A frank, graphic, autobiographical account of white colonial rule in Africa, first published in an English translation nearly eighty years after it was written. "I wish that I could have seen this book when I was conducting my research in the early 1990s" - Professor Dr Jan-Bart Gewald, Leiden University "A vivid and detailed experience... one gets goose-bumps just reading it" - Dr Martha Akawa, University of Namibia In 1942, in a Cape Town boarding house, Eugen Mansfeld painstakingly typed out his life story, in German, on 179 pages of lined paper. He was entirely alone: one son killed during the Nazi invasion of Normandy; two other sons interned in South Africa; his wife trapped while holidaying in Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War. Mansfeld's autobiography spanned seventy years. Buying ostrich feathers and antelope pelts in the Eastern Cape in the 1890s; managing farms and trading in the remote canyons and deserts of German South-West Africa (now Namibia); fighting to preserve German colonial rule in a bloody, genocidal war against the Herero people in 1904-5; robbing Bushman graves to add to his grotesque collection of skulls; picking up gemstones from the desert sands during the diamond rush in the 1900s; and taking arms in a desert campaign against the British Empire during the First World War. Grave-robber; soldier; diamond-dealer; executioner; horse-trader... Mansfeld's personal history of the "scramble for Africa" is gritty, shocking and unashamed; a scarce autobiographical account of the brutality and inhumanity of the colonisation process published for the first time nearly eighty years after its creation.

Diamonds have long been bloody. A new history shows how Germany’s ruthless African empire brought diamond rings to retail display cases in America—at the cost of African lives. Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove “conflict diamonds” from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds—gems extracted from war zones—has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation. In Blood and Diamonds, Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent U.S. market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the World Wars. Amid today’s global frenzy of mass consumption, Press’s history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence.

Each volume of the Dictionary of World Biography contains 250 entries on the lives of the individuals who shaped their times and left their mark on world history. This is not a who's who. Instead, each entry provides an in-depth essay on the life and career of the individual concerned. Essays commence with a quick reference section that provides basic facts on the individual's life and achievements. The extended biography places the life and works of the individual within an historical context, and the summary at the end of each essay provides a synopsis of the individual's place in history. All entries conclude with a fully annotated bibliography.

One of West Africa's earliest recipe books, "The Ghana Cookery Book" was first published in Accra in 1933. Over 800 recipes make use of a wealth of local ingredients: ripe, tropical fruit, abundant fresh fish from the Atlantic Ocean, exotic spices, and a profusion of vegetables, grains and nuts from the fertile plantations of the Gold Coast. Providing a fascinating, unique snapshot of West African cuisine during the colonial period, "The Ghana Cookery Book" features a number of charming period advertisements, and is packed with vintage hints and tips on running a household in tropical Africa. If you have an interest in West Africa and the cultural histories of the region, this book makes for essential and enjoyable reading.