{"product_id":"9780957083745","title":"The Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld: A German settler's life in colonial Namibia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"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.\"\u003c\/em\u003e - Professor Dr Jan-Bart Gewald, Leiden University.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"One gets goose-bumps just reading it\"\u003c\/em\u003e - Dr Martha Akawa, University of Namibia. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jeppestown Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47008634896624,"sku":"9780957083745","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780957083745_p0.jpg?v=1763881863","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780957083745","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}