It was this second voyage of Stanley’s which drew the attention of the world to the commercial possibilities of the Congo, and which made it possible for Leopold of Belgium to found his Congo Free State.
When at last the fate of Emin Pasha became a subject of worldwide concern, it was only natural that Stanley should be selected as the man best fitted to find him. He began his search in 1887 and the next year he found Emin in Wadelai just north of Lake Albert. Stanley tried to persuade this German, who seems to have exercised a tremendous power over the natives, to enter the service of the King of the Belgians, which would probably have meant that the great lake region of Africa would also have been added to the territory of the Congo colony. But Emin seems to have had plans of his own. As soon as he reached Zanzibar (he really was not anxious to be ‘saved’) he got in touch with the German authorities and it was finally decided to send him back, well provided with men and money, to try to establish a German protectorate over the high plateau between the three great lakes of Victoria, Albert, and Tanganyika. Along the coast of Zanzibar the German East Africa Company had acquired large interests as early as 1885. If the lake region were added, Germany would be able to frustrate the English plan for dividing Africa into two parts by a broad strip of English territory running from Egypt to the Cape. But in 1892 Emin was murdered near Stanley Falls on the Congo by Arab slave-dealers who wanted to avenge some of their colleagues deservedly hanged by the stem German in his younger days. Nothing therefore came of the Emin’s dream of the new Germany on the high plateau of Tanganyika. As a result of his disappearance, however, the greater part of central Africa had now been definitely put upon the map. And that brings us to the fifth natural division of Africa, the high mountainous regions of the east.
These stretch all the way from Abyssinia in the north to the Zambesi river in the south, where the territory known as South Africa begins. The northern part of this region is inhabited by Hamites, for the Abyssinians and the Somalis, although they have kinky hair, are not Negroes. The southern part consists of Negroes and a great many Europeans.
The Abyssinians are Christians of a very old vintage, having been converted as early as the fourth century. Their Christian sentiments, however, did not prevent them from making perpetual war upon their neighbours. In 525 they even crossed the Red Sea and conquered the southern part of Arabia, the Arabia Felix of the Romans (in contrast to the Arabia Deserta of the interior). It was this expedition which had made the young Mohammed realize the necessity for a strong and united Arab fatherland, and which had started him upon his career as the founder of a religion and a world-empire.
One of the first things his followers did was to drive the Ethiopians away from the coast towns of the Red Sea and to destroy their business relations with Ceylon and India and far-away Constantinople. After that Ethiopia became a sort of Japan which took no further interest In outside affairs until the middle of the last century when the different European powers began to cast longing glances in the general direction of the peninsula of Somaliland, not because Somaliland was of any possible value, but because it was situated on the Red Sea which soon would be merely an extension of the Suez Canal. France was the first to arrive upon the scene and to occupy the harbour of Jibouti, The English after a punitive expedition against the Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia, during which that extraordinary monarch killed himself rather than fall into the hands of his enemies, took British Somaliland which, situated just opposite Aden, gave them command of the gulf of that name. The Italians took a slice north of the French and British possessions with the intention of using the coastal region as a base of supplies from where to conduct a glorious expedition against Abyssinia.
This glorious expedition took place in 1896, and on that occasion the Italians lost 4500 white and 2000 native troops, with a slightly smaller amount of prisoners. After that the Italians left their Abyssinian neighbours alone for a long while, although they secured another part of Somaliland, south of the British settlement.
In the end, of course, Abyssinia will go the way of Uganda and Zanzibar. But the difficulties of transport, not overcome by the single railway line from Jibouti to Addis Ababa, and the broken-up nature of the entire Abyssinian plateau which makes it a natural fortress, together with the realization that those black men will under circumstances fight with great bitterness, for long saved that ancient kingdom from the usual annexation.
South of Abyssinia and east of the Congo lie the three great African lakes. Of those the Nyasa sends tributaries to the Zambesi, while Lake Victoria is responsible for the Nile, and the Tanganyika Lake connects with the Congo, suggesting that this region must be the highest part of Africa. The investigations of the last fifty years completely bear this out Kilima Njaro, south-east of Lake Victoria, is 19,321 feet high; Kenya rises to 17.000 feet, Mount Ruwenzori (the Mountain of the Moon of Ptolemy, which Stanley rediscovered some twenty centuries later) to 16,800 feet and Elgon to 14,000 feet.
KILIMA NJARO
This whole region was originally volcanic, but the African volcanoes have not been working at their trade for a good many centuries. Politically the entire territory is divided into a number of sub-divisions, all of them, however, under British rule.
Uganda, a cotton-growing country, became a protectorate in 1899.
The former possessions of the British East Africa Company, now Kenya Colony, were made part of the Empire in 1920, while the erstwhile holdings of the German East Africa colony became a British mandate in 1918 and are now part of Tanganyika territory.
The most important town in this district is Zanzibar, the capital of an old slave-trading sultanate over which the English established a protectorate in 1890. The town was a great centre for Arab merchants from all over the Indian Ocean. They were probably responsible for the spread of the Swahili language, the jargon of Zanzibar, which is now spoken all along the east coast of Africa just as Malayan has become the lingua franca of the islands of the Dutch East Indies. At the present time a slight knowledge of Swahili is the most valuable asset for anyone wishing to do business along the three thousand miles of the Indian Ocean front and their millions of square miles of hinterland.
