In today's encore excerpt--the mad
scramble for Africa, during which western
European powers took over essentially the
entire continent in a thirty year period:



"For centuries, Europeans found penetration
of Africa to be almost impossible: various
diseases endemic to the tropical parts of the
continent, especially malaria, restricted
slave-trading Europeans to coastal enclaves
free from the disease. By the nineteenth
century, steamships may have permitted access
to the interior on Africa's various rivers,
but malaria still killed most of the
explorers. Although the cause of malaria was
not discovered until 1880 and the means of
transmission by mosquito not uncovered until
1897, a process of trial and error led to the
realization by mid-nineteenth century that
the bark of the cinchona tree native to South
America contained quinine, a substance that
prevented malaria. British military personnel
then successfully planted cinchona seeds in
India and by the 1870s had greatly increased
the supply of quinine to their troops.



"The subsequent 'scramble for Africa' may
have been initiated in the 1870s by French
insecurities from their defeat by the Germans
in 1871, by the bizarre ... scheming of
Belgium's King Leopold II, and by British
determination to protect their colonial
interests in India, but all of those
motivations would have been irrelevant had it
not been for ... quinine, ... for steamboats,
or for new technology in weapons that killed
more efficiently. ...



"The American Civil War and a European arms
race in the 1860s and 1870s revolutionized
guns. ... The pinnacle of perfection came in
the 1880s with the invention of a reliable
machine gun, named after its inventor Hiram
Maxim. ... Africans put up a valiant and
stiff resistance [to Europeans], but their
technology was no match for the Maxim gun.
The most famous and perhaps deadly instance
was at the 1898 Battle of Obdurman where
British troops confronted the 40,000-man
Sudanese Dervish army. As described by
Winston Churchill, ... 'The charging
Dervishes sank down in tangled heaps.' ...
After five hours, the British had lost 20
soldiers; 10,000 Sudanese were killed. As a
saying had it:



"Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim gun and they have not.



"With such a technological advantage, by 1900
most of Africa had been divided up among a
handful of European powers, in particular
Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, with
Portugal hanging onto its seventeenth-century
colonial possession in Angola. Only Ethiopia,
under the extraordinary leadership of King
Menelik, defeated the weakest European power,
Italy, and thereby maintained its
independence."



Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern
World, Rowman & Littlefield, Copyright
2006 by Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 142-144.