boom, a huge economic loss for the colonial powers. Colonial agents died in their thousands of tropical fevers, malaria and other diseases that Europeans were unused to. At a certain point, the Great Powers were fighting over places just to extend their territory as an end in itself, with no thought as to the utility of the lands they were claiming. The Fashoda incident is probably the height of this delusion, as the British Empire and the French nearly went to war over a totally useless collection of mud huts in a malarial swamp with no natural resources or strategic value (the village of Fashoda, or Kodok as it is now called, is on the Nile in South Sudan today and still consists of little more than a few huts in the same malarial swamp). The Great Powers were positioning themselves for the coming war in Europe by playing the colonial game. After World War I, the issue wasn’t really if the colonies needed to be freed, but how and when. Despite this recognition, independence, when it did come, was unplanned and sudden and led to further disruptions, coups, wars and ethnic strife.
I can't quite agree with you there. The Kodok region may not have been very valuable (though today's Sudanese oilfields aren't that far from Kodok if I'm not mistaken), but it did make sense for the British to want that link between their Egyptian possessions and the ones in Uganda. I'm not sure how much sense the rival French plan for an east-west link all across Africa ever made, since most of that land was desert, but they too wanted Fashoda for strategic reasons. What's most fascinating about the British conquest of Sudan, including the Fashoda incident that happened during that time, is the way they carried it out partially in the name of Egypt (establishing the "Anglo-Egyptian Condominium" in Sudan, at least on paper), and managed to make the Egyptians foot much of the bill for it, too.
The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham
- 25/03/2015 11:51:41 PM
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Damn. What a review. How can I not buy the book after reading that?
- 26/03/2015 07:19:22 AM
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That might be interesting - what is the take on things? *NM*
- 26/03/2015 01:15:42 PM
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Click on a couple of different series to check out the various titles he draws from.
- 02/04/2015 11:37:42 PM
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I bought the Pakenham book from the Folio Society a few years ago.
- 03/04/2015 01:40:18 AM
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Very interesting. I definitely need to read more about Africa, so this could be a good start.
- 26/03/2015 10:44:42 PM
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What was wrong with blowing up the Mahdi's tomb?
- 27/03/2015 04:10:28 PM
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