The Project Gutenberg eBook of A history of the colonization of Africa by alien races
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: A history of the colonization of Africa by alien races
Author: Harry Johnston
Release date: April 16, 2025 [eBook #75882]
Language: English
Original publication: Cambridge: University Press, 1913
Credits: Peter Becker, KD Weeks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF THE COLONIZATION OF AFRICA BY ALIEN RACES ***
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. In the front
matter, blackletter font is delimited by ‘=’. A diacritical mark, a
comma above a ‘C’ or ‘X’, is represented here as a quotation mark, e.g.
‘C̓echwayo’ or ‘X̓osa’.
Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are
referenced.
Any text employed in the maps also have been moved to fall on a
paragraph break.
Errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the
transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the
handling of any issues encountered during its preparation.
=Cambridge Historical Series=
EDITED BY G. W. PROTHERO, F.B.A., LITT.D.
HON. LL.D. OF EDINBURGH AND HARVARD, AND HONORARY FELLOW
OF KING’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
THE
COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
=London=: FETTER LANE, E.C.
C. F. CLAY, MANAGER
[Illustration]
=Edinburgh=: 100, PRINCES STREET
=Berlin=: A. ASHER AND CO.
=Leipzig=: F. A. BROCKHAUS
=New York=: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
=Bombay and Calcutta=: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
_All rights reserved_
A HISTORY OF THE
COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
BY ALIEN RACES
BY
SIR HARRY H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B.,
HON. SC.D. CANTAB.
_WITH EIGHT MAPS_
NEW EDITION, REVISED THROUGHOUT AND
CONSIDERABLY ENLARGED
Cambridge:
at the University Press
1913
_First Edition 1899. Reprinted 1899, 1905._
_Second and enlarged Edition 1913._
GENERAL PREFACE
_The aim of this series is to sketch the history of Modern Europe, with
that of its chief colonies and conquests, from about the end of the
fifteenth century down to the present time. In one or two cases the
story commences at an earlier date: in the case of the colonies it
generally begins later. The histories of the different countries are
described, as a rule, separately; for it is believed that, except in
epochs like that of the French Revolution and Napoleon I, the connection
of events will thus be better understood and the continuity of
historical development more clearly displayed._
_The series is intended for the use of all persons anxious to understand
the nature of existing political conditions. “The roots of the present
lie deep in the past”; and the real significance of contemporary events
cannot be grasped unless the historical causes which have led to them
are known. The plan adopted makes it possible to treat the history of
the last four centuries in considerable detail, and to embody the most
important results of modern research. It is hoped therefore that the
series will be useful not only to beginners but to students who have
already acquired some general knowledge of European History. For those
who wish to carry their studies further, the bibliography appended to
each volume will act as a guide to original sources of information and
works of a more special character._
_Considerable attention is paid to political geography; and each volume
is furnished with such maps and plans as may be requisite for the
illustration of the text._
G. W. PROTHERO.
ERRATA
p. 69, _for_ Motawakkiq _read_ Motawakkil
p. 371, _for_ Boz _read_ Bor
PREFATORY NOTE
The Editor of this Historical series asked me in 1898 to compile this
work on the History of African Colonization. Even at that date there
existed a number of standard books on the history of African Exploration
(Dr J. Scott Keltie and Dr Robert Brown), on the history of South Africa
(M^cCall Theal and Sir Charles Lucas), and on the Map of Africa by
Treaty (Sir Edward Hertslet). But no attempt had yet been made to
summarise and review in a single book the general history of the
attempts of Asia and Europe to colonize Africa during the historical
period. The original edition of this book published in 1898 was
exhausted by the following year, and in the next reprint certain
additions were made; while to the reprint of 1905 a new chapter was
contributed giving the latest developments in the European colonization
of Africa.
A further issue of the work having been contemplated seven years later,
the Cambridge University Press agreed that I should rewrite the whole
book from beginning to end and enlarge it considerably, so that it might
be brought level with our more complete knowledge of African history in
1912, and at the same time continue the story down to the present year.
Much has happened since 1905 which forms an essential part of the
history of the colonization and development of Africa by alien races.
The old maps have been revised and new ones drawn.
The first edition of this work contained the antique feature of a
dedication. I hesitate to repeat this formally, yet I might mention that
the names I associated in 1898 with my treatise on the Colonization of
Africa were those of SIR GEORGE TAUBMAN GOLDIE (Nigeria); VISCOUNT
KITCHENER OF KHARTŪM (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan); MONSIEUR RENÉ MILLET
(formerly French Resident-General in Tunis), “who has shown how well a
Frenchman can administer a great dependency when allowed liberty of
action”; and MAJOR HERMANN VON WISSMANN (formerly German Imperial
Commissioner in Africa), “who founded the State of German East Africa,
and who has done more than any living German to establish and uphold the
prestige of that great nation in the darkest parts of the Dark
Continent”. I still think that under the guise of a dedication I chose
notable instances of strong and wise men doing good work in Africa, not
only for the colonizing nations, but equally for the subject peoples of
backward race. Their work in its importance has stood the test of time.
What Mons. Millet did in Tunis has been—or should be—made the model of
an administration under which France may succeed in regenerating
Morocco. It is tempting to add other great names to this list, but if,
for example, one inserts that of CECIL RHODES, then in common justice
one must mention DAVID LIVINGSTONE, JOHN KIRK, H. M. STANLEY, JOSEPH
THOMSON, FREDERICK LUGARD, GEORGE GRENFELL, E. N. ROUME, and FRANZ
STUHLMANN, and many others who have brought about the recent opening-up
of Africa by the white man.
H. H. JOHNSTON.
POLING,
_December, 1912_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC RACE MOVEMENTS IN AFRICA
The origin of African man—Principal Negro types—The
Bushman—Negroids (Fula, Songhai, Tibu, Hausa)—The Mystery of the
Zimbabwe ruins of Rhodesia—Probable distribution of native races
ten thousand years ago—The Dynastic Egyptians—The early
Semites—The Hamites—The Malay Colonization of Madagascar 1
CHAPTER II
THE MEDITERRANEAN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
The Phoenicians and their foundation of Sidonian and Tyrian cities
along the north coast of Africa—Carthage—Hanno’s voyage to West
Africa—The Greeks in Cyrenaica—In Egypt, Abyssinia, East
Africa—The Romans in Egypt—In North Africa and the
Sahara—Christian Abyssinia 32
CHAPTER III
THE ARAB CONQUEST OF AFRICA
The condition of North Africa in the 6th and 7th centuries of the
Christian era before the Arab invasion—Muhammad and
Muhammadanism—Arabs invade Egypt—The Khariji sect—Arabs invade
North Africa—Spain, Morocco, and the Berbers—The Jews and their
relations with North Africa—The Fatimite Khalifs—The “Hilalian”
invasion—The Almoravides—The Almohades—St Louis—The death of Dom
Sebastião—The Sharifian dynasties of Morocco—The Turks in
Africa—Arab Egypt—Turkish Egypt—The Arabs of East Africa—Arab
influence on Africa 52
CHAPTER IV
THE PORTUGUESE IN AFRICA
Origin of the State of Portugal—Prince Henry the
Navigator—Portuguese explorations of West African coast—Diogo
Cam and the Congo—Rounding of Cape of Good Hope—East African
conquests—Portuguese in Abyssinia—in the Congo Kingdom—in
Angola—Paulo Diaz—The benefits the Portuguese conferred on
Africa—Their struggles with the Dutch—Progress of their rule in
West Africa—in East Africa—Monomotapa—Dr Lacerda e
Almeida—Livingstone’s journeys—Present state of
Moçambique—Delagoa Bay—Beira—Mouzinho de Albuquerque—Moçambique
Company—The future of the Portuguese Colonies 76
CHAPTER V
SPANISH AFRICA
The Canary Islands—Spain invades Morocco in 1490—Algeria and Tunis
nearly conquered in 16th century—Spanish sphere in North
Morocco—Rio de Oro—Fernando Pô and Rio Muni 116
CHAPTER VI
THE DUTCH IN AFRICA
Dutch traders on the Gold Coast—Dutch settle at the Cape of Good
Hope—St Helena—Mauritius—The Netherland East India Co.—Huguenot
colonists—Governor Tulbagh—extensions of Dutch influence—First
hostile British expedition under Commodore Johnstone—First Dutch
war with the Kafirs—First British occupation of the Cape of Good
Hope—Interregnum of Dutch rule—British finally annex Cape
Colony—Their rulers come into conflict with the sentiments of
the Dutch colonists (Boers)—The Boer Treks—Origin of Transvaal
and Orange Free State republics—Annexation and revolt of
Transvaal—Sir Charles Warren’s expedition—Gold in the
Transvaal—Jews in South Africa—Johannesburg, the Outlanders, and
Jameson’s raid—The war of 1899-1902—Union of South Africa 123
CHAPTER VII
THE SLAVE TRADE
Negro predisposition for slavery—Slave trade in the Roman world,
in Muhammadan countries and India—Great development consequent
on the exploitation of America—English slave traders—English
Anti-Slavery movement—Author’s own experiences of slave
trade—Steps taken by various European countries to abolish Slave
Trade—By Great Britain in particular—Rev. S. W. Koelle—Zanzibar
slave trade—Wadai and Tripoli—Ethics of slavery—A word of
warning to the Negro—The foundation and history of Liberia—Dr
Blyden 151
CHAPTER VIII
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, I
(_West Coast, Morocco, North-Central_)
The English in West Africa—The Gambia—Sierra Leone—Gold
Coast—Ashanti—Northern Territories—Lagos—Niger
Delta—Beecroft—Benin—E. H. Hewett—H. H. Johnston—J. R.
Phillips—Northern Nigeria—Dr Baikie—Sir G. Taubman Goldie—Lugard
and Morland—Bornu—Fulas—Great Britain and Tripoli—and Morocco 168
CHAPTER IX
THE FRENCH IN WEST AND NORTH AFRICA
The Dieppe adventurers—Jannequin de Rochefort and the Senegal—Brüe
and the foundation of the colony of Senegal—Campagnon—Progress
of French rule over Senegambia—Seul Faidherbe—the Fula
Empires—Advance to the Niger—Samori and Ahmadu—Timbuktu—Binger
and the Ivory Coast—Samori—Timbuktu definitely occupied—Busa and
the Anglo-French Convention—Administrative divisions of French
W. Africa—France and Egypt—Algiers—Development of
Algeria—Tunis—The Sahara—Voulet and Chanoine—Morocco
Protectorate—Abyssinia—Marchand—Somaliland—French
Congo—Gaboon—The Shari and Mubangi—Cessions to Germany—Bagirmi
and Wadai—Senussi—Trans-Sahara Railway 196
CHAPTER X
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS
Their work the antithesis to the slave trade—Portuguese missions
to Congoland, to the Zambezi, to Abyssinia—First Protestant
missions—Church Missionary Society—Dr Krapf—Wesleyans,
Methodists, Society for Propagation of the Gospel—Roman Catholic
missions to Algeria, Congoland, the Nile—Cardinal Lavigerie—The
‘White Fathers’—The Jesuits on the Zambezi—in Madagascar—The
London Missionary Society—Swiss and German Protestant
Missions—French Evangelical Missions—Presbyterian (Scotch)
Missions—Norwegian and American Missions—Linguistic work of
latter—Universities’ Mission—Plymouth Brethren—Baptists—North
African Mission—Zambezi Industrial Mission—Abyssinian
Christianity 239
CHAPTER XI
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, II
(_South and South-Central_)
Great Britain’s seizure of the Cape of Good Hope—Permanent
establishment there—Abolition of slavery—Dutch grievances—Kaffir
Wars—Lord Glenelg and intervention of Downing Street—Boer
Treks—Responsible government in Cape Colony—Kaffir delusions as
to expected resurrection of their forefathers and expulsion of
English—St Helena, Ascension and Tristan d’Acunha—Discovery of
diamonds in Grikwaland—Notable Jewish pioneers in South
Africa—History of Natal—Kuli labour and Indian
immigration—Delagoa Bay arbitration—Damaraland—Origin of German
entrance into South African sphere—Walfish
Bay—Bechuanaland—Zambezia—Nyasaland—British Central Africa—The
African Lakes Co.—African Trans-continental Telegraph—South
African federation—The Transvaal—Sir Bartle Frere—Zululand and
the Zulu War—Boer revolt—Rhodes and Rhodesia—Matebele Wars and
Dr Jameson—Kruger and the Drifts—Jameson Raid—Viscount
Milner—The War of 1899-1902—Peace and Chinese Labour—The Union
of South Africa—The Basuto and Native Question—Mauritius and the
Seychelles 254
CHAPTER XII
GREAT EXPLORERS
Old-time travellers—Herodotos—Strabo—Pliny—Ptolemy—The Arab
geographers—The Portuguese explorers—Andrew Battel—British on
the Gambia—French on the Senegal—James Bruce and the Blue
Nile—Timbuktu—Mungo Park and the Niger—South African
explorations—Portugal and Dr Lacerda—Captain Owen—Tuckey and the
Congo—Major Laing—René Caillé—British Government expeditions in
Tripoli,—Bornu, Lake Chad, and Sokoto—Lander and the Niger
mouth—Barth and, the Western Sudan—the Jewish explorer
Mordokhai—Krapf, Rebmann, and the Snow
Mountains—Livingstone—Burton and Speke, Speke and Grant—Samuel
Baker—Livingstone and Kirk—French explorers in North-West
Africa—Livingstone and Central
Africa—Cameron—Rohlfs—Nachtigal—Alexandrine Tinne—Paul du
Chaillu—Winwood Reade—Stanley and the Congo—Portuguese
explorers—Schweinfurth and the Wele—Nile explorers—Nyasaland
explorations—Pogge, Reichard, Boehm, and von Bary—Dr
Felkin—Joseph Thomson—George Grenfell—von Wissmann—Emin
Pasha—Cameroons explorers—Nigerian and Chad
explorations—Tanganyika, Somaliland, and East African
discoveries—Kilima-njaro—Morocco—Marchand—Madagascar—Remarkable
20th century exploring work 297
CHAPTER XIII
BELGIAN AFRICA
The work of Cambier and Storms—Comité d’Études du Haut Congo—H. M.
Stanley founds the Congo Independent State—its subsequent
history—Long struggle with the Arabs—Captain Hinde—Baron
Dhanis—Rumoured atrocities—Katanga—Extension to the White
Nile—Murder of Mr Stokes—Railway to Stanley Pool—Denunciation of
King Leopold’s maladministration by E. D. Morel—Congo Reform
movement—Belgian annexation of Congo State 342
CHAPTER XIV
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, III
(_Egypt and Eastern Africa_)
England wrests Egypt from the French—Rise of Muhammad Ali—Suez
Canal—Arabi’s rebellion—Tel-el-Kebir—Mahdi’s revolt—Gordon’s
death—Lord Cromer—Lord Kitchener and the reconquest of the
Sudan—Fashoda—Egypt in the 20th century—Nationalism—Development
of the Sudan—Sudd-cutting—Aden and Somaliland—The ‘mad’
Mullah—Zanzibar—Sir John Kirk—Kilima-njaro—British East African
Company—Sir Frederick Lugard and Uganda—Sir Gerald Portal—The
Sudanese mutiny in Uganda—The Special Commission—Sleeping
Sickness—Zanzibar Government—Dissolution of British East Africa
Company—Mubarak’s rising—Ogadein Somalis—Big Game—‘White’ East
Africa 359
CHAPTER XV
THE ITALIANS IN AFRICA
Italian commercial intercourse with North Africa during Crusades
and Renaissance—The Popes and geographical research—Italy in
Tunis and Tripoli—Assab Bay—Abyssinia—Eritrea—Italian reverse at
Adua—Italy in Somaliland—The Italian invasion and annexation of
the Tripolitaine 390
CHAPTER XVI
GERMAN AFRICA
The Brandenburg traders and the West Coast—German aspirations after
colonies in the forties and sixties of the 19th century—German
missionaries in South-West Africa—Herr Lüderitz—Angra
Pequena—British indecision—German South-West Africa Protectorate
founded—Germany in the Cameroons—in East Africa—Anglo-German
partition of the Sultan of Zanzibar’s dominions—Rising against
German rule in East Africa—Germany in the Cameroons—Hottentot
and Damara rebellions in South-West Africa—Prospects of German
South-West Africa—Togoland 403
CHAPTER XVII
THE FRENCH IN MADAGASCAR
First rumours of the existence of Madagascar—Confusion with
Zanzibar and the Komoro Islands—Portuguese discovery—French
Company of the East founded to colonize the Island—Fort
Dauphin—Pronis, the immoral governor—Vacher de Rochelle,
King-Consort of a Malagasy Queen—French East India Company
founded. Île de Bourbon colonized—The Madagascar Pirates—French
found settlement of St Marie de Madagascar—Send scientific
expeditions to Madagascar which first make known its peculiar
fauna—Benyowski, the Polish adventurer—The Malagasy—The
Hovas—English capture Mauritius and Bourbon and turn the French
out of Madagascar—French regain Bourbon and re-occupy St Marie
de Madagascar—First missionaries of the London Missionary
Society arrive in Madagascar (1818)—Rise of Radama and the Hova
power—French repulse in 1829—The shipwrecked sailor,
Laborde—Queen Ranaválona and persecutions of the Christians—The
Sakalavas—Prince Rakoto and Lambert’s frustrated coup
d’état—Accession of Rakoto (Radama II)—Deposition and
death—French concession repudiated and indemnity paid—The
Laborde succession—Quarrel with France in 1883—The Shaw
incident—General Willoughby—England recognizes French
protectorate over Madagascar—final invasion, conquest and
annexation of the Island by the French—Réunion and Komoro
Islands 423
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCLUSIONS AND FORECASTS
The European partition of Africa—Only Liberia and Abyssinia remain
independent—Three classes into which Africa falls from
colonization standpoint—Healthy Africa—Yellow Africa—Black
Africa—Prognostications as to future race movements—Predominant
European races in the future—The eight great languages of New
Africa—Paganism will disappear—Muhammadan zeal will eventually
decay—The Negro may become identified in national interests with
his diverse European rulers, and not unite to form a universal
Negro nation with the cry of ‘Africa for the Africans,’ if he is
well treated—White nations may also arise in Africa—Yet future
of Africa remains very uncertain 442
APPENDIX I. Notable events and dates in the history of African
colonization 452
APPENDIX II. Bibliography 467
INDEX 472
LIST OF MAPS
1. Africa as known to the Ancients; showing
distribution of native races and lines of Bantu
invasion _To face_ p. 50
2. Muhammadan Africa _To face_ p. 74
3. Portuguese Africa _To face_ p.
114
4. French Africa _To face_ p.
238
5. British Africa _To face_ p.
388
6. German Africa _To face_ p.
422
7. Colonizable Africa _At end_
8. Political Africa, 1912 _At end_
_Note._ The spelling of African names adopted throughout this book is
the system sanctioned by the Royal Geographical Society, by which all
consonants are pronounced as in English and all vowels as in Italian. Ñ,
ñ represents the nasal sound of ‘ng’ in ‘ri_ng_i_ng_,’ ‘so_ng_,’ as
distinguished from the ‘ng’ in ‘a_ng_er.’ No consonants are doubled
unless pronounced twice in succession: thus ‘Massowah’ is properly
written Masawa. But where old established custom has sanctioned a
spelling diverging from these rules the official spelling of the name is
adopted. Thus: Moçambique instead of Msambiki; Quelimane instead of
Kelimān; Uganda as well as the more correct Buganda; Bonny instead of
Obani.
ERRATUM
p. 306, last line, _for_ Truster _read_ Truter, _and similarly in Index_
CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC RACE MOVEMENTS IN AFRICA
THE theme of this book obviously deals rather with the invasion and
settlement of Africa by foreign nations than with the movements of
people indigenous in their present types to the African continent;
nevertheless, it may be well to preface this sketch of the history of
African colonization by a few remarks explaining the condition and
inhabitants of the continent—so far as we can deduce them from indirect
evidence—before it was subjected to invasion and conquest by races and
peoples from Europe and Asia.
In all probability man first entered Africa from the direction of Syria.
He penetrated into tropical Africa in the train of those large mammals
which still form the most striking feature in the African fauna; many of
which however were evolved not in tropical Africa but in southern Europe
or western Asia as well as in Egypt and Cis-Saharan Africa. These great
apes, elephants, giraffes, and antelopes sought a refuge in tropical
Africa not only from the cold of the glacial pleistocene, but from the
incessant attacks of carnivorous man. Later on, but still in most remote
times, there were (no doubt) migrations of European man from the
northern side of the Mediterranean. But it seems more likely that the
bulk of African humanity as represented by its modern types passed from
Syria and Persia into Arabia, and thence into north-eastern Africa.
Did the Neanderthal species of humanity—_Homo primigenius_, with his big
head, big brain, short neck, long trunk and arms, and shambling legs,
his ape-like jaws and possibly hairy body—ever populate any part of
Africa? So far, no trace of him in an unmixed form has been found beyond
the limits of Europe, either living or fossil. But no farther away from
Africa than Gibraltar there has been obtained from the layers of deposit
below the floor of a cave the famous neanderthaloid Gibraltar skull,
Which in cranial capacity is lower than any other type of _Homo
primigenius_ as yet discovered. Yet there is nothing of the negro about
this and other types of _Homo primigenius_. The nose was quite
differently formed and was very large and prominent. The great brow
ridges characteristic of _Homo primigenius_ and of his collateral
relation the modern Australoid are an un-negro-like feature, though
occasionally they appear sporadically in the negroes of Equatorial
Africa and even in the northern Bushmen. Some French anthropologists
have thought that North Africa was first colonized by the Neanderthal
species of man, and that this type has even left traces of its presence
there in tribes like the Mogods of north-west Tunisia and certain
peoples of the Atlas mountains.
The successor and supplanter of _Homo primigenius_ in western Europe was
a generalized type of _Homo sapiens_, represented by the Galley-Hill man
inhabiting south-east England, France, and central Europe some 150,000
years ago—to judge by the approximate age of the strata in which his
earliest remains have been discovered. This man of the Thames estuary
(Galley-Hill is in north Kent, near Dartford) resembled somewhat closely
in skull-form and skeleton the Tasmanian aborigines and like them
possessed considerable negroid affinities. There is some slight evidence
that the Galley-Hill type co-existed for ages with the more specialized
and divergent _Homo primigenius_ (perhaps mingling his blood and
producing hybrid types), but gradually supplanted this big-brained
though brutish being and spread over Africa and southern Asia,
penetrating finally to remote Tasmania, where his last direct
descendants were exterminated in the middle of the 19th century by the
British settlers in that genial island. Certain “Strandlooper” skulls of
unknown age found in southernmost Africa seem to suggest affinities with
the Tasmanian or Galley-Hill type who may have been the first real man
to colonize Africa.
The actual evolutionary area of the negro sub-species of _Homo sapiens_
is unknown to us at present. At one time it was thought likely to have
been India. There is a strong underlying negroid element in the mass of
the Indian population; and in the southernmost part of the great
peninsula there are forest tribes of dark skin and strikingly negro
physiognomy, with frizzled or woolly hair. There is a negroid element in
the gentle Burmese; and in the Andaman Islands—geologically little more
than a depressed peninsula of Further India—the dwarfish people are
absolute negroes of the Asiatic type. In the Malay Peninsula, here and
there in Sumatra, above all in the Philippine archipelago, there are
Negrito tribes or types akin to the Andaman islanders. In the more
eastern among the Malay islands—especially in Buru, Jilolo, and
Timor—the interior tribes are of obvious negro stock. Still more marked
is this in the case of New Guinea, and most of all in the Bismarck
archipelago and northern Solomon Islands. In these last the resemblance
of the natives to the average negro of Africa is most striking, although
the distance from Africa is something like 8000 miles. Negroid
affinities extend east of the Solomon archipelago to Fiji and Hawai, and
south to New Caledonia, Tasmania and even New Zealand. On the other
hand, Africa for many thousand years has been obviously the chief domain
of the negro. Did the negro subspecies originate in, say, North Africa,
and thence spread eastwards to Persia (southern Persia has vestiges of
an ancient negroid population—the Elamites of the Hebrew scriptures),
India, Further India, Malaysia, and Oceania? Or was Europe—southern
Europe—the region where the negro specialized from some basic type like
the Tasmanian Galley-Hill man? Or Arabia[1], Syria, or India? The
evidence as yet before us is too slight to justify any positive theory.
The probability is that some region of western Asia such as Syria was
the birth-place of the negro of a generalized type, who from this centre
migrated into northern Africa, southern Europe, and southern Asia. The
discoveries made by Dr Verneaux and others in southern and western
France and in Italy would seem to show that from 30,000 to 40,000 years
ago the population of these regions was of negroid aspect, and that they
were succeeded by the tall Cro-Magnon race of totally different type,
more recalling Caucasian man and the taller Mongoloids, such as the
Amerindian. A glance however at the populations of Italy, France, Spain,
Wales, and southern Ireland shows the observant anthropologist that both
in nigrescence and in facial features the ancient negroid strain has
never been completely eliminated in these lands.
There are certain anatomical differences between the existing negroes of
Asia and Oceania on the one hand and the negroes of modern Africa on the
other[2]. Whether the African negro was the first human colonizer of
Africa, or was preceded by more brutish or more generalized types, such
as the Galley-Hill man, is not yet known to us. But from the little we
possess in the way of fossil human remains and other evidence it seems
probable that every region of Africa, even Algeria and Egypt, once
possessed a negro population. In Mauretania (Morocco to Tripoli) these
ancient negroes were partly driven out by prehistoric Caucasian invaders
and partly absorbed by intermarriage, the mixture resulting in the
darkened complexions of so many of the North African peoples. In Egypt a
dwarfish type of negro seems to have inhabited the Nile delta some
10,000 years ago; and big black negroes formed the population of upper
Nubia and Dongola so late as about 4000 years ago.
Yet there are reasons for thinking that not all parts of Tropical Africa
were colonized by negroes, or rather by the typical big black negro,
until 2000 or 3000 years ago. Although the fringe of the Congo basin,
for example, has been inhabited for a very considerable period (as is
testified by the presence of stone implements somewhat deeply buried in
the soil), the central part of that area would seem to have been invaded
quite recently by man; while in South Africa beyond the Zambezi there
have been periods in which the only human type was the Bushman, rather
than the big black negro. The comparatively recent human colonization of
the forests of the southern Cameroons and the inner Congo basin may have
been due to the density of tree growth and the opposition of the
gorilla; and (in Congoland) to the swamps and the presence of large
shallow lakes now dried up into river-courses. Several French and German
pioneers have described to the writer of this book the way in which,
when attempting to explore the forests of South Cameroons, far back from
the coast, their caravans of negro porters were attacked by the
gorillas; and the utterly uninhabited character of considerable areas
along the Congo-Cameroons water-parting is said to be due to the terror
inspired in the native mind by these enormous, fierce, and resolute
creatures. The same fact may have hindered at one time the populating of
similar forest countries between the Mubangi and the main Congo. South
of the main Congo there are no gorillas; but a good deal of this central
Congo region has been under water until quite recent times, and even now
its inhabitants are often compelled to live in pile dwellings raised
above flood level.
The African negro is divisible into two main types, very distinct one
from the other, the Negro proper and the Bushman. The former is of
fairly tall stature (except in its few dwarf tribes), dark, almost black
of skin, and long-headed, has abundant head-hair and an inclination to
hairiness of face and body, is prognathous and large jawed, and has no
marked tendency to fleshiness of the buttocks. His sweat glands emit a
rank and most characteristic odour, absent—in this very marked form—from
either the Asiatic negro or the Bushman. The Bushman on the other hand
is yellow-skinned, short of stature (though of well-proportioned limbs),
has a round head rather than a long one, is not markedly prognathous (in
his southern types), has no hair on face or body—or at most a very
scanty beard in the old men—has the hair arranged in segregated tufts on
the head, and is especially distinguished by his marked steatopygy—the
growth of fat and muscle on the buttocks. This steatopygy is much more
marked in women than in men and is absent altogether in very young
children. Both sexes amongst the Bushmen have peculiarities in their
external genitalia absent from the true negro type[3].
The average and typical Bushman is, as I have said, orthognathous rather
than prognathous, and usually, like the negro, is noteworthy for the
bulging forehead and the absence of strongly marked brow ridges. Yet
there are types of Bush race still living, more especially in German
south-west Africa, in which there is either a strongly marked brow ridge
and much prognathism, or even a degree of prognathism more extreme and
ape-like than is to be seen anywhere else in the world, unless it be
here and there amongst the Congo pygmies. These exceptional Bushman
types (which resemble somewhat similar sporadic “simian” individuals
amongst the Berg-Damara negroes and the helot tribes along the northern
Limpopo) have sometimes been identified with a certain class of
“Strandlooper” skull found in caves on the South African coasts and
exhibiting a low cranial capacity and much prognathism. But, again,
among the Strandloopers[4] there were other types of great antiquity
which scarcely seem negro at all—they are of good cranial development
and recall the skulls of a generalized Caucasian in form—so that South
Africa may have been invaded by “white men,” somewhat akin to the modern
Hamite, many thousand years ago.
The modern Bushman is singled out from other African races by his
extraordinary gift for delineating and painting. He has painted or
engraved many pictures on the rocks in past times, illustrating thus his
customs, superstitions, battles, and above all the wild animals of which
he has long been an adroit and fearless hunter. No existing tribe of
true negro stock has possessed such a gift for drawing or such a desire
to display it. To find some parallel to the artistic work of the Bushmen
we must cross the Zambezi and travel northwards to the Sahara desert
between Lake Chad and the northernmost Niger on the one hand and the
coast regions of Algeria on the other. In all this vast region of desert
or stony plateau there are many engravings and pictures on the rocks;
but from such slight indications as we possess (some of them are so
ancient that they depict extinct beasts) we are inclined to attribute
them to a primitive white race, to some such people as covered the walls
of caverns in France and Spain with splendid pictures of bison, horses,
mammoths, reindeer, salmon, eels, lions, ibexes, and boars. So far no
examples of Bushman paintings have been discovered in the far west of
South Africa or to the north of the Zambezi. Yet there is some slight
traditional and historical evidence to show that Bushmen still lingered
in Nyasaland and in the interior of Moçambique down to a period of
perhaps three hundred years ago.
Another distinguishing mark of the Bushman type is its peculiar
language. This is almost unwritable, so much is it compounded of
inarticulate and beast-like sounds—clicks with the tongue, gasps, and
nasal grunts. There is very little discoverable syntax in Bushman
speech. Its peculiar phonology is shared to some extent by the
Hottentot; but, on the other hand, Hottentot has a well-marked syntax as
clearly defined as that of any European language, and discriminates
between the masculine, feminine and neuter genders. In short in its
construction and grammar it recalls very markedly the Hamitic language
family of north-east Africa; and there is—remarkable to relate—a
language, the Sandawi of German East Africa, south of the Victoria
Nyanza, which resembles Hottentot in possessing clicks and also in a few
of its word-roots, and in its syntax. This speech is used by a
semi-nomadic tribe of hunters, who, however, in physique seem to be
negroid with some tinge of Hamitic blood.
So far as the slight indications of their legendary history go, the
Hottentots of south-west Africa seem in their origin to have come from
the same direction—Unyamwezi—to have wandered with cattle and sheep
(both of a north-east African type) between Tanganyika and Nyasa, and
across the Congo water-parting into Upper Zambezia, whence they made
their way slowly, pushed on by other people, into eastern Damaraland.
Here they settled for a time, and then again moved on to the Atlantic
coast between Mossamedes and the Orange River. For hundreds or thousands
of years, no doubt, they warred and yet mingled with the Bushmen, until
at last they had acquired many of their physical characteristics and a
large element of their language. At the present day they exhibit all the
points of a cross between the true negro and the Bushman, with perhaps
some attenuated element of the Caucasian, more in their minds and
legends than in their bodies.
To return to the true negro. He again may be subdivided into three main
types, and a fourth compounded of a mixing of the three others. The
first three are (1) the Congo pygmy, (2) the Forest negro, and (3) the
Nilotic negro. The Congo pygmy is a dwarfed form of the most ancient
negro type, with some affinities to the Asiatic negro, distinguished by
a very flat, large nose, much prognathism, long upper lips, turned-in
toes, short legs, and a tendency to hairiness on the body. The Forest
negro is a slightly improved pygmy, of taller stature, with exaggerated
negro facial features, long arms, and legs that are disproportionately
short. The Nilotic negro, on the other hand, is remarkable for his long,
stilt-like legs, short arms, and a greater likeness to the Caucasian in
his facial lineaments. The Nilotic negro in his finest developments
(such as the Turkana of Lake Rudolf) is perhaps the tallest race in the
world. A mixture of all these types one with the other, and no doubt
with the vanished Bushmen of East and North Africa, has produced the
“average” negro which is the commonest type to be met with in West,
East, Central, and South Africa. The ordinary Kafir or Zulu, dressed
appropriately, or the average Swahili or Munyamwezi of East Africa, or
the Mubangi or Muluba of Congoland, would pass muster as a Mandingo, a
Mosi, an Ashanti or a Nupe negro in West Africa, or even as a Hausa or a
Senegalese.
From whatever direction the negro entered Africa—if he did not arise
there—he seems to have settled most thickly to the north of the Equator,
in that broad belt below the 15th degree of north latitude which
stretches across the continent from Senegal and Liberia to Abyssinia and
the Victoria Nyanza. In the great western prolongation of Africa, above
all, between Kordofan and Senegambia, especially in Nigeria, the negro
must have been established for many thousand years to permit of the
enormous variety and diversity of the languages therein spoken having
arisen. In some parts of West Africa, such as Liberia and French Guinea,
there are six or seven absolutely distinct language-families, some of
which are confined in their use to an area no larger than Rutland or
Bedfordshire.
On the other hand, over the great southern third of Africa, beyond the
Equator, there are at most only eleven distinct language-families (as
compared to the forty-two or forty-three farther north). Of these
eleven, one, the Bantu, predominates vastly over the others; which
others are the Bushman and Hottentot in the extreme south, three
unclassified Sudanese language-families in Northern Congoland, three
small patches of non-Bantu speech in Northern German East Africa, and in
the same region and in British East Africa the intrusive Nilotic and
Hamitic speech-groups.
At the present day nearly all Africa south of the Equator is the domain
of but one language-family, the Bantu. The other negro languages are
fast dying out. The Bantu conquest has all the appearance of having been
a recent event, not beginning perhaps more than 2500 years ago. The
Bantu language-family is distinguished by its use of distinctive
prefixes, to which correspond a concord of pronouns and adjectival
prefixes. Nouns are divided into a number of classes (say seventeen),
and each class is marked by a special prefix and concord. But the
classes do not correspond to the masculine and feminine of the
sex-denoting languages, or masculine, feminine, and neuter. No
discrimination in prefix or pronouns takes place to indicate sex; but
nouns are allotted arbitrarily to classes which in most cases have lost
any special meaning but originally undoubtedly corresponded with a
division of objects into natural categories, each distinguished by some
special feature. Thus there was the ‘living’ or ‘human’ class, the
‘tree’ class, the ‘long’ or ‘river’ class, the classes of diminutive
objects, of ‘gigantic,’ of collective like ‘water’ and ‘tribe,’ of
‘strong’ and ‘weak.’
This principle of numerous classes not based on sex distinctions, but
each class having its distinctive particle and concord, is by no means
confined to Bantu in Africa, but is shared by an important group of West
African languages in Senegambia and Sierra Leone (Timne, etc.), and by
Fula. Except that the Fula speech (with some allied groups between the
Niger bend, the northern Gold Coast and Dahomé) is governed by suffixes
instead of prefixes, it offers much resemblance in structure to the
Bantu. Other prefix-governed languages (but without a distinct concord)
have been found recently in Southern Kordofan. From some such direction
as this the Bantu language-family—which in vocabulary, though not in
syntax, bears signs of relationship with some of the Lower Niger
languages—must have taken its origin in a region between the basins of
the Nile, Congo, and Shari. It may have been called into existence in
the moulding of a number of negro tribes by some semi-Caucasian invader,
of which the Hima of the Victoria Nyanza basin, the Mañbettu and the
Nyamnyam of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Wele-Mubangi are vestiges. After a
special development in the Mountain Nile basin, this language-type was
carried all over the southern projection of Africa by a series of
strenuous invasions proceeding west to the Cameroons, east to the shore
of the Indian Ocean, and south over the Great Lakes region, Zambezia,
and Congoland.
Fula[5], a form of speech of cognate origin, was the language of the
mysterious light-complexioned Fūl people who first came within the scope
of world-history when they rose into power as a conquering Muhammadan
nation of the Western Sudan (Senegambia and Upper Niger) in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that they had wandered more
or less as a cattle-keeping gypsy-like folk, scattered over Nigeria from
the basin of the Gambia and the Senegal to the confines of Bornu and the
Shari river; to the Benue, to Nupe, Borgu, and Dahomé. According to Arab
tradition they came into Senegambia originally from the Adrar country,
far south of Morocco. Some of their own traditions derive them from
Fezzan, south of Tripoli. Other slight indications lead us to suppose
that they formerly dwelt in Morocco and Algeria as—quite possibly—the
predecessors of the Libyans or Berbers, who will be dealt with
presently. The nearest affinities of the Fulde or Fula speech at the
present day are with the group of Mosi-Gurunsi negro tongues spoken at
the back of Ashanti and of Togoland. There are also faint resemblances
to Wolof, the language of the handsome black-skinned Jolofs of Senegal,
a mixed race with an ancient Caucasian strain in their blood. In any
case the pure Fula is a handsome hybrid type, obviously an early cross
(in North Africa most likely) between the invading Caucasian of Europe
and some ancient negro stock of North Africa. The purer types of Fula
have a skin no darker than the average Berber, the face-features of a
European, and hair that is in curly ringlets. Their gradual invasion of
the Western Sahara, Nigeria, and Senegambia—in the south they reached
down to the Lower Niger and Yoruba-land, to Baghirmi, and across the
Benue to within a few days’ journey of the Cameroons coast—may have been
caused by the peopling of North Africa some ten or more thousand years
ago by the Libyans or Berbers, a Caucasian people related in speech and
origin to the Gala and other Hamites of N.E. Africa, and to the ancient
Egyptians.
Four other negroid peoples require to be considered in their effect on
the colonization of Africa before we can deal with the more clearly
alien races. These are the Songhai of Central Nigeria, the Mandingo of
Western Nigeria, the Hausa, and the Tibus or Teda.
The Songhai (Sughai, Songhoi—the _gh_ is like the French _r_ _grasséyé_)
are something like the Wolofs in appearance, in that, though
black-skinned and woolly-haired, their features are often of Caucasian
cast, and their characteristics generally those of negroids rather than
negroes. Their language (the common speech of Timbuktu) is at present an
unsolved mystery, its affinities are unguessed at. The Songhai seem to
have dwelt first (where they still live under Tuareg influence) in the
Oasis of Agades, a country on the southern verge of the Sahara, due east
of the great Niger bend. Here they appear to have received immigrants
from Ptolemaic or Roman Egypt, who brought with them Egyptian domestic
animals and the Egyptian style of architecture. This last they applied
to building in mud instead of stone. But, although much modified since
by Berber or Arab (Saracenic) influence from the north, this massive
Egyptian style of mud-built walls, palaces, and mosques still prevails
throughout northern Nigeria from the Upper Niger to the vicinity of the
Shari River.
While the Songhai were extending their influence to the northern bend of
the Niger, the Mandingo peoples, from some unknown place of origin, were
fighting their way westwards along the Upper Niger towards Senegambia.
The Mandingos and the Songhai met somewhere about the junction of the
Niger and the Bani, near the celebrated Jenné, which became a great
Songhai city in the 8th century. The Mandingo negroids, who may have
been connected with the ancient N.W. African Kingdom of Ghana, early
attained wealth and power by opening up the salt and gold mines of the
arid country bordering on or within the Western Sahara. They possibly
carried on a trade thence with Romanized North Africa. Southwards they
got into touch with the gold-bearing country of Ashanti; and it was
perhaps through them that Roman and Byzantine beads first found their
way to Ashanti and the Gold Coast. Sometimes the Mandingo empire
prevailed over the Songhai; latterly the Songhai dominated the northern
Mandingos, until both were swamped by the Moorish invasion of the
sixteenth century. Both alike showed themselves very ready to receive
Arab traders and the Muhammadan religion.
