Scramble for Africa

I live in South Africa and this is an amazing account of a terrible and life changing time in our history. I had great-grandfathers on both sides. My Boer grandfather wrote a diary and then memoirs which I found recently and translated and made a book of them.

This is a truly great book which tells the complex but rivetting tale of how Africa came to be divided up by the main European powers. It was an unseemly scramble that lasted barely a decade - by the end, every African country apart from Ethiopia had succumbed to Western rule. Packenham's narrative weaves expertly between the scenes in London, Brussels, Berlin and Paris as the different governments sated their greed.