{"product_id":"9780957083752","title":"Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld: A German Settler's Life in Colonial Namibia","description":"\u003cp\u003eA frank, graphic, autobiographical account of white colonial rule in Africa, first published in an English translation nearly eighty years after it was written.\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 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMansfeld'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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGrave-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\u003cem\u003e\"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\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jeppestown Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47008636862704,"sku":"9780957083752","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780957083752_p0.jpg?v=1763873066","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780957083752","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}