The Hausa people are much more negro in their physical appearance than
the Mandingos or Songhai. But their language, on the other hand, is
imprinted with the white man’s influence. Not only is it sex-denoting,
but in pronouns and in the peculiarity of indicating the feminine gender
by the consonant _t_ it offers so many indications of ancient Hamitic
influence that we are entitled to assume that it arose through an early
invasion of Eastern Nigeria by people speaking a Hamitic language. If
there is any veracity in Hausa legends, these Hamitic civilisers of the
regions between the Niger and Lake Chad came from Egypt; apparently they
likewise penetrated as far south as Baghirmi on the Shari and westward
to the Logone, where they assisted to create the sex-denoting Musgu
tongue. At one time it was thought that the evident “Libyan” element in
Hausa came from the invasion of Central Nigeria by the Berbers or
Tuaregs[6]; but it now seems much more probable that it was a Hamitic
rather than a Berber influence, and more probably came from the regions
of Nubia and Dongola where at one time a Hamitic language was spoken.
The Hausa people were probably already in existence, and their
“compromise” trading language had already been formed before the Tuaregs
or desert Berbers of North Africa had found their way to the regions
east of the Niger.
Indeed this region south of the Tripolitaine, from Fezzan across the
Tibesti mountains and the eastern Sahara to Lake Chad, had become the
domain of another remarkable negroid race which has had much to do with
the opening up and the closing of negro Africa, the Tibu or Teda.
Physically they are an exact hybrid between Hamite and negro, and
resemble very much the more negro-like types of Somali; but their
language, which is cognate with the Kanuri of Bornu, a kingdom first
semi-civilized by the Tibu, offers no indications of affinity with other
African forms of speech; like Songhai it is (so far as our existing
knowledge goes) quite isolated. The Tibu had much to do with the
introduction of iron weapons and implements and iron-working into negro
Africa. They seem to have reproduced the boomerang or throwing-stick in
iron, and thus to have originated those wonderful throwing-knives which
attained their highest development in the north-central basin of the
Congo. A notable stream of Tibu culture (no doubt largely derived from
ancient Egypt) entered Congoland about 1500 to 2000 years ago, finding
its way up the Shari from Lake Chad, across the Mubangi and main Congo,
and so down into the Bushongo country of central Congoland. The old
Bushongo language (now extinct) was not a Bantu speech, but an
unclassified tongue with relationships to the forms of speech still
current on the Upper Shari.
Other civilizing negroid immigrants, Tibu or Hamite in origin, appear to
have drifted from the north-east into the Bahr-al-Ghazal region and
thence into N.E. Congoland, where by mixture with the negroes they
formed the remarkable Nyamnyam and Mañbettu peoples, or at any rate the
aristocracies of those tribes. Farther east still we have the remarkable
Hima aristocracies of cattle-keeping semi-nomads, very like the Fula in
appearance and customs, but always speaking pure Bantu languages. They
would seem to have been derived from an ancient Egyptian or Gala origin.
Putting together the slender evidence we have as to the prehistoric past
of Africa at a period of, let us say, 10,000 years ago—evidence
represented by stone implements, a few skulls of ancient date, rock
engravings in Mauretania, the earliest archaeological remains in Lower
Egypt—we may hazard the following conclusions. At that period the
coastal fringe of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt was inhabited by
Caucasian or semi-Caucasian races allied in the west, perhaps, to the
Fula type, and in the east (Cyrenaica and Egypt) to the Libyan or
Berber. There may even then have been the beginning of Semitic
settlements on the Isthmus of Suez and the Suez coast of the Red Sea.
These same Libyans or Hamites, at that period not strongly
differentiated from the Proto-Semites in race and language, and
emphatically “white men,” had probably also penetrated to the highlands
of Abyssinia, and by mixture with the precedent negroes and bushmen were
forming the modern Hamitic races. Some of these white men (besides the
more negroid Galas) had found their way down the more open, less
densely-forested east coast of Africa to Zambezia and South Africa[7].
But beyond this white fringe of Northern and North-eastern Africa, the
rest of the Dark continent was then the domain of the negro in his
Bushman and black-skinned types. The Sahara desert was not such a
rainless region then as now, but was more habitable and inhabited. On
the other hand, much of Central and some of Southern Africa was still
under water, covered with as yet undrained, unevaporated shallow lakes.
The vast forests of the centre and parts of the west may have been
uninhabited by man, afraid to encounter the chimpanzees and gorillas,
the leopards, pythons, and elephants which tenanted them. Then, 10,000
years ago, more or less, there came into the Nile valley from the
direction of Abyssinia the wonderful race of the Dynastic Egyptians[8],
whose original home seems to have been, first, South-West Arabia, and
next, the Danákil country, the coast-line of Abyssinia. The Dynastic
Egyptians were apparently a composite type, mainly of Hamitic stock,
impregnated with an ancient negroid strain and tinged to some extent
with Mongol blood from the early Mongolian invaders of Mesopotamia.
Their language remains an unsolved problem to this day. It offers
decided affinities with both Hamitic and Proto-Semitic, and yet contains
puzzling elements of its own which may be due both to negro and to
Mongolian influence. In the main it is an aberrant Hamitic tongue; but
with no very close resemblance to Gala or Somali, or to the Bisharin
dialects of Eastern Nubia. These (be it remarked) seem to have been
spoken for an enormously long period of time; and possibly the Bisharin
(Hamitic) natives of the Red Sea coast-lands—Rudyard Kipling’s
“Fuzzie-wuzzies”—were living where they now are when the dynastic
Egyptians poured as a Neolithic conquering host into the Nile valley in
Lower Nubia and made their way along the narrow ribbon of habitable
Egypt on either side of the Desert Nile.
The dynastic Egyptians found the Delta occupied by a Libyan people, akin
to the modern Berbers of North Africa. At that period the distinction
already existed between the Libyan or Berber and the Ethiopian or Gala
branches of the Hamitic family. Amongst these Berbers of the Nile Delta
were still lingering Bushman or negro serfs. The dynastic Egyptians
mingled much with these Libyans of North Egypt; indeed occasionally, in
the early days of organized Egypt, the Libyan race from the Western
Desert (which still lingers little altered in the Oasis of Siwah)
invaded Egypt and gave dynasties to that country. The dynastic Egyptians
ruled and populated the narrow valley of the Desert Nile as far south as
the first cataract, and also its broad delta to the shores of the
Mediterranean. South of the First Cataract there was a mixed population
of Egyptians, Hamites and negroes of the Nubian race. Above the Second
Cataract the country of the Nile valley was, whilst dynastic Egyptian
rule lasted, entirely negro in population. It was not invaded and
settled by Hamites of the Bisharin stock until about the period of
Ptolemaic rule.
The dynastic Egyptians governed a small portion only of the Red Sea
coast, between the Gulf of Suez and Ras Benās (Berenike). From ports at
Kosseir and Berenike they sent their fleets of galleys down the Red Sea
and out into the Gulf of Aden; and at a relatively late period of their
long (perhaps 6000 years) rule over Egypt, in about 1500 B.C., they
despatched the first of several expeditions to the Danákil coast and to
Somaliland, in search of incense trees. Whether Egyptian influence in
unrecorded voyages proceeded further down the east coast of Africa is
doubtful; at any rate it is not, so far, supported by any evidence. The
Egyptians seem to have been somewhat timid navigators. Their sea-going
galleys depended more on oarsmen than on lateen sails; and, although
they may have found it comparatively safe to coast along the Red Sea,
they would be perturbed by the much rougher, stormier waters of the Gulf
of Aden; while the Indian Ocean, with its strong monsoon winds and big
billows, would prove very unsafe for their unseaworthy ships. Their
civilizing, “Caucasianizing” influence over negro Africa was however
considerable, though probably not exercised with any effect until the
real Egyptian dynasties were passing away and the land of Egypt was
becoming a region doomed to be ruled by foreigners—Assyrians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Byzantines[9]. Egyptian trade, even as far back as 3000
or 4000 years before the Christian era, was penetrating through Nubia to
Kordofan and Darfur, Bornu, Tibesti, Agadés and the Niger; or down into
the Bahr-al-ghazal and the countries of the Mountain Nile where the
pygmies still dwelt. Hamitic peoples and Semitic colonists in Abyssinia
and Northern Galaland were in touch with the Egypt of the last dynasties
and the Egypt of the Ptolemies, and pushed a trade in Egyptian goods
inland as far as Mt Elgon and the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Their
ancient, blue, Egyptian beads are dug up occasionally in the sub-soil of
Kavirondo. Egyptian or Gala adventurers appeared (outcasts, criminals,
or mutinous soldiers in origin, it may be) in the lands of savage
negroes about the sources of the Nile. They were looked upon as
demi-gods; and their descendants to this day (with a strikingly
Pharaonic physiognomy) are often called by a name which means “spirits,”
“white men,” or “gods.” They, or traders whom they attracted, brought
with them the domestic animals of Egypt and the cultivated plants,
besides a knowledge of metal working.
Is it generally realized that the whole of negro Africa, south of the
Northern Sahara, received its first and its principal domestic animals
and cultivated plants from Egypt, and Egypt only? The ox, long-horned
and straight-backed, or shorter-horned and humped, an Asiatic, and not a
European ordanese goat (not the long-eared, polled, fleecy Nubian goat
of after-development); one or more breeds of dog; the domesticated
Nubian ass; the domestic fowl—all came from Egypt. In vegetable
food-stuffs there were the jowari or sorghum grain (_Andropogon_), the
eleusine, the _Pennisetum_ millets, the taro “yam” (_Colocasia_ aroid),
various peas and beans, and gourds and pumpkins. From Egypt came ideas
as to boat-building which penetrated as far south and west as the
Victoria Nyanza, Lake Chad, and the Northern Niger; also methods of
hut-building and the ambitious mud-architecture of the Nigerian Sudan, a
hint or reflection of which penetrated even to the Niger delta, the
Northern Cameroons and Congo. Simple articles of furniture, such as
carved stools, head-rest pillows, musical instruments (lyres, drums,
harps, xylophones, zithers), games of the cat’s-cradle and backgammon
type, weapons (shields, improved bows, slings, lances and battle-axes),
found their way into the heart of negroland; though many of these
inventions got no farther south than Uganda and the central basin of the
Congo, or south of the northern Niger.
Two other elements in the pre-historic colonization of Africa require
mention at this stage—the Semitic and the Malay. “Semitic” and “Hamitic”
are useful terms which apply exactly to two distinct types of
sex-denoting languages; languages which conceivably had a common origin
very far back in time—12,000 years ago or more?—somewhere in southwest
Asia, perhaps not far from Caucasia or Armenia. But in a looser sense we
apply Semitic and Hamitic to physical types, and speak of a Semitic
profile and the dark Hamitic complexion and curly hair. “Hamite”—or,
more correctly, Kushite—applies without much inconsistency to the
physical type which speaks the Eastern Hamitic languages[10]—yellow or
brown in skin colour, with the handsome features and straight, thin
noses of the better-looking Caucasian, and bushy, black hair which
betrays the ancient negro intermixture by its curliness. The Kushites
are in fact descended from Libyans (Berbers) who have mingled in
North-East Africa with negro races. The whiter Libyans passed on
westwards to colonize the southern and north-western shores of the
Mediterranean, while the Hamites populated Middle and Eastern Egypt,
Abyssinia, and Galaland; from which direction their nomad wanderers as
hunters and herdsmen permeated all Eastern Africa in ancient times. The
Hamitic languages are akin to the Libyan, though the two groups are
widely separated in affinities of vocabulary, and must have diverged
from a common origin in North-Western Arabia ten or more thousand years
ago.
It is far less easy in the case of the Semites to define a physical type
associated with the speaking of Semitic languages; as difficult, indeed,
as to postulate the corporeal form of the men who originated the Aryan
tongues. The Aramaic type so familiar to us in the typical Jew is akin
to the old Assyrian; and the Assyrian was probably a compound of
Armenian and Mediterranean man mixed with the old negroid peoples of
Southern Persia. The Arabs of Arabia are in the north very “Nordic” in
appearance, and evidently exhibit the results of ancient invasions of
Syria by peoples akin to the Teutonic or blond Aryan type; others again
show the hooked “Semitic” nose of the Armenian or the long nasal organ
of the average Persian; while in the natives of Southern Arabia there is
a Hamitic, Gala-like strain, besides the general underlying stratum of
that hypothetical small-bodied, big-nosed white Neolithic race which is
associated with stone-worship and megalithic stone-building, and is
perhaps the basis of the Mediterranean type of man. Curiously enough,
there is not any evidence as yet of an ancient _negro_ peopling of
Arabia, such as exists in regard to Algeria and Egypt, and Southern
(Elamite) Persia.
These varying and composite races speaking Semitic tongues appear to
have travelled south and west from Syria and Arabia on the heels of both
Libyans (Amorites) and Hamites, and even to have settled on the Red Sea
coast of Egypt at a very early period before the dynastic Egyptians had
conquered the Nile valley. Much later they invaded Lower Egypt in force
as the Haqshu (Hikushahu) or Shepherd kings—if these are rightfully
identified as speaking a Semitic tongue. Still later they began to cross
the Red Sea farther south and colonized Abyssinia and even Somaliland.
In these regions (Abyssinia and Harrar) their Semitic tongues remain to
this day. Perhaps as early as 1000 years before the time of Christ (at a
guess) their ships, more seaworthy than those of the Egyptians, found
their way from the ports of the Sabaean, Minaean and Himyarite kingdoms
to India, to the Zanzibar coast of Africa, and to the north end of
Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. Later, in all probability, than the
first Minaean ventures along the East African coast was a more authentic
voyage of the Phoenicians, which will be mentioned in the next chapter.
Attention should be given at this stage in our survey of the ancient
colonization of Africa to the unsolved mystery of the Rhodesian
ruins—the stone-built forts, the aqueducts, round towers, stone-embanked
hill-terraces, stone-lined pits, rock-mines, and buildings which suggest
the name of “temple.” These ruins (in and under which have been found
beautiful gold ornaments, ingot-moulds, strange, sculptured birds—eagles
or vultures—at the ends of long soap-stone monoliths, and stone
_phalli_) dot the surface of Southern Rhodesia somewhat thickly. They
seem to radiate, as it were, from the head streams of the Sabi River, in
fact from where the most wonderful of all these ruins, Great Zimbabwe,
is situated. The northernmost of the clusters of ruins of stone
buildings is to the north of Mt Hampden and the modern town of
Salisbury; but none of these strange remains of an unexplained
civilization are found anywhere near the Zambezi. It would seem that the
unknown people to whom the really antique and skilfully built among
these towers, temples, and labyrinthine fortifications (and not their
more modern, negro-made clumsy imitations) are to be ascribed, entered
south-east Africa at or near the old Arab port of Sofala and made their
way up the Sabi river. The ruins are all situated on lofty tablelands or
mountain ridges, in healthy, cool country. Their existence was noted by
Arab writers so early as the 10th century A.C.; and they were described
as old and partly in decay when first seen by the Portuguese in the 16th
century. The name “Zimbaoe,”—like the modern Zimbabwe—applied to them in
Portuguese writings is simply a local Bantu plural word meaning
“stones”; but these Zimba or Zimbabwe came to be specially associated
with the remarkable negro kingdom or empire of Monomotapa[11] which
existed in this part of south-east Africa from the time the Islamite
Arabs settled anew at Sofala in the 10th century A.C. down to the early
19th century, when it was apparently finally extinguished by the
invading Zulus from the south. From this region may have come the
conquering hordes of the “Ba-zimba” who are thought to have crossed over
into west Madagascar, and who passed ravaging and slaying up the east
coast of Africa—very much after the style of the later Angoni-Zulu
raids—in the late 16th century, temporarily effacing the Portuguese hold
over Mombasa.
The Rhodesian stone buildings are obviously associated with gold-mining;
but they must have been centres of somewhat elaborate agriculture, and
of a phallic worship (the _phallus_ being, together with the associated
cylinder or _lingam_, a sacred symbol of a religious belief which
prevailed once in Egypt, India, and ancient Arabia and Syria). Phallic
worship, for example, was carried by the Phoenicians to southern
Tunis—no doubt to Carthage and elsewhere; but its symbols happen to have
survived in actual use in southern Tunis to the present day. The masonry
of the Zimbabwe type of building (the real old kind, not the modern
negro imitation) displays remarkable skill in the shaping and placing of
stones in courses, all much of the same size. The masonry is without
mortar, but the stones fit fairly closely in their horizontal,
accurately-laid courses; and in the round buildings the symmetry is
remarkable.
What race raised such monuments and was gifted with so much civilization
at a period which is certainly antecedent (in the really ancient types
of building) to the 10th century A.C.? Was it the Arabs from southern
Arabia, who were settled on the East African coast before the Christian
era? This seems probable. The Zimbabwe ruins yield no ornament, no
detail whatever of the Saracenic style, and (so far) no inscription of
any kind in any language. There is nothing whatever about them to
suggest their having been built by Islamic Arabs; everything to the
contrary, as certainly these Arabs would not have carved either birds or
phalli. There are suggestions here and there of Indian influence. The
buildings of the true Zimbabwe style are certainly pre-Islamic or have
been associated with a people which ignored Islam. They resemble most
nearly the works of the Phoenicians and the southern Arabians, from any
date between 1000 B.C. and the early part of the Christian era. The
round conical towers are like those of Sardinia and Ireland and other
ancient haunts of the enterprising Phoenicians. Yet there is nowhere any
inscription in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Sabaean or Kufic or other ancient
eastern alphabets, though according to Portuguese traditions
inscriptions in unknown characters did exist at Zimbabwe; and no skull
has so far been dug up from beneath the ruins or in close association
with them or the ancient gold-workings which is not of the ordinary
Bantu negro type. No ancient coin has been found; all the pottery,
porcelain, and glass fragments indicate comparatively modern oriental
ware which might have been introduced at any date between the 15th and
the 17th centuries. Yet most of these last discoveries, though made at a
considerable depth below the surface under the oldest ruins, come from
places where they might have been buried in recent times, and do not
really militate against the theory that the finest masonry work of
Zimbabwe and kindred establishments dates from a period of 2000 years
ago or earlier.
No one who really knows the negro of Africa, south of the Sahara desert,
can easily believe that the hundreds of stone-built towns, villages and
forts of ancient appearance in southern Rhodesia were built, unaided and
uninspired, by a pure negro race, or doubt even that these works (I am
referring to those of perfect construction) were the outcome of some
foreign invasion of south-east Africa at a period of unfixed history
prior to the 7th century of the Christian era. We know of no negro,
scarcely any negroid, race of Africa which, left to itself and of its
own inspiration, has taken to building in stone. The great metal-working
tribes of the Congo basin which developed a really remarkable native
art—the Bushongo, for example, a race more negroid than
negro—nevertheless ignored stone as a building material or an object of
worship. Between southern Congoland or Nyasaland on the north and
Mashonaland on the south nothing has ever been discovered hitherto which
indicates the existence in former times of a stone-building race of
negroes or negroids, or of the path followed through the, until
recently, barbarous regions of Zambezia and Moçambique by the possible
ancestors of the people who built the Zimbabwe and similar monuments.
The resemblance between the round towers of Rhodesia and the primitive,
conical, round minarets of the old mosques at Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa,
and other places on the East African coast (dominated by Arabs for at
least 2000 years) is very striking. Both may date from the pre-Islamic
period. There are other analogies between the Rhodesian ruins and the
ancient buildings of pre-Islamic Arabia which suggest, as the most
probable explanation of this mystery in African colonization, that the
ancient gold-miners, _phallus-_ and sun-worshippers, irrigators,
terrace-cultivators of Matebele- and Mashonaland, were likewise Arabs
from some part of western or southern Arabia who penetrated inland from
Sofala attracted by the signs of gold. After a century or so of
profitable gold-mining in a land which had only then a spare Bushman
population, the Bantu hordes from the north descended on these Semitic
colonies and eventually exterminated or drove away the Arabs, taking
their place clumsily as gold-miners and builders. Although the Arabs
never regained their position in the interior, they continued or resumed
their occupancy of the south-east African coast-line down to the arrival
of the Portuguese. Probably also the Tsetse fly, by its interference
with the means of transport, was another deterrent factor in the history
of this colonization which failed to spread. It is possible,
nevertheless, that Madagascar and Bantu East Africa owe to these
hypothetical, unnamed, prehistoric Arab colonizers not only the
introduction (indirectly from India) of the edible banana or plantain,
which afterwards spread right across the continent, but also the
long-horned, straight-backed Egyptian ox, and the domestic fowl; hemp
perhaps likewise, a “smoking mixture” which preceded tobacco by many
centuries.
One of the greatest mysteries in the prehistoric past of Man is the
Malayan colonization of the large island of Madagascar. Madagascar lies
off the east coast of Africa at a minimum distance of 300 miles. Between
the north-west corner of the island and the East African mainland lies
the archipelago of the Comoro islands, which assist to some extent to
bridge the interval. So far as our researches go, there is no evidence
in Madagascar of ancient human inhabitants. The island was probably
uninhabited by man until the arrival of the Malagasy from Sumatra or
Java, though, more or less simultaneously, negroes from eastern Africa
were arriving on the west coast of Madagascar, either in their own
canoes, or more probably in the sailing vessels of the Arabs who were
trading up and down the east coast of Africa from perhaps as early as
1000 B.C. But the unsolved problem is, How did the Malagasy tribes reach
this island at different periods between an approximate 500 B.C. and 500
A.C.? Their language affinities[12] show that they must have come from
Sumatra or Java. Physically the Malagasy of pure race—like the Hova
tribes—unmixed (as so many of them are along the eastern side of the
central plateau) with negro, Indian, or Arab blood, resemble pretty
closely the Malay types of Sumatra and Java. We can understand the Malay
and Indonesian conquest of Oceania. In the relatively calm,
island-studded Pacific Ocean it is not an impossible task for men to
sail on from island to island in large canoes with outriggers and decks,
and with masts and sails, and thus to reach in their migrations to
within 2000 or 3000 miles of North or South America, and 5000 or 6000
miles from their starting-point. But it is a different matter to cross
in a direct line the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean from Java or
Sumatra to Madagascar, with no convenient islands to halt at by the way.
It is true that there is the little Chagos group, leading to the
Mascarene archipelago of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodriguez; but on no one
of these islands has there been found any trace of the former presence
of human inhabitants before the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch, and
French. It seems more probable therefore that the excursions and
adventures of the Sumatran and Javan Malays (inspired to some extent as
they may have been by the mysterious Indonesians coming from Indo-China,
who settled at some unknown date in Sumatra and the more eastern islands
of the Malay archipelago, and were the progenitors of the Polynesians)
first took a western direction in crossing the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon
and southern India; thence passing on to the Maldiv archipelago, and so
to the Seychelles and farther to the Almirante Islands and the north end
of Madagascar. But there is very little evidence of a positive nature to
support this theory, except it be the slightly “Malay” look about the
people of the Maldiv group and the scanty remains of ancient human
settlement which are undoubtedly to be found in the larger Seychelles
Islands; though these had long been uninhabited when rediscovered by the
Portuguese and French. It seems, however, almost impossible, that
repeated colonizations of Madagascar should have taken place by direct
voyages from Sumatra or Java (at a period from 2500 to 1500 years ago)
by adventurous Malays starting forth in outrigger canoes for an ocean
journey of about 4000 miles. How did they know Madagascar awaited them
on the other side of that tremendous interval? It is much more likely
that they passed on by degrees from point to point in their western
migrations; first to Ceylon, then to the Maldiv Islands (this name, like
some other place and tribal names in South India, suggests affinity with
“Malay,” “Malagasy”), and so on to the Seychelles, Almirante, Aldabra
and the Comoros. But, if so adventurous, why did not these Malagasy
Malays also colonize the east coast of Africa? If they ever did so,
there remains not the slightest trace of their presence in either the
physique or the languages of the present inhabitants. There are, it is
true, outrigger canoes in use at Zanzibar which may derive from some
occupation of that island by Malagasies on their way to Madagascar; but
Zanzibar, though only twenty miles from the mainland, is very distinct
from East Africa. Its original inhabitants, when it was first examined
by Europeans, belonged to only three types—negroes, Arabs, and Indians.
There is evidence, however, of a scattered and varied character, that
intercourse for trading purposes between China, India and Persia on the
one hand, and South Arabia and Zanzibar on the other is as old as the
beginning of the Christian era. Himyaritic-Arab intercourse with the
Malagasy of north Madagascar must be at least as old as that; to judge
by a variety of indications, it is certainly pre-Islamic.
The west coast of Madagascar may have been already peopled by negroes
from East Africa who had crossed over by the route of the Comoro
archipelago[13]. But, if so, these last must have been assisted or
compelled to make the attempt by some superior seafaring race coming
from the north, Arab or Phoenician, because there is no evidence that
the East African negroes have ever been great navigators or have
possessed in earlier times any means of embarkation better than dug-out
canoes propelled by paddles; and it is difficult to believe that in such
unstable vessels they could cross a broad strait of rough sea between
East Africa and the Comoro Islands. It is easier to suppose that the
large negro element of Bantu origin which exists in north-west
Madagascar was brought there within the last 2000 years by Arab ships,
before and after the days of Islam. The negro colonization of this large
island could not have been helped by the persistence of some
land-bridge, some Comoro isthmus which has since broken down; for along
such an isthmus would have come many African beasts, birds, and snakes,
which are totally absent from Madagascar[14]. With only a narrow strait
to cross, negroes or Bushmen might have passed over to Madagascar in
canoes or on rafts. The Comoro Islands, when first discovered by
Europeans, were (as now) inhabited by Arabs and a race of Bantu negroes,
speaking dialects related to the Swahili of Zanzibar. But these may have
been brought there centuries before by the Arab ships. It is probable
that there was no Malagasy settlement of the Comoro archipelago until
the 19th century.
Another curious feature in this Malay colonization of Madagascar is
that, once having reached this great island, the Malagasy immigrants
appear to have completely renounced their seafaring life, to have
maintained no sea-going vessels of any size (though they had and have
still neatly made outrigger boats), and never to have voyaged anywhere
from the coasts of their new home. Otherwise they could not have failed
to discover and colonize Mauritius or Réunion. In many of its aspects
the colonization of Madagascar in prehistoric times by a race coming
obviously from Sumatra or Java and allied in physical type and language
less to the Malays than to the Malayo-Polynesians and even to the darker
Melanesians is perhaps the most puzzling of the unsolved enigmas to be
found in the study of the peopling of Africa by foreign immigrants.
Judging from local traditions, from time to time fleets of canoes
containing Malays were blown right across the Indian Ocean to the east
coast of Madagascar. Such was—it is said—the history of the Imérina or
Hova tribes who originated mainly from the last accidental Malay
colonization of Madagascar. These Hovas found the coast belt so
unhealthy that they made their way inland to the high plateaus of
Imérina. Here, after long isolation, they acquired strength from their
invigorating climate and, obtaining arms from the Europeans in the 17th
and 18th centuries, spread over Madagascar as conquerors and brought
nearly the whole island under their rule. Yet the Sakalavas, the
dark-skinned remnant of a far earlier Malaysian invasion, spoke a
dialect nearer to the actual Malay than that of the Hova. It remains to
be said that the strong negroid element of Madagascar is attributed by
some authorities to Melanesian colonists from Malaysia of a relatively
ancient date and not to negroes from Africa. There are numerous
Melanesian words in the Malagasy language.
-----
Footnote 1:
A hundred thousand years ago the Red Sea may have been a long,
isolated lake filling up a great Rift Valley, and the south-western
extremity of Arabia have been joined across the narrow straits of
Bab-al-Mandib to Somaliland. There is an Arab tradition that in the
remote past these straits were formed by a series of earthquakes and
land-slides. But if this were the case why is not the west of Arabia,
in fertile, well-watered regions, more “African” in its mammalian,
bird, and insect fauna? Arabia is a great enigma still in these
questions of geographical distribution. It would be convenient to
regard it as the evolutionary area of the negro, if, for example,
there were any evidence of a positive character—as there is in
southern Persia—to show that it was ever the home of a negro race in
ancient times. But there is no such evidence, and its present negro or
negroid population only dates from the trade in negro slaves which
began about the commencement of the Christian era, and flourished
exceedingly after the eruption of Islam.
“Lemuria”—the hypothetical isthmus which once united Madagascar and
East Africa with India and Ceylon—could not have been the negro’s
birth-place, as some have suggested, inasmuch as it ceased to exist in
the early Tertiaries, long before Man had been evolved.
Footnote 2:
They can be gleaned—most of them—from the recent writings of Dr Arthur
Keith, and Mr W. L. H. Duckworth, and are to some extent summarized in
the preliminary chapter of the present writer’s book on _The Negro in
the New World_.
Footnote 3:
These will be found described in Mr W. L. H. Duckworth’s _Morphology
and Anatomy_, and also in studies of the Bushmen and Hottentots
recently published by Dr Péringuey of the State Library and Museum,
Capetown. It is true that the researches of German and Italian
anthropologists have shown that the hypertrophy of the external
genitalia characteristic of the Bushwoman, together with steatopygy,
not only occur amongst the East African negroes, but even in
Somaliland, Abyssinia and Egypt; but this is only an additional piece
of evidence showing the previous existence of the Bushman in these
regions, perhaps also in Southern Europe.
Footnote 4:
The name is Dutch and means “shore-runners,” there being a legend
amongst the Boers derived from the Hottentots that the present race of
Bushmen was preceded by a vanished type of humanity which derived its
living from the shellfish on the sea-shore.
Footnote 5:
It is more convenient to refer to this speech family and racial type
as “Fula,” but the actual name applied by the “Ful-be” people to their
language is “Fulful-de.”
Footnote 6:
It is more correct to spell this tribal name _Tawareq_, the plural of
Tarqi, “a raider.” But the modern pronunciation of this Arab term (it
is unknown to the Berbers themselves) is “Tuareg.” Wherever in this
book _q_ is used in transliterating African words it stands for the
faucal “k” of the Arabs and other Semites, a guttural which is more
commonly pronounced as a _g_ in North Africa.
Footnote 7:
In which region they may have been preceded by Bushmen, and by a more
generalized, Tasmanian-like type of man, similar to the Galley-Hill
man who inhabited Kent and Central Europe approximately 100,000 years
ago.
Footnote 8:
So called by Professor W. F. Petrie and others because the type is
illustrated in the many portraits of the Pharaohs of Egyptian
dynasties.
Footnote 9:
To be followed, with no return to sovereigns of real Egyptian race, by
Arabs, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Macedonians, Armenians, French,
and British.
Footnote 10:
Some writers reserve “Hamite” and “Hamitic” for the general name of
the language family which includes the Libyan and the eastern Hamitic
tongues, and employ Kushite as a special designation for the great
eastern branch of Hamitic speech-forms which extends its range through
North-east Africa from Egypt to the Equator. The main groups of these
eastern Hamitic or Kushite languages are the _Beja_ or _Bisharin_ of
the Red Sea north-west coast and the country between the Nile and
Suakin; the _Saho_ of the Abyssinian coast-lands; the
_Afar-Danakil-Somali_ group; the _Agau-Bilin_ of the Abyssinian
highlands; the _Gala_, stretching from central Abyssinia to the Juba
and Tana rivers; and the _Kafa_ of south-west Galaland, reaching
southward to near Lake Rudolf. In the south-west of the Ethiopian
Empire there are many unclassified Hamitic dialects (as there are in
northern German East Africa) which are much mixed with negro
word-roots and syntax. These almost merge into the Masai and Nilotic.
Footnote 11:
This word is evidently derived from the Zambezi Bantu words
_Mwene-mutapa_ = Lord of the Mine. Another form “Bena mutapa” for the
people might be translated “Brothers of the mine”—Bena (Baina) in Old
Bantu = brothers, or “clan.”
Footnote 12:
Although the people of west and south Madagascar are very negroid in
appearance and those of the north are evidently mixed with Arab and
Indian blood, the Malay-like Malagasy language is the one universal
speech throughout the whole island. It contains, however, loan words
from Himyaritic Arabic and from East African Bantu.
Footnote 13:
Some evidence, chiefly traditional, is adduced to show that Madagascar
was once inhabited by a yellow-skinned dwarfish race of Bushman stock
known as the “Kimo.” But it is still more difficult to imagine a
Bushman race possessing canoes sufficiently large and seaworthy for
the crossing of the Moçambique channel; or to ascribe to the
prehistoric Arabs, who may have traded with south-east Africa, the
motiveless transportation of Bushmen to south-west Madagascar. The
supposed negro aborigines, apart from the dwarfish Kimo, are known
traditionally by the Malagasy as “Ba-zimba” or “Va-zimba,” and their
burial places are pointed out. The Ba-zimba may have been the
mysterious race which built Zimbabwe.
Footnote 14:
Yet from two to ten thousand years ago, the Comoro island chain was
probably larger and approached much nearer to the mainland, thus
permitting Madagascar to be reached (by swimming) by two or three
species of hippopotamus (now extinct) and by the bush-pig which still
exists there. It is very improbable that either of these mammals could
have swum the distance of 200 miles which now separates East Africa
from the nearest Comoro Island.
CHAPTER II
THE MEDITERRANEAN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
The historical colonization of Africa by alien peoples (if we regard the
dynastic Egyptians as autochthonous) commences with the exploits of the
Phoenicians in Mauretania. This remarkable Semitic people, no doubt akin
to the ancestors of the Jews in race and language, is believed to have
originated on the S.W. shores of the Persian Gulf, and at a period of
some remoteness—perhaps four thousand years ago—to have made its way up
the Euphrates and across the Syrian Desert to the coast of the
Mediterranean, where eventually the great trading cities of Tyre (Tsur
or Ṣor), Akko, Saida or Sidon, Sarepta, Arvad or Ruad, Biruta or Biruna
(Beirūt), etc., were established mostly on islets off the Syrian coast
which eventually grew into peninsulas. From these strongholds their
galleys ranged the Mediterranean and reached the North African coast,
the Straits of Gibraltar, and the open Atlantic Ocean. By about the
twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians from Sidon had established
trading stations at Utica (Atiqa) at the mouth of the Majerda River in
North-East Tunisia, and at Lixus on the coast of Morocco (perhaps mouth
of River Draa, opposite to the Canary Islands). At the same
period—perhaps earliest of all—Gades (Cadiz) was founded as a Sidonian
colony at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in Southern Spain. Carthage
(Kart-hadshat or Kart-hadasht = the New City), afterwards the Phoenician
metropolis in North Africa, did not come into existence till about 822
B.C. It was a settlement of the Tyrians on the west side of the Gulf of
Tunis not far from Utica on the Majerda River, and was called the New
City in contrast to Utica the “Ancient” (Atiqa). The Tyrians and perhaps
the Phoenicians from other sea-cities also created trading depôts on the
Cyrenaic and Tripolitan coast, thus coming into contact with the
Egyptians. But from the seventeenth to the twelfth century before Christ
the Phoenicians had been under the overlordship of Egypt; and it was
only when the Egyptian power began to weaken that the great ships built
at Sidon and at Tyre from the timber of Cyprus and the Lebanon dared to
found African colonies immediately to the westward of Egypt.
Long afterwards, in the days when the strength of the Phoenicians was
itself to decline in the grip of the Assyrian kings, these bold
navigators hired themselves and their ships to the rulers of Egypt for
naval transport and geographical discovery. In about 600 B.C., according
to the story of Herodotos, the last but three of the native Egyptian
Pharaohs, Niku (Necho) II, summoned a captain of the Phoenicians whose
ships were stationed in the Gulf of Suez (perhaps conveyed thither from
the Mediterranean through some canal between the Nile and the Bitter
Lakes), and despatched him in command of an expedition of two or three
vessels, with the order to attempt to sail round the peninsular
continent of Africa and through the Straits of Gibraltar back to the
Nile Delta. Very likely the ship-masters from South Arabia had already
spread the news that the east coast of Africa trended steadily westwards
beyond the equator, and had guessed that Africa was circumnavigable from
the land of the negroes on the east back to that land of black men on
the west of which the Carthaginians were beginning to spread some dim
foreknowledge from their journeys southward along the Morocco and Sahara
coasts.
This Phoenician expedition accordingly set out, and in about three
years’ time had circumnavigated Africa and re-entered the Mediterranean
through the strait which separates Morocco from Spain. Somewhere off the
southern coast of Africa they had landed, sown grain and waited in the
southern summer (our winter) till it matured and ripened. Then they
reaped their harvest and continued the voyage, not willingly losing
sight of the coast, no doubt, yet landing as seldom as possible (we may
imagine) in their justifiable terror of savage tribes and fierce wild
beasts. The account given in Herodotos is very bare. Only one experience
of these Phoenician pioneers is given, other than the corn-growing; they
are said during the (northern) summer season to have had the sun on
their right hand—that is to say, in the north of the sky at mid-day.
This observation shows at any rate that these Phoenicians had sailed far
enough south to have reached the south temperate zone wherein the sun
would always be in the northern sky at mid-day; while the ship’s general
east-to-west course round the southern extremity of Africa would place
the sun on the right hand of a spectator facing the west.
All the minor geographical discoveries of this expedition have been lost
to us, if any were recorded. No mention is made of the gold of
south-east Africa, of any Arab settlements along the east coast, of the
negro inhabitants of these wild regions, or the means by which the
Phoenician mariners supplied themselves with food to supplement the corn
which they grew and reaped. It would not have been difficult for them,
coming from the east, to reach the southern extremity of Africa, and
still less difficult if there really were Arab stations at which they
could recruit in the vicinity of Sofala and Inyambane. The story, by no
means an incredible one, rests almost entirely on a statement of
Herodotos, but was thought to have received fresh support from records
of the events of the reign of Niku II which were said to have been
discovered in the collection of a French Egyptologist. These inscribed
scarabs are however now believed to be clear forgeries[15]. There is
nothing improbable about this legend of the Phoenician east-to-west
circumnavigation of Africa. The winds and currents, be it observed,
would make it much easier for sailing ships to circumnavigate Africa
from the east coast round to the west coast, and then north, than in the
reverse direction; and it is curious to note, among other shreds of
historical record, that a Persian nobleman of Egypt in the sixth century
B.C. and the Carthaginians of the same period both tried to sail round
Africa from Morocco past the West coast, and gave up the enterprise as
too difficult and tedious.
There has been transmitted to us through the diligence of ancient Greek
geographers the Greek version of what is supposed to be the original
description in Punic of the voyage of Hanno the Carthaginian. This Punic
explorer started from Carthage some time in the sixth century before
Christ (perhaps about 520 B.C.) with a fleet of 60 ships, and a
multitude of men and women (said to have been 30,000 in number), on a
voyage of discovery mainly, but also for the purpose of replenishing
with settlers the Carthaginian stations along the coast of Morocco. In
the account given of the journey it is stated that, after passing the
Straits of Hercules and stopping at the site of the modern Sebu, they
rounded Cape Cantin and came to a marsh in which a large number of
elephants were disporting themselves[16]. They then continued their
journey along the coast till they came to the river Lixus, which has
been identified with the river Draa. From here they coasted the desert
till they reached what we now call the Rio de Oro, and on an islet at
the head of this inlet they founded the commercial station of Kerne.
From Kerne they made an expedition as far south as a river which has
been identified as the river Senegal, having first visited the Lagoon of
Teniahir. Once more setting out from Kerne, they passed Cape Verde, the
river Gambia, and the Sierra Leone coast as far as the Sherboro inlet,
which was the limit of their voyage of discovery. Here they encountered
“wild men and women covered with hair”—probably the chimpanzees, which
are found there to this day, and not the gorilla, which is an ape,
restricted in its westward range to the Cameroons. As Hanno’s
interpreter called these creatures “gorilla,” that name was fancifully
given in the nineteenth century to the huge anthropoid ape discovered by
American missionaries in the Gaboon. When Hanno’s expedition visited the
neighbourhood of the Senegal river they were attacked by the natives,
who were described as “wild men wearing the skins of beasts and
defending themselves with stones.” So far as we know, this was the first
sight that civilized man had of his wild Palaeolithic brother since the
two had parted company in Neolithic times, except for glimpses of the
Troglodytes, whom the Carthaginians appear to have met with in the
valley of the river Draa[17].
At Kerne and other trading stations on the coast to the south of
Morocco, the Carthaginians did no doubt a little trade with the Berber
natives in the produce of the Sudan, south of the Sahara, but after a
time the weakening of the power of Carthage and the attacks of the
natives must have destroyed most of these West African settlements; for
the Romans in replacing the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone
further south than the river Draa.
During the eighth century before the Christian era the Tyrian and
Sidonian colonies in North Africa and Spain began to detach themselves
from any political submission to the Phoenician State in Syria, a
kingdom then much harassed by the Assyrians and henceforth doomed to
lose its independence under the alternate sway of Egypt, Assyria,
Chaldaea, Persia, and Macedonia. Carthage became the metropolis of
Western Phoenicia, of the Canaanite[18] settlements in Berberland and
Iberia. The North African coast was dotted at frequent intervals, from
Leptis (Lebda) in Tripoli to the mouth of the Draa on the Atlantic coast
of Morocco, with Canaanite trading or governing cities. More especially
was the Tunisian or African[19] coast under their domination, from the
Island of Meninx-Jerba (the land of date-palms and Lotos-eaters) to what
is now called Bona in Algeria; this last being one of the several towns
anciently named Ubbo or Hippo. One such was the modern Benzert
(Bizerta), the Hippo-Diarrhytos of the Greeks and the Hippon-Zaryt of
late Roman and Byzantine times.
