The Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld

<p><em>"I have read through the manuscript and know that it will be of great use to historians of Namibian and colonial history... 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><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 71 and alone: one son killed during the German invasion of Normandy; two other sons interned in South Africa for their Nazi sympathies; his wife trapped while holidaying in Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War. </p><p>As Mansfeld wrote, he lost himself in memories of an earlier world. 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 war against the ovaHerero people in 1904; 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>The result was a frank, graphic account of white colonial rule in Africa. 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>