SEA LION PRESS

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

By Gary Oswald Nzinga-a-Nkuwu or João I, King of Kongo at the time of Portuguese first contact, as depicted by Pierre Duflos Prior to the 19th Century, white people were rare in Africa. Residents in the big slaving ports would be used to white faces, both on the ships coming in to buy human cargo and from the small group of permanent residents in their forts, organising trade and alliances with the African elites. But inland, white people were only talked about rather than s

By Gary Oswald Arthur H. Clark's drawing of the HMS Brisk capturing the slave ship Emanuela. It is estimated that in the 1780s less than a quarter of the human world was what we would consider free. The rest were held in some kind of bondage, whether serfs, slaves or feudal peasants and few people were more disproportionately represented in this bondage than the Africans. For centuries Africa was defined as a place slaves came from. Millions were sent across the Atlantic wher

By Gary Oswald Ad for an 1893/1894 ethnological exposition of Sámi in Hamburg-Saint Paul by Adolph Friedländer This series of articles normally looks at countries, here we're going to focus instead on two individuals, one who lived prior to the Scramble and one who lived during it but who both were children when their homelands were conquered by Europeans. The two in question are Sara Baartman, who was born in the 1770s and was a house servant in the Dutch Cape Colony and Ota

By Gary Oswald Port Victoria, Mahe, Seychelles c.1895 Wars inevitably lead to exiles. When the Haitian Revolution saw the Black Slaves of Hispaniola take control of that island, the white residents of that island moved to exile communities in Cuba and the Southern United States, in one of the first modern refugee crises. And, of course more recent wars have resulted in the same problems, the boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon are one such example, the Syria

By Gary Oswald Statue of Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan in Mogadishu, Somalia. ‘I have rejected the abundant wealth the colonizers were willing to offer me. By abandoning my religion for the colonizer’s wealth is just accepting to be placed in the hell which I will not do. Only dreadful result is inherited from collaborating with the colonizers.’ The English translation, I am assured, loses most of the poetry of the original Somali but the above is a quote from one of the la

By Gary Oswald Abdallahi ibn Muhammad as drawn by Siegfried Weiß and shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence Abdallahi Ibn-Mohammed Al-Khalifa more than anyone else could be said to have created the Mahdist revolt. He had been born in a nomadic tribe subject to Darfur, which was then still independent from Egypt, as the grandson of a West African holy man from the Sokoto Caliphate. West Africa had just emerged from the Fulani jihads, a period of holy war and destruction which h

By Gary Oswald Muhammad Ahmad as portrayed by an unknown artist There is a tendency by students of history to place greater emphasis on motives that make sense within your own worldview. In this article, about the Mahdist revolt of Muhammad Ahmad, I will try and avoid that trap as best I can. There were numerous local revolts in the Sudan from 1879 to 1881 and they largely happened for economic reasons, the ban on slaves was making slave traders poorer while the poll tax was

By Gary Oswald Flag of the Khedivate of Egypt This article, the first of three about the Sudanese wars, is about Egypt during the scramble of Africa when it was still nominally a vassal of the Ottomans and in reality controlled by Muhammed Ali and his dynasty. Ali, an Albanian mercenary born in modern day Greece, seized control of Egypt while fighting in Ottoman service during the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Contemporary sources vary on whether they describe th

By Gary Oswald John Cary's 1805 Map of Africa At the beginning of the 19th century, the coast of Africa was well known, but the interior was still a mystery. Maps written by Europeans, Americans or Asians could not show where rivers and lakes were or which Kingdoms held sway. To an extent, this was not unique to Africa, most of the exploration of the 15th to 18th centuries had been done by boat. The Interiors of North America, Australia and the Amazon were still often not map

By Gary Oswald Flag of the Ethiopian Empire In 1868, the British Army invaded Ethiopia in order to free hostages that had been taken by Emperor Tewodros II to force the British into giving him the military support he’d asked for . Their General, Robert Napier, bought only 13,000 soldiers, though he had also gathered 26,000 camp followers and over 40,000 animals to support his army due to the British operating so far from their closest base in Yemen. Upon arriving in Ethiopia,

By Gary Oswald Depiction of the conquest of Madagascar. Artist is Louis Charles Bombled of Musee de l'Armee. The exact time Madagascar was first settled by humans is still disputed but most accounts date it to sometime between 200 and 900 AD, comfortably after the settlement of most other landmasses. Modern DNA research indicate that the first settlers were a mixture of Malay people from Indonesia and Bantu people from Africa. By around 1100 AD not only was Madagascar fully p

By Gary Oswald The Flag of the Sultanate of Oman There were eight European Empires involved in the Scramble. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the UK. The great losers of those 8 were the Ottoman Empire of Turkey who started the 19th century as the largest foreign power in the continent with nominal control from Morocco to Eritrea but saw its African departments grow more and more independent and eventually lost them to the other empires. By 1914, t

By Gary Oswald Flag of the Congo Free State Leopold’s aim for his colony in Africa was to make money. His efforts in portraying himself as a humanitarian were always aimed towards collecting donations, or ‘loans’ which he had no intention of paying back, from Europeans and Americans and his actions within the colony were the purest type of wealth extraction. Resources were to be taken out and sold and no money was to be given to the Africans. Originally, this meant primarily

By Gary Oswald 1890 map of the Congo Free State from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol. 1 The history of Slavery in Africa is one going back thousands of years. In this it's much the same as every other continent. Slavery varied in both the details and in the prevalence across the world but most polities to ever exit have used slaves. In terms of those details, I don't ever want to imply any slavery wasn't evil but certainly slaves tortured and sacrificed in Vodun ceremonies w

By Gary Oswald Ideas are cheap. Most people can come up with a thousand concepts for books. The skill is in the execution. In bringing that vision into life, putting the idea into words. And yet there is still a value in a good concept. There are hundreds of well written, well executed books that hold no interest to me because the concept is one I don’t care for. The world’s best written story about the innate eroticism of painting walls is still unlikely to become a best sel

By Gary Oswald Warning: This is an article about a Genocide and will be tough reading. As discussed at the end of the last article , the first blow to the good relations between the Herero and the Germans was the Rinderpest epizootic. Rinderpest is an infectious viral disease that arrived in Africa during the Italian Campaign in Somaliland because Cattle from India were bought in to supply the Italian troops. The infection spread like wildfire through cattle herds in Africa,

By Gary Oswald Hendrik Witbooi, Nama Leader, with Theodor Leutwein, German Governor, in 1896. Photo from the German Federal Archive and shared under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence The residents of the area that is currently the country of Namibia arrived there in a series of different migrations. The first residents were the San, who had been there since at least 25,000 BC. Then various Bantu cattle driving pastoralists arrived in the area during the 1600s, the most powerful of whi