From Carthage, the metropolis, there ran a causeway, of which traces
still remain, up the valley of the Majerda river (the Bagradas of old
times) to the date-palm country, the fruitful land of the shallow
salt-lakes and the hot springs—a region which is some day going to be of
the greatest importance in North Africa for its medicinal waters, its
never-failing springs of sweet water, its fertile soil and genial
climate. The Carthaginians also held from time to time desert cities of
commanding position in what is termed the Matmata country, between the
land of the “Shatts” or lakes and the Tripolitan frontier. But it is
doubtful even here if Carthaginian rule extended as much as 100 miles
inland; and elsewhere in North Africa, away from Tunisia, the
Carthaginians only held what they occupied. At the least weakening of
their power the Berber tribes were ready to revolt and take part with
their enemies. The Carthaginian troops were mainly recruited in Barbary,
and were mercenaries. They frequently mutinied and turned against their
Syrian employers. Yet occasionally Carthage produced a man like Hannibal
who could win the confidence of these Berber soldiers and lead them to
fight the battles of Carthage in Spain, Sicily, and Italy. But in the
outlying districts of North Africa, especially in Morocco, tradition
states that the Berbers occasionally rose as a nation and destroyed the
Carthaginian settlements.
The Phoenicians introduced Syrian ideas of religion into North Africa,
more especially the worship of Baal-hammana (the Lord Ammon) or Milk
(Moloch, the “King”), to whom human sacrifices were offered; Tanit, the
“Face of Baal,” the virgin goddess of the moon, a variant of the Syrian
Astarte; Ashmun, the God of Healing (Æsculapius); Rashūf, the Flame,
Fire, or Lightning God (= Apollo); Baal Milkkart, the “King of the City”
identified with Hercules; Tammuz or Adonis (a beautiful young man);
Pateχ, a hideous dwarf god; Rabbat Amma, the “Lady Mother,” a goddess
like the Greek Cybele. These religious ideas became associated in
southern Tunis and Tripoli with the worship of the _phallus_ as a symbol
of life-giving, creative power, and so powerfully tinged the mentality
of the indigenes of this region that down to the present day there are
schismatics in Islam (especially in the Island of Jerba) that erect
small phallic temples and shrines, or crown with a phallic symbol every
minaret. It is here, as well as in the fifth- and sixth-century
buildings of south-eastern Syria, dating from the early days of
Byzantine architecture, that one may trace the evolution of the _mahrab_
(mihrab) or holy shrine of the Muhammadan mosque from the hollow
phallus, into which the country people of Jerba enter to say their
prayers. This cult once existed in western Arabia, and it is remarkable
to find such distinct traces of it in the ruins of Zimbabwe in
south-east Africa.
The Phoenicians being used to the tamed “Indian” elephant in Syria—a
region in which there were wild Indian elephants down to about the time
of the Phoenician settlement of the Syrian coast—brought about the
taming of the smaller African elephant in North Africa. Probably they
also introduced Syrian breeds of horses, cattle, and pigs, though the
sheep and goats of Mauretania seem rather to have been derived from
Spain. They brought thither the Syrian greyhound and perhaps some other
breeds of dogs; but not the white, wolfish dog of the Berber nomads,
which came from Europe. To these beauty-loving Tyrian mariner-merchants
is due the early introduction of the peacock into North Africa. It is
still a common domestic bird in Tunisia, and figures on old inscribed
stones, even far away in the desert, which date, seemingly, back to
Carthaginian times. The Phoenicians probably brought with them, likewise
from Syria, the cultivated vine, olive, fig, and pomegranate.
Compared with the Romans, the Carthaginians did little to open up the
interior of North Africa, except in what is now called Tunisia. Trade
with the outer world was restricted by jealous monopolies; but the
Phoenician language was nevertheless much impressed on North Africa, and
became the accepted means of intercommunication among the more civilized
tribes between Tripoli and Western Morocco. Indeed the Phoenician
tongue, closely akin to Hebrew and not very far removed from Arabic, is
believed to have lingered all through the subsequent Roman occupation of
Africa and only to have disappeared completely under the invasion of
Arabic, the immediate consequence of the Arab conquest in the seventh
century of our era. Even then it is considered that some Phoenician
words remain incorporated in the Arabic dialects of Tripoli and Tunis
and especially in Maltese; Malta having also been occupied by the
Carthaginians. The Jews, who settled so abundantly in North Africa both
before and after the fall of Jerusalem, brought thither the influence of
Hebrew and of Aramaic, and contributed to Semiticise North Africa in
language and religion. So that Carthaginian rule paved the way for the
Judaizing of certain tribes, before and after the Roman empire ousted
Syria for a time as a colonizing agency; and the use of the Phoenician
tongue down to the seventh century A.C. in the villages and smaller
towns of the Tunisian coast-belt undoubtedly prepared the way for the
rapid and wide-spread acceptance of Arabic a hundred years later. Amid
all their wrangles, throughout all the recorded history of North Africa,
Berber and Semite seem unconsciously to have recognized that by descent
and language they had more kinship with each other than with the Aryan
peoples.
The Jews, after the first century of the Christian era, settled
numerously in North Africa from Cyrenaica to Western Morocco. They are
believed to have preceded the Berbers in settling the oasis of Twat in
mid-Sahara, and other oases of the desert also; though they probably
found these habitable regions still retaining a negroid population.
The earliest _historical_ connection between Aryan Europe and Africa was
brought about by the Greeks, commencing some 600 years B.C.[20], who
settled in the country of Kurene (Cyrene), the modern province of Barka.
After the repulse of the Persians there was a great expansion of Greece.
Prior to the historical establishment of settlements in the Ionian
Islands, in Sicily, at Marseilles and on the east coast of Spain, Greek
seamen had no doubt ranged the coasts of the Mediterranean; and from
their adventures were evolved the fascinating stories of the Argonauts
and Ulysses. Prehistoric settlements of Greeks on the coast of Tunis are
believed by modern French ethnologists to have taken place, on the
strength of the well-marked Greek type to be found amongst the present
population, for instance, in the Cape Bon peninsula; but these Greek
types may also be descended from the Byzantine occupation of the country
in the Christian era. The Island of Lotos-Eaters, of Greek mythology,
would seem with likelihood to take its origin in the island of Jerba,
where the date palm is indigenous[21]. But about 631 B.C. an expedition
of Dorians from the island of Thera[22] founded the colony of Kurene on
the north coast of Africa, where that continent approaches closest to
the Greek Archipelago. The settlement of Kurene was situated about ten
miles from the sea at an altitude of nearly 1800 ft. on the forest-clad
Aχdar mountains. Around Kurene (a name corrupted to Grenna by the Arabs)
were grouped four other cities—Barke, Teuχeira, Euesperides, and
Apollonia. This Greek colony continued to exist with varying
fortunes—threatened at times with dissolution through the civil wars of
the colonists and the intermittent attacks of the Berbers—till it came
under the control of Rome 100 years before Christ. It was occasionally
dominated by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Though the
civilization of the Cyrenaica was finally extinguished by the disastrous
Arab invasion in the seventh century of the Christian era, it had
nevertheless received a death-blow in 117 A.C. by an uprising of the
Jewish settlers, who attacked the Graeco-Roman colonists with the help
of the native Libyans and slew more than 200,000 of the descendants of
the Greek and Italian invaders. The Jews in their turn were massacred,
and after that most of the Cyrenaic cities fell into decay.
In the adjoining country of Egypt the Greeks began to appear as
merchants and travellers in the seventh century B.C. A Pharaoh,
Psammetik I, the father of the Niku who sent Phoenician ships to
circumnavigate Africa, had employed Greek mercenaries to assist him in
establishing his claims to the throne of Egypt. He rewarded their
services by allowing their countrymen to trade with the ports of the
Nile delta. The city of Naukratis was founded not far from the modern
Rosetta, and became almost a Greek colony. Nearly 200 years later
Herodotos, a native of Halikarnassos (a Greek settlement in Asia Minor),
visited Egypt and Kurene. It is probable that he ascended the Nile as
far as the First Cataract. He found his fellow-countrymen settled as
merchants and mechanics and also as soldiers in the delta of the Nile,
and he records that the whole coast of Cyrenaica between Dernah, near
the borders of Egypt, and Benghazi (Euesperides) was wholly occupied by
Greek settlements.
Through Herodotos and even earlier Greek writers, like Hekataios (who
derived his information from the Phoenicians), vague rumours reached the
Greek world of the Niger River, of ostriches[23], the dwarf races of
Central Africa (then perhaps lingering about the Bahr-al-Ghazal and
Nigeria), and baboons, described as “men with dogs’ heads[24].”
The great development of the Persian Empire under Cyrus brought that
power into eventual conflict with Egypt; and under Kambujiya (Cambyses)
the Persians conquered Egypt (in 525 B.C.), besides then and
subsequently dominating the western and southern parts of Arabia, from
which they occasionally meddled with Ethiopia. The Persians were
followed more than two hundred years later by their great conqueror,
Alexander of Macedonia, who added Egypt to his empire in 332 B.C., and
founded in that year in the westernmost reach of the Nile delta the
great city which bears his name, and which has been at times the capital
of Egypt. Alexander’s conquest was succeeded in 323 by the rule of his
general, Ptolemaios Soter, who founded in 308 the famous Greek monarchy
of the Ptolemies over Egypt, which lasted till near the commencement of
the Christian era, when it was replaced by the domination of Rome.
Subsequently the sceptre passed from Rome to Byzantium, and Egypt again
became subject to Greek influence. During the Ptolemies’ rule Abyssinia
was Egyptianized, and much Greek influence penetrated that country of
Hamites ruled by Semites, resulting in the foundation of the
semi-civilized kingdom of Axum in north-eastern Abyssinia with a port
(Adulis) on Annesley Bay. This Hellenized and, later on, Christian State
flourished for about six centuries from the commencement of the
Christian era, and conquered in the 6th century the opposite Arab
country of Yaman. Under the Roman and Byzantine Empire the Red Sea, the
coast of Somaliland, and Equatorial East Africa were much more carefully
explored and even charted; and it is said that the Greeks settled on the
island of Sokotra. The extent of knowledge which the Roman world
possessed at the beginning of the Christian era is displayed by the
celebrated Periplus of the Red Sea, written by a Greek merchant of
Alexandria about 80 A.C. This work shows that Greek commerce extended to
Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam; for by Rhapta is obviously indicated a port
on the east coast of Africa which can only be Dar-es-Salaam, the modern
capital of German East Africa. Opposite to this was the Island of
Menouthias, intended (as described in the Periplus) for Zanzibar, and
mentioned even then as being a region under the suzerainty of the Kings
of Yaman, and much resorted to by Arab merchants from the port of Muza,
no doubt the abandoned harbour of Uda, some distance north of Mokha.
Beyond this the knowledge of the Greek writer of the Periplus did not
extend; but further allusions to Menouthias or other islands near the
east coast of Africa, to be found in later Greek and Latin writers on
geography, seem to apply much more to Madagascar than to Zanzibar.
Among the Greek merchants of the first century trading with India was a
certain Diogenes, who may have supplied the unknown Alexandrian author
of the Periplus with some of his information. Diogenes, returning from a
voyage to India in about 50 A.C., landed at Rhapta or Rhaptum. From some
such point—Rhaptum in this instance may be distinct from Rhapta and
equivalent to Pangani, a trading-post at the mouth of the Rufu River,
opposite Pemba Island—Diogenes travelled inland for twenty-five days—so,
at least, he stated—and arrived in the vicinity of two great lakes and a
snowy range of mountains whence the Nile drew its twin sources.
Twenty-five days’ journey might have brought a Greek traveller easily
within sight of Kilimanjaro, but certainly not of the Victoria Nyanza.
It is more likely that Diogenes saw Kilimanjaro and added to his
impressions, of that mighty dome of snow and ice the statements of the
Arab traders who may at that period have penetrated inland as far as the
Victoria Nyanza and even ascertained the existence of Ruwenzori and the
Albert Nyanza. If pre-historic Arab trade permeated these countries at
that time, it was no doubt afterwards driven back to the coast by the
tumultuous movements of the Bantu and Nilotic negroes.
Though the information of Diogenes may have reached the author of the
Periplus, it was, so far as the semi-legendary history goes, told to a
Syrian geographer, Marinus of Tyre, who published it at Alexandria about
the same time that the Periplus was being written. The writings of
Marinus disappeared with the dispersal of the Alexandrian Library. But
that portion dealing with the sources of the Nile was quoted almost word
for word by a later writer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, a latinized
Egyptian-Greek who resided in Alexandria. Ptolemy (as he is commonly
called in English) wrote his works about the year 150 A.C.; and to him
is commonly attributed the first clearly expressed theory as to the main
origin of the White Nile. He believed that this mysterious river found
its ultimate source in two great lakes, the waters of which were derived
from a great snowy range called the Mountains of the Moon. It is,
however, clear from the writings of Eratosthenes (an African Greek who
published his geographical works about 200 B.C.) and Pliny the Elder
(Caius Plinius Secundus, whose principal book was published in 77 A.C.)
that before the Christian era a glimmering of the geography of the Upper
Nile basin had already reached Greek Egypt. Perhaps earlier still it had
come to the knowledge of the Persian rulers of Egypt, and may have been
brought to them by Ethiopian slave and ivory traders, akin to the modern
Abyssinians and Galas, who at that period seem to have freely penetrated
through the lands of the negro savages.
Not long after the Romans had annexed Egypt to their Empire, they had
begun to push their control of the Nile beyond the First to the Second
Cataract. Ahead of them went Greek explorers, mainly from Kurene or Asia
Minor, who traced the Nile upstream about as far as Khartum, perhaps
even beyond. All this region beyond the Second Cataract was known either
as the Nubian Kingdom of Napata (which was then peopled by Ethiopians
speaking Hamitic languages) or as Meroe (Merawi). The term Meroe applied
not only to a city but also to the supposed island, a considerable tract
of land nearly enclosed by the courses and tributaries of the Blue Nile,
White Nile, and Atbara, a region formerly of great fertility which
played a considerable part in the civilizing of Inner Africa, especially
westwards towards Lake Chad. The Emperor Nero was temporarily interested
in the mystery of the Nile sources and despatched an expedition under
two centurions about the year 66 A.C., to discover the origin of the
White Nile. This Roman expedition was organized in the principality of
Meroe and furnished with boats and men by the Nubian or the Ethiopian
chiefs. These boats were subsequently exchanged higher up the Nile for
dug-out canoes; and in these the two centurions apparently travelled as
far south as the confluence of the Bahr-el-Ghazal and the Kir or White
Nile. Their further explorations seem to have been stopped by the
accumulation of water vegetation called the sudd. Discouraged by the
natural obstacles to their penetration of this desolate region, by the
hostility of the naked Nile negroes, and no doubt also by the
unendurable attacks of the mosquitoes, the two centurions returned to
Egypt; and their discouraging reports apparently put an end to further
Roman enterprise in this direction.
The wars with Carthage in the second century before the Christian era
drew the Romans into the occupation of Tunisia. They were enabled
finally to conquer and destroy Carthage by allying themselves with the
Numidian and Mauretanian kings, who, in their desire to establish
complete home rule in North Africa, were anxious to destroy the
Carthaginian power. But after the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.
Rome picked quarrels, first with the Kings of Numidia, and next with
those farther west in what are now called Algeria and Morocco, with the
result that between 104 and 50 B.C. the region equivalent to Tunisia and
western Tripoli became the Roman province of Africa; while all the coast
region of Algeria and Morocco was annexed to the Roman Empire in 46 B.C.
and 42 A.C. respectively. Some time previous to this, in 96 B.C., the
Romans had annexed the old Greek colonies in Cyrenaica, to which—as a
Roman province—was added Egypt in 30 B.C.; while Roman armies
established Roman influence in Fezzan by 19 B.C. Consequently, by the
middle of the first century of the Christian era, the Roman power was
predominant over the whole coast-belt of North Africa. Roman explorers
even penetrated far into Morocco, examined the High Atlas range, and
crossed it into the Sahara Desert near Figuig; in fact, a Roman general,
Suetonius Paulinus, afterwards a conqueror of Britain, penetrated in 50
A.C. to the palm-fringed river valleys south of the Atlas range, which
would seem to have been in Pliocene times the head-waters of streams
flowing far south into the Niger basin. One such stream was called by
Roman geographers the Ger, and is still known as Gir by the Berbers.
Even before the Christian era began—if we may place any reliance on the
stories collected by Marinus Tyrius and cited in the works of Ptolemy
the Alexandrian—the Romans had despatched in 19 B.C. an expedition from
Fezzan (then a semi-civilized kingdom of the Tibus or Garamantes, far to
the south of Tripoli) to reach the country of the Blacks, reports of
which, together with some of its products, had come under Roman notice
even before the conquest of Carthage. Setting out from Garama (Jerma, in
Fezzan) and escorted by Tibu chieftains and their men, a Roman general
named Septimus Flaccus is said to have reached the black man’s country
across the Desert in three months’ marching. It is possible that camels
were already employed on this expedition, but horses would also have
been available; and even oxen seem to have been used as late as this
period by the desert peoples to draw carts. It is very probable that
1800 years ago this portion of the Sahara was much less arid, and that
there were more numerous wells and sources of water supply and a greater
amount of forage. What happened to Septimus Flaccus, and whether he
really reached the land of the negroes, afterwards to be known by an
Arab name, Sudan, we are not told; but about the beginning of the
Christian era another Roman explorer, Julius Maternus, also started from
Garama and reached a land which he named Agisymba, after a march of four
months. This was possibly Kanem, or even Bornu near Lake Chad, and is
described as a country swarming with rhinoceroses—beasts still to be
found there, though in much reduced numbers.
These are the only recorded attempts of the Romans to reach the Sudan
across the Sahara Desert; but that intercourse had been going on for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years between the Libyans and Hamites of
Northern and North-Eastern Africa on the one hand, and the negroids and
negroes of the Lake Chad and Benue regions and of the whole Niger basin
on the other, there can be little doubt, from a variety of evidence[25].
Roman beads are dug up in Hausaland and are obtained even from the
graves of Ashanti chiefs; and some of these differ but little from Roman
beads found in the mud of the Thames or amidst the ashes of Pompeii.
Even ideas of Roman and Greek Christianity filtered through the Libyan
and Sahara Deserts and reached countries beyond the Niger.
The Niger River had been vaguely known to classical geographers for two
or three centuries before and two centuries after the commencement of
the Christian era. These writers, as far back as the time of Herodotos,
recorded legends of Libyan adventurers from southern Tunisia who
penetrated through the Sahara Desert to lands of running rivers, open
waters, and tropical vegetation. The Senegal River, under the name of
Bambotus, is described by Polybius (about 140 B.C.) as a great stream
far beyond the Sahara Desert which contained crocodiles and hippopotami.
To such a river, or even, it may be, to this dimly realized Niger, was
applied a Berber name for a stream, Gir, or Ni-gir. I have already
mentioned the Gir River which rises to the south of the Great Atlas
range in Morocco, and which was discovered by the Roman general
Suetonius Paulinus about the year 50 A.C. This was confused with the
real Nigir or Niger, of which it may have been a million years ago one
of the ultimate tributaries. Lamps of Roman design in metal penetrated
as far into the interior of Africa as the Northern Cameroons, as did
also imitations in clay architecture of Greek or Roman fortresses. But
the remarkable clay architecture now associated with the Fulas and which
is ascribed in its origins to the Songhai of Agades, would seem rather
to have come from Egypt than across the Sahara Desert from Roman Africa.
Actual posts erected and even garrisoned by Roman soldiers may have
extended as far south as Ghadames (Cydames) or Murzuk (Phazania). Direct
Roman rule, however, was chiefly notable in what is now the Regency of
Tunis and in Egypt. Tunisia and western Tripoli almost surpass Italy in
the number and magnificence of their Roman remains. All along the actual
coast of Algeria and Northern Morocco existing ruins testify to the
great number of Roman cities which once flourished there. Eastern
Algeria shared with Western Tunisia a most notable degree of Roman
civilization. The present writer has been much impressed with the fact
that from Gafsa in the south of Tunis to Tebessa in Algeria the
traveller can ride along about a hundred miles of ancient Roman road
scarcely ever out of sight of the ruins of former cities, some of which
must have been of great magnificence, though their culmination of
splendour was not attained until the rule of Byzantium had replaced that
of Rome.
----------------------------------------------------------------
AFRICA AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS
BEFORE THE MUHAMMADAN INVASION OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY, B. C.
Plate I.
[Illustration]
Sir H.H. Johnston del^t W. & A.K. Johnston Limited Edinburgh & London
Explanatory Note
[blue] _Probable site of Bantu mother country_
[brown] ” _area of distribution of Black Negroes 2000 years
ago_
[tan] ” ” ” _Pygmies, Bushmen, and
Hottentots_
[yellow] ” ” ” _Hamites and Semites_
[pink] ” ” ” _Malay races_
_This map shows also the probable distribution of races about the
commencement of the Christian Era and the lines of Bantu invasion_
_The Blue lines give the directions of the principal Bantu invasions_
_The mingling of race tints indicates mixture of races_
_A Red line indicates the limits of more or less certainly known
country; a red dotted line gives the limits of vaguely known
regions. Red shading indicates the approximate area of country well
known to Europe or civilised Asia_
----------------------------------------------------------------
Nevertheless, all through the period between 146 B.C. and 415 A.C.,
when the Vandals invaded Roman Africa[26], the Romans were
constantly warring with the Berbers, who no doubt to a great extent
were pushed out of Tunisia by colonists more or less of Italian
origin. The most prosperous and brilliant period of Roman rule was
between 50 A.C. and 297 A.C. In 297 A.C. began the establishment of
definite Christianity. Between about 50 and 530 A.C., Latin replaced
Punic as the tongue most commonly spoken in the Roman province of
Africa and even in the coast-lands of Algeria and Morocco. Still the
Berbers were there all the time. Only a few became Christianized,
the bulk of the indigenous tribes showing disgust at the way in
which the different Christian sects attacked and slew each other.
The Jews, having settled numerously in North Africa, won over a
number of Berber chieftains to the Jewish religion. Hatred of Roman
rule and of Roman Christianity impelled the Berbers of Morocco and
Algeria to make common cause with the invading Vandals, and led to
the rapid overthrow of Roman rule and Roman civilization. But in 531
A.C. Byzantine generals from Constantinople conquered the Vandals
and established the rule of the Eastern Empire over Roman North
Africa from Tangier (Tingis) to Egypt. There was once again a
revival of Mediterranean civilization throughout all this region,
though the Berber tribes still remained recalcitrant.
Abyssinia between 350 and 500 A.C. accepted Christianity from the
teaching of Egyptian Greek missionaries, and developed a
considerable degree of strength from the civilization which followed
in the track of the Christian faith. Not only did Abyssinian kings
rule over the opposite parts of Western Arabia, but their armies and
slave raids penetrated far south from Galaland towards Equatorial
Africa. A debased edition of the Christian faith was carried almost
to the shores of Lake Rudolf; while the kingdom of Merawi, before
the Arab invasions of this stronghold of the Ethiopian negroids,
became a Christian state, which retained its Christianity well into
the 12th century of our era. Through the Abyssinian traders,
Graeco-Roman commerce began again to get indirectly into touch with
the Upper Nile and East Africa. But the Christian-Abyssinian
conquest of South-west Arabia seems to have arrested for a time the
Arab trade with Madagascar and the East African coast, and may have
contributed to the overthrow (by the invading hordes of Bantu
negroes) of the Zimbabwe civilization of South-east Africa. It was
however just as Graeco Roman rule in northern Africa was coming to
an end that its effects on Negro Africa became apparent. The great
racial movements in the northern Sudan, which led to the creation of
the Mandingo, Songhai, and Bornu kingdoms of the 8th century, were
undoubtedly due to impulses coming across the desert from Greek or
Roman Egypt, Tripoli, or Tunis. Christianized Berbers from North
Africa even carried Jewish and Christian ideas of religion as far
into the Dark Continent as Borgu, to the west of the Lower Niger.
-----
Footnote 15:
The alleged records on stone scarabs are discussed by Prof. Flinders
Petrie in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Nov. 1908.
Footnote 16:
This is an interesting observation. Not only does the statement
repeatedly occur in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman
geographers that the African elephant was found wild in Mauretania in
these times, but this animal is pictured in the remarkable rock
engravings in the Sus country in the extreme south of Morocco and in
the central and south-eastern part of Algeria, besides being
represented in the Roman mosaics of Tunisia, now exhibited at the
Bardo Museum near Tunis. (See for this the travels of the Moroccan
Jewish Rabbi, Mordokhai, the various works recently published by Mons.
Gautier of the University of Algiers, and the researches of Professor
A. Pomel.) The Phoenicians tamed the African elephant, found wild in
the forests of Western Tunisia, which was a somewhat smaller breed
than the Indian elephant or the elephant of tropical Africa, yet a
typical African elephant in its large ears. It was more often figured
on Roman medals and in Roman sculpture than the Indian type.
Footnote 17:
It does not follow, however, that these Troglodytes were dwarfs or
negroes, or palæolithic in culture, or greatly different in race from
the Berbers. They may have been akin to the Troglodytes still to be
seen in the Tunisian Sahara, a Berber people living in caves, which
are either natural hollows in the limestone rock or have been
artificially excavated. Other allusions and incidents connected with
the story of Hanno and an analysis of that story are fully discussed
in the first volume of the present writer’s book on Liberia, published
in 1906. It is remarkable to note that the little islet at the head of
the Rio de Oro Gulf is still called “Herne” by the Moors.
Footnote 18:
The national name for the Phoenicians was _χnā_ (_Khna_, _Kinah_,
_Kinahni_, ‘Canaan’). The Greeks invented for them the name
_Phoinike_, _Phoinikes_, which the Latins adopted as _Punica_, _Poeni_
or _Puni_, from _Phoinix_ = red; the Phoenicians appearing to the
fair-skinned Greeks as “red” men. Very often they went by the name of
Sidonoi (Sidonians), from the name of their oldest city Sidunnu
(Sidon, Saida).
Footnote 19:
The Phoenicians may have first brought into vogue the word “Africa.”
This would seem to have been derived (see note on p. 10 of Victor
Piquet’s _Les Civilisations de l’Afrique du Nord_: Paris, 1909) from a
Berber tribe named Afarik, Awarigha—or latterly, Awuraghen—which
occupied the north-east coast of Tunisia in pre-Roman times, but which
with other Berber peoples retreated by degrees into the interior till
at length it became a Tuareg or desert people. Under the name of
Awuraghen, dwelling in Asjer, west of Ghat, this tribe, which has
given its name to the whole continent, still exists.
Footnote 20:
The computation given by Eusebius would, according to the late Sir E.
H. Bunbury, date the founding of the colony at 631 B.C. In laying
stress on the word _historical_ I wish to impress on the reader that
European immigration into Africa from Sicily and Spain stretches far
back beyond the records of written history to ages quite remote in the
existence of man.
Footnote 21:
The fruit of the date-palm was almost certainly the lotos of the
ancients. It is much more likely to have made a profound impression on
them by its honey-sweet pulp than the insipid berries of the Zizyphus.
Footnote 22:
The modern Santorin or Thira, the most southern of the Cyclades.
Footnote 23:
The ‘cranes’ with whom the pygmies fought.
Footnote 24:
Other evidence goes to show that baboons were found wild in the
southern parts of Mauretania in ancient days.
Footnote 25:
This evidence has been fully discussed by the present writer in other
works, such as, for example, _The Nile Quest_, London, 1904, _The
Opening-up of Africa_, 1911, _Liberia_, 1906, _George Grenfell and the
Congo_, 1908, and _Pioneers in West Africa_, 1911, in which works
references to the opinions and researches of other writers are also
given.
Footnote 26:
The Vandals were a Gothic people supposed to be not far from the
Angles and Saxons in origin. After sweeping down on France and
Italy and settling in Baetica or southern Spain—a region to which
they are supposed to have given their name, Vandalusia, corrupted
by the Arabs into Andalusia—they built ships, on the Spanish
coast, crossed over with a host of Spanish camp followers into
Morocco, and with the aid of the Berbers swept the Roman power
before them till they conquered the whole country to the frontiers
of Tripoli. They also acquired Sardinia. By degrees they
concentrated their settlement on northern Tunisia, and here,
mingling with the Roman colonists and the Berber indigenes, they
gradually lost all their fighting spirit. But probably they added
a not unimportant element of European (Aryan) blood to the mixed
populations of North Africa, a region more or less ruled by their
Teutonic kings for 116 years.
CHAPTER III
THE ARAB CONQUEST OF AFRICA
At the beginning of the 7th century of our era the condition of
affairs in North Africa stood thus. In Egypt, which continued to be
governed from Greek Alexandria, the semblance of Roman rule was
wielded, in things temporal as well as spiritual, by the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch, who was usually appointed by the Emperor at
Byzantium to be Prefect as well. He occupied himself chiefly in
persecuting non-orthodox Christian churches, such as the Monophysite
or Jacobite Church, which, arising first in Syria, had become the
national church of the Egyptians or Copts, as contrasted with the
people of Greek race. The outposts of Upper Egypt were abandoned or
left but feebly garrisoned; the Hamitic Blemmyes or Bisharin, the
“Fuzzie-wuzzies” of the Red Sea coast-lands, and the negroid Nubians
overwhelmed the Nabatæan kingdom of Ethiopia and burst into Upper
Egypt, and, although they were once or twice severely chastised,
remained, and barbarized a land which at the beginning of the Roman
empire over Egypt had attained a high degree of culture.
In 616 A.C. the Persian armies once more entered Egypt, assisted in
their easy conquest by the disaffection of the Copts; at the same
period they drove the Abyssinians out of western Arabia and even
followed them up into eastern Abyssinia. Then the Persian power
became paralysed in its turn. In 626 Heraclius sent an army into
Egypt which drove out the Persians; and for a few years Egypt was
fairly well governed by a Greek governor sent from Byzantium. Then
once more the rule passed into ecclesiastical hands; and Kuros, the
last Greek patriarch, ruled Egypt from 630 till the invasion of the
Arabs, excepting for one short period of exile due to his fierce
persecution of the Jacobite Copts. Cyrenaica had been practically
abandoned to the Libyans after the terrible Jewish uprising and the
massacre of Greek colonists in 117 A.C. Along the rest of the
littoral of North Africa there were still flourishing Roman colonies
and cities under Byzantine rulers or Berber chiefs, from Leptis
Magna and Tripolis (Oea) on the east to Tangis (Tangier) on the
west; while other Roman or Byzantine towns still persisted far
inland in Tunisia and Algeria, notably Gafsa, Thala, Tebessa, and
Timgad. Elsewhere, beyond the walls of the Roman cities, the Berber
tribes had regained their independence and ruled over Romans and
Berbers alike.
At this period the great Libyan or Berber race of North Africa,
which inhabited the whole region between the western frontiers of
Egypt (Siwa) on the east and the Atlantic coast of Morocco on the
west (practically but one language, the Libyan, being spoken
throughout this vast breadth of Africa) were divided into three main
branches: (1) the Berbers of the East or Libyans proper (Luata,
Huara, Aurigha, Nefusa) occupying the Cyrenaica, Tripolitaine,
Tunisia and a portion of eastern Algeria; (2) the Berbers of the
West, or Sanhaga (Sanhaja), who peopled the Algerian coast-lands and
western Algeria and all Morocco as far down as the limits of the
Sahara; and (3) the Zeneta, a darker race, the descendants of the
Getulians, perhaps in origin akin to the Fula, who in the 7th
century A.C. peopled the more or less desert regions at the back of
eastern Algeria, southern Tunis and Tripoli. From these Zeneta are
descended the modern Mzab Berbers, the Wargli people, and the
Beni-Merīn who founded one of the ruling dynasties of mediaeval
Barbary. Several of these Zeneta dark-skinned Berber peoples pushed
down to the Mediterranean coast in later times. On the other hand,
many of the Eastern Berbers or Libyans were thrust back into the
desert by the Arab invaders; and some of them have become the semi
nomad “Tuareg” (Tawareq)[27] of to-day. Sections of the Western
Berbers of the Sanhaga group also passed down into the Sahara from
the 7th century onwards (though no doubt Berber invasions of Negro
Africa had occurred in previous times), and settled on or near the
northern Niger and the northern Senegal coast. In fact from Sanhaga
comes no doubt the Berber tribal name of “Zenaga” which the
Portuguese corrupted into “Senegal.”
In the 7th century, also, the negroid Garamantes, who shared
Phazania with the incoming Berbers and were no doubt identical with
the modern Tibu or Teda (whose language is utterly unlike Libyan,
and belongs to an unclassified negro speech-group), carried on a
good deal of trading intercourse south and eastward across the
Libyan Desert with Kanem and Lake Chad, Darfur and Kordofan, and no
doubt in this way facilitated the subsequent Arab penetration of the
Sudan and the Tripolitaine. The domesticated camel had been
introduced into North Africa before this period, and greatly
facilitated these race movements across the Desert.
In the year 623 A.C. an Arab of the Quraish Tribe of Western Arabia,
probably born in Mecca (anciently known as Bakka and really called
Makka at the present day), and named Muhammad or the Praiser,
attracted attention by establishing himself at the Palm Oasis of
Yathrib or Medina, not only as a bandit who led masterless men to
the attack of trading caravans, but also as a mystic who was
conceiving and promulgating a new form of religion, one which was
largely based on Jewish teaching and the Jewish Scriptures and yet
incorporated a few ideas from Christianity and perhaps even from the
Zoroastrian faiths of Persia. Muhammad opposed the degraded beliefs
in a variety of gods and goddesses which still lingered in Western
Arabia and, above all, at Mecca itself, where a wonderful fetish
stone—the remains of an immense meteorite—was exhibited for
reverence, and where, together with the rude representations of old
Semitic gods and a goddess named Allat[28], existed—as in
Coelo-Syria and Ancient Phoenicia—the idea of the Mahrab or Sacred
Shrine. This last was a sexual symbol and a relic of the
nature-worship of Phoenicia. It has also been the parent of the
horseshoe arch. The Sacred Shrine is an essential feature in all
Muhammadan mosques, though its original purport has long since been
forgotten.
Muhammad prevailed partly by his successes in warfare and the rich
booty they brought to his Arab adherents, partly by his sweetness of
disposition, the magnetism of his appearance and manner, and his
gift for pouring out conceptions of God and religion and garbled
versions of the Jewish Scriptures and Christian beliefs in rhyming
couplets easily committed to memory. He united gradually under his
sceptre, as a religious teacher and legist, all the clans of
fighting men in Western Arabia; and, in search of greater spoil than
the poverty-stricken peninsula of that day could afford, he marched
northwards to convert the Roman world and the great kingdom of
Persia to his new faith. Almost like another Moses, he died on the
threshold of the promised land; for within a few years of his death
(632 A.C.) the Arab armies had not only smashed the Byzantine rule
over Syria but were pouring into Byzantine Egypt and were rapidly
conquering for the Muhammadan faith the states of South-west, South
and East Arabia, and the whole kingdom of Persia, to the very heart
of Asia.
In 640-2 Amr-bin-al-As (an early opponent and a later convert of
Muhammad) invaded Egypt from Arabia; and he or his lieutenants
pushed thence into Tripoli, and even into Fezzan. A little later
(647-8), under Abdallah-bin-Abu-Sarh and Abdallah-bin-Zubeir, the
Arabs invaded Tripoli, and fought with a Byzantine governor known as
Gregory the Patrician, who had just before rebelled from Byzantium,
and proclaimed himself Emperor of Africa, with his seat of
government in central Tunisia. The battle lasted for days, but
Gregory was overmastered by a ruse and killed. The Arabs pursued his
defeated army into the heart of Tunisia, and even into Algeria. For
a payment of 300 quintals of gold they agreed to evacuate Tunisia,
but they left behind an agent or representative at Suffetula (the
modern Sbeitla), which had been Gregory’s capital.
In 661 the first dissenting sect of Islam arose, the Khariji. These
schismatics preached the equality of all good Muslims—a kind of
communism—the need for a Puritan life and the cessation of the
hereditary Khalifat (Caliphate) with the death of Ali. As they were
much persecuted, some of the Khariji fled at this period to the
coast of Tunis, and in the island of Jerba their descendants remain
to this day; while their doctrines were adopted by the bulk of the
Berber population of that island[29], and spread thence right across
inner North Africa to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, becoming after
720 almost a national religion of the Berbers as contrasted with the
orthodox Sunni Muhammadanism of the Arab governors or the Omaiyad
dynasties of Spain, or the Shia faith of the Fatimites of Tunis and
Egypt. The industrious Mzab Berbers of south central Algeria and the
Nefusa tribes of western Tripoli are also Khariji still at the
present day.
In 669 the Arab invasions of North Africa were resumed.
Oqba-bin-Nafa overran Fezzan, and was appointed by the Omaiyad
Khalif governor of “Ifriqiah” (modern Tunis). The Byzantines were
defeated in several battles, and Kairwan[30] was founded as a
Muhammadan capital about 673. Oqba was replaced for a time by Dinar
Bu’l-Muhajr, who pushed his conquests as far west as Tlemsan, on the
borders of modern Morocco. Oqba resumed command in 681, and advanced
with his victorious army to the Sūs country and shore of the
Atlantic Ocean, afterwards receiving a somewhat friendly reception
from Count Julian at Ceuta[31] (Septa).
But now the Berbers began to turn against the Arab invaders, finding
them worse for rapacity than Roman or Greek. A quondam ally, the
Berber prince Kuseila, united his forces with the Greek and Roman
settlers, and inflicted such a severe defeat on Oqba near Biskra
that he was enabled afterwards to rule in peace as king over
Mauretania for five years, being accepted as ruler by the European
settlers. Kuseila, however, was defeated and killed by other Arab
invaders in 688, though the victors subsequently retired and
suffered a defeat at the hands of the Byzantines in Barka. Queen
Dahia-al-Kahina[32] succeeded her relative Kuseila. The Arab
general, Hassan-bin-Numan, was successful in taking Carthage (698),
but afterwards was defeated and driven out of Tunisia by Queen
Kahina. Unfortunately this brave woman ordered a terrible
devastation of the fertile district or sub-province of Byzacene, so
that the want of food supply might deter the Arabs from returning;
and this action on her part was the beginning of the marked
deterioration of this magnificent country, the southern half of
Tunisia. Kahina was finally defeated and slain by the Arabs under
Hassan-bin-Numan in 705. Arab conquests then once more surged ahead
under Musa-bin-Nusseir. The whole of Morocco was conquered except
Ceuta, where the Arabs were repelled by Count Julian. To some extent
also Morocco was Muhammadanized; and no doubt through all these
invasions the Arabs experienced little difficulty in converting the
Berbers to Islam, even though they might subsequently enrage them by
their depredations. Before the arrival of the Arabs the Berbers in
many districts had strong leanings towards Judaism[33]. Amongst the
Berber chiefs converted to Muhammadanism by the invasion of Morocco
was a man of great gallantry known as Tarik, who became a general in
the Arab army. Tarik was left in charge of Tangiers by Musa, and
entered into friendly relations with Count Julian at Ceuta. Count
Julian, having quarrelled with the last Gothic king of Spain, urged
Tarik to invade that country. After a reconnaissance near the modern
Tarifa, Tarik invaded Spain at or near Gibraltar[34] with 13,000
Berbers officered by 300 Arabs, and was shortly afterwards followed
by Musa with reinforcements; and Spain was thus conquered.
For a few years longer all North Africa remained loosely connected
with the Khalifs (Caliphs) of Baghdad; then Idris, a descendant of
Ali, and consequently of Muhammad, established himself in Morocco as
an independent sultan, afterwards asserting his claim to be Khalif
and Imam, though he and his successors were of the Sunni, not the
Shia faith. At his death he was succeeded by his son Idris II; and
his blood is supposed to have filtered down through many generations
and devious ways to the present ruling family in Morocco. Until
about 800 A.C. Eastern Barbary, at any rate, was ruled by an Arab
governor from Baghdad; but soon after that date Harun-al-Rashid
appointed a brave Berber-Arab soldier, Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab, to be his
viceroy in Ifriqiah (as the Arabs called “Africa,” i.e. Tunisia).
Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab founded a dynasty which ruled over Tunis and
Tripoli for a hundred and ten years. Concurrently with the Aghlabite
viceroys or sultans in Roman “Africa,” there was the independent
Moorish kingdom of the Idrisites with its capital at Fez (near the
Roman Volubilis); a Berber principality of the Beni-Midrar at
Sigilmessa in Tafilalt (S.E. Morocco); and another of the Beni
Rustam at Tiaret (Western Algeria). These two last were Khariji or
heretic states.
