AFRICA
No one at all familiar with political conditions in the Near East will blame England for trying to maintain a strong hold upon this part of the world. The Suez Canal, the short cut to India, runs entirely through Egyptian territory, and it would be suicidal for England to let some other power get hold of that salty artery of trade.
The canal, of course, is not of England’s making. As a matter of feet, the British Government tried to prevent de Lesseps from beginning to dig it. There were two reasons for this. In the first place, England had not the slightest confidence in the oft-repeated assertions of Napoleon III that the canal, built by French engineers and with French money, was to be merely a commercial venture. Queen Victoria might love her dear brother in the Tuileries, who once upon a time had done service as a London special constable when her beloved subjects were on the verge of rioting for bread, but the average Englishman did not care to hear mention of a name which reminded him too much of a certain nightmare of half a century before. And in the second place, England feared that this short cut to the Indies and China and Japan would seriously interfere with the prosperity of her own good city on the Cape of Good Hope.
THE ATLANTIC
THE PACIFIC
Nevertheless the canal was built, and Signor Verdi composed his noble opera Aida in honour of the occasion, and the Khedive ruined himself by providing free board and lodging and free tickets to Aida to all his foreign visitors, who filled not less than sixty-nine vessels when they went a-picnicking from Port Said to Suez, the terminus of the canal on the Red Sea.
Then England changed her tactics, and her Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, bought a majority of the shares in the canal which the Khedive was compelled by his necessities to sell. The canal proved to be a godsend for the trade between Asia and Europe^ and produced almost £8,000,000 a year in revenue alone (28,000,000 tons passed through it in 1930).
By the way, the famous antiquities of Egypt are scattered over the land. The pyramids you will find in the neighbourhood of Cairo where once stood Memphis. But Thebes, the old capital of upper Egypt, was situated several hundred miles further up the river. Unfortunately the tremendous irrigation works of Assuan have turned the temple of Philae into a group of little islands which are entirely submerged by the muddy waters of the Nile during part of the year, and which are therefore doomed to ultimate destruction. The grave of King Tutankhamen, who died fourteen centuries before the beginning of our era, is to be found in that part of Egypt, as are the graves of many other kings whose former household possessions and whose mummies are gathered together in the museum of Cairo which is fast becoming a cemetery as well as one of the world’s most interesting collections of antiquities.
The third part of Africa, geographically different from all other sections, is the Sudan. The Sudan runs almost parallel with and south of the Sahara until it is brought to a sudden halt by the high plateaux of Abyssinia which separate it from the Red Sea.
Now in the great international bridge game played with Africa as a stake, when one nation calls “three spades” the others at once answer “four diamonds.” England had taken the Cape from the Dutch during the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Boers or original Dutch colonists disliked English rule, and in particular they thought that the British Government treated the natives too kindly. They therefore inspanned their oxen and trekked northward to what is now Natal. But they were not allowed to found an independent state, and so the ox-wagons rolled westward beyond the Vaal river. This time the Boers were left in peace and the independence of the Transvaal was recognized by the British Government in 1852. All, however, was not to be clear sailing for the new colony. The Boers were faced by the fierce and powerful Zulus who would doubtless have proved too much for them without British help. In 1877 their perilous position caused the British Government to annex the Transvaal, an unwise step, for though two years later the British fought and broke the power of the Zulus, in 1880 the Boers took up arms against their protectors and inflicted a severe defeat upon a British army at Majuba Hill. This, however, would not have been conclusive but that Mr Gladstone, who was eminently fair in this matter, on that occasion gave a lesson in forbearance which all statesmen might well copy: “Just because we were defeated last night and our pride is hurt is no reason why we should insist on the shedding of more blood!” said he, and gave back their independence to the Boers.
