SEA LION PRESS

By Gary Oswald Picture of King Lobengula of the Matabele; by Ralph Peacock, based on a sketch by E. A. Maund The Shona people, the largest ethnicity in modern day Zimbabwe, have a much longer history of strong centralised Empires than most of Southern Africa. Great Zimbabwe was the dominant force in the country in the early middle ages, the Mutapa ruled much of it from the 15th to 18th centuries and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries the Shona were united under the

By Gary Oswald Defeat of the Ashantees, by the British forces under the command of Coll. Sutherland, July 11th 1824 The Machine Gun more than anything else is the iconic weapon of the Scramble for Africa, the thing that made European conquest possible. Early versions of it often jammed in combat, allowing European forces to be defeated, which meant it was often unpopular by soldiers on the grounds, but by the 1890s it was much more reliable and so a killing machine, something

By Gary Oswald The traditional Senussi banner, later used as inspiration of the flag of Cyrenaica and eventually incorporated into the flag of Libya. Shared under the CC0 licence. The fate of the Senussi family is heavily entwined with the modern history of Libya, they were the royal family of the Kingdom of Libya, which existed from 1951 to 1969 and were the leaders of the armies of the Senussi order during their wars with Italy from 1911 to 1932. But the Senussi were not or

By Gary Oswald Flag of Republic of the Rif African forces defeated European forces all the time during the Scramble. It was not remotely uncommon for Imperial patrols, columns and garrisoned posts to be wiped out. The nature of colonial rule was that there was almost always less soldiers than conquered people, so they were vulnerable to being overwhelmed. What was rare was for that momentary defeat to turn into a rout across an entire front. Probably the best example of that

By Gary Oswald Of the European countries to still have territory in Africa by 1914, Spain controlled the least land. Her African Empire consisted solely of the Canary islands, Western Sahara, parts of Morocco and the two parts of modern day Equatorial Guinea, then known as Spanish Guinea. Those two parts are some islands of which the largest is Bioko (then known as Fernando Po and inhabited by the Bubi) and the mainland enclave of Rio Muni (inhabited primarily by the Fang). S

By Gary Oswald Musa depicted holding an Imperial Golden Globe in the 1375 Catalan Atlas The precolonial history of sub-Saharan Africa is not particularly well taught or widely known in the West, for a bunch of reasons. A major one is a lack of reliable sources (a lot of major incidents are known primarily by oral history, which often gets corrupted and in some cases aren't shared with outsiders). There's also often a lack of funding into research because Africa tends not to b

By Gary Oswald Flag of Transvaal The Great Trek of white settlers away from the British Cape Colony to their own Republics in the interior has been somewhat mythologised and so it is perhaps worth putting it in context. For a start, it wasn't a Trek of purely white settlers. The Voortrekkers bought with them their black servants and slaves so, as a result, the Trek was composed of around half black people and half white people and the black retainers were crucial for the Boer

By Gary Oswald Flag of Lesotho Henry Bartle Frere was recalled to London in August 1880 by the new Gladstone ministry to answer for having launched an unauthorised war against the Zulu which led to the loss of nearly 2,000 British Soldiers. But, to an extent, he could defend himself as not having done a terrible job. The UK, after the annexation of the Transvaal Boer Republic, was not far from it's goal of a self defending autonomous United South Africa with an entirely disa

By Gary Oswald Portrait of Sir Henry Bartle Frere, 1st Baronet. Painting by George Reed. British Policy towards Southern Africa was always somewhat hot and cold, depending on who was in Power in London, in terms of both whether the government was Conservative or Liberal and whether the Colonial Office was more interested in balancing the books or painting the Map. While there were certainly periods of expansion, there were also periods of retreat. In the 1830s they had turned

By Gary Oswald Nongqawuse (right) with fellow prophet, Nonkosi In 1856, the Xhosa people of the Western and Eastern Cape provinces of modern South Africa committed possibly the single largest unforced error in the history of modern geopolitics. It began when a 15 year old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse was asked to scare birds from her Uncle's farm. There she reported meeting two spirits of the dead, who told her that the Xhosa should destroy all their crops and kill all their c