Spain had remained from 715 till about 760 an appanage of the
Abbaside Khalif of Baghdad. But in 758 there arrived in southern
Spain a refugee prince of the rival house of Omar, Abd-ar-rahman bin
Mūawiya, who after thirty years of almost incessant warfare wrested
all Spain from the Baghdad Caliphate and founded the most splendid
of the Arab dynasties in Spain, that of the Omaiyads, which lasted
till about 1020. The Omaiyad Amirs or Khalifs frequently invaded
Morocco and derived thence numbers of negro slaves, who, together
with Slav prisoners bought in Germany through the Jews, made up
their powerful mercenary armies. As Mamluks or slave-soldiers, quite
a number of Slavs from Germany and Austria—made prisoners and sold
to the Moslems of Spain by Charlemagne and his successors—settled in
North Africa from the 8th to the 10th century.
In the ninth century numerous Shia Arabs, who were advocates of the
caliphate of the descendants of Ali and Fatima (Muhammad’s
daughter), had converted to the Shia faith the powerful Berber tribe
of the Ketama (of the Sanhaga group dwelling in Eastern Algeria);
and an emissary of the “hidden” Khalif of the Alide
family—Obeid-Allah—arrived in North Africa about 890 and preached
the Shia faith and the coming of a Madhi or Divine messenger. Having
by the aid of the Berbers overthrown the Aghlabite dynasty of
Kairwan, this emissary, who was named Abu-AbdAllah, sent for the
Mahdi, Obeid-Allah, the descendant of Ali and Fatima. Obeid-Allah
came and founded the great Fatimite dynasty which played such a part
in Tunisia, Sicily and Egypt; but ungratefully enough he caused
Abu-AbdAllah to be slain and the Ketama tribe to be massacred. He
then moved his capital from Kairwan to Mahdia, or Mehdia, on the
coast of Tunisia, a city which he founded on the ruins of a Roman
town. His son and successor, who nicknamed himself “The sustainer of
God’s orders” (Al-Kaïm bi Amr Allah), instituted the practice of
never appearing in the open in public without a sunshade being held
over his head—the Royal Umbrella which still figures in Moroccan
court ceremonial. Under the third sovereign, Al Mu’izz, the dynasty
of Fatimite Caliphs reigned over all North Africa, from Morocco to
Egypt, and thence to Damascus. The Fatimite general commanding the
army in Egypt, Jauhar-al-Kaid, founded the citadel and town of Cairo
(Al Kahirah) in 969-71[35], more or less on the sites of the
previous Arab capitals of Al-Masr, Al-’Askar, and Al-Katai; and here
the Fatimite Caliph transferred his capital and his presence from
Kairwan, giving up the rule over Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco
to Berber viceroys.
From the 7th to the middle of the 11th century, the Arab element in
North Africa was small and represented chiefly by a few thousand
warriors, statesmen and religious teachers, who had in a marvellous
manner, difficult to explain, forced their religion, and to some
extent their language and rule, on several millions of Berbers, on
some 300,000 Christians of Roman, Greek and Gothic origin, and
100,000 Jews. But in the 11th century took place those Arab
invasions of North Africa which have been the main source of the
Arab element in the northern part of the continent, and without
which Muhammadanism might in time have faded away; and a series of
independent Berber states have been formed once more under Christian
rule.
About 1045 two Arab tribes, the Beni-Hilal and the Beni-Soleim
(originally from Central Arabia, and deported thence to Upper
Egypt), left the right bank of the Nile to invade Barbary. They had
made themselves troublesome in Upper Egypt; and the weakened rulers
of that country, to get rid of them, had urged them to invade
north-western Africa. About two or three hundred thousand crossed
the desert and reached the frontiers of Tunis and Tripoli. They
defeated the Berbers at the battle of Haiderān, and then settled in
southern Tunis and western Tripoli. During their raids they
destroyed the city of Kairwan, which never regained its former
importance. Eventually some portion of them was unseated by the
Berbers and driven westward into Morocco. They were succeeded by
fresh drafts from Egypt and Arabia, but many of these later invaders
settled in Barka and eastern Tripoli[36]. Later on other Arab tribes
left the west coast of Arabia, and settled on the central Nile,
avoiding the Abyssinian highlands, where they were kept at bay by
their Christianized relatives of far earlier immigrations; and on
the Blue Nile (Sennār), where they founded the powerful Funj empire
which lasted from the 14th to the early 19th century. From the upper
Nile they directed many and repeated invasions of Central and
Western Africa. To this day tribes of more or less pure Arab descent
are found in the districts round Lake Chad, in Darfur, Wadai, and in
the western Sahara north of the Senegal and Niger rivers.
In the 11th century began the real revival of the Roman Empire from
the onslaught of Arabia and the prior Teutonic invasions. The
Normans recovered Sicily and Malta from the Berbers; earlier still,
the Pisans drove the Berbers out of Sardinia and crushed them in
Majorca. The cities of Italy, forming themselves into republics,
were tempted by their extending commerce to interfere with North
Africa. The Venetians, in spite of the hare-brained crusades and the
damage that they did by reviving Muhammadan fanaticism, began to
open up those commercial relations with Egypt, which for four and a
half centuries gave them the monopoly of the Levant and Indian
trade. The Normans, after founding the kingdom of Naples and Sicily,
commenced a series of bold attacks on the coasts of Algeria, Tunis
and Tripoli, which did not however lead to an occupation of more
than forty years (about 1123 to 1163). The Pisan and Genoese natives
in the 11th and 12th centuries carried out a series of such sharp
reprisals against the Moorish pirates, that they inspired some
respect for Italy in the minds of Tunisians and Algerians.
Afterwards they were enabled to open up commercial relations,
especially with the north coast of Tunis; and these, to the
advantage of both Italy and Barbary, continued, with fitful
interruptions, until the 16th century.
In the 11th century another great Berber movement took place—the
rise of the “Almoravides.” The name of this sect of Muhammadan
reformers is a Spanish corruption of _Al-Murabitin_, which is the
plural of _Marabut_; and _Marabut_ is derived from the place-name
_Ribat_ (a monastery or school), meaning “the people living at the
Ribat,” though the word has since come to mean in North Africa and
elsewhere a Muhammadan saint. The Almoravides owed their origin to
one of the early African Mahdis or Messiahs, of whom the tale has
subsequently been repeated and repeated with such servile imitation
of detail that one can only imagine the mass of African Muhammadans
to have been without any philosophical reflections on history or any
sense of humour; since Mahdi after Mahdi arises as an ascetic saint,
and dies a licentious monarch, whose power passes into the hands of
a lieutenant, who is the first in the line of a slowly crumbling
dynasty. Far away across the Sahara Desert, and near the Upper
Niger, was a tribe of Tawareq Berbers known as the Lamta or Lemtuna,
who had been in the 10th century converted to Muhammadanism. The
chief of this tribe, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, met a
Berber of South Morocco known as Ibn Yaṣin, who on his Meccan
pilgrimage had acquired a great reputation for austere holiness. The
chief of the Lemtuna invited Ibn Yaṣin to his court; and the latter,
after arriving in the Niger countries, established himself on an
island named Ribat, on the upper Niger, where he collected adherents
round him and promulgated his puritanical reforms. Gradually Ibn
Yaṣin’s influence extended over the whole Lamta or Lemtuna tribe,
and he urged these Berbers towards the conversion of Senegambia. It
was mainly through his influence that the Berbers were carried by
their conquests into Senegambia and Nigeria. Then he led them (about
1050) north-west across the Sahara Desert; and they conquered
Morocco, and from thence invaded Muhammadan Spain. By this time Ibn
Yaṣin, the teacher, was dead, but the warrior chief of the Lamta
tribe—Yussuf-bin-Tashfin—had become sovereign of Morocco and Spain,
and had assumed the title of Amir-al-Mumenin[37].
A hundred years later another Berber Mahdi arose in the person of
Ibn Tumert, who was “run” by Abd-al-Mumin of Tlemsan (West Algeria),
and whose fighting force was the great Berber tribe of the Masmuda
from the High Atlas Mountains. The programme was the same—to start
with puritanical reform, afterwards degenerating rapidly into mere
lust of conquest. This small sect known by us as the “Almohades”
(from Al-Muāḥadim or Muaḥidūn, meaning “(Disciples of) the Unity of
God[38]”) attacked the decaying power of the Almoravides. Ibn
Tumert—an exact parallel of all the Mahdis—died early in the
struggle, but was succeeded as “Khalifa” by his warlike lieutenant,
Abd-al-Mumin, who pursued his conquests until he had brought under
his power all North Africa and Muhammadan Spain, and had founded the
greatest Berber empire that ever existed. Concurrently, however,
with the sway of his overlordship, the Ziri and Hamadi dynasties of
Berber sultans continued to exist at Tunis and in eastern Algeria.
After ruling for a century the Almohade empire broke up, and was
succeeded by independent Berber rulers in Tunis and Tripoli (the
Hafsides), in Algeria (the Abd-al-Wadite or Zeyanite kings of
Tlemsan), and in Morocco (the Marinide or Beni-Marin). Remarkable
among these was the Hafs dynasty, which governed Tunis and part of
Tripoli for 300 years, and proved the most beneficent of all
Muhammadan rulers in North Africa. Abu Muhammad Hafsi was a Berber
governor of Tunis under one of the last of the Almohade emperors,
and eventually became the independent sovereign of Tunisia. The
Almohade rulers, towards the end of the 12th century, had
transported most of the turbulent Arabs of southern and central
Tunisia to Morocco, where for the first time the Arabs began to form
an appreciable element in the population. About this time Kurdish
and Turkish mercenaries began to find employment in Tunisia and in
Tripoli under chiefs who rebelled against the Almohade empire.
During the period between 1250 and 1500 the Moorish civilization,
art, architecture, letters, and industries reached their highest
development: especially at Kairwan, Tlemsan, and Fas (Fez).
In 1270 that truly good but erratic monarch, St Louis of France,
deflected a crusade intended for the Levant to Tunis as being a
Muhammadan country much nearer at hand and more accessible. Moreover
his brother, Charles of Anjou, claimed the sovereignty of Sicily and
Naples, and thought the possession of Tunis would better establish
his precarious kingdom. Louis IX landed at Carthage, but owing to
failing health his imposing invasion was followed by military
inaction. He died at Carthage, and a capitulation subsequently took
place by which the Crusaders retired from Tunisia. After their
departure the Muhammadans entirely destroyed all that remained of
Roman Carthage, as the buildings had afforded to the invaders the
protection of fortresses. Up till that time a good deal of Roman
civilization had lingered in Tunisia, but now the country became
more and more Arabized. Christian bishops probably ceased to exist
in the 13th century, but Christians were not persecuted for another
two or three hundred years, until the attacks of the Spaniards and
the intervention of the Turks roused Muhammadan fanaticism to a high
degree which is only beginning to abate with the opening of the 20th
century and the spread of education.
In the 13th century the Spanish and Portuguese kings reduced the
area of Muhammadan rule in the Iberian Peninsula to the kingdom of
Granada in S.E. Spain; and early in the 15th century the kingdom of
Portugal felt itself sufficiently strong to carry the war into the
enemy’s country. In 1415 the Portuguese army, to which was attached
Prince Henry, afterwards known as the Navigator, captured the
Moorish citadel of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast; and from this
episode started the magnificent Portuguese discoveries initiated by
Prince Henry which will be described in the next chapter. The
Portuguese subsequently acquired Tangier, Tetwan, and most of the
ports along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Castile-Aragon, bursting
out a little later, when her monarchs had conquered the last Moorish
kingdom on Spanish soil (Granada), seized Melilla in 1490, and, on
one pretext or another, port after port along the coasts of Algeria
and Tunis, until by 1540 the Spanish empire had established
garrisons at Oran, Bugia, Bona, Hunein, and Goletta[39]. They also
instigated the Knights of Malta—an outcome of the crusades—to hold
for a time the town of Tripoli in Barbary, and the Tunisian island
of Jerba. The Portuguese kings by the middle of the 16th century
were practically suzerains of Morocco. The penultimate ruler of the
brilliant House of Avis—young Dom Sebastião—determined in 1578, soon
after his accession to the throne of Portugal at the age of 23,
thoroughly to conquer Morocco. He landed with 100,000 men at
Acila[40], then marched inland and took up a position behind the
Wad-al-Makhazen on the fatal field of Kasr-al-Kabir. But he was
utterly defeated by the Moors under Mulai Abd-al-Malek (who died
during the battle) and Abu’l Abbas Ahmad-al-Mansur. The latter
became Sultan of all Morocco after the defeat and death of the
unfortunate Dom Sebastião. Al-Mansur belonged to a family of Sa’adi
Sharifs[41] (noblemen—descended from Fatima and Ali and therefore
from Muhammad) from the upper valley of the river Draa in South
Morocco. His ancestor, Muhammad-al-Mahdi, had overturned the
Marinide Sultan and founded the second Sharifian (Arab) or Saadian
dynasty. Nevertheless, the Portuguese retained most of their
fortified ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and also Ceuta.
During the 60 years of the abeyance of the Portuguese monarchy
(1580-1640) these places became nominally Spanish, but returned to
Portugal with the restoration of the House of Bragança, though Ceuta
and Melilla were subsequently ceded to Spain, and Tangier to
England. Thus ended what might very well have been, but for the
battle of Kasr-al-Kabīr, the Portuguese Empire of Morocco.
At the end of the 12th century, other Sharifs of Yanbu, the coast
port of the holy city of Medina in Arabia, following returning
Moorish pilgrims, established themselves at Sijilmassa in Tafilalt,
or Filal, a country of Southern Morocco. One of them,
Hassan-bin-Kassim, increasing greatly in power, became in the 15th
century the founder of the present Sharifian dynasty of Morocco;
though some centuries elapsed before these Filali chiefs succeeded
in becoming supreme rulers over both Fez and Marrakesh. The Filali
Sultans did not displace the Saadian Sharifs till 1658.
But during the reign of the sixth Saadian monarch—Al-Mansur, also
surnamed “the Golden”—Morocco reached the acme of her power and
acquired a vast Nigerian dominion. At the close of the 15th century
a Muhammadan negro dynasty had arisen on the upper Niger, and in the
western Sudan. One of these negro kings, who made a pilgrimage to
Mecca, obtained from the descendant of the Abbaside khalifs residing
at Cairo the title of “Lieutenant of the Prince of Believers in the
Sudan.” He made Timbuktu[42] his capital, and it became a place of
great learning and flourishing commerce. His grandson,
Ishak-bin-Sokya[43], became rich and powerful, and attracted the
rapacity of the Saadian Sharifian Khalif of Morocco (Abu’l Abbas
al-Mansur, who had distinguished himself by wiping out the
Portuguese under Dom Sebastião at the battle of Kasr-al-Kabīr), and
had recently extended his rule across the Sahara to the oasis of
Twat[44]. The Moorish emperor attempted to pick a quarrel by
disputing this negro king’s right to the title of Lieutenant of the
Khalifs in the Sudan, demanded his vassalage, and a tax on the
Sahara salt mines along the route to Timbuktu. Ishak-bin-Sokya
refused, whereupon a Moorish army under Juder Basha was despatched
by Abu’l Abbas-al-Mansur in 1590 to conquer the Sudan. This army
crossed the Sahara, defeated Ishak-bin-Sokya, and captured Timbuktu,
but raised the siege of Gaghu or Gao, lower down the Niger, whither
Ishak had fled. A more vigorous commander, Mahmud Basha, completed
the Moorish conquest of the Sudan, a conquest which extended in its
effects to Bornu on the one hand and to Senegambia on the other, and
only faded away in the 18th century, mainly owing to the uprise of
the Fula and the attacks of the Tawareq. Gradually all Morocco was
brought under Sharifian rule; all European hold over the country was
eradicated; and the reign of culminating glory was that of the
Filali emperor Mulai Ismail, the “Bloodthirsty,” who ruled for 57
years, and is said to have left living children to the number of 548
boys and 340 girls. Mulai Ismail died in 1727. He had attained to
and maintained himself in supreme power by the introduction of
regiments of well-drilled Sudan Negroes; but the “nigrification” of
Morocco—the importation on a large scale of negro slaves and
soldiers—had begun much earlier in the conquest of North Africa by
the Lamtuna Berbers from the northern Niger, the “Almoravides.” But
the civilization and the conquering power of Morocco were largely
due to the “Ruma” or “Rumi” element, the Spanish Moors emigrating
from Spain and bringing into North-West Africa a powerful “White
Man” element—for they were often the descendants of the
Roman-Iberian people of Gothic Spain. They were remarkable for their
knowledge of firearms and their skill as artisans; and their
descendants are everywhere the “aristocracy” of Muhammadan North
Africa.
Morocco might have conquered and ruled all North Africa in the 16th
century but for the arrival of the Turks. The Turks, who had
replaced the Arabs of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor as
Muhammadan rulers, had captured Constantinople in 1453, had seized
Egypt in 1517, and were becoming the backbone of the Muhammadan
power. When the Algerians and Tunisians appealed to Turkish pirates
for help against the attacks of the Christian Spaniards in the 16th
century, the Sultan of Constantinople took advantage of their
intervention to establish, through the Turkish Corsairs, Turkish
regencies in Algeria (1519), Tunis (1573), and Tripoli (1551)[45].
Morocco, however, always remained independent; and indeed, after the
extinction of the line of Abbasid Baghdad Khalifs at Cairo in 1538,
the great Sharifian sovereign, Al-Mansur, after his victory over the
Portuguese, declared himself Khalif over the Muhammadan world in
right of his descent from Fatima and Ali, and refused to recognize
the claim of the Ottoman Emperor of Constantinople to have acquired
the transfer of the Caliphate from Motawakkiq the last of the
Abbasids in 1517. Nevertheless, though Morocco remained a great
independent Muhammadan power, her princes borrowed many customs from
Turkey, such as the Turkish style of clothing, the Turkish method of
arranging troops in battle, and the title of Pasha (Basha).
Except in Morocco, Turkish control replaced Arab influence in
northern Africa, and extended by degrees far into the old Garamantan
kingdom of Fezzan, and across the Libyan Desert to the Red Sea. But
no matter whether Turk, Circassian, Greek, Albanian, Slav, or
Arabized Negro ruled in Berber North Africa, Muhammadan influence
and Arab culture continued to spread over all the northern half of
Africa. Somaliland, Sennār, Nubia, Kordofan, Darfur, Wadai, Bornu,
Hausa-land and the Sahara, much of Senegambia, and most of the
country within the bend of the Niger and along the banks of the
upper Volta were converted to Muhammadanism, and became familiar
with the Arab tongue as the religious language, and with some degree
of Arab civilization.
Egypt after the Arab invasion of 640-2 was governed from the Delta
of the Nile to the First Cataract by Arab governors deputed by the
Khalif of Baghdad. The Christian Copts and Greeks were not
materially interfered with, provided they paid their taxes
regularly. In 706 Arabic finally displaced Greek as the official
language of the country, and never subsequently lost its hold over
Egypt. Coptic (the degenerate form of Ancient Egyptian) gradually
sank into the position of a ritual language only connected with
religious exercises and literature; and Arabic since the 8th century
has been the universal speech of all Egypt, except in the Oasis of
Siwa, where a Berber dialect is still spoken, and among the tribes
inhabiting the lands between the Cataract Nile and the Red Sea, who
preserve their Hamitic (Gala-like) languages. A good deal of Arab
colonization of Upper and Lower Egypt, and of Nubia and Dongola,
took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. In 828-32 a
serious rebellion of Copts and of malcontent Arabs was only
suppressed by the Baghdad Khalif introducing an army of 2000 Turks;
and from this time onwards the Turks had much to do with Egypt, as
they had with Syria and Mesopotamia, because the Arabs were losing
their energy and fighting capacity. After 856 most of the
functionaries in Egypt were Turks; and in 875 a Turkish governor,
Ahmad bin Tulūn, turned his governorship into a hereditary
sovereignty. The Tulunid dynasty of sultans governed Egypt till 905,
when the direct rule of the Baghdad Khalifs was resumed. Then, once
more, a Turkish governor was appointed to rule Egypt for the Khalif,
in 935, to whom was granted the kingly title of Ikshid. The Ikshids
governed until 969, when they were supplanted by the establishment
of the Fatimite Khalif Mu’izz-li-din-Allah already referred to, who
left Tunisia in 973 to take up his residence first in Alexandria and
then in newly-founded Cairo.
This revolution was really effected by a Jewish official, Yakub bin
Killis, and a Slav or Greek general, Jauhar, both of them converts
to Islam. The Fatimite Khalifs of Egypt rose for a short time to be
the greatest power in Islam, their empire extending from Tangier to
Aleppo, and nearly always including Syria. But the Khalifs soon
became puppet sovereigns, the rule being carried on in their name by
Jewish, Syrian, Negro, Turkish, or Kurd ministers. Between 1163 and
1170 the French and German crusaders invaded Egypt and for a short
time garrisoned Cairo. They were driven out by a Kurdish prefect of
Alexandria, Salah-ad-din Yusaf bin Ayub (“Joseph the son of Job”—the
famous “Saladin”), who at last swept away the fiction of these Shia
Khalifs, restored the Sunni form of Muhammadanism and proclaimed the
Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad as spiritual leaders. Egypt has remained
Sunni ever since. Saladin however made himself “Malik” or King of
Egypt and Syria. His descendants ruled Egypt, Western Arabia and
such parts of Palestine as were not occupied by the Crusaders until
1260, when this Ayubite dynasty was replaced by that of the Turkish
slave, Bibars. The Ayubite kings of Egypt purchased large numbers of
boy slaves (_Mamluk_) and trained them as soldiers. They were
European Slavs, Greeks and Italians, Asiatic Turks, Circassians,
Kurds and Mongols. These dynasties of slave sultans recognized and
kept in their midst a puppet Abbasid Khalif, who after the capture
of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1260 resided in Cairo. The Mamluk Kings
governed Egypt until 1517, when this land was conquered by the
Ottoman Turks and the last of the Abbasid Khalifs was compelled to
confer the Muhammadan Caliphate (most illegally) on the Ottoman
Emperor of Rūm (Rome, i.e. Constantinople). But the Mamluk or slave
soldiers, derived from the races above mentioned, continued to exist
and to some extent to administer Egypt even under Turkish governors
till the invasion of the French in 1798; they revived again after
the French quitted Egypt (1801), till the last of them were
massacred by a Turkish (Macedonian-Albanian) major of artillery,
Muhammad Ali, who became the almost independent Pasha of Egypt and
founded the present dynasty of the Khedives.
During all this period of twelve hundred and twenty years (between,
let us say, 690 and 1910) while Northern Africa lay under Islamic
control, enormous numbers of Asiatics and Europeans colonized Egypt
and Mauretania—Arabs, Jews, Syrians; Turks, Kurds and some Persians;
Greeks, Slavs (sold by the conquering Germans to Jewish dealers who
resold these Poles, Chekhs, Wends, Croats and Serbs to the Spanish
Arabs, the Berbers, Egyptians and Turks); Italians, Spaniards,
Germans; French; and even English and Irish. One is also struck with
the power wielded over the Muhammadan world of North Africa by the
Jew, which was not displaced till the modern Christian European
conquest of North Africa.
Arabs completely displaced the Hamitic tribes on the Desert Nile in
Nubia, Dongola and Sennār after the 11th and 12th centuries, and in
the last-named country, Sennār, founded the Funj dynasty of kings
which powerfully affected North-East Africa from the 13th to the
18th centuries. In the 12th century, Somaliland was converted to
Islam and from that period onwards permeated by Arabs. From the
middle of the 8th century, the pre-Islamic settlements of southern
Arabs along the East coast of Africa were revived by fresh bands of
militant traders and missionaries of Islam. Arabs established
themselves once more at Sofala, at Sena and Quelimane on the lower
Zambezi, at Moçambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, and various ports
on the Somali coast. A colony of Muhammadanized Persians joined them
in the 10th century at Lamu; and Persian as well as Muhammadan
Indian influence began to be very apparent in architecture on the
East coast of Africa. The powerful Sultanate of Kilwa was founded in
the 10th century, and exercised for some time a dominating influence
over all the other Arab settlements on the East coast of Africa.
Arabs, as already related, had discovered the island of Madagascar,
which they first made clearly known to history. In Islamic times
they again settled as traders on its north and north-west coasts,
while the adjoining Comoro Islands or Islands of the “Full Moon”
(Komr) became little Arab sultanates practically in the hands of
Arabized Negroes. Until the coming of the Portuguese in the 16th
century these Arab East African states were sparsely colonized by
Himyaritic or South Arabian Arabs from the Hadhramaut, Yaman, and
Aden. But a development of power and enterprise amongst the Arabs of
Maskat, which led to their driving away the Portuguese from the
Persian Gulf and subsequently attacking them on the East coast of
Africa, caused the Maskat[46] Arab to become the dominant type. The
Maskat Arabs founded the modern Zanzibar sultanate, which quite late
in the 19th century was separated by the intervention of the British
Government from the parent state of ’Oman.
As the result of the Muhammadan invasion of Africa from Arabia—only
brought to a close at the end of the 19th century—it may be stated
that Arabized Berbers ruled in North and North-West Africa; Arabized
Turks ruled in North and North-East Africa; Arabized Negroes ruled
on the Niger, and in the Central Sudan; Arabs ruled more directly on
the Nile, and on the Nubian coast; and the Arabs of south Arabia and
of ’Oman governed the East African coast, and eventually carried
their influence, and to some extent their rule, inland to the great
Central African lakes, and even to the Upper Congo.
The Muhammadan colonization of Africa was the first event which
brought that part of the continent beyond the Sahara and Upper
Egypt within the cognizance of the world of civilization and
history. The Arabs introduced from Syria and Mesopotamia an
architecture—“Saracenic”—which was an offshoot of the
Byzantine[47], with a dash of Persian or Indian influence. This
architecture received at the hands of the Berbers and Egyptians an
extraordinarily beautiful development, which penetrated northwards
into Spain and Sicily and in a modified type into Italy, and
southwards reached the Lower Niger, the Upper Nile, the vicinity
of the Zambezi, and the north coast of Madagascar. They gave to
all the northern third of Africa a _lingua franca_ in Arabic, and
besides spreading certain ideas of Greek medicine and philosophy,
they taught the Koran, which admitted all those Berber and Negro
populations into that circle of civilized nations which has
founded so much of its hopes, philosophy and culture on the
Semitic Scriptures. The Arabs, especially of Yaman and ’Oman, were
the means, more or less direct (especially through their seafaring
trade with India), of enlarging the food supply and means of
transport of the negro and negroid, and of conveying to Europe a
few useful African products, such as coffee. They had much to do
with the introduction of the Indian buffalo into Egypt, and the
camel into the Sahara and Libyan deserts, Nigeria and Somaliland.
Similarly they extended the range of the domestic horse and ass,
of goats, and sheep and poultry in Negro Africa. They certainly
introduced the lime and orange, and the sugar cane, and possibly
the banana; though this last may date back to pre-Islamic times,
like wheat and rice.
----------------------------------------------------------------
MUHAMMADAN AFRICA
Plate II.
[Illustration]
Sir H.H. Johnston del^t. W.&A.K. Johnston Limited. Edinburgh &
London
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[yellow] Indicates approximate area over which Islam is the
dominating religion at the present day
(_N.B.—The present area is larger than it has ever been in the
past_)
_Dotted spots of colour illustrate sporadic establishments of
Muhammadanism_
_The Boundaries of most important Muhammadan Empires when at their
greatest extent are shown in coloured lines_
----------------------------------------------------------------
Through their contact with Europeans, Arabs and Arabized Berbers
first sketched out with some approach to correctness the geography
of Inner Africa, and of the African coasts and islands. The direct
and immediate result of this Muhammadan conquest of Africa was the
drawing into that continent of the Portuguese—themselves but
recently emancipated from Muhammadan rule, and still retaining some
conversance with Arabic, a language already used in African and
Eastern commerce from Tangier and the Senegal to Ternate and the
Spice Islands off the coasts of New Guinea. Thanks to this intimate
acquaintance with Muhammadans, and their _lingua franca_, the
Portuguese were now to advance considerably the colonization of
Africa by the Caucasian race.
-----
Footnote 27:
Tawareq is the plural of an Arabic word, Tarqi, a raider.
Footnote 28:
The origin of the name Allah applied by Muhammadans to the Supreme
God. Allah acquired a masculine sense although in its original
form the word was feminine.
Footnote 29:
Jerba, usually called Meninx by the ancients, is supposed to have
been the Island of Lotos-Eaters of Greek mythology.
Footnote 30:
The origin of the name Kairwan has been much disputed. The present
writer, visiting this place some years ago, was told by a native
that the word was the Arab name for a small bustard-like courser
(a bird which the French call Poule de Kairouan), and that, seeing
this bird in large numbers—where it is still to be found—in the
marshy plain on which the city was built, the Arabs gave its name
to the town. Kairwan was chosen as the site for the Muhammadan
capital by the early Arab invaders because it was considered
sufficiently far from the sea-coast to be beyond the reach of
attack from a Byzantine fleet.
Footnote 31:
Count Julian appears to have been a Byzantine governor on the
coast of Morocco, who after the Byzantine downfall to some extent
attached himself to the Romanized Gothic kingdom of Spain.
Footnote 32:
This is the Arab rendering of her name. Dahia meant “queen” and
Al-Kahina “the wise woman” or “prophetess.” This remarkable
personage was from a Berber tribe, the Jorāwa, which had been
converted to Judaism and was partly Jewish in blood.
Footnote 33:
Jewish colonies began to settle in North Africa soon after the
destruction of Jerusalem, or even as far back as the Ptolemaic
rule over Egypt. The Jews were particularly attracted to Tunisia
and Tripoli (the former Carthaginian coast) by their kinship in
race and language with the Phoenicians.
Footnote 34:
The rocky peninsula where Tarik landed was called by the Arabs
Jibl-al-Tarik, a name which subsequently became corrupted by the
Spaniards into Gibraltar.
Footnote 35:
There has been a succession of great cities since prehistoric
times ranging round about or situated on the site of Cairo—an
“inevitable” city site, because it is at the head of the Nile
Delta. Memphis was only 12 miles away, and Heliopolis or On less
than half that distance. Babel or Babylon was built by emigrants
from old Babylon on the Euphrates on the actual site of Cairo in
about 525 B.C. This became a Roman city and was succeeded by the
Arab Al Fostat or Masr.
Footnote 36:
A little more than one-third of the modern population of
Cyrenaica, Tripoli, and Mauretania is of Arab race; but
seven-tenths of the North African population speak Arabic and not
Berber.
Footnote 37:
Prince of the Faithful.
Footnote 38:
From the Arabic _Wahad_, “The One.”
Footnote 39:
It also later on left traces of its temporary occupation on the
island of Jerba, where a fine Spanish fortress remains intact to
this day.
Footnote 40:
Arzila.
Footnote 41:
_Sharif_, plur. _Shorfa_, means in Arabic “nobly born.” The first
Sharifian Arab dynasty ruled Morocco from 788 to 970. Then
followed a long succession of Berber dynasties till 1524, when the
Sa’adi Sharifs from the upper Draa began to rule Morocco. The
third Sharifian Arab dynasty—Filali, from Ta-filal-t—succeeded the
Sa’adi Sultans in the 17th century and still occupies the Moroccan
throne.
Footnote 42:
Timbuktu had been founded by a Tawareq (Berber) tribe about 1100
A.C.
Footnote 43:
or Askia.
Footnote 44:
Now in the hinterland of Algeria, and occupied by the French.
Footnote 45:
Algeria and Tunis were conquered by Turkish pirates, quite as much
from the mild Berber dynasties possessing them as from the Spanish
encroachments. Tripoli was taken from the Knights of Malta.
Gradually all these three Regencies detached themselves from the
Turkish Empire in everything but the mere acknowledgment of
suzerainty; but, in 1835, the Turks abruptly resumed the direct
control of Tripoli and Barka, to which they added Fezzan in 1842.
Footnote 46:
or ’Oman. Maskat is the capital of the principality of ’Oman (a
word which is really pronounced ’ūman) in East Arabia, ruled by an
“Imam” or laicized descendant of a line of preacher-kings or
“Prince Bishops,” leaders of the Ibadite sect of Puritan
Muhammadans, believing mostly that sin was worse than unbelief.
The Ibadites were identical in origin with the N. African Khariji
already described, whose tenets, in the 18th and 19th centuries,
were unconsciously repeated by the followers of Muhammad ibn
Abd-al-Wahhab, the conquering “Wahhabis” of Nejd.
Footnote 47:
The architectural style known as Saracenic made its beginnings in
Inner Syria and Mesopotamia a century or nearly so before the
Muhammadan invasion; and the “Horseshoe Arch” or the arch
prolonged for more than half a circle was invented by Hellenized
Syrians in the sixth century of this era. The “Mahrab” of the
Mosque and some of the doming were added by the Arabs and actually
descend from the symbols of phallic worship.
CHAPTER IV
THE PORTUGUESE IN AFRICA
The mother of Portugal was Galicia, that north-western province of
the present Kingdom of Spain. It was here at any rate that the
Portuguese language developed from a dialect of provincial Latin,
and hence that the first expeditions started to drive the Moors out
of that territory which subsequently became the Kingdom of Portugal.
A large element in the populations of Galicia and of the northern
parts of Portugal was Gothic. The Suevi settled here in considerable
numbers; and their descendants at the present day show the fine tall
figures, flaxen or red hair, and blue eyes so characteristic of the
northern Teuton. Central Portugal is mainly of Latinized Iberian
stock, while southern Portugal retains to this day a large element
of Moorish blood. The northern part of Portugal was first wrested
from the Moors in the 11th century by the bravery of Alfonso V,
Ferdinand I and Alfonso VI, Kings of Leon. Alfonso VI placed it (as
a tributary county) in charge of Henric of Besançon or Burgundy, a
French prince of the Capetian house, who married the illegitimate
daughter of Alfonso VI, and extended the conquered area nearly to
the banks of the Tagus. He became known to the Moors as Errik; and
his warrior son Alfonso I was styled in Moorish history “ibn Errik,”
the “son of Henry.” Alfonso I became the first king of Portugal in
1143, though it is doubtful whether the kingly title was assumed or
recognized till the reign of Henric’s great-great grandson Alfonso
III, by whom in 1250 the southernmost province of Algarve[48] was
conquered. By the middle of the 13th century the Moors had ceased to
rule in the Roman Lusitania. Lisbon, the capital, had been wrested
from the Muhammadans in 1147, thanks to the cooperation of a
crusading force of English, Dutch and Germans, who volunteered the
aid of their ships and fighting men. Most of these Saxon crusaders
settled in Portugal, which at that period even imported Anglo-Saxon
or English architects and craftsmen; and not a few of the later
_conquistadores_ and bold sea-captains of the Lusitanian kingdom
could trace their descent from Teutonic adventurers of the 12th
century.
In course of time the Portuguese, not content with ridding the
western part of the Peninsula of the Moorish invaders, attempted to
carry the war into the enemy’s country, urged thereto by the
irritating attacks of Moorish pirates. In 1415, as already
mentioned, a Portuguese army landed on the coast of Morocco, and
captured the citadel of Ceuta, the Roman Septa. One by one the
Portuguese captured the coast towns of north-west Morocco, till in
the second half of the 16th century the king of Portugal was almost
entitled to that claim over the Empire of Morocco which asserted
itself down to 1910 in the formal setting-forth of his dignities.
Most of these posts were either abandoned some years before or just
after the defeat of the young king “Sebastião o Desejado”—Sebastian
the desired—who at the age of only 23 was defeated and slain by the
founder of the Sharifian dynasty of Morocco on the fatal field of Al
Kasr-al-Kabīr in 1578[49]. Ceuta was taken over by Spain in 1580—was
garrisoned, that is, by Spanish soldiers[50]; the two or three other
Moroccan towns which remained in Portuguese hands after the battle
of Kasr-al-Kabīr, being garrisoned by Portuguese soldiers, reverted
to the separated crown of Portugal in 1640. Of these Tangier was
ceded to England in 1662, Saffi was given up to the Moors in 1641,
other points were snatched by the Moors in 1689, and Mazagan was
finally lost in 1770.
The second son of the king Dom João I (who reigned from 1385 to
1433) and Philippa, daughter of the English John of Gaunt, was named
Henry (Henrique), and was subsequently known to all time as “Henry
the Navigator” from the interest he took in maritime exploration. He
was present at the siege of Ceuta in 1415, and after its capture was
said to have inquired with much interest as to the condition of
Morocco and of the unknown African interior, and to have heard from
the Moors of Timbuktu.
On his return to Portugal he established himself on the rocky
promontory of Sagres, and devoted himself to the encouragement of
the exploration of the coasts of Africa. Under his direction
expedition after expedition set out. First Cape Bojador to the south
of the Moroccan coast was doubled by Gil Eannes in 1434[51]. In
1441-2 Antonio Gonsalvez and Nuno Tristam passed Cape Blanco on the
Sahara coast, and on the return journey called at the Rio d’Ouro or
River of Gold[52], whence they brought back some gold dust and ten
slaves. These slaves having been sent by Prince Henry to Pope Martin
V, the latter conferred upon Portugal the right of possession and
sovereignty over all countries that might be discovered between Cape
Blanco and India. In 1445 a Portuguese named João Fernandez made the
first over-land exploration, starting alone from the mouth of the
Rio d’Ouro, and travelling over seven months in the interior. In the
following year the river Senegal was reached, and Cape Verde was
doubled by Diniz Diaz; and in 1448 the coast was explored as far as
the Gambia river. In 1455-6 Ca’ da Mosto (a Venetian in Portuguese
service) and Uso di Mare (a Genoese) discovered the Cape Verde
Islands, and visited the rivers Senegal and Gambia, bringing back
much information in regard to Timbuktu, the trade in gold and ivory
with the coast, and the over-land trade routes from the Niger to the
Mediterranean. It is asserted by the Portuguese that some years
later two Portuguese envoys actually reached Timbuktu; but the truth
of this assertion is somewhat problematical, since, had they done
so, they would probably have dissipated to some extent the excessive
exaggerations regarding the wealth and importance of the Songhai
capital. In 1460 Diego Gomes reached the river and mountain
peninsula of Sierra Leone; the last named from the incessant rumble
of thunderstorms making the mountain range roar like a lion. In
1462, two years after the death of Prince Henry, Pedro de Sintra
explored the coast as far as Cape Palmas in modern Liberia. By 1471
the whole Guinea coast had been followed to the Gold Coast and on
past the Niger delta, to the Cameroons and as far south as the
Ogowe.
In 1448, under Prince Henry’s directions, a fort had been built on
the Bay of Arguin, to the south of Cape Blanco; and a few years
later a Portuguese company was formed for carrying on a trade with
the Guinea coast in slaves and gold. The first expedition sent out
by this company resulted in the despatch of 200 Negro slaves to
Portugal, and thenceforward the slave trade grew and prospered. It
at first resulted in but little misery for the slaves, who exchanged
a hunted, hand-to-mouth existence among savage tribes in Africa for
relatively kind treatment and comfortable living in beautiful
Portugal, where they were much in favour as house servants. In 1481
the Portuguese, who had been for some years examining the Gold
Coast, decided to build a fort to protect their trade there. In 1482
the fort was completed and the Portuguese flag raised in token of
sovereignty. This strong place, for more than a hundred years in
possession of the Portuguese, was called Saõ Jorge da Mina[53]. In
the same year in which this first Portuguese post was established on
the Gold Coast[54], exploration of the African coast was carried on
beyond the mouth of the Ogowe by Diogo Cam, who discovered the mouth
of the Congo in 1482, and sailed up that river about as far as Boma.
In 1485 Diogo Cam returned with a stronger expedition which sailed
and rowed up the Congo to the mouth of the Mpozo river, just below
the Yellala Falls[55]. Diogo Cam’s discoveries were continued by
Bartolomeu Diaz de Novaes, who, passing along the south-west coast
of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in stormy weather without
knowing it, and touched land on February 3, 1488, at Mossel Bay,
then again at Algoa Bay, Cape Padrone and the mouth of the Great
Fish river. Here the timorous officers and crew insisted on a return
westwards. On the homeward voyage Diaz beheld and named Cape
Agulhas, and also “Cabo Tormentoso,” the terminal point of South
Africa, which was afterwards christened by Diaz, or by his monarch,
King Joaõ II, “the Cape of Good Hope.”
At this stage in the relation of the founding of the Portuguese
dominion and influence over Africa some mention must be made of the
part played during the 15th century by the Jews settled in Portugal.
