THE ENGLISH ARRIVE IN AFRICA c.1800
Southern Africa
1760 England was by now the most powerful nation on Earth having removed the French from both North America and India but when loosing America in 1776 the superpower sets about strengthening its naval routes from England to India. In 1790 England assume control in Cape Town from the Boer settlers for strategic reasons and to ensure unmolested support for their ship repair and re-watering yards en-route to India. The Dutch Boers in Cape Town are forced to move north east from the Cape as they become fed up with British attempts to outlaw slavery by all white nations operating in Africa. The British assume full control of the Cape in 1806. By 1835 Dutch Afrikaners leave the Cape area en-mass in what now is called the Great Trek.

Northern Africa
The French resurface as a threat to England under Napoleon.
In the early days of Napoleon he was appointed head of the French army and attacked Italy, where in discussions with the Pope he was given the blessing to attack Imperial Britain commencing with their Empire. His first staging post was the conquest of Egypt to be followed by British controlled India. Egypt fell to Napoleon in 1798 in the Battle of the Pyramids. This historic victory was immediately annulled by the English fleet under Nelson who totally destroyed the French Navy in the mouth of the Nile.

The British stayed in but did not occupy Egypt (which was part of the Ottoman Empire) until 1882 when the security of the Suez sea route was put in question by an Arab nationalist uprising. Britain remained in Egypt, extending south in Sudan, until 1956

THE EUROPEAN RACE TO COLONISE AFRICA
Britain was the only world superpower from 1760- 1914 but in 1870 two new European countries, Germany and Italy, were finally unified and joined with the English, French, Belgiums and Portuguese in looking to colonise the only remaining unexplored continent, Africa.

England is very much at the forefront having set up the African Association in London in 1788. Medical doctor Mungo Park from Scotland is commissioned to explore the river Niger and find Timbuktu which is still an important Gold city but in the hands of still hated Muslims. Mungo Park is captured by Muslim Arabs on his first trip and drowns during his second! It is left to French explorer Rene Caillie in 1828 to become the first European to reach Timbuktu. The French quickly follow this up with a full invasion from the north and occupy all of Algeria and the desert, south to Timbuktu and the Niger river basin by 1830. The French conquests are hard won as unfortunately for the French the local Arabs are in the throws of an Islamic fundamentalist revival where fighting to the death is the quick route to heaven. However the French Generals had something to prove having lost so many wars to the British since 1760, ( India, Canada, the Nile, Trafalgar and Waterloo so without any authority from Paris claim Algeria as part of France.

David Livingstone explores Black Africa
In the mean time the early Victorians launched numerous British explorers into Africa, notably another Scottish medic Dr David Livingstone who arrived in South Africa as a Christian missionary in 1841. Livingstone was the first white man to see, the Victoria Falls and the upper reaches of the river Zambezi. He was also the first white man to traverse the African continent (Zambezi river in the east to Luanda on the Atlantic coast) and he also attempted to trace the source of the river Nile. His heart is buried where he died by the African Lake, Bangweulu and his body lies in Westminster Abbey.

Henry Morton Stanley
Sir Henry Stanley as just Mr Stanley emigrated from Britain in 1859 to become a reporter for the New York Herald. In 1871 he was sent by the paper to Africa to find and write a story about David Livingstone. Livingstone he duly found and Stanley remained an African explorer to become just as famous as Livingstone. So famous that he was hired by King Leopold of Belgium to explore and set up the upper reaches of the Congo River as the Kings private estate in Africa. The King ruthlessly exploited the area and its inhabitants to his dying day.

Germany who had just humiliated France in the Franco-Prussian war now feel they should be a world power and in 1884 set up a European conference in Berlin to carve up Africa between the European powers. This is duly done with no regard whatsoever for local African ruling dynasties and histories. The following countries now “own” Africa in approximate ascending order by land mass: France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Spain and Italy.

Cecil Rhodes
A little earlier a rather sickly young man, Cecil Rhodes, the son of an East Anglican vicar, leaves England in 1870 to join a farming brother in Natal, South Africa. No one man can claim to have acquired so much land and wealth on behalf of his country as Cecil Rhodes.
An aunt loaned Rhodes £3000 for the trip which he invested on arrival in a diamond mine in Boer/Afrikaner Transvaal. (Over the river Vaal). He soon leaves his brothers cotton farm to look after his diamond investments but takes a break from this work to study back home at Oxford University. Here he is influenced by the likes of Ruskin and develops the view that the English have the divine right to rule the world. He sets forth, back to Southern Africa, to do just that. His financial powerbase is created by wheeler dealing in the Transvaal where the fledgling diamond business is in financial difficulties. Using his acquired company De Beers, he purchases a number of bankrupt mines which mainly require mine water extraction technology, which Rhodes acquires, and restarts them.