But all the world knew what the end would be of this struggle between the British Empire and a handful of farmers. English land companies, acquiring enormous tracts of land from native duels, were creeping up further and further northward. Meanwhile British troops, in order to protect Egypt, were slowly but steadily working their way southward along both banks of the Nile. A famous English missionary was exploring the central region of Africa. Plainly the English were digging themselves a tunnel through the heart of the Dark Continent. They had started building operations simultaneously in Cairo and the Cape (the usual way for tunnels to be constructed). Sooner or later the two ends would meet in the region of the great lakes where both the Nile and the Congo came from, and then England could run her trains from Alexandria to Table Bay (so called after the Table Mountain, that curiously shaped mesa that forms a natural background for Capetown) without a change of cars.
What England was so evidently trying to do along a line running from north to south France now planned to do along a line running from west to east, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, let us say from Dakar in the Senegal to Jibouti in French Somaliland, which was also the port of entry for the whole of Abyssinia and which even then was connected by railway with the Abyssinian capital of Addis Ababa.
Such gigantic projects take time, but not quite as much time as we sometimes feel inclined to expect when we look at the map and contemplate the terrific difficulties that are to be overcome. The French were faced with difficulties enough ere they could carry their line to such a hard-to-get-at spot as Lake Chad, just north of Nigeria—but from there the hardest part of the route began, for the eastern Sudan (now the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) was as inhospitable a region as the Sahara.
Capital, however, in the hands of an energetic modern power, especially if it sees a chance of making twenty shillings on the pound, will dynamite its way through time and space as lightly and easily, and usually as ruthlessly, as a war tank rolls through a flock of geese. The Third French Republic, trying to regain the prestige the Second Empire had lost, was energetic enough, and the stockings and the hidden old cigar boxes of the French peasants produced the necessary capital. The struggle for the right-of-way from west to east in competition with the right-of-way from north to south was on in all seriousness, and the French, who since the beginning of the seventeenth century had been fighting with the English and the Dutch for the possession of the land situated between the Senegal and Gambia rivers, now used that territory as a political tin-opener with which to get at the contents of the unlimited area of the whole of the Sudan.
I can’t go into the details of all the operations and machinations and the diplomatic steps and the commercial steps and the lying and cheating and horse-dealing and cajoling that took place before the French could claim the greater part of the western Sudan as part of their African Empire. Even to-day they keep up the pretence of being merely the temporary administrators of a number of protectorates and mandates, but everybody knows what that means. The gangsters who have acquired exclusive control over the New York milk trade will probably call their band of cut-throats “The Milk Dealers’ Protection Association.” European nations have coined the word ‘mandates.’ But the results are about the same.
Geographically speaking, the French have made a wise choice. Most of the Sudan is very fertile, which of course explains why the natives are by far the most intelligent and industrious of all the different Negro tribes that inhabit Africa. Part of the soil is the same sort of loess as that found in northern China, and as Senegambia (merely another name for Senegal) is not cut off from t
he sea by a mountain ridge, the interior has sufficient rainfall to allow the people to breed cattle and grow maize and millet, the staple food of the natives. They are also remarkable artists, whose curious bits of sculpture and pottery look for all the world like the masterpieces of our own futurist painters.
The Sudanese, however, have one great disadvantage from the white man’s point of view. They are ardent followers of the Prophet whose missionaries overran and converted the whole of northern Africa. In the Sudan, one race especially, the Fula or Fellatah, a mixture of Negroes and Berbers, who are to he found everywhere south and east of the Senegal river as the dominating class of society, have long been a menace to French authority. But railways and roads and aeroplanes and tanks and caterpillar tractors are more powerful than all the Sudras or verses of the Koran. The Fellatah are learning to drive motor cars. Romance is rapidly making its exit by way of the petrol pump.
OASIS
Before the French and the English and the Germans settled down in the Sudan, the greater part of this territory belonged to those charming native princes who had grown rich stealing each, other’s subjects and selling them into slavery. Some of these potentates have gained a certain sad fame as among the most picturesque but also the most brutal of bygone despots. No matter how greedy the new white master might be, he was always a great improvement on the black tyrant who had just been deposed.