Badly as the Christians of Portugal treated the Jews, their
existence in this western kingdom was not unbearable compared with
the ferocious cruelty of the Spaniards; consequently during the 15th
century the Jewish colonies in Portuguese cities increased
considerably, and Jews even rose to a high position in the state. In
return they established printing-presses, advanced education, and
spread a knowledge of geography, astronomy, mathematics, classical
history and medicine which was directly useful to the new school of
Portuguese seamen-explorers, who mostly obtained their nautical
instruments from the Jews. In short the Jews did much to create a
Portuguese Empire beyond the seas; but they were subsequently
treated with the grossest ingratitude and expelled from Portugal in
the early 16th century, thousands of them being deported to Saõ
Thomé in the Gulf of Guinea where they died of malarial fever.
Before the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by Diaz, the King of
Portugal was convinced of the circumnavigability of Africa from the
Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. Through enterprising Portuguese Jews
(Abraham of Beja and Joseph of Lamego) who had travelled overland
via Egypt and Syria to the Persian Gulf, he had heard that this was
possible[56], and resolved to send two Portuguese officers, Pero de
Covilham and Alfonso de Paiva, to travel to India by way of the Red
Sea, and to find out all they could about the Christian King of
Ethiopia and the Arab settlements on the East coast of Africa, and
whether the King of Portugal might look for allies or friendly
neutrals in this direction. Accordingly, in 1487, de Covilham and
Paiva reached Egypt; and the former journeyed by the Red Sea to
India, while the latter made for Abyssinia, but was killed on the
way, near Suakin. Pero de Covilham, on his return journey from
Southern India, visited the north coast of Madagascar and the
settlement of Sofala, near the modern Beira (S.E. Africa). Thence he
proceeded northwards, calling at all the Arab ports of East Africa
till he once more re-entered the Red Sea. Returning to Cairo he
learnt that his companion, Paiva, had been killed, but he met the
two Jews, Abraham and Joseph. By the last-named he sent back word of
his discoveries to King John II, and then starting off with Abraham
of Beja he visited Mecca and Medina and finally landed at Zeila (N.
Somaliland) and travelled to Abyssinia. The information sent back by
de Covilham decided the despatch of an expedition under Vasco da
Gama to pass round the Cape of Good Hope to the Arab colonies, and
thence to India. Vasco da Gama set out in 1497, and made his famous
voyage round the Cape (calling at and naming Natal on the way) to
Sofala, where he picked up an Arab pilot who took him to Malindi,
and thence to India. On his return journey Vasco da Gama took
cognizance of the island of Mozambique, and visited the Quelimane
river near the mouth of the Zambezi. Numerous well-equipped
expeditions sailed for India within the years following Vasco da
Gama’s discoveries. While India was the main goal before the eyes of
their commanders, considerable attention was bestowed upon the
founding of forts along the East coast of Africa, both to protect
the Cape route to India, and to further Portuguese trade with the
interior of Africa. In nearly every case the Portuguese merely
supplanted the Muhammadan Arabs, who—possibly succeeding Phoenicians
or Sabaeans—had established themselves at Sofala, Quelimane, Sena
(on the Zambezi), Moçambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Malindi,
Lamu, and Magdishu. Sofala was taken by Pedro de Anhaya in 1505.
Tristan d’Acunha hoisted the Portuguese flag on Sokotra Island and
at Lamu in 1507, in which year also Duarte de Mello captured and
fortified Moçambique. Kilwa and the surrounding Arab establishments
were seized between 1506 and 1508; and a little later the remaining
places already mentioned on the East coast of Africa were in
possession of the Portuguese, who had also Aden on the south coast
of Arabia, the island of Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, and various
places on the coast of ’Oman, including Maskat. Meantime, for thirty
years, Pero de Covilham remained a prisoner at the Court of the
Emperor of Abyssinia, though treated with the utmost distinction.
Before this period of the world’s history, and from the time of the
earlier crusades, a legend had grown up of the existence of Prester
(priest) Johannes—some Christian monarch of the name of John, who
ruled in the heart of Asia or of Africa, a bright spot in the midst
of Heathenry and Islam. The court of Prester John was located
anywhere between Senegambia and China; but the legend had its origin
probably in the continued existence of Greek Christianity in Dongola
and Abyssinia. Pero de Covilham having at last located Abyssinia,
and an Abyssinian envoy having proceeded to Lisbon in 1507 to invite
an alliance, a Portuguese embassy sailed round the Cape of Good Hope
to the Red Sea and landed (apparently at Masawa) in 1520. With this
embassy were two priests, one of whom (Alvarez) thirty years
afterwards wrote an interesting account of Northern Abyssinia. The
priest-missionaries remained for a long time in Ethiopia; but the
lay-members of the mission returned after a residence of five years,
bringing Covilham away with them. But he died on the way back.
The Turks meanwhile had taken possession of Egypt and Western
Arabia, and became very jealous of Portuguese interference with
Abyssinia and the Red Sea. They stirred up a Somali warrior,
Muhammad Granye, furnished him with artillery, and urged him to
conquer Abyssinia. This Muhammadan Somali from the Danákil country
commenced invading and raiding Abyssinia from 1528. A Portuguese
priest, Bermudez, was sent to Lisbon to beg for assistance. This was
sent by way of India, whence came in 1541 a strong Portuguese fleet
to Masawa. Six months afterwards the fleet landed at Masawa a force
of 450 Portuguese soldiers under Christoforo da Gama. But after
carrying all before them the Portuguese unwisely split their forces.
Muhammad Granye, having received Turkish and Arab reinforcements,
captured Christoforo da Gama’s camp, and put that gallant Portuguese
to death. Ultimately, however, with the help of the remaining
Portuguese, the Abyssinian Emperor defeated Muhammad Granye, who was
himself slain by da Gama’s attendant, Pedro Leon (1542). Portuguese
Jesuit missionaries remained in Abyssinia until 1633 and penetrated
into countries which have only been since revisited by Europeans
within the last few decades. Father Pedro Paez discovered the source
of the Blue Nile in 1615; and Father Lobo visited the same region
and much of S.W. Abyssinia in 1626. Portuguese civilization
distinctly left its mark on Abyssinia in architecture and in other
ways. The very name which we apply to this Empire of Ethiopia is a
Portuguese rendering of the Arab and Indian cant term for
“negro”—_Habesh_—a word of uncertain origin.
From the beginning of the 16th century the Portuguese visited the
coasts of Madagascar, as will be related in the chapter dealing with
that island. They had also discovered in 1507 the Mascarene islands
(named after a sea-captain, Mascarenhas) now known by the names of
Réunion and Mauritius, though they made no permanent settlements on
either. Madagascar, which was first sighted by Diogo Diaz in 1500,
was named the Island of St Laurence.
On the West coast of Africa geographical discovery was soon followed
by something like colonization. The island of Madeira, which had
been known to the Portuguese in the 14th century, was occupied by
them in the 15th, and a hundred years afterwards was already
producing a supply of that wine which has made it so justly
famous[57]. The island of St Helena—afterwards to be seized by the
Dutch and taken from them by the English East India Company—was
discovered by the Portuguese in 1502; and this island also, at the
end of a century of intermittent use by the Portuguese, possessed
orange groves and fig trees which they had planted.
When Diogo Cam returned from the Congo in 1485 he brought back with
him a few Congo natives, who were baptized, and who returned some
years later to the Congo with Diogo Cam and a large number of
proselytizing priests. This Portuguese expedition arrived at the
mouth of the Congo in 1491 and there encountered a vassal chief of
the king of Kongo[58] who ruled the riverain province of Sonyo. This
chief received them with a respect due to demi-gods, and allowed
himself to be at once converted to Christianity—a conversion which
was sincere and durable. The Portuguese proceeded under his guidance
to the king’s capital about 200 miles from the coast, which they
named São Salvador. Here the king and queen were baptized with the
names of the then king and queen of Portugal, João and Leonora,
while the Crown Prince was called Affonso. Christianity made
surprising progress amongst these fetish worshippers, who readily
transferred their adoration to the Virgin Mary and the saints, and
discarded their indigenous male and female gods. Early in the 16th
century the Kongo kingdom was visited by the Bishop of São Thomé, an
island off the Guinea coast, which, together with the adjoining
Prince’s Island, had been settled by the Portuguese soon after their
discovery of the West coast of Africa. The Bishop of São Thomé,
being unable to take up his residence in the kingdom of Kongo,
procured the consecration of a native negro as Bishop of the Congo.
This man, who was a member of the Kongo royal family, had been
educated in Lisbon, and was, I believe, the first negro bishop known
to history. But he was not a great success, nor was the next bishop,
in whose reign in the middle of the 16th century great dissensions
arose in the Kongo church among the native priesthood, which led to
a considerable lessening of Christian fervour. After the death of
the King, Dom Diego, a civil war broke out; and one by one the males
of the royal house were all killed except “Dom Henrique,” the king’s
brother. This latter also died soon after succeeding to the throne,
and left the state to his son, “Dom Alvares.” During this civil war
many of the Portuguese, whom the kings of Kongo had invited to
settle in the country as teachers, mechanics and craftsmen, were
killed or expelled as the cause of the troubles which European
intervention had brought on the Kongo kingdom; but Dom Alvares, who
was an enlightened man, gathered together all that remained, and for
a time Portuguese civilization continued to advance over the
country. But a great stumbling-block had arisen in the way of
Christianity being accepted by the bulk of the people—that
stumbling-block which is still discussed at every Missionary
conference, polygamy. A relation of the king Dom Alvares renounced
Christianity and headed a reactionary party. Curiously enough he has
been handed down to history as _Bula Matadi_, “the Breaker of
Stones,” the name which more than three hundred years afterwards was
applied to the explorer Stanley by the Congo peoples, and has since
become the native name for the whole of the government of the
Belgian Congo.
In the middle of the 16th century Portuguese influence over Kongo
received a deadly blow. That kingdom, which must be taken to include
the coast-lands on either side of the lower Congo, was invaded by a
savage tribe from the interior known as the “Jagga” people, probably
the same tribe as the Ba-Kioko or Ba-jok of Upper Kwango river[59].
The Jaga or Imbangola were powerful men and ferocious cannibals, and
they carried all before them, the king and his court taking refuge
on an island on the broad Congo, not far from Boma. The king of
Kongo appealed to Portugal for help; and that ill-fated but
brilliant young monarch, Dom Sebastião, sent him Franciso de Gova
with 600 soldiers. With the aid of these Portuguese and their guns
the Jaga were driven out. The king, who had hitherto led a very
irregular life for a Christian, now formally married, but was not
rewarded by a legal heir, and had to indicate as his successor a
natural son by a concubine. About this time the king of Portugal
pressed his brother of Kongo to reveal the existence of mines of
precious metals. Whether there are such in the Kongo country—except
as regards copper—has not been made known even at the present day,
but they were supposed to exist at that time; and certain Portuguese
at the Kongo court dissuaded the prince whom they served from giving
any information on the subject, no doubt desiring to keep such
knowledge to themselves. The king of Kongo, Dom Alvares, when the
Jaga had retired, made repeated appeals for more Portuguese priests,
and sent several embassies to Portugal; but Dom Sebastião had been
killed in Morocco, and his uncle, the Cardinal Henrique, who had
succeeded him and who was the last Portuguese king of the House of
Avis, was too much occupied by the affairs of his tottering kingdom
to reply to these appeals. But when Philip II of Spain had seized
the throne of Portugal he despatched a Portuguese named Duarte Lopes
to report on the countries of the Congo basin. After spending some
time in Congoland, Duarte Lopes started to return to Portugal with a
great amount of information about the country, and messages from the
king of Kongo. Unfortunately he was driven by storms to Central
America, and when he reached Spain the king was too busy preparing
the Great Armada to listen to him. Therefore Lopes went on a
pilgrimage to Rome to appeal to the Pope. Whilst staying in Italy,
Lopes allowed a papal official named Filippo Pigafetta to take down
and publish in 1591 his account of the Kongo kingdom, together with
a recital of the Portuguese explorations and conquests in East
Africa.
Although Portuguese priests—Jesuits probably—continued for a little
while longer to visit the kingdom of Kongo, from the end of the 16th
century both Christian and Portuguese influence slowly faded, and
the country relapsed into heathenism, in spite of the strenuous
efforts made by the Popes of the 17th and 18th centuries, who sent
thither Italian, Flemish, and French missionaries. The Portuguese
appear to have excited the animosity of a somewhat proud people by
their overbearing demeanour and rapacity. They held intermittently
Kabinda, on the coast to the north of the Congo estuary, and
occasionally sent missions of investiture to São Salvador to
represent the king of Portugal at the crowning of some new king of
Kongo; and the king of Kongo was usually given a Portuguese name and
occasionally an honorary rank in the Portuguese army. But it was not
till after the middle of the 19th century that Portugal began to
assert her dominion over the Congo countries. France and Britain
during the 18th and nearly all the 19th centuries steadily refused
to recognize Portuguese rule anywhere north of the Loge river in
Angola (south of the Congo Estuary); but Britain in 1884 proposed to
do so under sufficient guarantees for freedom of trade set forth in
a treaty which was rendered abortive by the opposition of the House
of Commons. If this treaty had been ratified it would have brought
under joint English and Portuguese influence the lower Congo,
besides settling amicably Portuguese and British claims in
Nyasaland. The opposition of a knot of unpractical philanthropists
in the House of Commons wrecked the treaty, and gave to the other
powers of Europe an opportunity for interfering in the affairs of
the Congo. The result to Portugal, nevertheless, was that she
secured the territory of Kabinda north of the Congo, and the ancient
kingdom of Kongo south of that river.
Although the Portuguese discovered the coast of Angola in 1490, they
did not attempt to settle in that country until 1574, when, in
answer to an appeal of the chief of Angola (a vassal of the king of
Kongo), an expedition was sent thither under the command of Paulo
Diaz[60]. This expedition landed at the mouth of the Kwanza river,
and found that the chief of Angola who had appealed to the king of
Portugal was dead. His successor received Diaz with politeness, but
compelled him to assist the Angolese in local wars which had not
much interest for the Portuguese. Diaz found in the interior of
Angola many evidences of Christian worship, which showed that
missionaries from the Congo had preceded his own expedition. When
Diaz was at last allowed to return to Portugal, the king (Dom
Sebastião) sent him back as “Conqueror, Colonizer, and Governor of
Angola” with seven ships and 700 men. His passage out from Lisbon in
the year 1574 occupied three and a half months—not a long time at
that period for sailing-vessels. Diaz took possession of a sandy
island in front of the bay which is now known as the harbour of São
Paulo de Loanda. Here he was joined by 40 Portuguese refugees from
the Kongo kingdom. Eventually he built on the mainland of Loanda the
fort of São Miguel, and founded the city of São Paulo, which became
and remains the capital of the Portuguese possessions in South-west
Africa.
For six years perfect peace subsisted between the Portuguese and the
natives; then, afraid that the Portuguese would eventually seize the
whole country, the king of Angola enticed 500 Portuguese soldiers
into a war in the interior where he massacred them. But this
massacre only served to show the splendid quality of Paulo Diaz, who
was a magnificent representative of the old Portuguese type of
Conquistador. Leaving Loanda with 150 soldiers—nearly all that
remained—he marched against the king’s forces near the Kwanza river,
and routed them with great loss, being of course greatly helped in
securing this victory by the possession of muskets and cannon. The
Angolese were defeated repeatedly before they gave up the struggle;
but at length in 1597 the Portuguese had established themselves
strongly on both banks of the river Kwanza. In that year 200 Flemish
colonists were sent out by the king of Spain and Portugal. In a very
short time all were dead from fever. In spite of many reverses,
however, the Portuguese slowly mastered the country south of the
Kwanza nearly as far as Benguela. Portuguese traders and
missionaries probably travelled inland up the Congo as far as the
Bateke country or Stanley Pool. In 1606 an interesting but
unsuccessful attempt was made to open up communication across
south-central Africa between the Kwanza and the Zambezi settlements.
But the explorer never got beyond the King of Kongo’s capital, that
potentate refusing him permission to proceed further into the
interior. Nevertheless, from Portuguese annals it is clear that
numerous venturesome priests and soldiers attempted at this period
to penetrate Darkest Africa, and were never heard of again. What a
subject for romance would be their experiences in these lands, at
that time absolutely free from the influence of the European—a
condition which no longer applied to the natives of Darkest Africa
when Stanley first made known the geography of those regions. For in
the three and a half centuries which had elapsed, even those savages
in the heart of Africa, who possibly knew nothing of the existence
of white men, had nevertheless adopted many of the white man’s
products as necessities or luxuries of their lives, such as maize,
tobacco, sweet potatoes, manioc, papaws, chillies, the pine-apple,
and the sugar cane.
We may here fitly consider the greatest and most beneficial results
of the Portuguese colonization of Africa. These wonderful old
Conquistadores may have been relentless and cruel in imposing their
rule on the African and in enslaving him or in Christianizing him,
but they added enormously to his food-supply and his comfort. So
early in the history of their African and Indian explorations as
about 1510 they brought from China, India, and Malacca the orange
tree, the lemon and the lime, which, besides introducing into Europe
(and Europe had hitherto only known the sour wild orange and the
lime, brought by the Arabs), they planted in every part of East and
West Africa where they touched. They likewise brought the sugar cane
from the Mediterranean and the East Indies and introduced it into
various parts of Brazil and West Africa, especially into the Islands
of São Thomé and Principe and the Congo and Angola countries.
Madeira they had planted with vines in the 15th century; the Açores,
the Cape Verde Islands and St Helena with orange trees in the 16th
century. The cacao tree was introduced into São Thomé in 1822. From
their great possession of Brazil, overrun and organized with
astounding rapidity, they brought to East and West Africa the Musk
duck (which has penetrated far and wide into the interior of
Africa), chili peppers, maize (now grown all over Africa, and
cultivated by many tribes who have lost all tradition of its foreign
origin), wheat (into Zambezia)[61], tobacco, the tomato, pine-apple,
sweet potato (a convolvulus tuber), manioc (from which tapioca is
made), rice (into West Africa), haricot beans and lentils, onions,
guavas, jackfruit, papaws, small bananas, ginger and other less
widely known forms of vegetable food. The Portuguese also introduced
the domestic pig into West Africa, and the domestic cat, possibly
also certain breeds of dogs; in East tropical Africa the horse is
known in the north by an Arab name, in the centre by the Portuguese
word, and in the extreme south by a corruption of the English. Take
away from the African’s dietary of today the products that the
Portuguese brought to him from the far East and far West, and he
will remain very insufficiently provided with necessities and simple
luxuries. I may add one or two dates concerning these introductions
by the Portuguese:—the sugar cane and ginger were first planted in
the island of Principe, off the coast of Lower Guinea about 1520;
maize was introduced into the Congo (where it was called _maza
manputo_) about 1560[62].
In 1621 a chieftainess, apparently of the Kongo royal family, known
as Jinga Bandi, came to Loanda, made friends with the Portuguese,
was baptized, and then returned to the interior, where she poisoned
her brother (the chief or king of Angola), and succeeded him. Having
attained this object of her ambitions, she headed the national
party, and attempted to drive the Portuguese out of Angola. For 30
years she warred against them without seriously shaking their power,
though on the other hand they could do little more than hold their
own. But a much more serious enemy now appeared on the scene. The
Dutch, who took advantage of the union between the Spanish and
Portuguese thrones in 1580[63] to include the Portuguese empire as a
theatre for their reprisals against Spain, made several determined
attempts during the first half of the 17th century to wrest Angola
from the Portuguese. They captured São Paulo de Loanda in 1641, one
year after Portugal had recovered her independence under the first
Bragança king. The Portuguese concentrated on the Kwanza. The Dutch
attempted by several treacherous actions to oust them from their
fortresses on that river. At last, however, following on the
reorganization of the Portuguese empire after 1640, reinforcements
were sent from Brazil to Angola, and a siege of São Miguel took
place. The Portuguese imitated with advantage the Dutch game of
bluff, and by deceiving the besieged as to the extent of their army
they secured the surrender of 1100 Dutch to under 750 Portuguese. In
the preliminary assault on the Dutch at São Paulo de Loanda the
Portuguese lost 163 men. After the recapture of this place they
proceeded methodically to destroy all the Dutch establishments on
the Lower Guinea coast as far north as Loango. In the concluding
years of the 17th century nearly all the remaining Portuguese
missionaries in the kingdom of Kongo[64] migrated to the more
settled and prosperous Angola. In 1694 Portugal introduced a copper
coinage into her now flourishing West African colony—flourishing,
thanks to the slave trade, which was mightily influencing the
European settlement of West Africa.
In 1758 the Portuguese extended their rule northwards from São Paulo
de Loanda into the Ambriz country, where however their authority
continued very uncertain till about 1885. About the same time
Benguela was definitely occupied; and Portuguese influence continued
extending slowly southward until, in 1840, it reached its present
limits by the establishment of a settlement (now very prosperous)
called Mossamedes, almost exactly on the fifteenth parallel of south
latitude[65].
Between 1807 and 1810 attempts were made to open up intercourse with
the Lunda kingdom of the Mwata Yanvo, and thence across to the
colony of Moçambique, but they proved only partially successful. In
1813 and in the succeeding years a renewed vigour of colonization
began to make itself felt in the creation of public works in Angola.
Amongst other 19th century improvements was the bringing of the
waters of the Kwanza by canal to São Paulo de Loanda, which until
then had no supply of good drinking water. The Dutch had attempted
to carry out this, but were interrupted. The Portuguese efforts in
the early part of the last century proved unsuccessful, but in 1887
the canal was at last completed, and it made a great difference to
the health of the town. Portuguese rule inland from Angola waxed and
waned during the 19th century, but on the whole was greatly
extended. Livingstone found Portuguese in 1855 established to some
extent on the upper Kwango, an affluent of the Congo, and for long
the eastern boundary of Angola. From this, however, they had to
retire owing to native insurrections; though now their power and
their influence have been pushed far to the east, to the river
Kasai.
In 1875 a party of recalcitrant Boers quitted the Transvaal owing to
some quarrel with the local government, trekked over the desert in a
north-westerly direction, and eventually blundered across the Kunene
river (the southern limit of Portuguese West Africa) on to the
healthy plateau behind the Shela Mountains. It was feared at one
time that they would set the Portuguese at defiance and carve out a
little Boer state in south-west Africa. About this time, also,
Hottentots much under Boer influence and speaking Dutch invaded the
district of Mossamedes from the coast region; but by liberal
concessions and astute diplomacy, joined with the carrying out of
several important works, like the waggon road (now the railway)
across the Shela Mountains, the Portuguese won over the Boers to a
recognition of their sovereignty, though they have since left the
country and returned to German or British South Africa.
Slavery was not abolished in the Portuguese West African dominions
until 1878; but the slave trade had been ostensibly forbidden in the
first quarter of the 19th century. Prior to that time the slave
trade had brought extraordinary prosperity to the islands of São
Thomé and Principe, to the Portuguese fort on the coast of Dahomé,
and to Angola, all of which countries were more or less under one
government. The abolition of the slave trade however caused the
absolute ruin of Principe (which has not yet recovered), the
temporary ruin of São Thomé (the fortunes of this island have since
revived owing to the cultivation of cinchona and the enormous
extention of the planting of cacao), and the partial ruin of Angola,
which began to be regarded as a possession scarcely worth
maintaining. Brazil (though it had been severed from the crown of
Portugal) did almost more than the Mother Country to revive trade in
these dominions. Enterprising Brazilians such as Silva Americano
came over to Angola in the sixties and seventies of the 19th
century, started steam navigation on the river Kwanza, and developed
many industries. Through Brazilian, United States, and British
influence a railway was commenced in the eighties to connect São
Paulo de Loanda with the rich interior, especially with the coffee
districts on the water-shed of the Congo. Another railway of even
greater importance has been begun by a British company in the
Benguela district south of the Kwanza River. This line starts from
Lobito Bay, near Benguela, and is destined to cross Angola at its
broadest and ultimately reach the copper and gold mines of Katanga
in the Belgian Congo. American and Swiss protestant missionaries
have formed important settlements on the Bailundo uplands. The
magnificent island of São Thomé, just under the Equator, possesses
mountains which rise high into a temperate climate. On these, as
already related, flourishing plantations of cacao, cinchona and
coffee have been established. Public works in the shape of good
roads and bridges have been carried out in many parts of Angola, and
this country is certainly the most successful of the Portuguese
attempts at the colonization of Africa. Unfortunately the “boom” in
cacao (cocoa, chocolate) and the fact that it is a capricious tree,
not easy to acclimatize and only growing to perfection in a few
parts of tropical America and the west coast of Africa, notably São
Thomé, induced the Portuguese government from 1880 onwards to push
the interests of São Thomé at the expense of Angola. A kind of slave
trade under the guise of “apprenticeships” was revived in South and
East Angola, which made its effects felt on the Congo populations as
far inland as the Kasai and Lomami. These apprentices, once landed
in São Thomé (they were regularly bought and sold) never, or hardly
ever, obtained their liberty or received regular pay for their work.
In all other respects they were kindly treated. But this policy led
to native wars and insurrections in the Angola hinterland, and
attracted attention and condemnation in Europe.
In the autumn of 1904 the Portuguese forces in Southern Angola
sustained a disastrous defeat near the Kunene river from the
Kuanyama (Cuanhama) people, a tribe connected linguistically with
the Ovambo and the Ovaherero (Damara). Bantu negroes, speaking
dialects of this Ondonga or Herero group and distantly allied in
racial origin with the Zulu-Kafir stock, inhabit the south of Angola
and are formidable warriors. These disturbances in Southern Angola
have died down since the hinterland of Benguela was opened up to
profitable commerce by the Anglo-Portuguese railway concessionaires
who are building a line from Lobito Bay eastwards to Katanga.
Portuguese rule was extended in 1885 northwards to the southern
shore of the Congo, and over the small territory of Kabinda, which
is separated by a narrow strip of Belgian territory from the Congo
estuary. On the other hand the Portuguese protectorate over Dahomé—a
protectorate which never had any real existence—was abandoned to
France together with its only foothold, São João d’Ajudá[66]. The
Portuguese forts on the Gold Coast had not been held very long
before they were captured by the Dutch at the beginning of the 17th
century. Portugal, in spite of discovering and naming Sierra Leone,
never occupied it; but in varying degree she continued to maintain
certain fortified posts amid that extraordinary labyrinth of rivers
and islands in Senegambia, between the Gambia and Sierra Leone. This
is a district of some 14,000 square miles in extent, to-day
carefully defined, and known as Portuguese Guinea. But in the
seventies of the 19th century it was doubtful whether Portuguese
sovereignty over this country had not been abandoned. England, which
exercised exclusive influence in these waters, attempted to
establish herself in the place of Portugal, but the Portuguese
protested and proclaimed their sovereignty. The matter was submitted
to arbitration, and the verdict was given against England.
Consequently the Portuguese reorganized their colony of Guinea,
which in time was separated from the governorship of the Cape Verde
islands. There was a serious native rising in 1908, but it was
suppressed. In the present condition of Portuguese Guinea, however,
the native tribes are practically independent.
The Cape Verde Islands are a very important Portuguese asset three
hundred miles off the north-west coast of Africa. They have been
continuously occupied and administered since their discovery in the
15th century. They possessed then no population, but are now peopled
by a blackish race descended from Portuguese, Negroes and Moors. In
one or two of the healthier islands are white settlers of Portuguese
blood. Owing to the magnificent harbours which these islands offer
to shipping, especially São Vicente, and their use as a coaling
station, they may yet figure prominently in the world’s history.
Both Ascension and St Helena were discovered and named by the
Portuguese. The first-named was never continuously occupied until
England took possession of it as an outpost of Napoleon’s prison in
1815. St Helena was taken in the early part of the 16th century by
the Dutch, and passed into the hands of the English in the middle of
that century. Another Portuguese discovery was the most southern of
those isolated oceanic islets, Tristan d’Acunha, which bears the
name of its discoverer, but which, so far as occupation goes, has
always been a British possession[67].
On the East coast of Africa Portuguese colonization did not commence
until the 16th century had begun, and Vasco da Gama, after rounding
the Cape, had revealed the existence of old Arab trading settlements
and sultanates between Sofala and Somaliland.
The need of ports of call on the long voyage to India caused the
Portuguese to decide soon after Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage to
possess themselves of these Arab settlements, the more so because
hostilities against the “Moors” were a never-ending _vendetta_ on
the part of Spaniard and Portuguese, while the conquest was at that
date an easy one, as the Portuguese had artillery and the East
African Arabs had none.
By 1520, the Portuguese had ousted the Arabs and had occupied in
their stead Kilwa, Zanzibar, Pemba, Mombasa, Lamu, Malindi, Brava
(Barawa), and Magdishu (Magadoxo), all north of the Ruvuma river.
South of that river they had taken Sofala and Moçambique. Here they
had, it is said, established a trading station in 1503; but
Moçambique island[68] was not finally occupied by them till 1507,
when the existing fortress was commenced and built by Duarte de
Mello. The fort was then and is still known as “the Praça de São
Sebastião.” It had been decided before this that Moçambique should
be the principal place of call, after leaving the Cape of Good Hope,
for Portuguese ships on their way to India; but, when in 1505 the
Portuguese deliberately sanctioned the idea of a Portuguese East
African colony, they turned their attention rather to Sofala as its
centre than to Moçambique. Sofala, which is near the modern Beira,
was an old Arab port and sultanate, and had been for some 1500 years
the principal port on the south-east coast of Africa, from which the
gold obtained in the mines of Manika (Monomotapa, _i.e._ Southern
Rhodesia) was shipped to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Consequently the first proposed Portuguese settlement on the East
coast of Africa was entitled “the Captaincy of Sofala.” But later on
Moçambique grew in importance, and eventually gave its name to the
Portuguese possessions in East Africa.
The Quelimane river, taken to be the principal exit of the Zambezi
by the Portuguese, was discovered and entered by Vasco da Gama in
the early part of 1498, and was by him called the “River of Good
Indications.” He stayed a month on this river, where there seems to
have been, on the site of the present town of Quelimane, a trading
station resorted to by the Arabs, who were even then settled in
Zambezia. The name Quelimane (pronounced in English Kehmane) is
stated by the early Portuguese to have been the name of the friendly
chief who acted as intermediary between them and the natives, but it
would rather appear to have been a corruption of the Swahili-Arabic
word “Kaliman,” which means “interpreter.”
The first “factory” or Portuguese trading station at Quelimane was
established about the year 1544; and by this time the Portuguese had
heard of the River of Sena (as they called the Zambezi) and of the
large Arab settlement of Sena on its banks. They had further heard
both from Quelimane and from Sofala of the powerful empire of
Mohomotapa[69], and especially of the province of Manika, which was
reported to be full of gold. Having found it too difficult to reach
Manika from Sofala, owing to the opposition of the natives, they
resolved to enter the country from the north by way of Sena, on the
Zambezi; consequently, in 1569, an exceptionally powerful expedition
left Lisbon under the command of the Governor and Captain-General
Francisco Barreto. After a preliminary tour up and down the East
coast of Africa as far as Lamu, and a rapid journey to India and
back, Francisco Barreto with his force, which included cavalry and
camels, landed at Quelimane, and set out for Sena. The expedition
was accompanied, and, to a certain extent, guided by a
mischief-making Jesuit priest named Monclaros, who wished to avenge
the assassination of his fellow-priest, Gonçalo de Silveira,
martyred not long previously in the Monomotapa territories.
Francisco Barreto found on arriving at Sena that there was already a
small Portuguese settlement built alongside an Arab town. These
Arabs appear to have got on very well with the first Portuguese
traders, but they evidently took umbrage at Barreto’s powerful
expedition, and are accused of having poisoned the horses and
camels. What really took place, however, seems to have been that the
horses and camels were exposed to the bite of the Tsetse fly, and
died in consequence of the attacks of this venomous insect. From
Sena, Barreto sent an embassy to the Emperor of Monomotapa, whom he
offered to help against a revolted vassal, Mongase. After receiving
an invitation to visit the emperor, a portion of the Portuguese
force commenced to ascend the right bank of the river Zambezi, but
apparently never reached its destination, because it was so
repeatedly attacked by the hostile natives that it was compelled to
return to Sena. Shortly afterwards there arrived the news of a
revolt at Moçambique, and consequently Barreto, together with the
priest Monclaros, having handed over the command of the expedition
to a lieutenant, entered a canoe, descended the Zambezi to the Luabo
mouth, and from there took passage in a dau to Moçambique. He and
Monclaros subsequently returned to Sena, but Barreto died soon after
his arrival. The Portuguese chroniclers of this expedition write
with considerable bitterness of the Jesuit Monclaros, to whose
counsels most of the misfortunes and mistakes are attributed. The
expedition after Barreto’s death returned to Moçambique, and
attempted later on to enter Monomotapa by way of Sofala, but was
repulsed.
For some time to come further exploration of the Zambezi or of the
interior of Moçambique was put a stop to by the struggle which
ensued with the Turks. Towards the end of the 16th century (in
1584), following on the conquest of Egypt and at the instigation of
Venice, the Turkish Sultan sent a powerful fleet out of the Red Sea,
which descended the East coast of Africa as far as Mombasa, and
prepared to dispute with Portugal the dominion of the Indian Ocean.
The Turks, however, were defeated with considerable loss by the
Admiral Thomé de Sousa Coutinho; and Portuguese domination was not
only strengthened at Zanzibar and along the Zanzibar coast, but was
also affirmed along the south coast of Arabia and in the Persian
Gulf.
At the end of the 16th century the Portuguese had terrific struggles
with the natives in the interior of Monomotapa, behind Kilwa, on the
mainland of Moçambique[70], and in the vicinity of Tete on the
Zambezi; and shortly afterwards appeared the first Dutch pirates in
East African waters, some of whom actually laid siege to Moçambique.
In 1609 there arrived at Moçambique the first Portuguese Governor of
the East coast of Africa, this province having been separated from
the Portuguese possessions in India, and withdrawn at the same time
from the spiritual jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa, and placed
under the Prelate of Moçambique. Meantime the efforts to reach the
gold-mines to the south of the Zambezi had been so far successful
that a considerable quantity of gold was obtained not only by the
officers, but even by the private soldiers of the different
expeditions; but the expectations of the Portuguese as to the wealth
of gold and silver (for they were in search of reported silver-mines
on the Zambezi) were considerably disappointed; and later on, in the
17th century, their interest in these East African possessions
waned, largely on account of the poor results of their mining
operations. The Dutch in 1604-7 twice attacked Moçambique, and again
in 1662 sought to obtain possession of the little fortress island.
In the middle of the 17th century, however, a new source of wealth
was discovered—the Slave Trade—which for two hundred years following
gave a flickering prosperity to these costly establishments on the
East coast of Africa. In 1645 the first slaves were exported from
Moçambique to Brazil. This action was brought about by the fact that
the province of Angola had fallen for a time into the hands of the
Dutch, and, therefore, the supply of slaves to Brazil was
temporarily stopped.
In consequence of this, Moçambique and the Zambezi for some years
replaced West Africa as a slave market. In 1649 the English first
made their appearance on this coast; and two years afterwards the
Portuguese were perturbed by the definite establishment of a Dutch
colony at the Cape, and by the establishment of French factories on
the coast of Madagascar—events which are prophetically described by
a contemporary writer as “Quantos passos para a ruina de
Moçambique!”—“So many steps towards the ruin of Moçambique!” At the
same time the Arabs in the Persian Gulf drove the Portuguese out of
Maskat, and towards the end of the 17th century began to attack
their possessions on the Zanzibar coast. By 1698 Portugal had lost
every fortress north of Moçambique; and in that year this, their
last stronghold, was besieged straitly by the Arabs and very nearly
captured. In fact it was only saved by the friendly treachery of an
Indian trader who warned the Portuguese of an intended night attack.
All of these posts on the Zanzibar coast were finally abandoned[71]
by the Portuguese in the early part of the 18th century by agreement
with the Imam of Maskat, who founded the present dynasty of
Zanzibar. In 1752 this fact was recognized by the formal
delimitation of the Portuguese possessions in East Africa at the
time when they were also again removed from any dependency on the
Governor of Goa. In this decree of the 19th of April, 1752, the
government of Moçambique was described as extending over
“Moçambique, Sofala, Rio de Sena (Zambezi), and all the coast of
Africa and its continent between Cape Delgado and the Bay of
Lourenço Marquez (Delagoa Bay).” Hitherto commerce in Portuguese
East Africa had been singularly restricted, and after being first
confined to the Governors and officials of the state, was then
delegated to certain companies to whom monopolies were sold. In 1687
there was a fresh arrival, after a considerable interval, of Indian
traders, who established themselves on the Island of Moçambique; and
by degrees the whole of the commerce of Portuguese East Africa was
thrown open freely to all Portuguese subjects, though it was
absolutely forbidden to the subjects of any other European power,
and considerable anger was displayed when French and Dutch
endeavoured to trade on the islands or on the coast in the province
of Moçambique. In the middle of the 18th century the practice of
sending the worst stamp of Portuguese convicts to Moçambique was
unhappily adopted in spite of the many protests of its governors.
About this same time also there occurred a series of disasters
attributable to the deplorable mismanagement of the Portuguese
officials. The fortresses of the gold-mining country of Manika had
to be abandoned, like Zumbo[72] on the upper Zambezi. The forts on
the mainland opposite Moçambique were captured by an army of Makua;
and the Island of Moçambique itself very nearly fell into the hands
of the negroes of the mainland.
Towards the close of the 18th century, however, occurred a great
revival. In fact, the period which then ensued was the only bright,
and to some extent glorious phase of Portuguese dominion in
South-east Africa. A remarkable man, Dr Francisco Jose Maria de
Lacerda e Almeida (a Brazilian), was made Governor of Zambezia at
his own request, and commenced the first scientific exploration of
southern Central Africa. His journey resulted in the discovery of
the Kazembe’s division of the Lunda empire, a country on the Luapula
and Lake Mweru. It is interesting to note that in 1796, only one
year after the British had seized Cape Town, Dr Lacerda predicted
that this action would lead to the creation of a great British
Empire in Africa, which would stretch up northwards like a wedge
between the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Moçambique. But Dr
Lacerda in time fell a victim to the fatigues of his explorations;
and Portuguese interest in East Africa waned before the
life-and-death struggle which was taking place with France in
Portugal itself. Long prior to this also, in the middle of the 18th
century, the Jesuits had been expelled from all Portuguese East
Africa; and with them had fallen what little civilization had been
created on the upper Zambezi. In fact, it may be said that after
Lacerda’s journey the province of Moçambique fell into a state of
inertia and decay, until Livingstone, by his marvellous journeys,
not only discovered the true course of the Zambezi river, but drew
the attention and interest of the whole world to the development of
tropical Africa.
On all old Portuguese maps, indeed on all Portuguese maps issued
prior to Livingstone’s journeys, there was but scanty recognition of
the Zambezi as a great river. It was usually referred to as the
“rivers of Sena,” the general impression being that it consisted of
a series of parallel streams. No doubt this idea arose from its
large delta; on one or two maps, however, the course of the Zambezi
is laid down pretty correctly from its confluence with the Kafue to
the sea; but the fact cannot be denied that its importance as a
waterway was quite unknown to the Portuguese, who usually reached it
overland from Quelimane and travelled by land along its banks in
preference to navigating its uncertain waters. The Shire was
literally unknown, except at its junction with the Zambezi. The name
of this river was usually spelt Cherim, but its etymology lies in
the Mañanja word _chiri_, which means “a steep bank.” Admiral W. F.
W. Owen, who conducted a most remarkable series of surveying cruises
along the West and East coasts of Africa in the early part of the
19th century, was the first to make the fact clearly known that a
ship of light draught might enter the mouth of the Zambezi from the
sea and travel up as far as Sena.
Livingstone’s great journey across the African continent in the
earlier fifties attracted the attention of the British nation and
Government to the possibilities of this region, so highly favoured
by nature in its rich soil and valuable productions. Livingstone was
appointed Consul at Quelimane, and placed at the head of a
well-equipped expedition intended to explore the Zambezi river and
its tributaries. Prior to this the Portuguese had abolished the
slave trade by law, though slavery did not cease as a legal status
till 1878, and had thrown open Portuguese East Africa to the
commerce of all nations; and undoubtedly these two actions were an
encouragement to the British Government to participate in the
development of Southeast Africa, especially as Livingstone’s
journeys had shown conclusively that the rule of the Portuguese did
not extend very far inland, nor to any great distance from the banks
of the lower Zambezi. The second Livingstone expedition may,
therefore, be regarded as the first indirect step towards the
foundation of the present Protectorate over British Central Africa
(Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia), which dependencies follow to a
great extent in their frontiers the delimitations suggested by Dr
Livingstone at the close of his second expedition.