That closes the chapter on northern Africa, except for the narrow coastal region that lies between the Atlantic and the mountains of the Sudan and the Cameroon mountains. This strip of land has been known these last four hundred years as Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea. I have already mentioned the Guineas when I spoke of slavery, for it was there that the ‘black ivory’ was gathered ere it was made ready for shipment to the rest of the world. To-day that coast belongs to a number of nations, which realize the growing value of the plant products of this region, particularly palm products.
Sierra Leone is an old English settlement which, like Liberia just to the west of it, was intended to be a homeland for former slaves. Neither Sierra Leone nor Liberia, with its capital city of Monrovia, amounts to anything except sad disappointments in the hearts of a good many perfectly honest men and women who had hoped for better things when they generously offered their money to return the black man to the country of his great-grandfather’s birth.
The Ivory Coast is French. Accra, in British territory, known as the Gold Coast, has a harbour, but a new harbour has been constructed at Takoradi, further west. Railways run inland from both places. Nigeria is also English. The capital is Lagos. Dahomey was an independent native state until the French took it in 1893.
Cameroon was German until the War. It is now a French protectorate. So was Togo until it was partitioned between the French and the English as mandated territory. So was and is Togo. The rest is part of the French Congo, making the whole of that part of the world a large French equatorial empire with little foreign enclosures.
The Dutch East India Company, in order to shorten the voyage from Batavia to Amsterdam, had maintained an overland route ol its own by way of Persia and Syria and Alexandria. But every time there was a quarrel between two Mesopotamian potentates the mails
and the caravans were so hopelessly delayed that the hulk of the merchandise continued to be sent by way of the Cape.
In order that nothing might interfere with the steady How of their Indian products, the Dutch thereupon occupied a few harbours along the coast of Guinea which they could also use as slave ports, took St Helena, and fortified the Cape.
In 1671 the Dutch, who like all good merchants preferred to have things in writing, bought the land round the fort of Capetown from the Hottentots. That meant the end of the Hottentots, for, deprived of their land, they were forced to move northward into the region of the Orange River and the Vaal which was occupied by their hereditary enemies, the Bushmen. It seemed a punishment from Heaven that those same Dutch farmers, who had been terribly cruel in their dealings with both Hottentots and Bushmen, should afterwards have suffered a similar fate. For Capetown was occupied by the English in 1806 and then it was the turn of the Boers to move northward. They repeated this manoeuvre a number of times until 1902, when the last of their two independent republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State, were definitely annexed by the English.
Capetown, however, has remained the most important harbour of the whole triangle. But the coastal region counts for nothing compared to the interior, rich in gold and other minerals. This interior consists of a high plateau dotted with low hills called kopjes. On the west this plateau is cut off from the Atlantic by highlands. On the east it is separated from the Indian Ocean by the Matoppo hills and other ranges, such as the Drakensberg mountains.
None of these mountains has any glaciers. All the rivers therefore of this entire region depend upon rainfall for their water supply. As a result they are wild torrents in the winter and dry, hollow roads in the summer, and as they have got to break their way through a mountain ridge ere they reach the sea (with the exception of the rivers in Natal, which therefore is the richest of the different countries that now make up the Union of South Africa) they are of no possible use as roads of commerce to the interior.
In order therefore that the hinterland might have access to the sea, a number of railways have been constructed. Before the war the most important of these was the one between Pretoria and Lourenço Marques on Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa. Since the War the roads to Swakopmund and Lüderitz in the former territory of German South-west Africa (now a mandate of the Union) have been finished; and northward one can now go by rail as far as Lake Tanganyika and then, after having crossed the lake by boat, one can take another train from there for the island of Zanzibar. A regular race in railway development is taking place both here and in Central Africa.
In order to get thus far north the traveller is obliged to spend an uncomfortable day crossing the Kalahari desert, but once this has been left behind he enters into the hilly territory of Rhodesia, so called after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the old British South Africa Chartered Company, and one of the earliest prophets of a united South Africa under British domination. That dream has partially come true. The different chartered companies and the former Boer republics and the Kaffir and Zulu nations are now all of them part of the Union of South Africa which was proclaimed in 1910. But as the Boer element which lives in the country districts seems to be gaining on the English element which has been chiefly attached to the cities, there is a violent struggle going on to decide which of the two rival elements shall be the dominant factor. By way of compromise, Capetown has been made the place where the Parliament of the Union meets, but Pretoria, the old capital of the Transvaal Republic, has been promoted to act as the seat of the Government.
As for the two unusually large remnants of the ancient Portuguese Empire which continue to separate the Union of South Africa from the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Angola in the west and Mozambique in the cast, they are so badly administered that they may possibly in course of time be taken over by one of their more powerful neighbours. Just now, with agricultural products at a lower price than ever before and cattle-breeding at a complete standstill, the South Africans are not in search, of fresh pastures and grain, fields. When times return to normal, these Portuguese colonies may be annexed without the firing of a single gun. For South Africa is developing a new race, neither Dutch nor English but purely South African. And it is so rich in mineral wealth, in copper and coal and iron, and the soil is fertile enough that it may well develop into a sort of United States on a slightly smaller scale.
