"Do not talk to me of gold…[it] brings more dissension, misfortune and unexpected plagues in its trails than benefits." So said Paul Kruger, president of the small Boer republic of the Transvaal in 1885 when he was told that gold had been found on the country's eastern border. Kruger went on: "Every ounce …taken from the bowels of our soil will yet have to be weighed up with rivers of tears." His prescience was remarkable. Within scarcely a decade his country's independence had been snuffed out by Britain, which lusted to control the world's richest gold mines. This anecdote finds many echoes across the ages and from country to country in a sweeping new history of Africa by Martin Meredith, a historian with an acute eye for detail and a firm grip on the forces that swept the continent. Africa's profusion of natural wealth-whether gold, ivory or the very bodies of its inhabitants-served not to enrich its peoples but to impoverish and enslave them. Going back to the time of Egypt's pharaohs, he notes, Africa's riches have been coveted.
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