A jealous feeling, however, arose at the time of Livingstone’s
explorations between Portuguese and British; and considerable
pressure was brought to bear on the British Government to abandon
the results of Livingstone’s discovery. These representations,
together with other discouraging results of British enterprise in
East and West Africa, induced the British Government during the
later sixties and earlier seventies to hold aloof from any idea of
British rule in the interior of the continent. Meantime the
Portuguese were making praiseworthy efforts to develop these
long-neglected possessions. Great improvements were effected, and a
wholly modern aspect of neatness and order was given to the towns of
Quelimane and Moçambique, which in many respects compared a few
years ago favourably with other European settlements on the East
coast of Africa. Large sums were spent on public works; indeed, in
the year 1880, not less than £157,000 was provided by the
mother-country for the erection of public buildings in Portuguese
East and West Africa; and at this period the handsome hospital in
the town of Moçambique was erected, together with a good deal of
substantial road and bridge making. A good many more military posts
were founded; and Zumbo, on the central Zambezi, at the confluence
with the Luangwa, was reoccupied. Nevertheless, Livingstone’s work,
and especially his death, inevitably drew the British to Zambezia.
In 1875 the first pioneers of the present missionary societies
travelled up the Zambezi and arrived in the Shire highlands. In 1876
the settlement of Blantyre was commenced, and the foundations of
British Central Africa were laid. These actions impelled the
Portuguese to greater and greater efforts to secure the dominion to
which they aspired—a continuous belt of empire stretching across the
continent from Angola to Moçambique; and an expenditure exhausting
for the mother-country was laid out on costly expeditions productive
not always of definite or satisfactory results. This policy
culminated in the effort of Serpa Pinto to seize by force the Shire
highlands, despite the resistance offered by the Makololo
chiefs[73], who had declared themselves under British protection.
Thence arose the intervention of the British Government and a long
discussion between the two powers, which eventually bore results in
a fair delimitation of the Portuguese and British spheres of
influence, and the annulling of any inimical feeling between England
and Portugal in their African enterprises. Moçambique proper (_i.e._
the provinces N.E. of the Zambezi) has proved a costly dependency to
the mother-country. From the year 1508 to 1893 there was always
annually an excess of expenditure over revenue, sometimes as much as
an annual deficit of £50,000. In the year 1893, for the first time
since the creation of the colony, a small surplus was remitted to
Lisbon. It is questionable whether this possession will ever prove
profitable to Portugal. At the present day nearly two-thirds of the
trade is in the hands of non-Portuguese (Indians and Europeans). The
bulk of the wholesale commerce between Ibo and Quelimane is carried
on by German, Dutch, and French firms; and the retail trade is
conducted by British Indians, or by natives of Goa and other
Portuguese Indian possessions.
The Chartered Company of “Nyassa” has a virtual monopoly of the
hinterland trade between Lake Nyasa and the Ibo coast, and
administers the country between the Lurio river on the south and the
Ruvuma on the north. In Portuguese Zambezia exists the Zambezia
company with a number of minor concessionaires; and most of these
hold _prazos_ or leases of prescribed areas, in which they have
exclusive trading rights and a virtual mastery over the natives, who
are consequently at times rebellious when exactions of labour in
lieu of or in addition to taxes are levied on them. There is and has
been very little real Portuguese colonization of the Moςambique and
Zambezia provinces. The vicious spirit of the old slave trade days
still taints the local administration. The Angoshe region between
Moςambique Island and the northern vicinity of the Quelimane river
is almost independent of Portuguese authority under powerful
Arab-Negro Muhammadan “Sultans,” who until quite recently shipped
over many dau-loads of slaves to Madagascar.
The chief article of trade in the Moςambique province is
ground-nuts—the oily seeds of the _Arachis hypogæa_, a species of
leguminous plant, the seed-pods of which grow downwards into the
soil. These ground-nuts produce an excellent and palatable oil which
is hardly distinguishable in taste from olive oil, and indeed
furnishes a considerable part of the so-called olive oil exported
from France. This, perhaps, is the reason why the ground-nuts find
their way finally to Marseilles. The india-rubber of Moçambique is
of good quality and fetches a high price in the market. Other
exports are oil-seeds derived from a species of sesamum, copra, wax,
ivory and sugar. Some copper and malachite are exported from the
Nyassa company’s territories north of the Lurio. A few enterprising
people started coffee plantations on the mainland near Moçambique
some years ago; but the local Portuguese authorities immediately put
on heavy duties and taxes, so that the coffee-planting industry was
soon killed. The same thing may be said about the coco-nut palm. At
one time it was intended to plant this useful tree in large numbers
along a coast singularly adapted for its growth; but, owing to the
fact that the local Portuguese Government imposed a yearly tax on
each palm, the cultivation of the coco-nut was given up. The ivory
comes chiefly from Ibo and Cape Delgado, and also from Quelimane,
and is derived from elephants still existing in the Zambezi basin
and in the eastern parts of Nyasaland. Nevertheless, most of the
products above alluded to, with the exception of ivory, are only
furnished by the fertile coast belt; for beyond the twenty-mile
strip of cultivated land which extends more or less down the whole
coast of Moçambique, the interior of the country is dry and arid
except in certain favoured river valleys, and in the splendid
mountain region of Namuli, between Angoshe and the upper Shire
river.
Portuguese influence, though not always Portuguese rule, was carried
southward to the northern shore of Delagoa Bay at the end of the
17th century. Here the settlement of Lourenςo Marquez was founded as
a trading station. At the beginning of the 18th century this
Portuguese station was abandoned; and the Cape Dutch came and built
a factory there, which however was destroyed by the English in 1727.
Nevertheless Portugal continued to assert her claims to Lourenço
Marquez; and when, in 1776, an Englishman named Bolts (formerly in
the employ of the English East India Company), who had entered the
service of Maria Theresa in order to found an Austrian Company to
trade with the East Indies from Flanders, came thither with a large
following composed of Austrian-Italian subjects, and made treaties
with the chiefs of Delagoa Bay, the Portuguese protested and
addressed representations to the Austrian Government. These
protestations would have been of but little avail had not a terrible
outbreak of fever carried off almost all the European settlers. The
Austrian claim was therefore abandoned; and the Portuguese continued
at intervals to make their presence felt there by a quasi-military
commandant or a Government trading establishment. When Admiral
Owen’s expedition visited Delagoa Bay between 1822 and 1824, they
found a small Portuguese establishment on the site of the present
town of Lourenço Marquez[74]. Realizing the importance of this
harbour, and finding no evidence of Portuguese claims to its
southern shore, Captain Owen concluded treaties with the King of
Tembe by which the southern part of Delagoa Bay was ceded to Great
Britain. The Portuguese made an indirect protest by removing the
British flag during Captain Owen’s absence, but the flag was
rehoisted in 1824. Owen’s action, however, was not followed up by
effective occupation, though on the other hand the Portuguese did
nothing to reassert their authority over the south shore of the bay
until, in the sixties, the growing importance of South Africa led
the British to reassert their claims. The matter was submitted to
arbitration, and Marshal MacMahon, the President of the French
Republic, was chosen as arbitrator. His verdict—a notoriously
biassed one—not only gave the Portuguese the south shore of Delagoa
Bay, but even more territory than they actually laid claim to.
Britain had to some extent prepared herself for an unfavourable
verdict by a prior agreement providing that whichever of the two
disputing powers came to possess the whole or part of Delagoa Bay
should give the other the right of pre-emption.
Reading the vast mass of evidence brought forward and preserved in
Blue Books, it seems to the present writer that any dispassionate
judge would arrive at these conclusions: That the Portuguese claim
to the northern shore of Delagoa Bay was valid; but that over the
southern shore of this important inlet they had exercised no
occupation and raised no claim until the arrival of Admiral Owen and
his treaty-making; and that even after the action taken by Admiral
Owen, they did nothing beyond removing the flag he had raised, and
effected nothing in the way of occupation or treaty-making on their
own account. Owen’s procedure was not repudiated by the British
Government, who besides had other rights over the territory in
question inherited from the Dutch. Owen’s intervention was not, it
is true, succeeded by immediate occupation; and the British case
would have been a very weak one judged by the severe rules of the
Berlin Convention of 1884. But then, if Portuguese territory in East
Africa had been delimited by the same severe rules, it would have
been reduced to a few fortified settlements. Great Britain had a
fair claim to the south shore of Delagoa Bay; and the award of
Marshal MacMahon was a prejudiced one, said to have been mainly due
to the influence of his wife, who was ardently in favour of the
Portuguese for a variety of reasons.
In 1887-9 a railway was constructed under a concession by the
Portuguese between Lourenço Marquez (Delagoa Bay) and the Transvaal
border by a group of English and American capitalists, with results
which are set forth in Chapter VII. This railway was seized and
extended by the Portuguese in 1889.
Subsequently to the Delagoa Bay award, the Portuguese made
determined efforts to explore and conquer the South-east coast of
Africa and the countries along the lower Zambezi. To the extreme
north of their Moçambique possessions they had a dispute with the
Sultan of Zanzibar as to the possession of Tungi Bay and the south
shore of the mouth of the river Ruvuma. After their disastrous
struggle with the Arabs in the 17th and 18th centuries, the
Portuguese had defined the northern limit of their East African
possessions as Cape Delgado; and Cape Delgado would have given them
the whole of Tungi Bay, though not the mouth of the Ruvuma. It is
evident that the Sultan of Zanzibar was trespassing as a ruler when
he claimed Tungi Bay, though not when he claimed the mouth of the
Ruvuma. Portugal, losing patience at the time of the division of the
Zanzibar Sultanate between England and Germany, made an armed
descent on Tungi Bay in 1889, and has since held it, though the
Germans withdrew from her control the Ruvuma mouth, which they
claimed as an inheritance of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
The establishment of the British South African Company in 1889 and
the consequent development of Mashonaland and Matebeleland subjected
the Portuguese territories south of the Zambezi to a searching
scrutiny on the part of these merchant adventurers, who laid hands
on behalf of Great Britain on all territory where the Portuguese
could not prove claims supported by occupation or ruling influence.
The strongest temptation existed to ignore Portuguese claims on the
Pungwe river and to push a way down to the sea at Beira; but a
spirit of justice prevailed, and no real transgression of Portuguese
rights was sanctioned by the British Government, or indeed attempted
by the Company. In June, 1891, after several unsuccessful attempts,
a convention was arrived at between England and Portugal, which
defined tolerably clearly the boundaries of British and Portuguese
territories in South-east, South-west, and South-central Africa.
Rights of way were obtained under fair conditions both at Beira and
at Chinde (Zambezi Delta[75]). Since 1891 a friendly feeling has
been growing up between the British and the Portuguese.
The Portuguese have been making steady efforts to bring under
control their richly endowed East African province. For some time
after their settlement with Great Britain they were menaced in the
south by the power of Gungunyama, a Zulu king who ruled over the
Gaza country, and had been in the habit of raiding the interior
behind the Portuguese settlements of Lourenço Marquez and Inhambane.
The Portuguese warred against him for three years without
satisfactory results, until Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque, by a bold
stroke of much bravery, marched into Gungunyama’s camp with a
handful of Portuguese soldiers and took the king prisoner. For this
gallant action he was eventually promoted to be Governor-General of
Portuguese East Africa, and then did something towards bringing
under subjection the turbulent Makua tribes opposite Moçambique.
----------------------------------------------------------------
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
Plate III.
[Illustration]
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[green] _Area of Portuguese Possessions in 1820_
[tan] ” ” ” _1912_
[red] _Possessions lost or exchanged_
----------------------------------------------------------------
The greater portion of their trans-Zambezian possessions along the
East coast and immediately south of the lower Zambezi and north of
Inhambane and the Sabi River was in 1891 handed over to the
administration of a Chartered Company,—which although theoretically
Portuguese derives its capital mainly from English, French and
Belgian sources, and is mainly managed by Englishmen. This
“Moçambique Company” since its institution has done much to open up
the country; the railway construction however is chiefly due to the
British South African Company, who have constructed a line of
railway from the capital, Beira, to the eastern frontier of Southern
Rhodesia. In addition, under the auspices of the Moçambique Company,
a northern line is being constructed to the Zambezi and across that
river to join the Shire Highlands railway at Port Herald. When this
is finished, Beira, instead of Chinde or Quelimane, will become the
seaport of British Nyasaland.
South of the Sabi River and up to the frontiers of British South
Africa the country is directly ruled by Portugal, the large town of
Lourenço Marquez (Delagoa Bay) being now the supreme capital of the
State of East Africa, as the Moçambique provinces are called. Here
resides the Governor-General, with subordinate officials at
Moçambique, Quelimane, Sena, Zumbo, Tete, Chinde and Inhambane.
The recent revolution in Portugal (1910), and the change from a
monarchy to a republic, have slightly affected the Portuguese
African possessions for the better. Long-standing abuses are being
enquired into, and some remedies are being applied. Yet the
resources of little Portugal are grievously strained in men and
money to maintain rule, law, and order in these vast African
possessions—possessions which stretch from North-west to South-east
Africa and include an area of 794,000 square miles. In 1898, when
the unsettled state of Africa and the rivalry between Britain,
Germany, and France made it advisable to forecast an allotment of
the Portuguese colonies, should they slip from the grasp of Portugal
or be offered for sale, an agreement was entered into between
Britain and Germany partitioning the Portuguese African possessions
into spheres of influence. But it is understood that at a later date
Great Britain, on renewing her old alliance with Portugal,
guaranteed her the undisturbed possession of her colonial dominions.
-----
Footnote 48:
From the Arabic _Al-gharb_ the ‘west,’ the ‘sunset.’ The title of
the Kings of Portugal was “King of Portugal and the Algarves, on
this side and on the other side of the sea in Africa, etc.”
Footnote 49:
This battlefield was on the banks of the river Lukkus, not very
far from the coast port of Al-Araish, the Roman _Lixus_.
Footnote 50:
It was finally ceded to Spain by Portugal in 1668.
Footnote 51:
It had however been known to Italian and Norman navigators a
century earlier. Indeed it is increasingly probable that the
Portuguese as discoverers of West Africa had been preceded a
hundred years earlier by the Genoese, the Catalans and Majorcans,
and the Norman French of Dieppe. A remarkable map of the continent
of Africa was painted in Italy, about 1351, and is now in the
Medicean Library at Florence. It is known as the Laurentian
Portolano and gives the most correct general outline of the whole
continent which had as yet been depicted. For the first time the
great Bight of the Gulf of Guinea is shown, together with the
tongue-like projection southwards of Central and Southern Africa.
There is even the indication of a river where the Congo emerges
into the South Atlantic.
Footnote 52:
Only a long inlet in the Desert coast. At the head of this inlet
was the little island of Kerné (still called Herné by the Moors)
which was once a trading station of the Carthaginians.
Footnote 53:
Nowadays known as Elmina.
Footnote 54:
As will be seen in another chapter, there are traditions of Norman
merchants from Dieppe having established forts or trading stations
along the West African coast in the later years of the 14th
century, especially at “La Mine d’Or”—Elmina—where the Normans
possibly preceded the Portuguese.
Footnote 55:
Mr E. G. Ravenstein deduces 1485 as the date from the details
shown in the coat of arms in the inscription. This inscription was
only discovered on the high rock, near the Mpozo confluence, by a
Swedish missionary in 1906. The inscription begins “Aqi chegaram
os navios do esclarecido Rey Dom Joam ho seg° de Portugall,” and
is followed by the names of Diogo Cam (Cão) and others. See the
_Geographical Journal_ for June, 1908.
Footnote 56:
They described the Arab settlements on the South-East African
coasts and alleged that certain Arab ships had been driven by
stress of weather past the Cape of Good Hope, and had brought back
word of the northward trend of the west coast.
Footnote 57:
The Canary Islands, inhabited by a race of Berber origin, had been
rediscovered (for Greek and Roman geographers knew of them) by
Normans and Genoese in the 14th century. Previous to that they had
already been brought into touch with the Moors of the Moroccan
coast, though they were never Islamized but remained in some
respects in the primitive, stone-age condition which the Berbers
of the mainland had quitted two thousand years before. The men
often went naked; but the race in some respects exhibited a
characteristic Neolithic civilization and was far removed from
savagery. The archipelago was partially conquered by a Norman
adventurer, Jean de Betancourt or Bethencourt; and his title after
passing through many hands was finally claimed by Portugal.
Portugal, however, transferred her rights to Castile in 1479.
Footnote 58:
It is necessary to discriminate in spelling between the river
Congo and Congoland generally and the little kingdom of Kongo
between Stanley Pool and the Atlantic coast. This important native
state, whose legendary founder was a mighty hunter armed with an
iron spear (Kongo) gave its name to the great river, which was
also styled Zaire by the Portuguese from the native term Nzadi.
Footnote 59:
The original name of this tribe, which came from the southern
Congo basin, was “Imbangola.” _Jaga_ was apparently like the Jinga
of old Angola merely the title of their clan-chieftains, _Jok_ or
_Kiokwe_ (as they are called in Lunda) was a nickname meaning
“Hyena.” Their descendants seem still to reside on the river
Kwango behind Angola under the name of Imbangala. The Ba-yaka of
the Northern Kwango are quite distinct.
Footnote 60:
Grandson of the explorer, Bartolomeu.
Footnote 61:
Such wheat as is cultivated in Africa north of 15° N. Latitude is
similar to the European and Egyptian kinds; the wheat introduced
by the Arabs and Portuguese into Zambezia is red wheat, apparently
from India.
Footnote 62:
Duarte Lopes, who records this fact in his description of the
Congo region at the end of the 16th century, gives incidentally or
directly other interesting scraps of information, such as, that
the coco-nut palm was _found_ by the Portuguese growing on the
West coast of Africa. This palm, we know, originated in the
Pacific Archipelagoes or on the Pacific coast of tropical America.
It is possible to imagine that its nuts may have been carried over
the sea to Southern India and thence to Madagascar and the coast
of East Africa, but, inasmuch as the coco-nut palm cannot grow
further south than Delagoa Bay owing to the cooling of the climate
it is not very clear how it reached the tropical West African
coast, unless it was introduced by Europeans. Lopes mentions the
banana for the first time under the name “banana,” a name which
seems to be derived from the Vai and other languages of the Sierra
Leone-Liberia coast. Hitherto this fruit had only been known
vaguely to Europe as the Indian fig or by its Arab name, which was
latinized into _Musa_. The long banana or plantain was of ancient
and widespread cultivation throughout tropical Africa, but the
small banana with stubby fruit seems to have been a recent
introduction from India which has penetrated into few parts of the
interior.
Footnote 63:
Philip II of Spain had the best claim to the Portuguese throne
after the death without heirs of the Cardinal-King Henrique. But
the Portuguese disliked union with Spain and would have preferred
to elect a Portuguese king.
Footnote 64:
In 1621 Pope Paul V sent a mission to the King of Kongo at São
Salvador; and thenceforward, until 1717, the Kongo kingdom was
evangelized by Italian and Belgian Capuchins, and after 1673 by
Belgian Recollets friars. But in 1717 the Capuchins were expelled
by the king’s people. In 1760 Catholic missions were resumed in
Congoland (Loango and Kongo) by French, Italian and Portuguese
missionaries; but these too came to an end by 1800, and for some
eighty years the Kongo kingdom relapsed into complete barbarism.
Footnote 65:
This place was named after the Baron de Mossamedes, a Portuguese
Governor of Angola, afterwards Minister for the Colonies.
Footnote 66:
This fort, by the abortive Congo Treaty of 1884, was to have been
made over to England. Although the Portuguese never in any sense
ruled over or controlled Dahomé, their indirect influence and
their language were prominent at the Dahomean court because
certain Brazilians had during the first half of this century
established themselves on the coast and in the interior as
influential merchants and slave traders. Their descendants now
form a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian caste in Dahomé.
Footnote 67:
Most prominent features, and some countries on the west and south
coasts of Africa from the Senegal round to the Cape of Good Hope
and Moçambique, bear Portuguese names: Cape _Verde_ is “The Green
Cape,” Sierra Leone (_Serra Leoa_) is “The Lionlike Mountains,”
Cape _Palmas_ “The Palm-trees Cape,” Cape Coast is _Cabo Corso_
“The cruising Cape,” _Lagos_ is “The Lakes,” Calabar (_Calabarra_)
is “The bar is silent,” Cameroons is _Camaroẽs_ “prawns,” Gaboon
is _Gabāo_ “The Hooded Cloak” (from the shape of the estuary),
_Corisco_ is “Lightning,” Cape _Frio_ is “The Cold Cape” and
_Angra Pequena_ is “The Little Cove,” and so on. All the prominent
points on the Liberian coast, and most of the Niger mouths, have
Portuguese names.
Footnote 68:
This is a little coral islet about 2 miles long by ¼ mile broad,
situated between 2 and 3 miles from the coast (a shallow bay), in
15 degrees south latitude, where the East African coast approaches
nearest to Madagascar. It commands the Moçambique Channel. Its
native name was probably originally Musambiki. By the neighbouring
East African tribes it is now called Muhibidi, Msambiji, and
Msambiki. It has sometimes been the only parcel of land remaining
in Portuguese hands during the vicissitudes of their East African
empire.
Footnote 69:
A corruption of _Mwene-mutapa_. According to some authorities this
title meant “Lord Hippopotamus,” the hippopotamus on the Zambezi
above Tete being looked upon as a _Totem_ or sacred animal
indicative of the royal clan; but in my personal opinion
_Mwene-mutapa_ is really “Lord of the Mine, or gold mining,”
_mutapo_ or _mtapo_ being a shallow pit dug in clay or sand for
mining, or washing gold.
Footnote 70:
Where they have not yet brought under subjection the Muhammadan
Makua and the Arab half-castes of Angoshe. The chief native foes
of the Portuguese in East Africa at the close of the 16th century
were the Ba-zimba, one of those Zulu-like marauding tribes like
the modern Angoni, which would range over hundreds of miles in a
few months and commit devastations that left their effects for
nearly a century.
Footnote 71:
Except Mombasa, which was retaken and held between 1728 and 1729.
Footnote 72:
Zumbo was given up (though it was never much more than a Jesuit
Mission Station) in 1740.
Footnote 73:
These Makololo chiefs were formerly headmen of Livingstone’s
second expedition, left behind by him on the Cataract Shire to
stiffen the resistance of the timid natives against the Muhammadan
slave raiders.
Footnote 74:
The modern and existing town of that name was not founded till
1867.
Footnote 75:
The use of the Chinde mouth of the Zambezi gives free water
communication between the outer world and Nyasaland, by way of the
Zambezi and Shire rivers.
CHAPTER V
SPANISH AFRICA
The enterprise of Spain in Africa was relatively small, the greater
part of Spanish energy being devoted to founding an empire in the
New World, in the far East, in Italy and Flanders. It was also knit
up politically at first with the Portuguese colonial empire.
Nevertheless Spain has left very distinct marks of her influence on
North-western Africa in both language and culture. This in past
times arose from the Spanish Moors expelled from Spain, but bringing
much Spanish valour, ingeniousness, art, and pride into the life of
Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Timbuktu.
When Portugal was commencing to acquire oversea dominions in the
Açores (1437-66), Madeira (1430), and on the coast of Morocco,
Christian Spain was still divided into three kingdoms—Castile,
Aragon and Navarre—and the two former were concentrating their
energies on the destruction of the Moorish kingdom of Granada (not
accomplished till 1492). But the monarchs of Castile and Aragon
became jealous of the oversea expansion of Portugal; and that power
deemed it wise to surrender to Castile in 1479 the Portuguese claim
to the Canary Islands.
The Canary Islands had been partially conquered by a Norman
adventurer, Jean de Béthencourt, in 1402-6, more or less under the
suzerainty of Castile; and the Canary kingdom passed into the hands
of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1476. Prior to the final occupation of
the Spaniards the islands were inhabited by a Berber race of some
antiquity known as the Guanches. These were partly exterminated and
partly absorbed by the Spanish settlers, to whom they were so much
akin in blood that complete race fusion was rendered easy,
especially as the Guanches had not been reached by Muhammadanism.
The Canary Islands were an invaluable stepping-stone for the
trans-Atlantic ventures of the Spanish ships during the first fifty
years of American discovery and colonization. Many Spanish and
Guanche colonists—the Isleños or Islanders—proceeded from this
archipelago of seven islands to the greater Antilles; and there are
plantations and villages to-day in Cuba and Porto Rico which possess
Berber names derived from those of the Guanche prisoners or
colonists who founded them. It took Spain however fifteen years to
conquer the brave and warlike Guanches, a task not accomplished
until 1495. The wonderful scenery, genial climate, and fertile soil
attracted the attention of the British in the 18th century; and one
or two attempts were made to acquire this archipelago, but in face
of the gallant resistance offered by the islanders (it was at
Tenerife that Nelson lost his arm in an attempted landing) British
cupidity was foiled. In 1833 the archipelago was made a separate
government—a province of Spain by itself; but in 1902 a movement for
home rule was severely repressed. The Canary Islands now form
politically part of Spain. They are thoroughly civilized, well
governed and prosperous. The two principal islands, Tenerife and
Grand Canary, are favourite health resorts; and the whole group owes
much to British capital, enterprise and shipping for its industrial
and agricultural development.
At the close of the 15th century the Spaniards followed up their
expulsion of the Moors from Spain by attacking them on the North
coast of Africa. They established themselves at Melilla[76], Oran,
Algiers[77], Bugia, Bona, Hunein, Susa, Monastir, Mehedia, Sfax, and
Goletta[78]. The apogee of Spanish power in North Africa was reached
about 1535, at which time the Spaniards alternately with the Turks
dominated the Barbary States. Then, owing to victory inclining to
the Turkish corsairs[79], the Spaniards’ hold over the country began
to decline. A resolute attempt was made by Charles V in 1541 to take
and hold the town of Algiers, the Spanish having lost Peñon, a rock
fortress overlooking part of the town. This attempt of 1541 (only
less serious than the French expedition of 1880) would probably have
succeeded but for a torrential downpour of rain, which made the
surrounding country impassable to the Spanish guns and cavalry, and
led to a terrible rout. Had Algiers fallen at this time, its capture
might have resulted in a Spanish empire over North Africa. As it
was, this twenty-four hours’ downpour of rain changed the future of
the northern part of the continent, or rather prevented a change
which might have had very far-reaching results. Charles V had
invaded Tunis in 1535 at the appeal of the last sovereign but one of
the House of Hafs, who had been dispossessed by the Turkish pirate,
Khaireddin. Although his intervention was ultimately unsuccessful,
and his _protégé_ was killed and succeeded by his son, who more or
less intrigued with the Turkish corsairs, the Spaniards retained
their hold on Goletta till 1574, the Turks having then definitely
intervened in the affairs of Tunis. The Spaniards surrendered
Goletta to the renegade pirate, Ochiali; and with it went all their
influence over Tunis. An expedition which they had sent to the
island of Jerba, under the Duke de Medina-Cœli and the younger
Doria, ended in a great disaster—a defeat at the hands of the
Moorish pirates who massacred, it is said, not less than 18,000
Spaniards (May, 1560). Their skulls were built into a tower, which
remained visible near the town of Humt Suk till 1840, when the
kindly Maltese settlers on this island obtained permission from the
Bey of Tunis to give Christian burial to the Spanish skulls, which
now are interred in the Christian cemetery at Humt Suk. For brief
intervals the Spaniards held other coast towns[80] of Tunis, but in
retiring from Goletta they withdrew from all further hold over the
Regency.
They finally quitted Oran in 1791, after a terrible earthquake. They
had been turned out of this place in 1708, but recaptured it after a
period of 24 years, and held it for 59 years longer. Spain only
retained down to the present day on the north coast of Morocco the
little island of Melilla[81], the island of Alhucemas, the rock of
Velez de la Gomera, and the rocky promontory of Ceuta. Ceuta (and
Tetwan, which she once possessed) she inherited from Portugal after
a separation had once more taken place between the two monarchies in
1640.
Awakened from the torpor which followed the Napoleonic wars and the
home struggles for constitutional government by the French
activities in Algeria, Spain suddenly seized the Chafarinas
Islands[82] in 1849 so as to forestall the French. On the strength
of some clause in a treaty concluded after the war with the Moors
(1859-60), Spain secured from Morocco the town of Ifni, near Cape
Nun on the Atlantic coast and nearly opposite the Canary Islands,
but made no attempt to occupy it. From the middle of the 19th
century onwards an increasing number of Spaniards, chiefly of the
artisan and peasant class, emigrated from Andalucia to the Oran
coast of Algeria, with the result that Western Algeria to-day
contains a Spanish-speaking population of about 150,000. Yet prior
to the 20th century, Spain, distracted by home affairs and troubles
in Cuba, seemed willing to let Morocco drift beyond her control to
that of England or Germany, until the revival of Spanish industries
and trade and the loss of her colonies in America and the Pacific
decided her to plead with Britain and France that a sphere of
influence should be reserved for Spain on the North Morocco coast.
In 1910-11 the region between Melilla and the Muluya mouth was
brought under Spanish control; and in 1911 Spanish troops occupied
all the important towns on or near the coast between Melilla and
Kasr al Kabīr on the Atlantic, except Tangier (which will probably
be internationalized). Spain in fact will sooner or later annex all
the Rif country of North Morocco. In the south she claims a very
large area between Cape Jubi and the Anti-Atlas mountains.
Spain had allowed her influence over the coast opposite the Canary
Islands (“Santa Cruz de Mar Pequena”) to lapse between the end of
the 16th century and the scramble for Africa which commenced in
1884. At this period an English trading firm with agencies in the
Canary Islands had been established at Cape Jubi, south of the
Morocco border; and British influence for a time dominated the coast
immediately opposite the Canary Islands, and arrested Spanish action
in that neighbourhood. After the scramble for Africa commenced,
however, the Spanish, who were greatly interested in the north-west
coast (for its valuable fisheries in which the Canarian fishermen
were employed), raised their flag in 1885 at an inlet called the Rio
d’Ouro[83], and declared a Protectorate over the Sahara coast
between Cape Blanco and Cape Bojador and for a varying distance
inland. This Protectorate has since been extended farther to the
north beyond Cape Bojador; but the Empire of Morocco theoretically
extends to the south of Cape Jubi to meet the Spanish frontier, the
Moorish Government having bought up the claims of the English
company. The inland boundary of this Spanish Protectorate has
recently been settled as between France and Spain, and comprises an
approximate area of 73,000 square miles, mainly desert, but
extending inland to the Adrar hills. The only establishment of any
importance or size is on the Rio de Oro inlet, not far from the
islet which the Carthaginians once frequented. No doubt before long
the Rio de Oro Protectorate will be fused with the territory which
Spain claims in South-west Morocco.
In 1778 Spain, which had become deeply interested in the slave trade
on the West coast of Africa, on account of the need for a regular
supply of slaves to her South American possessions, obtained from
Portugal the cession of the island of Fernando Pô, and also took
over the island of Anno Bom—the last of this series of equatorial
volcanic islands and the smallest. About the same time the Spaniards
made a settlement at Corisco Bay[84]. The Spanish claims extend some
distance up the river Muni. The boundaries of Spanish Guinea (as it
is called) were settled with the French in 1900-2 and resulted in a
territory of 9800 square miles being allotted to Spain. This very
interesting patch of Equatorial West African Coast is emphatically
the home of the gorilla. It is populated by Bantu negroes, more
especially belonging to the Fang group.
At the end of the 18th century the Spanish island of Fernando Pô was
almost abandoned. When the British undertook to put down the slave
trade off the West African Coast, Fernando Pô became their
head-quarters (in 1829); and for a time they were allowed to
administer it by the Spanish Government, the British representative
or “Superintendent” being made at the same time a Governor with a
Spanish commission. But in 1844 the Spanish decided to resume the
direct administration, and refused to sell their rights to Great
Britain, though overtures were made to that end. Until about 1890
nothing was done to develop the resources of this densely forested,
very fertile, but unhealthy island. From that time onwards, however,
some encouragement was given to negro and European planters. From
the island having been for so long under British control, there is a
large population of English-speaking negroes, and English is
understood in Fernando Pô much better than Spanish. These negroes
are descended from a number of freed slaves from Sierra Leone. The
indigenous inhabitants are a Bantu tribe of short stature and very
lowly culture known as the Bube[85]. This tribe is distantly related
to the people of the northern part of the Cameroons, and speaks an
isolated Bantu dialect. Much development of cacao planting has
recently taken place in Fernando Pô, involving the importation of
foreign negro labourers from Liberia; but the interests of the Bube
natives have been well protected by Spanish Dominican and British
Primitive Methodist missionaries.
-----
Footnote 76:
In 1490.
Footnote 77:
Or the rock, or “Peñon,” overlooking the town, seized and
garrisoned by Cardinal Ximenez in 1509. It was taken by
Khaireddin, the Turkish corsair, in 1530.
Footnote 78:
Held by Spain from 1535 to 1574.
Footnote 79:
The following is a _résumé_ of the history of the first
intervention of Turkey in Barbary. In 1504 Uruj (Barbarossa I), a
pirate of mixed Turco-Greek origin, attracted by the rumours of
American treasure-ships in the western Mediterranean, captured
Algiers (1516) and Tlemsan (1517); but he was defeated and killed
by the Spaniards coming from Oran. His younger brother Khaireddin
(Barbarossa II) appealed to Turkey, which had just (1518)
conquered Egypt, and received from Sultan Selim the title of
Turkish Beglerbeg of Algiers and a reinforcement of 2000 Turks. He
mastered almost all Algeria, was made Admiral of the Turkish fleet
in 1533, captured Tunis in 1534, was driven out by Charles V, and
retired to Turkey in 1535. His successors were sometimes
Sardinian, Calabrian, Venetian, Hungarian renegades; but among the
more celebrated was Dragut, a Turk of Karamania.
Footnote 80:
Susa, Sfax, and Monastir, which were lost to the Turks by 1550.
Footnote 81:
The oldest of her continental African possessions, dating from
1490.
Footnote 82:
The Chafarinas Islands are off the mouth of the Muluya river, near
the Algerian frontier.
Footnote 83:
This Portuguese name becomes in Spanish Rio de Oro.
Footnote 84:
This also, like so many other places on the West coast of Africa,
was named by the Portuguese; _Corisco_ meaning “sheet lightning,”
a name applied to the place because it was first seen during a
violent thunderstorm.
Footnote 85:
Bube is said to be a cant term meaning “male” (from the Bantu
root, _-ume_, _-lume_) and the real name of this race is perhaps
Ediya. This subject is fully treated in the author’s book, _George
Grenfell and the Congo_, which gives a full account of Fernando Pô
and the Bube indigenes.
CHAPTER VI
THE DUTCH IN AFRICA
Although, as will be seen in a succeeding chapter, British seamen
were the first adventurers of other nationalities to follow the
Portuguese in the exploration of the African coasts, the Dutch, as
settlers and colonists, are almost entitled to rank chronologically
next to the Portuguese and Spanish. The Dutch made their first
trading voyage to the Guinea Coast in 1595, 16 years after throwing
off the yoke of Spain. On the plea of warring with the Spanish
Empire, which then included Portugal, they displaced the latter
power at various places along the West coast of Africa—at Arguin, at
Goree (off Dakar, purchased from the natives 1621), Elmina (1637),
and at Saõ Paulo de Loanda about the same time; while they three
times threatened Moçambique on the East coast (1604, 1607, 1662),
and possessed themselves of the island of Mauritius (1598), which
had been a place of call for Portuguese ships. Mauritius, discovered
in 1505 by the Portuguese sea-captain, Mascarenhas (after whom the
“Mascarene” Islands—the Mauritius-Réunion-Rodriguez groups—have been
named), was uninhabited at the time and possessed enormous
quantities of a large and monstrous ground fruit-pigeon, the Dodo,
which the Dutch sailors and their imported herds of swine
exterminated in the course of about a hundred years. On the West
coast of Africa, besides supplanting the Portuguese, the Dutch
established themselves strongly on the Gold Coast by means of 16 new
forts of their own[86], in most cases alongside British settlements,
which were regarded by the Dutch with the keenest jealousy.
Dutch hold on the Gold Coast was responsible for an enormous
increase of the Slave Trade between West Africa and America and is
the reason why such a large proportion of the United States, West
Indian, and Guiana negroes are of Ashanti (Coromanti, Kormantyn) and
Fanti descent; as is evident from their folk-lore, legends and the
linguistic evidence of their dialects. The Dutch were not loath to
mingle their blood with that of the Gold Coast negroes; and their
long occupancy of these forts produced an impression in the shape of
a race of Dutch half-castes, which endures to this day, and
furnishes useful employés to the British Government in many minor
capacities. But after the abolition of the slave trade Dutch
commerce with the Guinea Coast began to wane, and their political
influence disappeared also; so that by 1872 the last of the Dutch
ports had been transferred to Great Britain in return for the
cession on our part of rights we possessed over Sumatra. Meantime
Dutch trade had begun to take firm hold over the Congo and Angola
Coast; and it is possible that, had the cession of the Gold Coast
forts been delayed a few years longer, it would never have been
made, for Holland possesses a considerable trade with Africa, and
there has been a strong feeling of regret in the Netherlands for
some time past at the exclusion of that country’s flag from the
African continent.
But a far more important colonization than a foothold on the
Slave-trade Coast was made indirectly for Holland in the middle of
the 17th century; the Dutch East India Company, desirous of making
the Cape of Good Hope something more than a port of call, which
might fall into the hands of Portugal, France, England, or any other
rival, decided to occupy that important station. The Dutch had taken
possession of St Helena in 1645; but a Dutch ship having been
wrecked at Table Bay in 1648, the crew landed, and encamped where
Cape Town now stands. Here they were obliged to live for five
months, until picked up by other Dutch ships; but during this period
they sowed and reaped grain, and obtained plenty of meat from the
natives, with whom they were on good terms. The favourable report
they gave of this country on their return to Holland decided the
Dutch Company, after years of hesitation, to take possession of
Table Bay. An expedition was sent out under Jan van Riebeek, a
ship’s surgeon, who had already visited South Africa. The three
ships of Van Riebeek’s expedition reached Table Bay on the 6th of
April, 1652[87].
At different periods in the early part of the 16th century the Dutch
had consolidated their sea-going ventures into two great chartered
companies—the Dutch Company of the West Indies, and the Dutch
Company of the East Indies. The West Indian Company took over all
the settlements on the West Coast of Africa, and had the monopoly of
trade or rule along all the Atlantic Coast of tropical America. The
East India Company was to possess the like monopoly from the Pacific
Coast of South America across the Indian Ocean to the Cape of Good
Hope. The head-quarters of the East India Company, where their
Governor-General and Council were established, was at Batavia, in
the island of Java. It was not at first intended to establish
anything like a colony in South Africa—merely a secure place of call
for the ships engaged in the East Indian trade. But circumstances
proved too strong for this modest reserve. The inevitable quarrel
arose between the Dutch garrison at Table Bay and the surrounding
Hottentots. At the time of the Dutch settlement of the Cape all the
south-west corner of Africa was inhabited only and sparsely by
Hottentots and Bushmen; the prolific Bantu Negroes not coming nearer
to the Dutch than the vicinity of Algoa Bay. A little war occurred
with the Hottentots in 1659, as a result of which the Dutch first
won by fighting, and subsequently bought, a small coast strip of
land from Saldanha Bay on the north to False Bay on the south, thus
securing the peninsula which terminates at the Cape of Good Hope.
French sailing vessels were in the habit of calling at Saldanha Bay;
and in 1666 and 1670 desultory attempts were made by the French to
establish a footing there. Holland also about this time was
alternately at war with England or France or both powers. Therefore
the Dutch resolved to build forts more capable of resisting European
attack than those which were sufficient to defend the colony against
Hottentots. Still, in spite of occasional unprovoked hostilities on
the part of the Dutch, they were left in undisturbed possession of
the Cape of Good Hope for more than a hundred years. The English had
St Helena as a place of call (which they took from the Dutch in
1655); and the French had settlements in Madagascar and at
Mauritius, where they succeeded a former Dutch occupation. On the
other hand, the officials of the Dutch Company were instructed to
show civility to all comers without undue generosity; they might
supply them with water for their ships, but they were to give as
little as possible in the way of provisions and ships’ stores. It
was to the interest of both France and England that some European
settlement should exist at the Cape of Good Hope for the refreshment
of vessels and the refuge of storm-driven ships. After several
attempts, which continued down to 1673, to dispossess the English of
St Helena, the Dutch finally surrendered the island to them. They
had also in 1598 taken the Island of Mauritius, and commenced a
definite occupation in 1640. But this island was abandoned in 1710,
and became soon afterwards a French possession. So that the French
at Mauritius on the one hand (and also on the Island of Bourbon, now
called Réunion) and the English on the other at St Helena, had
places of call where they could break the long voyage to and from
India, and were therefore content to leave the Dutch East India
Company in full possession of South Africa.
The Government of the Netherlands East India Company was thoroughly
despotic. It was administered by a Chamber of 17 directors at
Amsterdam, with deputies at Batavia. The Commandant at the Cape, who
was under the orders of Amsterdam and Batavia alternately and might
be overruled by any officer of superior rank who called at his
station in passing, was the slave of the Company and had to carry
out its orders implicitly. He was advised in his local legislation
by an executive council, consisting of a number of officers who
assisted him in the administration, and legislating by means of
proclamations and orders-in-council without any representation of
popular opinion among the colonists, who, however, in time were
allowed to elect members of the Council of Justice or High Court.