The fact that the diamond mines are in Boer territory is a disadvantage, so Rhodes supports and is involved in an attempted coupe (against the President of Transvaal, Stephanus Kruger) which fails. Rhodes who had become Prime Minister of the Cape is forced to resign.
The British Government takes up the mantle and sends in the army to acquire the Boer lands of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to become part of the British Empire.

The Boer War. 1880-81 and 1899-1902
The English expect this to be over quickly but underestimate the Boer will to fight and a bloody and cruel battle commences. Boers are mainly farmers and huntsmen who do what ever they do with the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. What they do well is guerrilla warfare and they know every inch of their land. The British call for huge reinforcements from home and eventually heavily outnumbering the Boers the battle is won.

A feature of the Boer War is the English invention of the concentration camp (as used by the Germans in the Second World War). In the Boer War the English develop a scorched earth policy by burning Boer farms and rounding up women and children for internment in these concentration camps where food is so short that many die with those who survive looking much the same as the Jewish survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust. The British murder 20,000 innocent women and children in this manner.

Rhodesia
In the mean time Cecil Rhodes travels further north into Black Africa to look for the gold mines of the ancient Zimbabwe tribe. There is no gold but his followers stay as farmers taking over the land occupied by the Matabele and Mashona tribes.
The land, Rhodesia is named after him and at that time extended both north and south of the Zambezi River. Now called Zambia in the north and Zimbabwe in the south.

Rhodes died in 1902 as one of the wealthiest men in the world almost fulfilling one of his ambitions in painting the whole of the eastern side of Africa pink (the colour used on maps to show the British Empire.) The only hole in the pink was German occupied East Africa (now called Tanganyika) which England gained after the First World War, making the British ruled territories in the east of Africa going north to south as:
Egypt, Sudan, British Somaliland, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia now Zambia, Southern Rhodesia now Zimbabwe, Bechuanaland now Botswana and the Union of South Africa.
To these must be added the huge country of Nigeria in the west which turned out to be both oil rich and disastrously divided between a Muslim north and a Christian south.

The end of the European Empires in Africa and the recommencement of home rule.
After the 1939-45 war the world’s colonised countries saw their opportunity to regain self government when the European colonial masters were too weak to do anything about it. The first major loss to England was of course India in 1948, then for France the loss of Vietnam (French Indo-China) and the commencement of the Algerian war in 1954.

The first African country to move against the British was Egypt under their leader Colonel Nasser who in 1956 nationalised the Suez Canal with out compensation to the British who had paid Egypt £4 million pounds for a 100 % share in 1870. The British immediately retaliated with the help of Israel and France but were forced to withdraw their troops by the Americans and Russians. The Americans did not want to be brought into another war and the Russians who wanted Egypt, and much of the rest of Africa, for themselves. The British for the first time in hundreds of years were forced to cow tow to international pressure. The English Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign. This set the climate for the whole of Africa to seek independence from their European masters which was achieved with the exception of Rhodesia by most countries in the 1960s. Ian Smith of Rhodesia refused to comply with British instructions to hand over power to the Africans and independently remained in power until 1980. Smith thought (in retrospect quite rightly) that Black Africans were not capable of ruling themselves in a civilised way.

The last 50 years (1955-2005.)
Smith was right, no African nation is ruled by a democratic elected government who totally respects the rule of law and human rights and sensibly uses the huge amounts of aid money received from western donor nations to help the starving Africans in their crossly mismanaged economies. Indeed the majority of financial aid finds its way into the private Swiss bank accounts of the African rulers and their cronies. Many African countries have seen millions murdered in ethnic genocides and more millions starved to death as their crops fail due to land grabbing or mismanagement aggravated by climate change.

Before the end of the cold war the Russians and the Americans were sending in troops to secure particular countries for either Communism or Capitalism and the poor locals suffered. The peace following the end of the cold war saw some improvements but the world has now learnt that aid is a waste of money unless local rulers are bypassed as is the case with donations to charities who direct aid to those on the ground who need it. In the mean time dictators come and go generally with out fair and free elections and the worst may still celebrate a victory by publicly eating the unsuccessful candidate. (Liberia)
Sometimes, but unfortunately infrequently, good men come to the top as in the case of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu both of South Africa.