The greater part of the southern Sudan is cut off from the ocean by the high steep-faced terraces of the plateau which follows the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea. This prevents rivers such as the Niger from playing a really important part in the development of the interior, for, like the Congo, the Niger is obliged to take a very roundabout way to avoid the main mass of these highlands and, just before it reaches the coast, it must dig a channel through them, with the result that there are a number of cataracts where they are least wanted (that is, near the sea). The upper part of the great African river is often navigable, but there is nobody there to navigate it. In the case of the Niger this does not hold true. It is more a succession of long lakes and small pools than a regular river, as Mungo Park discovered in 1805 when he gave his life to find the river of which he had dreamed since he was a small boy in Scotland. The formation of the river may have been the reason why the Sudanese, deprived of all waterways, were able to make such a success of their overland trade-routes, and why Timbuktu, on the left bank of the upper Niger, could become such a very important centre of trade, the Nijni-Novgorod of Africa, where the north and the south and the east and the west came together to do business.
Timbuktu owes a great deal of its popularity to its curious name which sounds like the magic formula of some mysterious African witch-doctor. In 1353 it had been visited by the Ibn Batuta, the Marco Polo of the Arab world. Twenty years later it made its first appearance on Spanish maps as a great market for gold and salt, commodities which were of almost equal value in medieval days. When Major Gordon Laing reached it in 1826, after having crossed the Sahara from Tripoli, it was merely the ruins of its former self, having been repeatedly attacked and destroyed by Tuareg and Fellatah marauders. On his way to the coast Major Laing was murdered by the Fellatah of Senegambia, but from that time Timbuktu was no longer another mysterious Mecca or Khiva or Tibet, but became a plain, ordinary ‘objective’ of the French forces operating in the western Sudan.
In 1893 it was taken by a French ‘army,’ consisting of one French naval ensign and six white men, accompanied by twelve Senegalese. The power of the desert tribes was not broken, for soon afterwards they killed most of the white invaders and almost completely destroyed a relief corps of two hundred men which was coming up from the coast to avenge the naval contingent.
But of course it was then merely a matter of time before all of the western Sudan would be in French hands. The same held true of the region round Lake Chad in the central part of the Sudan, which was easier of access, because the Benue river, a tributary of the Niger which runs almost due east and west, is much more navigable than the Niger itself.
CONGO AND NIGER
Lake Chad, which lies about 700 feet high, is very shallow and rarely deeper than about twenty feet. In contrast to most other inland seas, the water is fresh and not salt. It varies in size with the rainy season, but on the whole seems to be growing smaller and smaller, and in another century it will be merely a marsh. One river loses itself in this lake. It is called the Shari, and the fact that it is merely an inland river which starts a thousand miles from the sea and ends a thousand miles from the sea, yet is as long as the Rhine, will give you a better idea of the proportions of central Africa than almost anything else I can think of.
The mountainous Wadai region east of Lake Chad acts as the great divide between the Nile, the Congo, and the Chad region. Politically it belongs to the French and is supposed to be an administrative part of the French Congo. It also marks the end of the French sphere of influence, for on the east of it begins the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a country which the ancients knew as the land of the White Nile.
When the English began to survey their road from the Cape to Cairo and decided that they must occupy this most valuable strategic point or run the risk of losing it to some other nation, the eastern Sudan was a desert, plain, simple, and fancy. The Nile was unnavigable, and there were no roads. The people, at the mercy of all the scum from the adjacent deserts, were poor and wretched beyond belief. Geographically it was without any value, but politically its possibilities were enormous. In 1874, therefore, the Khedive of Egypt entrusted the administration of these hundreds of thousands of square miles of “nominal Egyptian territory” to that same “Chinese Gordon” whom we have already met. Gordon remained in the Sudan for six years, and with the help of a very clever Italian assistant, one Romolo Gessi, he accomplished the one thing most needed: he broke up the last of the slave rings, shot the leaders, and set more than 10,000 men and women free and allowed them to return to their homes.