After the first three years’ hesitation, strenuous efforts were
directed to the development of agriculture, especially the
cultivation of grain. Wheat was sown in suitable localities, and
vines and willows were planted by the banks of streams on the
hillsides at the back of Cape Town. Nevertheless the colonists were
terribly hampered by restrictions, which made them almost slaves to
the Company. White labour proving expensive and somewhat rebellious,
an attempt was made to introduce negro slaves from Angola and
Moçambique, but they were not a success as field labourers. The
Dutch therefore turned towards Madagascar, and above all, to the
Malay Archipelago; and from the latter especially workers were
introduced who have in time grown into a separate population of
Muhammadan freemen of considerable prosperity[88]. As Dutch
immigrants still held back from settling the Cape with an abundant
population (owing to the greed and despotic meddlesomeness of the
Company), it became more and more necessary to introduce black
labour; and in the first half of the 18th century many negro slaves
were imported from the Gold Coast and from Moçambique. The Cape
became a slave-worked colony, but on the whole the slaves were
treated with kindness; their children were sent to school, and some
attempt was made to introduce Christianity amongst them. The people
really to be pitied, however, were not the imported slaves, but the
Hottentots, who had become a nation of serfs to the Dutch farmers,
and whose numbers began greatly to diminish under the influence of
drink and syphilis, and through their being driven away from the
fertile, well-watered lands back into the inhospitable deserts. In
1682, after the colony had been established 30 years, a census
showed a total of 663 Dutch settlers, of whom 162 were under age or
children. For about the same period few if any attempts were made to
explore the country 100 miles from Cape Town; but the coast from
Little Namakwaland on the west to Zululand on the east had been
examined by the end of the 17th century. Indeed the Bay of Natal was
purchased by a representative of the Netherlands Company in 1689;
but the ship bringing back the purchase deed was lost, and no
further attempt was made to push the claim. In 1684 the first export
of grain to the Indies took place, and in 1688 some Cape wine was
sent to Ceylon. In 1685 and in subsequent years representations were
made to the directors in Amsterdam that the colony consisted mainly
of bachelors, and that good marriageable girls should be sent out.
The result of this appeal was that in 1687 many of the free Burghers
(namely, persons more or less independent of the Company) had been
furnished with wives; and they and their families amounted to nearly
600, in addition to 439 other Europeans, who were mainly employés of
the Company.
In 1685, Louis XIV unwittingly dealt a fearful blow to France in the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which resulted in thousands of
French Protestants emigrating to other countries where they might
enjoy freedom of religion. The Protestant Dutch sympathized with the
homeless Huguenots; and the Netherlands Company decided to give free
passages and grants of land to a number of these refugees. By 1689
nearly 200 French emigrants had been landed at the Cape and settled
in the mountain country behind Cape Town. Here, however, they were
not allowed to form a separate community. They were scattered
amongst the Dutch settlers, their children were taught Dutch, and in
a few years they were thoroughly absorbed in the Dutch community;
though they have left ineffaceable traces of their presence in the
many French surnames to be met with amongst the South African Dutch
at the present day (always pronounced however in the Dutch way), and
in the dark eyes, dark hair, and handsome features so often seen in
the best-looking type of Boer. Handsomer men and women than are some
of the Afrikanders it would be impossible to meet with; but this
personal beauty is usually traceable to Huguenot ancestry. The
French settlers taught the Dutch improved methods of growing corn
and wine, and altogether more scientific agriculture. Towards the
latter end of the 17th century the Dutch introduced the oak tree
into the Cape Peninsula and the suburbs of Cape Town, where it is
now such a handsome and prominent feature. All this time the
Hottentots gave almost no trouble. They were employed here and there
as servants; but they attempted no insurrection against the European
settlers, though they quarrelled very much amongst themselves. In
1713 large numbers of them were exterminated by an epidemic of
smallpox. The Dutch had not yet come into contact with the so-called
Kaffirs[89].
Towards the middle of the 18th century the Dutch Company ceased to
prosper, suffering from French and English competition. Already, at
the beginning of the 18th century, its oppressive rule, and the
abuse of power on the part of its governors, who used its authority
and its servants to enrich themselves, resulted in an uprising
amongst the settlers; and although some of these were arrested,
imprisoned, and exiled, the Company gave some redress to their
grievances by forbidding its officials in future to own land or to
trade. Even before this the Company had found it necessary to place
a special official, answering to an Auditor-General and an
independent judge combined, alongside the Commandant or Governor,
directly responsible to the Directors and independent of the
Governor’s authority; but this institution only led to quarrels and
divided loyalty. Amongst the governors there were some able and
upright men; and special mention may be made of Governor Tulbagh,
who ruled without reproach and with great ability for twenty years
(1751-71)[90].
In spite of licences and monopolies, tithes, taxes, and rents, the
Company could not pay its way in Cape Colony. In 1779, it was more
closely associated with the State in Holland by the appointment of
the Stadhouder (or Head of the State) as perpetual Chief Director.
With this change, the Company, partly supported by the State,
managed to continue the direction of its affairs; and there was
possibly some lessening of restrictions, which enabled settlers to
live further afield. Until the beginning of the 18th century a
standing order had forbidden trading between the settlers and the
natives; but this order being abolished, the farmers commenced to
buy cattle from the Hottentots, and the population became more
scattered. In leasing land to the farmers the Company laid down the
rule that clear spaces of three miles should intervene between one
homestead and the next; and this rule brought about a wider
distribution of European settlers than was contemplated in the
Company’s policy.
By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch settlers had begun to
cross the mountains which lie behind the narrow belt of coast land
that forms a projection into the ocean on either side of the Cape of
Good Hope. Seventy years later the boundaries of Cape Colony on the
north and west were the Berg River and the Zwartebergen Mountains,
and on the east the Gamtoos River. A few years later the pioneers of
colonization had crossed the Berg River, and had established
themselves as far north as the Olifants River, so named because
earlier explorers had seen on its banks herds of hundreds of
elephants. The Orange River was first discovered in 1760; and in
1779 Captain Gordon, a Scotchman in the service of the Dutch
Company, had traced it for some distance down to its mouth, and had
named it after the head of the Dutch State. Hitherto, the Dutch
Government was confined to a narrow coast strip; but in 1785 the
district of Graaf Reinet[91] was formed, and the same name was given
to the village which formed its capital. Then the Dutch boundary
crept up to the Great Fish River, which rises far away to the north,
near the course of the Orange River. This Great Fish River remained
the easternmost boundary of the Colony in Dutch times. To the north
its limits were vague, and in one direction reached nearly to the
Orange River, beyond the second great range of South African
mountains—the Sneeubergen. But beyond the immediate limits of Cape
Colony the Dutch displayed some interest in the fate of South-East
Africa. They opened up a furtive and occasional trade with the
Portuguese coast of East Africa, which at first began for slaves
(numbers of Makua were brought from Moçambique to Cape Town), was
continued for tropical products, and, with many interruptions,
resulted in the establishment at the present day of important Dutch
commercial firms along the Mozambique coast. In 1720, after the
evacuation of Mauritius, an expedition was sent from Cape Colony to
Delagoa Bay, which, though claimed by the Portuguese, had been
abandoned by them at the beginning of the 18th century, so far as
actual occupation was concerned (see p. 110). A fort was built by
the Dutch which was named Lydzaamheid; and tentative explorations
were made in the direction of the Zambezi, from which gold dust was
procured. During ten years of occupation, however, the deaths from
fever were so numerous that the settlement was given up in 1730.
In 1770 the total European population in Cape Colony was nearly
10,000, of whom more than 8000 were free colonists, and the
remainder “servants” and employés of the Company. All this time,
although the prosperity of the Cape increased and its export of
wheat, wine, and live-stock progressed satisfactorily, the revenue
invariably failed to meet the expenditure; and, if other events had
not occurred, the Dutch Company must soon have been compelled by
bankruptcy to transfer the administration of the Cape to other
hands. But towards the close of the 18th century, the Dutch, too
weak to resist the influence of France and Russia, were showing
veiled hostility towards England, with the result that England—which
on the other hand was secretly longing to possess the Cape, owing to
the development of the British Empire in India—declared war against
the Netherlands at the end of 1780. In 1781 a British fleet under
Commodore Johnstone left England for the Cape of Good Hope with 3000
troops on board. Johnstone, however, from storms and other reasons
not so apparent, but possibly due to a certain indecision of mind,
delayed his fleet at Porto Praya, in the Cape Verde Islands; and
news of the expedition having been treacherously imparted to France
by persons in England who were in her pay, Admiral Suffren—one of
the greatest of sea-fighters—surprised the British fleet at the Cape
Verde Islands with a squadron of inferior strength, and gave it such
a sound drubbing that Johnstone was delayed for several months in
reaching Cape Town, where the French had preceded him, and had
landed sufficient men to make a British attack on Cape Town of
doubtful success. Johnstone therefore contented himself in a not
very creditable way with destroying the unarmed Dutch shipping in
the port, and then left Cape Town without effecting a landing. The
result was the garrisoning of Cape Town by a French regiment for two
more years, during which time however another attempt was made by
the British to seize the Cape, which was nearly successful. In the
course of this war, however, England apparently made up her mind
that the possession of the Cape of Good Hope and of Trinkomali in
Ceylon was necessary to the welfare of her Indian possessions, and
did not lose sight of this policy when the next legitimate
opportunity presented itself to make war upon Holland. On the other
hand, the French, though they withdrew their troops in 1783, were
equally alive to the importance of the Cape; and in the great duel
which was to take place between the two nations it is tolerably
certain that South Africa would never have remained in the hands of
the Dutch; if it had not become English it would have been taken and
kept by the French.
About this time the Dutch came into conflict with the Kafirs. This
vanguard of the great Bantu race had been invading southern Africa
almost concurrently with the white people. Coming from the
north-east and north they had—we may guess—crossed the Zambezi about
the 6th century of the Christian Era; and their invasion had brought
about the partial destruction and abandonment of the Sabaean and
Arab settlements in the gold-mining districts of south-east Africa.
The Semitic inhabitants of Zimbabwe and other mining centres had
been driven back to the coast at Sofala. The progress of the black
Bantu against the now more concentrated Hottentots and Bushmen was
then somewhat slower, delayed no doubt by natural obstacles, by the
desperate defence of the Hottentots, the tracts of waterless country
on the west, and internecine warfare amongst themselves. Overlying
the first three divisions of Bantu invaders there came down across
the Zambezi from the districts of Tanganyika the great Zulu race,
akin to the Bechuana-Basuto people who had preceded them, but less
mixed with Hottentot blood, and speaking a peculiar Bantu
language[92]. By the beginning of the 18th century this seventh
wave—as one may call it—of Bantu invasion had swept as far south as
the Great Kei River, and some years later had pushed the Hottentots
back to the Great Fish River. In 1778 they came into direct contact
with the Dutch; and the Governor of the Cape entered into an
agreement with the Kafir chiefs that the Great Fish River should be
the boundary between Dutch rule and Kafir settlement. Nevertheless,
this agreement was soon transgressed by the Kafirs, who commenced
raiding the Dutch settlers. In 1781 the first Kafir war ended
disastrously for the Bantu invaders, who were driven back for a time
to the Kei River. Eight years later they again invaded Cape Colony.
A policy of conciliation was adopted, which ended by the Kafirs
being allowed to settle on the Dutch side of the Great Fish River in
1789.
In 1790 the Netherlands East India Company was practically bankrupt;
and in the following year (when it was computed that the European
population of the Cape numbered 14,600 persons, owning 17,000
slaves) the Dutch Governor was recalled to Europe, and the country
was for a year left in a state of administrative chaos, until two
Commissioners, sent out by the States General, arrived and took over
the government. But the next year these Commissioners went on to
Batavia; and the Burghers of the interior districts became so
dissatisfied with the mismanagement of affairs that they expelled
their magistrates and took the administration of their district into
their own hands, calling themselves “Nationals,” and becoming to
some degree infected with the spirit of the French Revolution.
Meantime, in the same year, 1793, the Dutch Government had joined
England and Prussia in making war upon France. Two years afterwards,
in 1795, the French troops occupied Holland, and turned it into the
Batavian Republic, a state in alliance with France. The Prince of
Orange, hereditary Stadhouder of the Netherlands, fled to England;
and in the spring of 1795 he authorized the British Government to
occupy Cape Colony on behalf of the States General in order to
obviate its seizure by the French. In June 1795 a British fleet
carrying troops commanded by General Craig arrived at False Bay. The
Dutch were not very willing to surrender Cape Town at the first
demand, even though the interior of the country was in revolt
against the Company. Both the officer administering the Company’s
Government and the dissatisfied Burghers sank their differences in
opposition to the landing of the British. The latter were anxious to
avoid hostilities, and therefore spent a month in negotiations; but
on the 14th of July the British forcibly occupied Simons Town, and
three weeks later drove the Dutch from a position they had taken up
near Cape Town. In September 3000 more troops arrived under General
Clarke, and in the middle of that month marched on Cape Town from
the south-east. A capitulation was finally arranged after an attack
and a defence which had been half-hearted. Thenceforth for eight
years the English occupied Cape Town and administered the adjoining
colony. At first their rule was military, just, and satisfactory;
afterwards, when a civilian governor was sent out, a system of
corruption and favouritism was introduced which caused much
dissatisfaction. The British also had made it known that they only
held the colony in trust for the Stadhouder; and this made the Dutch
settlers uncertain as to their allegiance. Meantime, however, the
British administration gave some satisfaction to the settlers by its
policy of free trade and open markets, and by certain reliefs in
taxation; also by the institution of a Burgher Senate of six
members. But the Boers of the interior remained for some time
recalcitrant. The Dutch, moreover, made an attempt to regain
possession of the Cape by dispatching a fleet of nine ships with
2000 men on board, which, however, was made to surrender at Saldanha
Bay by Admiral Elphinstone and General Craig without firing a shot.
Kafir raids recommenced; and the British having organized a
Hottentot corps of police, the other Hottentots who were serfs to
the Dutch rose in insurrection against their former masters. When in
1803 the British evacuated Cape Town, they did not leave the colony
in a sufficiently satisfactory condition to encourage the Dutch
settlers to opt for British rule. From 1803 to 1806 the Dutch
Government ruled Cape Colony as a colony, and not as the appendage
of a Chartered company, which had now disappeared. The Cape ceased
to be subordinate to Batavia, and possessed a Governor and Council
of its own. A check was placed on the importation of slaves, and
European immigration was encouraged. Postal communication and the
administration of justice were organized or improved. In fact, the
Commissioner-General De Mist and Governor Janssens, in the two years
and nine months of their rule, laid the foundations of an excellent
system of colonial government. But the march of events was too
strong for them. The great minister Pitt, in the summer of 1805,
secretly organized an expedition which should carry nearly 7000
troops to seize the Cape. In spite of delays and storms, this fleet
reached Table Bay at the beginning of January, 1806. Six British
regiments were landed 18 miles north of Cape Town. Governor Janssens
went out to meet them with such poor forces as he could gather
together—2000 in all against 4000 British. The result of course was
disastrous to the Dutch, whose soldiers mainly consisted of
half-hearted German mercenaries. On the 16th of January, Cape Town
surrendered; and after some futile resistance by Janssens in the
interior, a capitulation was signed on January 18, and Janssens and
the Dutch soldiers were sent back to the Netherlands by the British
Government.
By a Convention dated August 13, 1814, the Dutch Government with the
Prince of Orange at its head ceded Cape Colony and the American
possession of Demerara to Great Britain against the payment of
£6,000,000, which was made either by the actual tendering of money
to the Dutch Government, or the wiping off of Dutch debts.
On the other hand, the surrender of the Cape to Great Britain
induced the latter power to give back to Holland most of the Dutch
possessions in the East Indies, which we had seized and administered
during the Napoleonic wars. If Holland lost South Africa—which she
had only directly ruled for three years—she was enabled by the
British attitude of self-denial to build up an empire in the East
only second in wealth and population to the Asiatic dominions of
Great Britain.
Yet, in an indirect fashion, Dutch Africa exists still, though the
flag of Holland no longer waves over any portion of African soil as
a ruling power. The old rivalry between the English and the Dutch,
which had begun almost as soon as the Dutch were a free people, and
competitors with us for the trade of the East and West Indies, had
created a feeling of enmity between the two races, which ought never
to have existed, seeing how nearly they are of the same stock, and
how closely allied in language, religion, and to some extent in
history—also how nearly matched they are in physical and mental
worth. Curiously enough, there is far greater affinity in thought
and character between the Scotch and the Dutch than between the
Dutch and the English. The same thriftiness, bordering at times on
parsimony, oddly combined with the largest-hearted hospitality, the
same tendency to strike a hard bargain, even to overreach in matters
of business, and the same dogged perseverance, characterize both
Dutch and Scotch; while in matters of religion, almost precisely the
same form of Protestant Christianity appeals to both; so much so,
that there is practically a fusion between the Dutch Reformed Church
and the Presbyterians. Had Scotchmen been sent out to administer
Cape Colony in its early days, it is probable that something like a
fusion of races might have taken place, and there would have been no
Dutch question to cause dissension in South African politics in the
19th century. The Scotch would have understood the Boer settlers and
their idiosyncracies, and would not have made fun of them or been so
deliberately unsympathetic as were some of the earlier English
governors. Slavery would have been abolished all the same, but it
would have been abolished more cautiously, in a way that would not
have left behind the sting of a grievance. But after Cape Colony had
been definitely ceded to Great Britain, its governors in the early
days were mostly Englishmen, who, though often able and just men,
were at little pains to understand the peculiarities of the Boer
character, and to conciliate these suspicious, uneducated farmers.
Another source of trouble was the influx of British missionaries,
who found much to condemn in the Dutch treatment of the natives,
which resembled that in vogue amongst Britons of the previous
century, before the spirit of philanthropy was abroad. Some of these
missionaries, it is true, were Scotchmen, though belonging to
Protestant sects of more distinctly English character. At any rate,
the missionaries no doubt had so much right on their side in
condemning the Boers for their conduct towards the natives, that
their feelings in this respect overcame their national affinity for
the Dutch. The Boer settler at no time showed that fiendish cruelty
to the natives he was dispossessing which was, and is, so terribly
characteristic of the Spanish colonization of Mexico or northern
South America, or of some of the English, French, and Portuguese
adventurers on the West coast of Africa in the 17th century; but he
was determined to make of the native a serf, and denied him the
rights of a man like unto himself. If the native revolted against
this attitude he was exterminated in a businesslike fashion; but if
he submitted, as did most of the Hottentots, he was treated with
patriarchal kindness and leniency. The Dutch settlers appear from
the first to have dissociated their dealings with the Hottentots
from their ordinary code of morals. It was not thought dishonest to
cheat them, not thought illegal to rob them, not thought immoral to
use their women as concubines. So entirely without scruples were the
Dutch on this last point, that whole races arose, and have since
become nations likely to survive and prosper, whose origin was the
illicit union of Dutch men and Hottentot women. These “bastards,” as
they were frankly called, were well treated by the Dutch; they were
not disowned, were usually converted to Christianity, and were
taught to lead a more or less civilized life and to talk the Dutch
language, which they speak in a corrupt form at the present day. In
short, the morals of the South African Dutch were the morals of the
Old Testament, as were those of Cromwell’s soldiers; and in this and
many other modes of thought the Dutch Afrikanders lived still in the
17th century, whereas the British missionaries were of the early
19th, in the red-hot glow of its as yet disillusioned and somewhat
frothy philanthropy. The Dutch settlers were denounced at Exeter
Hall and on every missionary platform; and the fact that many of the
accusations were true in great measure did not make them more
palatable to the accused.
As the Government policy at the Cape was for the first half of the
century greatly influenced by the missionary societies, the Dutch
with some justice regarded these attacks and recriminations as
directly emanating from the British Government, and hence withdrew
from or rebelled against our rule. The dissentient, dissatisfied
Boers began to trek away from the settled portion of Cape Colony
into the wilderness behind, where they might still lead the
pleasant, unfettered, patriarchal life they had grown to love. They
travelled beyond the Orange River, which had come to be the northern
limit of British influence, and, avoiding the deserts of
Bechuanaland, passed north-eastwards into the better-watered
territories now known as the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
They also sought a way out towards the sea in what is now the colony
of Natal. Here they came into conflict first with the Kafirs and
Basuto on the west, and then with the Zulus on the east. The former
were to some extent under British protection; therefore the British
Government was ready to espouse their cause if they were unjustly
dealt with. The Zulus, on the other hand, were strong enough and
numerous enough to prevent a Boer settlement on their land.
Nevertheless, the Boer invasion of Natal from the north was at that
time a transgression into territory recently conquered and
depopulated by one of the most abominable shedders of blood that
ever arose amongst Negro tyrants—Chaka, the second[93] king of the
Zulus. This latter saw the danger, and lured the pioneers of the
Boers into a position where he was able to massacre them at his
ease. With splendid gallantry—one’s blood tingles with admiration as
one reads the record of it—the few remaining Boers mustered their
forces and avenged this dastardly murder by a drastic defeat of the
Zulus. But this was in the early forties, when British adventurers,
more or less discouraged or unencouraged by the Home Government, had
founded a coast settlement in Natal, on the site of what is now the
town of Durban. The usual shilly-shally on the part of the British
Government misled the Boers into thinking that they could maintain
themselves in Natal against our wishes. As they had further broken
an agreement with us by attacking the Basuto and the Kafirs, a
British force was despatched against them in 1842, which, after a
brief struggle, induced them to capitulate. Natal was then secured
as a British colony, and the Boers with bitter disappointment had to
seek their independent state to the north of the Orange River. But
here also they were followed up; and, had the Governor of the
Cape—Sir George Grey—been supported from Downing Street, the Orange
River sovereignty would never have become the Orange Free State, and
it is probable that even the territory beyond the Vaal River might
in like manner have been subjected to British control.
But Downing Street for eighty years after the cession of the Cape of
Good Hope persistently mismanaged South African affairs, now blowing
hot with undue heat, now blowing cold, and nipping wise enterprise
in the bud. The action of the Governor was repudiated, and the Sand
River Convention unratified. In the most formal manner the Boers
north of the Orange River were accorded absolute independence,
subject to certain provisions about slavery; and the like privilege
had been previously accorded to those who had further trekked across
the Vaal River at a time when the Orange River State was likely to
become a British Colony. So, from 1852 and 1854 respectively[94],
the South African Dutch formed two states entirely independent of
British rule in their internal affairs, and very slightly in their
external relations. The Orange Free State, which contained a
considerable British element dating from the period of British
sovereignty, had latterly an uneventful career of steady
prosperity[95], due in large measure to the wisdom of its chief
magistrates. When the diamond fields were discovered on its borders
towards the end of the “sixties” it had some cause for complaint
against the British Government, since, taking advantage of the
undefined rights of a Grikwa (Bastard Hottentot) chief, the British
extended their rule over this arid territory north of the Orange
River, which was suddenly found to be worth untold millions of
pounds. But the amount of territory under dispute was relatively
small; and, if the British had transgressed their rightful
borderland to some slight degree, they atoned for it by paying the
Orange State an indemnity of £90,000. Great Britain also intervened
several times to prevent the warlike Basuto (who dwell in that
little African Switzerland between the Orange Free State and Natal)
either from raiding the Orange Free State, or from being themselves
raided and conquered by Boer reprisals. Eventually (1882)
Basutoland, whose affairs had been somewhat mismanaged by the Cape
Parliament, was taken under direct imperial control; and ever since
there has been a complete cessation of trouble in that quarter with
the Orange Free State.
The career of the Transvaal Republic was much less successful in its
early days. The territory was vaster, in many places not so healthy;
and the native population, especially in the eastern districts[96],
was turbulent, and strongly averse to accepting Boer rule. The
existence of gold, though occasionally hinted at by unheeded
pioneers, was unknown to the world at large, and absolutely ignored
by the Boers; there was little or no trade, and the European
population was scanty. By 1877 the condition of this state had
become so hopeless, with a bankrupt treasury and the menace of a
Zulu invasion, that it was annexed, somewhat abruptly, by the
Imperial representative, Sir Theophilus Shepstone. No doubt this
step was consonant with the enlightened policy then favoured by the
Imperial Government and subsequently by Sir Bartle Frere, who was to
become Governor of the Cape during the latter part of the late Earl
Carnarvon’s tenancy of the Colonial Office. Lord Carnarvon himself
was resolutely intent on carrying out in Africa south of the Zambezi
a scheme of federation similar to that which had in 1866
consolidated the Dominion of Canada. But the actual method by which
the Transvaal was taken over was not a well considered one; and
unhappily it was followed by the appointment of an officer to rule
over that country whose demeanour was wholly unsympathetic to the
Boer nature. At the end of 1880 the Boers revolted. After a short
military campaign, conspicuous for its utter lack of generalship on
the part of the English, and for the disastrous defeats inflicted on
our forces by the Boers at Lang’s Nek and Majuba Hill, the British
Government of the day (which a few months before had absolutely
refused the Boers’ appeal for the reversal of the annexation)
concluded a hurried armistice, and gave back (1881) its independence
to the Transvaal, subject to a vague suzerainty on the part of the
British Crown, and later on to a British veto which might be
exercised on treaties with foreign powers. The best plea that can be
urged on behalf of this surrender, which subsequent British
Governments have had such cause to regret, was the belief that a
stern prosecution of the war, and the eventual Boer defeat, would
lead to the uprising of the Dutch settlers in Cape Colony and the
intervention of the Orange Free State. It is doubtful whether there
was much foundation for this fear, or whether it would not have been
much easier at that time to settle British supremacy once and for
all over all Africa south of the Zambezi, even if it led to some
degree of internecine fighting; the more so as there would have been
no danger of European intervention at that date. But the chance was
let slip, and the Boers acquired an independence the more justly won
and the less easily disturbed since it was the result of their
sturdy valour.
The restraining conditions of the 1881 Convention were still further
attenuated by the London Convention of February 27, 1884, in which
with further fatuity the Government of the day accorded
unnecessarily to the Transvaal state the extravagant title of “The
South African Republic.” Perhaps this is the most remarkable act of
abnegation which has ever occurred in the history of the British
Empire; and it must have seemed to the inhabitants of British South
Africa like the admission of a rival ruling power into the British
sphere south of the Zambezi. By this 1884 Convention (worthless for
that purpose, as are all treaties and conventions when the force to
maintain them is not apparent) the geographical limits of the
Transvaal state were clearly defined, and the Boers engaged to keep
within them.
Encouraged by this diplomatic success, and the feeble manner in
which the Imperial Government had permitted them to carve out a
fresh state in the heart of Zululand, the Boers of the Transvaal now
determined to add Bechuanaland to their dominions; thus possibly to
cut off British expansion towards the Zambezi, and to make their
western frontier coincident with the natural limits of that
Protectorate which Germany had just established, north of the Orange
River. But public opinion in Great Britain was becoming intolerant
of any further sacrifices of British aspirations in South Africa or
of breaches of faith on the part of the Boers, and forced the
Government of the day to assert itself. A strong expedition was sent
out under Sir Charles Warren at the end of 1884, which finally
secured for Great Britain the Protectorate of Bechuanaland, and the
restraining of the Transvaal within its proper limits. Nevertheless,
in 1894 a fresh concession was made to that state by the withdrawal
of British opposition to its absorption of a little enclave of Zulu
country known as Swaziland. In excuse for the British Government it
must be pointed out that the Swazi chiefs had previously made over
to Transvaal subjects so many rights and concessions that any other
solution than the further cession of the administration was rendered
difficult under the existing conditions. [The detachment of
Swaziland as a small native state, administered by Imperial
officials, was effected in 1902.]
Soon after the conclusion of the London Convention of 1884, the vast
wealth in gold, which for more than ten years back had been asserted
by uneducated pioneers, and denied by mining experts, began to be
made known. The development of the marvellous Witwatersrand brought
about the foundation of Johannesburg, and directed to the Transvaal
an enormous influx of outsiders, mainly English, at any rate mainly
British subjects, though many of them were Jews from England, or
from France and Germany, who had become naturalized British
subjects[97]. Mines were also opened in the east and in the north of
the Transvaal. On the other hand, to counteract the influence of
this British element, the Transvaal Government had almost ever since
its establishment in 1881 been strengthening the Dutch element by
inviting the settlement of Hollanders from the Netherlands, who were
employed in its Government offices, in its schools, its churches,
and on the construction of its railways. These natives of Holland
showed themselves very hostile to British influence; and through
their efforts a great deal of sympathy with the South African Dutch
was aroused in Holland and Germany. On the other hand, the
Outlanders, who settled round Johannesburg and other mining centres
and who soon came to outnumber the Boer element in the Transvaal
population to the extent of five to one, became dissatisfied with
their position under the Boer Government, who ruled them
autocratically, without giving them any voice in the administration
or in the spending of the heavy taxes levied on their industries. It
should be noted that the Boer Government had attempted to wall
itself in from contact with the surrounding British and Portuguese
states by an exceedingly high tariff of import duties, which
rendered many articles of necessity or luxury extremely expensive,
and made civilized life five times dearer than in the adjoining Cape
Colony. It was again the contrast between the very end of the 19th
century and the manners, customs, language, and puritanical religion
of the 17th century.
To some extent this recalcitrant attitude of the Boers was condemned
and deprecated by their much more enlightened brethren, the Cape
Dutch. In time, probably, these latter might have encouraged and
supported the intervention of the Imperial Government in securing
fair terms to the Outlanders; and as these fair terms must have
given the Outlanders a preponderating voice in the Government, the
Transvaal might have been brought within the South African
Federation under the British ægis. But the Right Hon. Cecil John
Rhodes, then Prime Minister of the Cape and Managing Director of the
British South Africa Chartered Company, saw in this discontent at
Johannesburg the means and excuse for his personal intervention in
the Transvaal. He hurried on the movement, and even carried it
beyond the limits indicated by the more disinterested Reformers. The
administrator of the Chartered Company’s territories, Dr Jameson,
invaded the Transvaal (Dec. 29, 1895) with a small force of between
500 and 600 mounted police, and endeavoured to reach Johannesburg,
the centre of unrest, with a half-avowed intention of subsequently
marching on Pretoria, and upsetting the Boer Government. But the
Boer forces intercepted Dr Jameson at Doornkop before he could reach
Johannesburg; and after an engagement in which a few of his men were
killed, and when further progress would have meant annihilation, he
surrendered. The High Commissioner of South Africa hurried to
Johannesburg; Dr Jameson and his officers were handed over to the
British Government to be dealt with, and afterwards underwent a
short term of imprisonment. On the other hand, the reformers of
Johannesburg were treated by the Pretoria Courts with inexcusable
harshness, seeing that they had not taken an active part in Dr
Jameson’s inroad, and had surrendered their city to the Boer
Government. Enormous fines, amounting eventually to nearly half a
million sterling, were inflicted on them, after a somewhat burlesque
trial in which they were condemned to death, only to be subsequently
imprisoned or expelled. For the time being this wanton aggression on
the part of Mr Rhodes alienated all sympathy with the grievances of
the Outlanders, and provoked strong expressions of opinion in
certain European states, who, until they were assured that the
British Government was dissociated with Mr Rhodes’ scheme, were not
unnaturally prone to imagine that their own territories in Africa
might some day be exposed to a British raid. The immediate outcome,
therefore, of this ill-advised action on the part of the Cape
Premier (though that official was admittedly actuated by the same
desire which has inspired some British statesmen, to bring about the
Britannicizing of all Africa south of the Zambezi) was the
strengthening and intensifying of the separatist character of the
two Dutch republics still existing in South Africa. The Orange Free
State concluded (1896) an offensive and defensive alliance with the
South African Republic (Transvaal); and enormous quantities of arms,
ammunition, and modern artillery were imported into Dutch South
Africa _via_ Lourenço Marquez (Delagoa Bay) and the new railway[98].
It was believed that eventually war must break out with Great
Britain, but that probably one or more European powers would
intervene and attack Great Britain, thus paralysing her striking
force in South Africa; that the Cape Dutch would rise and contribute
a quota of 30,000 men to the 80,000 to 90,000 of the Boer States; in
short that the future of South Africa lay with the Dutch element.
War was declared on Great Britain on October 11, 1899. Amazing
victories at first fell to the Boer generals, but Europe did not
intervene, nor did more than 8000 Cape Dutch join their Boer
brothers. The tide of victory having turned in favour of the
British, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Komatipoort (the frontier
station of the Delagoa Bay railway) were occupied between May and
September 1900. President Kruger fled to Holland, and the two
republics were annexed to British South Africa. Though the war did
not end till the peace of Vereeniging in May, 1902, the last year of
the nineteenth century saw the extinction of any independent Dutch
State in Africa. Yet soon after the conclusion of this peace
responsible government was once more granted to the reconstituted
states of the Orange River and the Transvaal in 1906-7. The
last-named, however, was deprived of Swaziland and of its province
of northern Zululand, which last was added to Natal. The Union of
South Africa (Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal)
followed in 1910; and the first Prime Minister of Dutch and
English-speaking South Africa was General Louis Botha, a leading
general of the disbanded Boer army. These brave, sturdy Boers have
played a great part in Africa, a part of which, Holland—the country
which first colonized South Africa—may well be proud. The South
African Dutch are so near to our own blood and tongue, and history,
that we may, without any more sting of bitterness than that with
which we recall the revolt of the American Colonies, take pride in
their achievements and smile grimly at the stout blows they have
dealt us in their own defence.
-----
Footnote 86:
Their “capital” was at Elmina; they held—when in full vigour—Fort
Nassau (built before they took Elmina from the Portuguese),
Kormantin, Secondee, Takorari, Accra, Cape Coast Castle,
Vredenburg, Chama, Batenstein, Dikjeschop (Insuma), Fort Elise
Carthage (Ankobra), Apollonia, Dixcove, Axim, Prince’s Fort near
Cape Three-points, Fort Wibsen, and Pokquesoe. Before the
abolition of the slave trade, Dutch Guinea was very prosperous. It
was governed by a subsidized Chartered Company—the Dutch West
India Co.—under the control of the States General; and the local
government consisted of a Governor-General at Elmina, a chief
Factor (or trader), a chief Fiscal (or accountant-general), an
under-fiscal (or auditor) and a large staff of factors,
accountants, secretaries, clerks and assistant clerks. There was a
chaplain; there were Dutch soldiers under Dutch officers who
garrisoned the forts. After the wars of the French Revolution the
Dutch Government took over the management of these establishments
on the Gold Coast.
Footnote 87:
As Sir Charles Lucas points out in his _Historical Geography of
the British Colonies_, “164 years after Bartolomeu Diaz had
sighted the Cape of Good Hope.”
Footnote 88:
The “Cape Malays.”
Footnote 89:
It will be no doubt remembered that this word is derived from the
Arab word “unbeliever.” The Arabs of south-east Africa applied
this term to the Negroes around their settlements. The Portuguese
took it up from the Arabs, and the Dutch and English from the
Portuguese.
Footnote 90:
Tulbagh deserves special remembrance not only from his
geographical explorations, but from the fact that he was the first
person to send specimens of the giraffe to Europe.
Footnote 91:
Named after Van de Graaf, who was Governor at the time. “Reinet”
means in Dutch “a goat’s beard,” but I have not been able to
discover why this term should have been added to the name of the
Governor.
Footnote 92:
Nevertheless, by their final and more complete contact with the
Hottentots and Bushmen the Zulu-Kafirs adopted three of the
Hottentot clicks; whereas earlier invaders—Karanga, Bechuana, and
Herero—though adopting a few Hottentot terms, kept clear of
Hottentot phonetics, and use no clicks to this day. The Zulu-Kafir
language, divided into four dialects—X̓osa-Kafir, Zulu and Swazi
(all three closely related), and Tonga or Ronga of the Delagoa Bay
district, is on the whole most nearly related to the East African
Bantu groups, with some affinities with Central African Bantu. But
it has no near relations and has developed a very peculiar
vocabulary, as though it had been isolated for centuries.
Footnote 93:
If Dingiswayo, his master, can be regarded as the first.
Dingiswayo was rather the paramount chief of a Kafir
confederation, of which the Zulu tribe was a member. Chaka was the
younger son of a Zulu chief, but was eventually elected chief in
his father’s place and then succeeded to the paramount sway of
Dingiswayo. Racially and linguistically there is very little
difference between Zulus and Kafirs.
Footnote 94:
The Sand River Convention, recognizing the independence of the
Transvaal, was signed in January, 1852; the Bloemfontein
Convention, which loosed the Orange Free State from British
control, was signed in February, 1854. In 1858, Sir George Grey
laid before the Cape Parliament proposals from the Orange Free
State for reunion in a South African Federation, and was recalled
by the Home Government for advocating this policy.
Footnote 95:
For the first few years of its existence it had much fighting with
the Basuto.
Footnote 96:
Zulus under Msilikazi and Swazis in the east; Bechuana tribes in
the west and north.
Footnote 97:
The part played by the Jews in the development of South Africa has
been as remarkable as their share in the settlement and civilizing
of North Africa, of the West Indies and the Guianas, of Australia
and New Zealand. Between 1840 and 1850 a number of Jewish business
houses were founded or became prominent in Cape Colony and Natal.
They started the guano collecting off the S.W. coast, the mohair,
wool, hides, sealskin and whale oil industries, and
sugar-planting. Notable among such were the De Pass and Mosenthal
firms. The De Passes came (I believe) from Gibraltar, and followed
to the Cape of Good Hope the first consignments of British troops.
The protection given by the British Government to Spanish-speaking
Jews at Gibraltar from the early part of the 18th century onwards
was well rewarded by a great increase of British commerce and
political power in the Mediterranean. The Mosenthals were
attracted to South Africa by the importation of German troops and
German colonists. Already in the early sixties members of the firm
of Lilienfeld were established in the Orange Free State and
hastened to develop the diamond mining industry of the future
Kimberley district. The part played by Alfred Beit (of a Hamburg
Christian-Jewish family), by the Lipperts, the Honourable Simeon
Jacobs, Sir Sigismund Neumann, Sir Lionel Phillips, Sir George
Albu, Sir David Harris, Senator Samuel Marks, Professor Alfred
Mosely, by the Mendelssohns, Rabinowitzes, and Rapaports, in South
African finance, politics, industry, education, law, and
philanthropic work has been a considerable one; and recent South
African history, either in the Boer states or in the British
colonies and protectorates, cannot be written in detail without an
allusion to their names, their achievements, their intentions,
influence, mistakes, and dogged, persevering belief in the
resources and splendid future of Cis- or Trans-Zambezian Africa.
This was a region in earlier days so unpromising to the eye and on
the surface that it needed the Semitic _flair_ for gold and
precious stones—the same mysterious divination which led the
Sabaeans (I am sure) to Zimbabwe, the Phoenicians to Spain, and
the Arabs to the Ashanti hinterland—to induce that persistent
opening-up of Grikwaland, Orangia, inner Cape Colony, the
Transvaal and Rhodesia, which has by the first decade of the 20th
century laid the foundations of another United States in the
southern quarter of Africa.
Footnote 98:
This Delagoa Bay railway was made by a group of British and
American concessionaires, headed by Colonel Edward M^cMurdo, an
American, between 1887 and 1889. In the following year it was
arbitrarily seized by the Portuguese Government on an unfair
quibble. The Portuguese then completed the line farther inland
until it joined the Netherlands Railway Co.’s line to Pretoria,
thus giving the South African Republic a means of access to the
sea independent of British control. The wrong inflicted on the
Delagoa Bay Railway Company went to arbitration in Switzerland,
1889; and the case was decided after 11 years’ deliberations in
favour of the Company, to whom the Portuguese paid £978,000 in
compensation.
CHAPTER VII
THE SLAVE TRADE
Man had not long attained full humanity before he conceived the idea
of enslaving instead of, or as well as, eating his enemies or his
inferiors. Slavery and the slave trade, however—mere servitude—need
not excite great horror or pity when it occurs among people of the
same race or the same religion, or in countries which are not far
from the home of the enslaved. It is where the state of servitude
exists between widely divergent races that it gives rise to abuses,
which are obvious even to those who are not sensitive
philanthropists.
The Negro, more than any other human type, has been marked out by
his mental and physical characteristics as the servant of other
races. There are, of course, exceptions to the general rule. There
are tribes like the Kruboys of the West African coast, the
Mandingo, the Wolof, and the Zulu, who have always shown
themselves so recalcitrant to slavery that they have generally
been let alone; while the least divergence from the negro stock in
an upward direction—such as in the case of the Fula, Gala and
Somali—appears to produce an unconquerable love of freedom. But
the Negro in a primitive state is a born slave. He is possessed of
great physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a
short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused
gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from
home-sickness to the over-bearing extent that afflicts other
peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is
easily made happy. Above all, he can toil hard under the hot sun
and in the unhealthy climates of the torrid zone. He has little or
no race-fellowships—that is to say, he has no sympathy for other
negroes; he recognizes, follows and imitates his master
independently of any race affinities, and, as he is usually a
strong man and a good fighter, he has come into request not only
as a labourer but as a soldier.