At the other side of the strait of Mozambique lies the island of Madagascar which measures 230,000 square miles and is slightly larger than the Republic of France to which it belongs. The population is not far short of 4,000,000. It is a mountainous island and the eastern part, exposed to the trade-winds, has excellent timber which is exported from the harbour of Tamatave, connected by rail with the capital, Antananarivo. Other exports are hides, rubber, and copal.
The people look more like Malays than like Negroes. But Madagascar must have been separated from Africa at a very early period in our geological history, for none of the usual African animals are to be found on the island.
East of Madagascar lie two little islands which were of great importance when the India trade still followed the route of the Cape, They are Mauritius and Reunion. Mauritius, an old freshwater vegetable station of the Dutch East India Company, is now English, and Reunion is French.
As for the other islands which, geographically speaking, belong to Africa, I have already mentioned St Helena, while Ascension, further to the north in the Atlantic, is also a coaling and a cable station. The Cape Verde islands are Portuguese. They lie a few hundred miles west of the coast of Mauretania, now occupied by the insignificant Spanish colony of Rio de Oro. The Canary islands are Spanish. Teneriffe, with Santa Cruz, the capital, and its well-known volcano, Madeira and the Azores are Portuguese. As for the island of St Brandon, in which all honest skippers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed as firmly as we ourselves believe in the tables of multiplication, that was situated here too. But no one could ever find out where, because it went to the bottom of the ocean as soon as any vessel came near it, and only reappeared when the visitor was gone. That seems to have been a sensible thing to do on the part of an African island. It was the only way it could escape being occupied by a foreign power.
Most continents can be reduced to a few simple images. We say ‘Europe’ and we see the dome of St Peter’s and ruined castles on the Rhine and the silent fjords of Norway and we hear the troika bells of Russia, Asia calls forth pictures of pagodas and masses of little brown men bathing in a wide river, and strange temples, ten thousand feet up in the air, and the placid symmetry of old Fuji. America means skyscrapers, factory chimneys, an old Indian on a pony going nowhere in particular. Even far-off Australia has its symbols, the Southern Cross, the amiable kangaroo with his inquisitive and intelligent eyes.
But Africa, how shall we reduce that land of contrasts and extremes to a single symbol?
It is a land of torrid heat without any serviceable rivers. Yet the Nile is almost as long as the Amazon, and the Congo is only a little shorter than the Mississippi, and the Niger longer than the Hwang Ho. It is a land of torrential rains and insufferable moisture. Yet the Sahara alone, the driest of all deserts, is larger than all of Australia, and the Kalahari is as big as the British Isles.
The people are weak and helpless, the black man does not know how to defend himself. Yet the most perfectly organized military machine the world has ever seen was developed among the Zulus, and the desert Bedouins and other northern tribes have been known to charge successfully against European troops armed with machine-guns.
Africa has no convenient inland seas like the Baltic or the American Great Lakes. Granted, but Lake Victoria is as large as Lake Superior, Tanganyika is as big as the Baikal Sea, Nyasa twice as big as Lake Ontario.
Africa has no mountains, in a manner of speaking. But Kilima Njaro is 5000 feet higher than Mount Whitney, the highest peak of the United States, excluding Alaska, an Ruwenzori, just north of the equa
tor, is higher than Mont Blanc.
Then what is wrong with this continent: 1 don’t know. Everything is there, but the whole arrangement seems wrong. Even the Nile, which at least flows into a sea of great commercial importance, is hampered by its many cataracts. As for the Congo and the Niger, they have no comfortable access to the sea, while the Zambesi starts where the Orange River should end, and the Orange River ends where the Zambesi should start.
Modern science may eventually make the desert bear fruit and drain the marshes. Modern science may find ways to cure the dysentery and the sleeping-sickness which have wiped out entire countrysides in the Sudan and the Congo region, as modern science has set us free from yellow fever and malaria. Modern science may turn the high central and southern plateaux into a replica of the French Provence or the Italian Riviera. But the jungle is strong and persistent, and the jungle has a start of millions of years. Let modern science relax but for a moment and the jungle and all its atrocities will be back at the white man’s throat and will throttle him, and it will breathe its poisonous breath into his nostrils until he dies and is eaten by the hyenas and the ants.
Perhaps it is the lightless tropical forest which has put its dreadful stamp upon the whole African civilization. The desert may be frightening but the shimmering dark forest is terrifying. It is so full of life that it has become lifeless. The struggle for existence must proceed quietly lest the hunter himself become the hunted. And so day and night and night and day creation devours itself beneath the high roof of the listless leaves. The most harmless-looking insect has the most deadly sting. The most beautiful flower carries its secret burden of poison. Every horn and hoof and beak and tooth is against every other horn and hoof and beak and tooth. The pulse-beat of existence is accompanied by the crunching of bones and the tearing asunder of soft brown skins.
The Home of Mankind Page 38