As soon, however, as this humanitarian crusader had turned his back upon the Sudan, the old terrible conditions of misgovernment and oppression returned. The result was the outbreak of a movement for complete independence, a sort of “Sudan for the Sudanese and all the slave-trading we want.” The leader of this rebellion was a certain Mohammed Ahmed, who called himself Mahdi or guide who would show the faithful the road of the true Moslem faith. In 1883 the Mahdi conquered El Obeid in Kordofan, and later in the same year he destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under Hicks Pasha, an English colonel in the service of the Khedive. Meanwhile, in 1882, England had assumed a protectorate over Egypt, and the Mahdi now had in contend with a more dangerous enemy.
But England was too experienced in colonial affairs and knew the difficulties too well to rush into any rash expeditions. For the moment she counselled the Egyptian Government to withdraw its troops from the Sudan. General Gordon was once more sent to Khartum to arrange for the withdrawal of the remaining Egyptian garrisons. But no sooner had he reached Khartum than the forces of the Mahdi swept northward and left Gordon and his companions marooned in Khartum. He sent urgent messages for relief. Gladstone sent a relief expedition, much too late, for when it was still several days away from Khartum the town was taken by the forces of the Mahdi, and Gordon was murdered. That happened in January of 1885. In June of the same year the Mahdi died. His successor maintained himself as ruler of the Sudan until 1898 when an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener wiped his followers from the face of the desert and recaptured the entire territory as far south as Uganda, which is on the equator.
The English have done an enormous amount of good in improving the condition of the natives by giving them roads, railways, safety, by stamping out all sorts of hideous and unnecessary forms of disease, the usual things which the white man does for the black man and for which the white man expects the black man to say thank you, if he is foolish enough, but for which the black man will shoot the white man in the back just as soon as he can, as the white man knows if he
has had a couple of centuries of colonial experience.
The railway southward from Wady Haifa now runs as fir as El Obeid in the west and Port Sudan on the Red Sea in the east. If in the years to come an enemy should suddenly destroy the Suez Canal England can still transport her troops from east to west via this line that crosses the Nubian desert.
But now we have got to go back a few years and see how the Mahdi revolt was to have the most far-reaching influence upon the development of Africa in a way which had nothing at all to do with the Mahdi himself or his ambitions to become the independent ruler of the land of his fathers.
When the Mahdi uprising began, the Egyptian forces furthest towards the south were forced to find a refuge in a part of central Africa which was then practically unknown. Speke had crossed it in 1858 when he discovered Lake Victoria, the mother lake, so to speak, of the river Nile. But most of the land between Lake Albert and Lake Victoria was still terra incognita. This Egyptian force, under command of a German physician, a certain Dr Eduard Schnitzer, better known by his Turkish title of Emin Pasha, had disappeared from sight after the fall of Khartum, and the world was curious to know what had become of him.
The job of finding him was entrusted to an American newspaper man by the name of Stanley. His name was really Rowlands, but he had adopted that of a New Orleans merchant who had been very good to him when he had first landed in America, a poor English boy who had run away from the workhouse. Stanley was already famous as an African explorer for the voyage which he had undertaken in 1871 to find Dr Livingstone. Since then England had begun to realize the importance of keeping at least a few fingers in the African pie, and the Daily Telegraph co-operated with the New York Herald in defraying the cost of the voyage. This expedition, which lasted three years, and which was undertaken from east to west, proved that the Lualaba which Livingstone had suspected of being part of the Congo was in reality the beginning of that river. It also showed the vastness of the territory traversed by the Congo river on its circuitous route to the sea, and it brought home tales of strange native tribes, the presence of which no one so for had suspected.
The Home of Mankind Page 37