Unscramble for Africa

Starting the Unscramble for Africa: Part One, The Congo Everything starts somewhere. The following interview begins the story of the Unscramble for Africa. As this conversation between Chloé Suberville and Pascal Bashombani below starts to unravel, we can begin to perceive the untangling and unscrambling of Africa. …

Editor’s Note: One of our Contributing Editors, Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, was recently named a CNN Hero. This presents a real challenge to all of us fellow Mez Mag contributing editors because now we have to tease Jackson even more relentlessly so that this recent accolade …

What is needful? Learning and teaching. Teaching and learning. — Taittiriya Upanishad, 7th Century BC Land, cattle, forced labour, hut tax: here (in 1894) were combustible gases unnoticed by the new settlers in both Matebeleland and Mashonaland. If the whites were planning to produce an explosion …

It was just over fifty years (in 1883) since the voortrekkers, the Boer pioneers of the Great Trek, had shaken the dust of Cape Colony off their feet. In their canvas-covered wagons, followed by their cattle, sheep and African servants, they had splashed across the …

At the Peace Conference in 1919 the victors divided the spoils. The British claimed and got the lion’s share. Belgium was thrown a picturesque bone: Ruanda-Urundi hidden away beside the Mountain of the Moon. When the Belgians scuttled out of the Congo in 1960, they …

By September 1890, Kitchener should have smashed the Dervishes and captured Khartoum. His orders were then to stream up-river to force the French to withdraw. To save the southern Sudan, and so Egypt, was an issue over which it was worth risking a war with …