By Gary Oswald Khoekua marksmen played a key role in the Cape Frontier Wars One of the most shocking things about the Scramble of Africa was its speed. In less than 40 years, Africa went from mostly free to mostly run by European Empires. Prior to the 1870s, a lot of African polities had either limited contact with Europe or were used to them as fairly weak visiting traders who could be forced to back down by threats. The Kingdoms of Dahomey and Benin certainly knew who the E

By Gary Oswald The conference of Berlin, as illustrated in "Illustrierte Zeitung The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 is probably the best known and most taught moment of the Scramble of Africa. It was a meeting of representatives from 14 countries who came together in Germany to decide the future of Africa. Famously the people invited included no Africans at all. The 14 countries who got to decide on the fate of a continent were Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany

By Gary Oswald Cattle dead from rinderpest in South Africa, 1896 Between 1500 and 1820, Africa’s population declined relative to that of the rest of the world due a combination of booming populations in Europe and Asia and the effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The decline of that Slave Trade and the increasing use of new agricultural techniques within Africa during the 19th century, should have led to this being reversed but while relative population stabilised it didn’t s

By Gary Oswald Everfair by Nisi Shawl, is a book that I knew I had to buy as soon as I saw the concept. Which is 'what if the Congo Free State was overthrown by Native Africans before it got sold to Belgium', The titular Everfair is the state that emerges within the Congo after Leopold's defeat and is run by a coalition of native Africans, African American Missionaries and European Socialists as the progressive beacon that the Congo Free State was sold as being. It is rare f

By Gary Oswald Agence Meurisse's photo of Blaise Diagne taken in 1921 In 1914, Blaise Diagne became the first entirely ethnically black African to be elected to a European parliament when he entered the French Chamber of Deputies as their representative for Senegal. He was a socialist outsider who had used black votes to overturn the mixed race and white dominance of the Colony and his success was bitterly opposed by the elite of both the colony and France. There were even at

By Gary Oswald Picture of Behanzin, King of Dahomey by Alexandre d'Albéca. The King once claimed to have spent his entire life smoking a pipe, including when he was a newborn baby, and would only be pictured with one. The first articles I ever wrote for this site were a three part series looking at the Kingdom of Dahomey in modern day Benin, West Africa. In that series I said the following "D ahomey was in the middle of a process of change when it was conquered by the Fren

By Gary Oswald Samori Ture The African Polities of the late 19th century threw up more than their fair share of brilliant military leaders and commanders, a consequence of constant warfare, but the pick of the bunch was almost certainly Samori Ture. Samori fought the French Empire throughout Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire for 16 years of bitter warfare. Few other African rulers put up such prolonged and effective resistance to European imperialism and few ru

By Gary Oswald Flag of Colonial Sierra Leone As previously discussed , Sierra Leone began as a utopian private project wherein the black poor of Europe and North America could build their own city in Africa. In 1808, this project, struggling with money and food, was bought out by the British Empire and was run as a crown colony, with a white Governor in charge. Freetown, its capital, became the base of the British West African Squadron during the Blockade of Africa and so wh

By Alexander Wallace Article from the Ottawa Journal All too often, those of us in the West have rather skewed views of what we consider ‘developed.’ Much of the world thought that the Soviet Union was a backward, almost failing state when it shot first Sputnik and then Yuri Gagarin into space. At that time, it was the United States that swaggered haughtily about the world with an optimism about its future that seemed almost infectious. But it was not only the Cold War hegemo

By Gary Oswald Flag of Liberia The coastal people of modern day Liberia and Sierra Leone, especially those who spoke one of the Kru languages, had done well out of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The decline of the Songhai and Mali Empires and then their collapse after the 1590 Moroccan invasion of the Sahel had destabilised the land to their north, destroying existing trade routes and sending refugees down into their territory. As a result they had re-orientated towards the sea, f