Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld

<p>A frank graphic autobiographical account of white colonial rule in Africa first published in an English translation nearly eighty years after it was written.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><em>"I wish that I could have seen this book when I was conducting my research in the early 1990s."</em> - Professor Dr Jan-Bart Gewald Leiden University.</p><p><em>"One gets goose-bumps just reading it"</em> - Dr Martha Akawa University of Namibia.</p>