Negro slaves were imported into Lower Egypt as servants in the
earliest dynastic times. A few reached Carthage from time to time
and many were brought to Imperial Rome; but the determined
exploitation of the black races did not begin on a large scale till
the Muhammadan conquest of Africa. The Arabs had swept across
Northern Africa, and become directly acquainted with the Sudan[99].
Before the promulgation of Islam they traded with the East coast of
Africa, and after the Islamic outburst they ruled there as sultans.
The secluding of women in harims guarded by eunuchs had come into
vogue during the Byzantine Empire; but it was probably a custom of
Syrian, Mesopotamian, or Egyptian origin. It was adopted with
emphasis among the civilized Mussulmans, and the negro eunuch proved
the most efficient and faithful guardian of the gynæceum. So the
slave trade developed mightily in the Muhammadan world. Household
slaves and eunuchs were imported into North Africa, Arabia, Turkey,
and Persia from the Sudan; while in a later century the Emperors of
Morocco established their power firmly by importing fighting negroes
from Nigeria. Arabia, Persia, and India obtained negroes from the
Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and the Zanzibar coast. Into the West
coast of India negro slaves were imported from East Africa to become
the guards of palaces and the fighting seamen of navies. In the
Bombay Presidency these negroes became so useful or powerful that
they carved out states for themselves, one or more of which, still
ruled by negro princes, are in existence at the present day as
dependencies of the Government of India[100].
The final impetus was given to this traffic by the European. When
the Spanish, Portuguese and English discovered and settled America
they found the native races too few in numbers, too fierce, or too
weakly to be suited for compulsory agricultural work; and so early
as 1503 African slaves were working in the mines of Hispaniola,
brought thither by the Spaniards[101]. A few years later they were
being imported into Mexico, Panama and Peru. In 1517 the slave trade
between Africa and America was regularly established, Charles V of
Spain having granted to a Flemish merchant the exclusive privilege
of importing into America 4000 slaves a year. This monopoly was
subsequently sold by the concessionaire to a company of Genoese
merchants, who struck a bargain with the Portuguese government to
supply the slaves from Guinea.
English adventurers, who had first found their way out in Portuguese
ships to investigate the spice trade, soon determined to take up the
traffic in negro labourers for the plantations in America as being
more profitable. John Hawkins, one of the famous seamen of the
Elizabethan era, in 1562 took over to the West Indies the first
cargo of slaves transported under the British flag. Afterwards made
Sir John Hawkins (and adopting a “demi-Moor in his proper colour,
bound with a cord” as his crest) he made two other voyages (1564,
1567) to the West coast of Africa, conveying some eight hundred
kidnapped or purchased negroes to the West Indies. England did not
engage largely in the slave trade on her own account until in the
17th century she commenced to possess Jamaica and other West Indian
islands, and to develop the tobacco plantations of Virginia. Then
she almost outdid rival nations. The late Dr Robert Brown, in his
interesting work, “The Story of Africa,” computed that in a little
more than a century, from 1680 to 1786, 2,130,000 negro slaves were
imported into the British-American colonies, Jamaica in the course
of 80 years absorbing 610,000. Towards the latter end of the 18th
century the various European powers interested in America imported
on an average over 70,000 slaves a year, the British bringing more
than one half, and sometimes a still greater proportion. At first
the slaves came chiefly from the Gambia and the other rivers
southward to Sierra Leone, and from the Gold Coast, where they were
supplied to the Dutch through the incessant wars of the Ashanti
people. Later they were brought from Dahomé and Benin, and from the
Portuguese possessions of Angola and the Zambezi. Then, as the
demand grew, a rich field was tapped in the 18th century in that
network of swampy rivers, which we now know as the delta of the
Niger river. But slowly there grew up in England, in Denmark, and in
the United States a feeling that there was something wrong in this
system which imposed so much misery on beings, who, though in some
degree inferior to white men, were yet of the same species, since
they could interbreed with us and learn to talk our language. That
such feelings must have existed at all times was evident from the
desire of good men when dying to grant freedom to their slaves. But
the feeling as a national one remained dormant, and was not general
in England until the close of the 18th century. Here and there cases
of a negro prince being sold into slavery attracted attention and
sympathy and caused a searching of consciences among enlightened
men.
In 1768-72 a great-minded Englishman, Granville Sharp, succeeded by
pushing a test case in getting a judicial decision that slavery
could not exist in England, and that therefore any slave landing in
England became free, and could not be taken back into slavery. In
1787 Wilberforce, Clarkson, and other philanthropists formed
themselves into an association to secure the abolition of slavery,
and by their exertions in Great Britain a bill was passed in 1807
which did not go to the lengths they desired, but which subjected
the slave trade under the British flag to severe disabilities. In
1811 this measure was completed and enforced by another bill
declaring the Slave Trade to be a felony punishable by penal
servitude. Yet it is doubtful whether, before these acts were
passed, the hardships of the slaves transported by sea were so
terrible as they became after the restrictions placed on the trade
rendered it necessary to carry large numbers of human beings on a
single voyage more or less concealed from sight in the hold of the
vessel with an utter disregard for sanitary conditions[102]. In
these later days, when it was necessary to evade tiresome
regulations or to carry on the trade in the face of direct
prohibition, the sufferings of the slaves were so appalling that
they almost transcend belief. It would seem as though the inhuman
traffic had created in Arabs, Negroes and white men a deliberate
love of cruelty, amounting often to a neglect of commercial
interest; for it would obviously have been more to the interest of
the slave raider and the slave trader and transporter that the
slaves should be landed at their ultimate destination in good
condition—certainly with the least possible loss of life. Yet, as
the present writer can testify from what he has himself seen in the
eighties and nineties of the last century, a slave gang on its march
to the coast was loaded with unnecessarily heavy collars or
slave-sticks, with chains and irons that chafed and cut into the
flesh, and caused virulent ulcers. The slaves were half starved,
over-driven, insufficiently provided with drinking water, and
recklessly exposed to death from sunstroke. If they threw themselves
down for a brief rest or collapsed from exhaustion they were shot or
speared or had their throats cut with fiendish brutality. I have
seen at Taveita (now a civilized settlement in British East Africa)
boys and youths left in the bush to die by degrees from
mortification and protrusion of the intestines owing to the
unskilful way in which they had been castrated by the Arabs, who had
attempted to make eunuchs of them for sale to Turkish and Arab
harims. Children whom their mothers could not carry, and who could
not keep up with the caravan, had their brains dashed out. Many
slaves (I again write from personal knowledge) committed suicide
because they could not bear to be separated from their homes and
children. They were branded and flogged, and, needless to say,
received not the slightest medical treatment for the injuries
resulting from this usage.
So much for the overland journey which brought them to the depôt or
factory of the European slave trader on the coast; then began the
horrors of the sea passage, the description of which, it must be
admitted, refers almost entirely to the ships of civilized nations,
like the English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Americans, and not
to the Arabs and Indians, who carried slaves across from the East
coast of Africa to Arabia or India. In the latter case the sailing
vessels were not often overcrowded, and the slaves were allowed a
fair degree of liberty. In the slave trade with America, especially
when it was placed under restrictions and finally penalized, it was
the aim of the masters to pack as many slaves as possible on board
the vessel, the peril of making one run being only half of what was
entailed in making two. Very often the slaves were sent on board
stark naked. They were packed like herrings in the hold or on the
middle deck, and in times of bad weather, or for reasons of
security, were kept under hatches. The stench they produced then was
appalling, and many died asphyxiated. On some ships, and where the
captain was a humane man, the slaves were occasionally allowed to go
on deck, and were watered with a hose; and where the skipper’s
commission made it profitable to him to land the slaves in good
condition, they received better food, and occasional luxuries like
tobacco; but if the slaver were chased by a British cruiser, no
scruple was shown in throwing the slaves overboard to drown.
Denmark has the credit of being the first European power to forbid
the slave trade to her subjects (1792). Two years later the United
States of America forbade their subjects to “participate in the
exportation of negroes to foreign countries”; and in 1804 an act
(first promulgated in 1794) was revived, which prohibited the
introduction of any more slaves into the United States. A long
struggle had taken place in Great Britain (many of the Liverpool and
Bristol merchants being deeply interested in the slave trade)
before, in 1807, an act of Parliament was passed (intensified in
1811) abolishing the slave trade so far as British subjects were
concerned. At the Congress of Vienna (1814) France agreed in
principle that the slave trade should be done away with, and even
signed a treaty providing that whilst the slave trade continued with
French colonies it should only be carried on by French subjects.
During Napoleon’s hundred days of rule in 1815 a decree was issued
ending the slave trade for good and all. In the same year Portugal
subjected the slave trade to certain restrictions, but did not
finally abolish it till 1830. In 1836 Britain paid Portugal the sum
of £300,000 in order to get the export of slaves from any Portuguese
possession prohibited. Great Britain had also in 1820 paid £400,000
to Spain to purchase a promise from the Spaniards that they would
cease to buy negroes in Africa. Both contracts, though ostensibly
agreed to by the Governments concerned, were frequently violated by
individuals. In 1814 and 1815 the Dutch and Swedes respectively
prohibited the slave trade to their subjects, and a few years later
most of the Spanish South American states abolished the slave trade
on attaining their independence. Slavery was abolished as a legal
condition in all parts of the British dominions by 1840; in Jamaica
and the West Indies in 1833, in South Africa 1834-1840, and in India
about the same time[103]. Besides the sums mentioned which Britain
paid to Spain and Portugal to induce them to give up the traffic in
slaves, she distributed twenty millions of pounds amongst slave
owners of the West Indies as compensation for the abolition of
slavery, and £1,250,000 to those who possessed slaves in Cape Colony
when they were emancipated. Add to these sums the millions of money
she has spent in founding Sierra Leone as a slave settlement, in
helping Liberia[104] (from the same motive), in patrolling the East
and West coasts of Africa and the Persian Gulf, and it will be
admitted that we have here a rare case of a nation doing penance for
its sins, and making that real reparation which is evidenced by a
monetary sacrifice.
By 1848 the French had abolished slavery in all their possessions.
The Dutch did not do so till 1863; in which year also the status of
slavery ceased in the United States. Slavery lingered in some of the
South American states until 1840-5. In the Portuguese African
possessions slavery was abolished in 1878 and in Spanish Cuba and
Porto Rico in 1886; while Brazil remained a slave-holding country
until 1888, the final and somewhat abrupt abolition of slavery being
one of the causes which led to the downfall of the Emperor. However,
long after British or French possessions had ceased to offer
inducements to the slave trader to run illegal cargoes, there were
sufficient countries in the Western Hemisphere to provide an
excellent market for negroes, while the Muhammadan world in the East
continued to make greater demands than ever on the Central African
slave preserves[105].
To counteract the attempts to evade the law a powerful British
squadron swept the West coast of Africa; but in spite of British
efforts to intercept slave-trading vessels, these latter continued
to run cargoes across to the United States, Cuba and Brazil, and it
was not possible for this traffic to be wholly vanquished until the
abolition of slavery in those countries closed the last markets to
the slave trader. A most interesting light is thrown on the vastness
of the area covered by these slave-trading operations in a work by
the Rev. S. W. Koelle (a missionary of the Church Missionary
Society) published in 1854, entitled “Polyglotta Africana.” Mr
Koelle established himself at Sierra Leone for some years and busied
himself in collecting from the slaves who were landed there from
British cruisers vocabularies of the languages they spoke in their
own homes. In this way he took down over 200 languages, which
represented most of the tongues of the West coast of Africa, of the
upper Niger, of Senegal, of Lake Chad, the South-west African coast
as far as Benguela, Nyasaland, the Zambezi delta and the South-east
coast of Africa, and even Wadai.
When, at the close of the 18th century, British philanthropists were
desirous of repatriating loyalist negroes in North America who
wished to return to Africa, the Sierra Leone Company was started,
which purchased from native chiefs the nucleus of the present colony
of Sierra Leone. Here, for three-quarters of a century, British
cruisers landed and set free the slaves that were captured off the
West coast of Africa. Zanzibar, on the other side of the continent,
became about twenty years ago the eastern analogue of Sierra Leone.
Since the British occupation of Egypt, slavery has practically
ceased to exist in that country; and owing to the French occupation
of Algeria and Tunis, and the influence brought to bear by Britain
on Turkey in regard to Tripoli, there is not much traffic in slaves
across the Sahara Desert to those countries; though anybody visiting
the south of Tunis will be surprised at the large number of negroes
in all the villages, showing that quite recently constant supplies
must have been received from Bornu and the Hausa states. The
devastating slave raids of the Matebele Zulus have been abolished by
the British South Africa Company; and similar raids of the Angoni
have been put an end to by the British and German Governments in
East and Central Africa.
The Arabs of Zanzibar had acquired an evil fame for their gigantic
slave raids in East-central Africa. Great Britain, who had assisted
to separate Zanzibar from Maskat as an independent state in 1862,
began to concern herself a few years later with the slave trade
which flourished in those dominions. By 1873 the Sultan of Zanzibar
had, after considerable pressure, been induced to make the slave
trade illegal in his Sultanate, though it continued to flourish in
an illegal manner until the administration of his territories by the
British and Germans.
Arabs from ’Oman in South-west Arabia and from Zanzibar pushed ever
farther and farther into Central Africa from the East coast until
they reached the Upper Congo, where they established themselves as
sultans amongst the negroes, and enslaved millions. Here and there
they Muhammadanized a tribe like the Wa-yao, Manyema, or
Wa-nyamwezi, whom they provided with muskets and made worse slave
raiders than themselves. These slave raids in the districts of Lakes
Nyasa and Tanganyika, revealed to the world by Livingstone, greatly
concentrated the attention of Great Britain on these regions; and
one of the intentions of the British Government in establishing a
protectorate in South-central Africa was the abolition of the slave
trade, which was brought about in 1896, after six years’ campaigns
with a small force of Indian soldiers[106], and the placing of two
gunboats on Lake Nyasa. At the same time the Belgian officers of the
Congo State had attacked and broken up the Arabs, the principal
slave-hunters amongst whom were slain or expelled from the Congo.
The Germans under the brilliant Major von Wissmann hanged several
Arab slave-raiders in East-central Africa, and had completely
abolished the traffic of the others. The slave-raiding states of
Dahomé and Ashanti, of the Mandingo conqueror Samori, and of the
Fula and Nupe Sultans and Vicegerents in Eastern Nigeria had been
conquered by France or Britain between 1893 and 1903. Finally
between 1904 and 1911, France conquered and occupied Wadai, the most
powerful Muhammadan state of the Central Sudan and thus put an end
to the slave-raiding of the Maba power which was fast depopulating
the heart of Africa; while this action was fortified by the Italian
occupation of Tripoli and Cyrenaica (1911). So long as any
Muhammadan power held under its direct and uncontrolled sway any
part of the African coast, there was bound to be slave-raiding and
slave-trading in the interior.
In short, though slavery still exists, avowed or disguised, in many
parts of Africa, the slave trade is almost at an end, and slave
raids are confined to such parts of Nigeria, S.W. Congoland and
Abyssinian Galaland as are not under complete European control.
Abominable as the slave trade has been in filling Tropical Africa
with incessant warfare and rapine, it has added much to our
knowledge of that continent, and has furnished the excuse or cause
of European intervention in many cases, resulting sometimes in a
vastly improved condition of the natives when European rule has
taken the place of that of Negro or Arab sultans. Its ravages will
soon be repaired by a few decades of peace and security during which
this prolific, unextinguishable negro race will rapidly increase its
numbers. Yet about the African slave trade, as with most other
instinctive human procedure, and the movements of one race against
another, there is an underlying sense of justice. The White and
Yellow peoples have been the unconscious agents of the Power behind
Nature in punishing the negro for his lazy backwardness. In this
world Natural Law ordains that all mankind must work to a reasonable
extent, must wrest from its environment sustenance for body and
mind, and a bit over to start the children from a higher level than
the parents. The races that will not work persistently and doggedly
are trampled on, and in time displaced, by those who do. Let the
Negro take this to heart; let him devote his fine muscular
development in the first place to the setting of his own rank,
untidy continent in order. If he will _not_ work of his own free
will, now that freedom of action is temporarily restored to him; if
he will not till and manure and drain and irrigate the soil of his
country in a steady, laborious way as do the Oriental and the
European; if he will not apply himself zealously under European
tuition to the development of the vast resources of Tropical Africa,
where hitherto he has in many of his tribes led a wasteful
unproductive life; then force of circumstances, the pressure of
eager, hungry, impatient, outside humanity, the converging energies
of Europe and Asia will once more relegate the Negro to a servitude
which will be the alternative—in the continued struggle for
existence—to extinction. The Negro in some parts of Africa has been
given back his freedom that he may use it with a man’s sense of
responsibility for the waste of time and opportunities. In not a few
European “colonies” or protectorates in Africa the over-ruling white
man, or more often the irresponsible trader, planter, prospector and
labour recruiter, stills looks upon the Negro race as a people
doomed to perpetual serfage. But this mental outlook is fast being
modified—under British influence, mainly—into an honest appreciation
of native rights to land and produce.
An episode in the history of African colonization which may be most
fitly mentioned here, in relation to the effects of the slave trade
on West Africa, is the foundation of the negro Republic of Liberia
by private agencies in the United States.
When the Napoleonic wars were over and the great western expansion
of the United States was beginning, the question—not yet wholly
solved—arose: what was to be done with the Negro or Mulatto as
citizen, as a free man with every right to a vote? There were
already many manumitted negroes in North America and in the West
Indies, and their position in the first half of the 19th century was
an indeterminate one. As it commenced to be irksome, from the social
and ethical problems it involved, an attempt was made (1816-20) by
certain benevolent and political societies to solve it by deporting
all discontented free negroes and negroids back to Africa, where
they might make a new home for themselves and even enjoy the
privileged position that the one-eyed man occupies amongst the
blind. Great Britain, as we have already seen, had much the same
problem to face at an earlier date and answered it by the foundation
of Sierra Leone. At first it seemed simplest for the various
missionary and philanthropic societies to dump their free negroes on
the coast of Sierra Leone (in 1820); but the Governor of that colony
seems to have received the proposal rather coldly. The fact was that
at Sierra Leone (almost a failure from the “repatriation” point of
view) we were beginning to find that it is scarcely easier to plant
a Black colony in any part of inhabited Africa than to found a White
one; you have to displace some other people, and such indigenes, if
asked to choose, would rather make way for an intrusive white
element than a band of foreign negroes. And when such negroes or
negroids come from America or Asia they resist the African climate,
or rather its germ diseases, not much better than Europeans.
Probably the Sierra Leone Government had begun by 1820 to think more
of the interests of the really indigenous, native tribes of that
“colony,” than of the woes and welfare of American ex-slaves.
Being thus rebuffed, the promoters of the expatriation of American
free negroes made a hasty compact with the chiefs of the Dē tribe at
Cape Mesurado, on the Grain Coast, just beyond the Sierra Leone
influence; and in 1821 sent out a large batch of negro and mulatto
colonists under the tutelage of American white men. The white men
all died of fever or abandoned the enterprise in severe ill-health;
but amongst the future colonists was a courageous negro, Elijah
Johnson, who by his indomitable courage and resourcefulness kept the
infant colony from perishing at the hands of the natives, who had
not really understood the transaction by which they were supposed to
have sold for a few pounds’ worth of trade goods a considerable
tract of coast land. In 1823 however there came out a white man of
high character and great abilities, the Rev. Jehudi Ashmun; and he
it was who practically founded “Liberia” (as the new settlements
were called by the Rev. Robert Gurley of the American Colonization
Society, in 1824).
The town which American negroes built on Cape Mesurado was named
“Monrovia,” after the President of the United States who formulated
the “Monroe” doctrine. Other settlements were made on Cape Mount
(Robertsport), at Cape Palmas (Maryland), at Sinô (Greenville), and
at Grand Basa. In course of time these grew into two separate
republics, “Liberia” and “Maryland.” The existence of the former as
a sovereign and independent State was first recognized by Great
Britain in 1847; indeed the British Government had not only been
very benevolent all through to the struggling Liberian communities,
and several times come to their assistance when they were attacked
by native forces, but had urged on the American negroes the
advisability of their forming a State that European Powers could
recognize as a valid government on the Grain Coast. Britain was the
first Power to recognize Liberia as a sovereign State. The first
President of Liberia, an octoroon American named Joseph Jenkins
Roberts, went to England in 1847, was very kindly received by Queen
Victoria, and made a treaty with Lord Palmerston and the Colonial
Office. He afterwards visited the principal countries of western
Europe. In 1857 Maryland was united with Liberia; and this negro
republic then (in the eyes of Europe) ruled the West African coast
from near Sherbro on the west to the river San Pedro on the
east—about 400 miles, an extent of littoral since reduced by about
90 miles.
Yet this State has not so far been a success. American immigration
on any large scale ceased with the outbreak of the American Civil
War and the emancipation of American slaves. The natives of the Kru
coast and of the Muhammadan interior spurned any idea of being
governed or taxed by foreign Europeanized negroes; and the
Americo-Liberians lacked either the courage or the monetary means to
effect a conquest of the regions outside the portions of the coast
belt on which they had built their towns and established their
plantations. As the more vigorous among the American negroes and
mulattoes, who had started the settlement, died out, the younger
generation failed to bring a similar degree of energy into the
development of their native country. All had their faces far too
much turned towards either America or England. English, of course,
was and remained the official language of Liberia, its adoption
being facilitated by the close connection between the Kru population
and British West Coast trade (many Krumen also served, and serve
still, in the British Navy); the constitution of the Republic was
closely, too closely, modelled on that of the United States; very
little interest was taken in the languages, history, manners and
customs of the million and a half of Liberian aborigines, or in the
wonderful native flora and fauna[107]. With the exception of the
journeys of Benjamin Anderson in the sixties of the last century,
there arose no Liberian explorer of any note who revealed anything
about the geography or natural history of the hinterland. This
indeed remained (geographically) a closed book down to 1903, when a
series of explorations by British, French, Swiss, German and Dutch
explorers at last brought to light by 1910 the main features of
Liberian geography and ethnology. British and German traders and
pioneers (not Americo-Liberians) alone discovered and worked the
gold and diamonds of western Liberia and the rubber forests of the
centre and east.
Meantime, from the beginning of the seventies onwards Liberia got
into financial difficulties. Attempts to open up the interior were
costly in a country of dense forests and unnavigable rivers. A loan
was contracted in England in 1871, the proceeds of which were
vaguely squandered without results. Another loan in 1906 enabled the
Liberian Government to pay off some of its German, Dutch and British
creditors; but, although this loan brought about the installation of
a British official as head of the Liberian customs, and consequently
a vast improvement in the revenue, the disorder in the country’s
finances continued. France took occasion to press for a settlement
of the inland frontier on terms not favourable to Liberia, though as
favourable perhaps as the circumstances warranted. Great Britain had
greater vested interests in the country than any other foreign
nation, but forbore to press them out of regard for American
feelings and a wish not to seem to impinge too much on the French
sphere. Germany had trading interests in the country scarcely
inferior to those of Great Britain, and but for the American factor
would probably have pressed for a German protectorate, an
intervention which might have been displeasing to Britain and
France, the two _limitrophe_ Powers. In these circumstances the
Liberians were encouraged to appeal to their mother-country, the
United States; and, after considerable deliberation, an American
proposal was made for taking over the control of Liberian finances
and a general supervision of Liberian affairs on somewhat the same
lines as have been followed by American intervention in Santo
Domingo. This was accomplished in the year 1912. What the results
will be it is difficult to say.
But for international jealousies, the preferable solution of the
Liberian problem would have been fusion with the adjoining colony of
Sierra Leone, the coast settlements of which had an origin very
similar to that of Liberia, while the use of the English language,
laws, forms of Christianity, were common to both. Not a few among
the Sierra Leone citizens have attained local eminence in
administrative capacities; one or two even have become
“world-citizens”; and several have received marks of distinction
from British sovereigns. Liberia has produced her noteworthy
personalities, men like Dr Edward Wilmot Blyden (a great writer on
Africa), and Arthur Barclay, President of Liberia from 1904 to 1911;
but they have been men of a European culture and class of mind, and
have contributed little to the solution of African problems.
-----
Footnote 99:
Sudan means in Arabic “Black men” or the “Land of the Blacks.”
Footnote 100:
As for example, Janjira in Konkan, which has an area of 325 sq.
m., and Jafarabad in Kathiawar, 42 sq. m. in extent.
Footnote 101:
Three hundred negro porters and soldiers accompanied Cortes on his
march to Mexico in 1519; negroes carried the loads of Balboa when
he discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, and accompanied Hernandez
to Peru in 1530. Negro workmen assisted the Spaniards to found the
city of St Augustine in Florida in 1565; and negroes, rising high
in the Spanish service, in the first half of the 16th century
explored for Spain the lands of New Mexico and Arizona.
Footnote 102:
For particulars on this subject consult my book on the _Negro in
the New World_ (1910).
Footnote 103:
Natives of British India, however, continued to hold slaves on the
East coast of Africa until it was made a criminal offence in 1873.
Footnote 104:
Liberia commenced with an attempt made by philanthropic Americans
(the American Colonization Society) in 1820 to repatriate free
negroes from the United States. It was formally recognized as an
independent state by the British Government in 1847 and
occasionally assisted to maintain its authority by British war
vessels. Liberia did not enter into diplomatic relations with the
United States till 1862.
Footnote 105:
Slavery was abolished in the Turkish dominions after the Crimean
War, but the slave trade exists still to some degree on account of
the harims, which demand a supply of eunuchs. Slavery of a mild
kind also continues in force in the states of Arabia, in Persia,
and in Morocco.
Footnote 106:
Sikhs from the Indian Army. These campaigns have been described in
the present writer’s work on _British Central Africa_; and by Mr
Alfred Swann in _Fighting the Slave-Hunters in Central Africa_.
Footnote 107:
Though Liberia is quite a small country—some 40,000 square
miles—and is not clearly demarcated by natural features from the
surrounding lands of the West African coast, it is found to
possess a peculiar mammalia of great interest and a rich flora
which also has its regional peculiarities. Amongst singular
Liberian mammals may be noted the pigmy Hippopotamus, the Zebra
antelope and Jentinck’s duiker.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, I
(_West Coast, Morocco, North-Central_.)
From very early days in the history of the Portuguese monarchy close
and friendly relations had been established between England and
Portugal. A large body of English (together with German and Flemish)
troops on their way out to the Crusades had assisted the first king
of Portugal to capture Lisbon from the Moors in the 12th century. A
later king of Portugal married a daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of
Lancaster; and his sons, among them the great Prince Henry the
Navigator, were half English in blood. These friendly relations were
no doubt partly to be accounted for by the French origin of both
ruling houses.
Therefore, when the effect of Portuguese discoveries in West Africa
began to be felt in England by the extension of the spice trade
(hitherto a monopoly of Venice), and the dawning idea that negro
slaves from Africa would be an excellent commodity for American
plantations, British seamen-adventurers were prompt to follow in the
path of the Portuguese. The trade in spices seems to have been the
first inducement, more powerful than gold or slaves. Englishmen had
previously shipped on board Portuguese vessels before they ventured
to sail to West Africa in craft of their own. Quite early in the
16th century several Englishmen thus found their way to Benin in
company with the Portuguese. But their proceedings were looked upon
with suspicion, and friendly relations between the two nationalities
soon cooled under the influence of rivalry in what the Portuguese
would have liked to make their monopoly of West African trade. At
the end of the reign of Edward VI (1553), and during that of Mary
(1554-5), English ships ventured to cruise to the Gambia, the Grain
Coast, and even the Gold Coast and Benin river, bringing back gold,
ivory, Guinea pepper[108] and “grains of Paradise[109]” for spice
making. In 1562-4-7 Captain (Sir) John Hawkins visited the West
African coast with a ship of his own, and later one or more ships of
Queen Elizabeth. He piratically attacked the Portuguese ships and
robbed them of their negro slaves; he bought and kidnapped slaves on
his own account and conveyed them to the West Indies. But actual
trading ventures of a peaceful or honest nature were rendered very
hazardous by the hostility of the Portuguese. When, however, in the
latter part of the 16th century, Portugal was absorbed by Spain and
Spain went to war with England, Queen Elizabeth had no hesitation in
granting charters to two companies of merchant adventurers to trade
with the West coast of Africa. In 1585 the first charter was granted
to a body of London adventurers for the carrying on of commerce with
Morocco and the Barbary States; in 1588 another charter was given to
Devonshire merchants, who had been for some time previously
endeavouring to trade on the Senegambia coast. Thus in 1588 were
laid the foundations of the British settlement of the Gambia. This
river, which was at first, and probably more accurately, known as
the “Gambra,” is remarkable among African rivers in that it has a
mouth with a deep bar, which can be crossed by big ships at any time
of the tide. Next to the Congo, it is probably the safest river to
enter on all the West African coast; and as its navigability extends
for over 200 miles into the interior of Senegambia, it is a very
valuable means of access to the heart of the fertile regions of
North-west Africa. When the British arrived on the Gambia, and for
two centuries afterwards, the banks of the river were thickly
studded with Portuguese trading settlements. The Portuguese,
however, never seem to have raised any difficulties about its
passing under British control. It was the French from Senegal who
made the most determined attempts to oust the British from the
Gambia.
In 1592 Queen Elizabeth chartered a further association for trading
on the coast between the Gambia and Sierra Leone. As regards the
subsequent history of the Gambia, it may be mentioned that the first
consolidated company formed to work the trade and administer the
British settlements was incorporated in 1618, but it was not
successful and the association following it also failed[110]. In
1664 a fort, subsequently called Fort James, was built on the island
of St Mary, off the south bank of the mouth of the Gambia. This was
the nucleus of the present capital of Bathurst, named a century and
a half afterwards from the same Colonial Secretary whose name was
given to the Australian town. In the 17th century the French made
determined attacks on the Gambia, and in 1696 succeeded in
destroying the British settlement, which however was reoccupied and
restored four or five years later. In spite of the dissipation of
the rumours of gold in the country of the Upper Gambia (the result
of the mission of enquiry conducted in 1723 by Captain Bartholomew
Stibbs), the Gambia settlement became rich and prosperous in the
18th century owing to the slave trade. The Gambia River became the
starting place of the first serious British explorations in Western
Africa and Nigeria. In 1783 the intermittent struggle with France
was concluded by the French recognition of exclusive British trading
rights on the Gambia, with the exception of the French factory at
Albreda, in return for a similar concession to themselves of the
commercial monopoly of the river Senegal; but as a set-off against
the French factory on the Gambia the British retained the exclusive
right to trade with the Moors of Portendik (near Cape Blanco) for
gum. In 1857 these two rights were exchanged. During the Napoleonic
wars England seized the French settlements at the mouth of the river
Senegal, and British merchants went thither to trade. Upon the
surrender of Senegal to France in 1817 these British merchants left
the Senegal and founded the town of Bathurst, now the capital of the
Gambia colony. In 1807, the tiny Gambia colony, now much
impoverished by the abolition of the slave trade, had been subjected
to the newly-founded government of Sierra Leone. In 1843, its
prosperity having somewhat revived owing to the growing trade in
ground-nuts, and its area having been increased by various additions
of territory along the banks of the river, it was rendered
independent of Sierra Leone; but again in 1866 was attached to that
colony until once more it was given a separate administration in
1888. In the early seventies attempts had been made to assert
British claims to the coast separating the Gambia and Sierra Leone,
where Portuguese rule had lapsed; but Portugal having succeeded in
asserting her claims (p. 98), the project was dropped, and during
the period of discouragement which followed France was allowed to
extend her sway over all the country on either side of the lower
Gambia. Several times during the 19th century the project was mooted
of exchanging the Gambia with France, first for her possessions on
the Gaboon coast, and later on for Porto Novo, and Grand Bassam. The
first project, which would have ultimately given us French Congo,
was opposed and defeated by the British merchants on the Gambia; and
the second, which would have eventually led to a continuous British
coast line from Sierra Leone to the Niger, was upset by the
opposition of Marseilles trading houses at Porto Novo. In 1891 the
best was made of a bad position, and a delimitation agreement was
come to with France, which at any rate secured to Great Britain both
banks of the river Gambia to the limits of its seaward navigability.
After this settlement with the French there was a certain amount of
friction amongst the Muhammadan (Mandingo and Fula) natives due to
interference with their slave-raiding. A chief named Fodi Kabba had
to be expelled for this reason from British territory. Two years
afterwards another slave-raider, Fodi Silah, inflicted severe losses
on a punitive expedition sent against him, but eventually was driven
into French territory where he died. Meantime Fodi Kabba, having
fixed his residence in French Senegambia at Medina, the celebrated
town in Wuli associated with Mungo Park, directed thence an
insurgent movement against the British which resulted in the death
of two British officials. But the French forces cooperated in 1901
with those of Great Britain; Medina was captured and occupied; and
Fodi Kabba was killed. Since then the Gambia region—once a great
recruiting ground for slaves—has been peaceful and prosperous. A hut
tax has increased its revenues since 1894. In 1906 domestic slavery
was extinguished by an ordinance, the slave trade having been
extirpated by joint British and French occupation of the trade
routes a few years previously.
The words “Sierra Leone” are a kind of compromise between Spanish
and Portuguese due to the dull hearing and careless spelling of
foreign names so characteristic of the English until the present
generation. Projecting into the sea on this part of the coast (a
coast otherwise flat and swampy) is a mountainous peninsula with
bold hills facing the sea front. If these mountains are not
sufficiently high[111] to be the “Theion Oχema” of the Greek
translators of Hanno’s journal, they were at any rate sufficiently
striking to make an impression on the early Portuguese explorers,
who dubbed them “Serra Leoa” or the “Lion-like Mountain Range”
because the reverberating thunder from the frequent storms booms and
echoes between these forested peaks and valleys exactly like the
roar of many lions. (The Spanish form would be Sierra Leona, and it
was apparently the Spanish name that the English navigators
adopted.) The British first frequented this coast in 1562 when (Sir)
John Hawkins came to the Sierra Leone (Rokel) river to get slaves.
From that time onwards British ships called at Sierra Leone whenever
they could elude the warships of the angry Portuguese. A British
trading station was established here in the latter part of the 17th
century and did not wholly disappear (though usually tenanted as the
slave depôt of some English-speaking mulatto) till it was merged in
the definite occupation of 1787. Towards the end of the 18th century
the fine harbour—the best harbour on the West coast of
Africa—attracted the attention of Dr Henry Smeathman; and inspired
by his writings the British Government obtained the cession of the
Sierra Leone peninsula in 1788. Four years later a charter was
granted and the territory was transferred to a philanthropic
association known as the “St George’s Bay Company,” which decided to
establish in that part of West Africa a settlement for freed negro
slaves from the West Indies and Canada.
Upon the granting of the charter the name was changed to the “Sierra
Leone Company.” To Sierra Leone had been brought in 1787 loyal free
negroes, who had fought on the British side during the American War
of Independence, and were therefore given their liberty, but whom it
was thought better to deport to a climate more suitable to Africans
than that of Nova Scotia, where they were at first disbanded. Then
were sent out about 400 masterless negroes picked up in England
after the judicial decision obtained by Granville Sharp as to the
illegality of slavery in England. These were known as the
“Granvilles.” To them were added later the “Maroons[112]”—Jamaica
negroes mixed in a slight degree with the blood of the extinct West
Indian natives, who had taken to the bush in Jamaica, and were
making themselves troublesome. Further, as soon as Sierra Leone was
adopted as the dumping ground of the slaves set free from the
captured slave-trading ships, there were added to these ex-slaves of
America and England the heterogeneous sweepings of West, Central,
and South-east Africa, generally known as “Willyfoss Niggers,”
because their freedom was originally due to the exertions of Mr
Wilberforce. Then of course there were the original Timne, Bullom,
Mendi, and Susu inhabitants; so that altogether the negro population
of modern Sierra Leone is an extraordinarily mixed stock, to which a
large colony of Kruboys from the Liberian coast has since been
added.
The philanthropic company which started this settlement in 1787 had
some quaint notions in its inception. Sixty London prostitutes were
sent out to Sierra Leone to marry with the negroes and become honest
women, while numbers of English, Dutch, and Swedes were invited to
go there as free settlers, under the belief that West Africa was as
suited for European colonization as Cape Colony. The result was of
course that nearly all these European immigrants died a few years
after their arrival, though not before they had left their
impression upon the strangely mixed population of Sierra Leone. The
whole settlement had to be begun over again in 1791.
In 1807 the rule of the colony was transferred to the Crown; and in
1821 Sierra Leone was for the first time joined with the Gold Coast
and the Gambia into the “Colony of the West African Settlements.” In
1843 the Gambia was detached, in 1866 joined again; and in 1874 the
Gold Coast and Lagos were separated from the supreme control of
Sierra Leone. Finally in 1888, the Gambia having been made a
separate administration, Sierra Leone became an isolated colony.
Between 1862 and 1864 its territory was considerably extended along
the coast; and a treaty of delimitation with France in 1894, though
it cut off the access of Sierra Leone to the Niger, still extended
the influence of the colony a considerable distance inland. During
the eighties of the 19th century there were considerable
difficulties with turbulent tribes, especially the ‘Yonnis,’ who
were subdued by an expedition under Sir Francis de Winton. In 1898
an uprising of the natives of the interior in opposition to the
suppression of the slave trade and the levying of a hut tax
seriously disturbed the colony, and led to some months’ obstinate
bush fighting mainly against the Timne, Kisi, and Mendi peoples, and
a massacre of American missionaries. But this little war produced
excellent results. The turbulent, slave-trading, and—in the
south-east—fetish-governed, cannibalistic natives were for the first
time effectively conquered by the white man. A resettlement of the
territory of 30,000 square miles took place. The old colonial
nucleus of Sierra Leone was limited to the peninsula of that name
and the coast strip. All the interior was declared a protectorate
and divided into districts wherein the rule of the native chiefs was
maintained or revived, under the control of British resident
commissioners. The hut tax was firmly instituted, but the natives’
exclusive rights to the land were carefully respected. Finally a
railway was built for some 230 miles across the south-east half of
the Protectorate to the Liberian frontier. Other railways or
tramways are being constructed to the French frontier on the north.
A short but very important mountain railway now carries passengers
to the healthy summit of the beautiful mountain range above the hot
and unhealthy capital (Freetown). Here the European residents can
reside, can pass the night in a comparatively cool climate. Sierra
Leone has ceased to be the white man’s grave. From many points of
view it has become the model West African colony.
Although British traders in gold and in slaves came to the Gold
Coast in the wake of the Portuguese in the 16th century, they
established no form of administration there until 1672, when Charles
II gave a charter to the Royal African Company and the monopoly of
trade between Morocco and Cape Colony. The Royal African Company
built forts at various places on the Gold Coast, and at Whyda[113]
on the coast of Dahomé. It was succeeded in 1750 by the African
Company of merchants, a company subsidized by the Government, which
continued to exist until 1821, at which date the British forts on
the Gold Coast were placed under the Sierra Leone government of the
West African settlements, and the fort at Whyda was abandoned. In
1807, the powerful Ashanti tribe thrust itself anew on the attention
of European nations (already acquainted with it as a great provider
of slaves and a diligent worker of the alluvial gold deposits) by
forcing its way to the coast, and attacking and destroying the
British fort of Anamabu and the Dutch fort of Kormantyn. They even
besieged Cape Coast Castle. In 1817 a mission, eventually under the
charge of Thomas Edward Bowdich, was sent to Ashanti to bring about
more friendly relations with the King of Kumasi. It succeeded, but
the terms of the treaty then made were not carried into effect by
the British Government, out of pity for the harassed Fanti coast
tribe; consequently the relations between Cape Coast Castle (then
the head-quarters of British administration in the Gold Coast) and
Ashanti once more became strained[114]. In 1824, while on a tour of
inspection, the Governor of Sierra Leone, Sir Charles Macarthy,
landed at Cape Coast Castle, and unfortunately embarked on a war
with the Ashanti without properly organized forces. He was defeated
and killed. The Imperial Government carried on the war for three
years, finally inflicting a defeat on the Ashanti near Accra, which
led three years later to a peace. But this lengthy campaign had
disgusted the Imperial Government with rule on the Gold Coast, and
as soon as peace was concluded with the Ashanti they handed over
these settlements to a committee of London merchants. This committee
selected and sent out an excellent man as Governor—Mr Charles
Maclean. This administrator contrived with a yearly subsidy of £4000
and a force of 100 police to extend British influence over an area
nearly coincident with the present Gold Coast Colony. But in 1843
the rule of the merchants was replaced once more by that of the
Crown, though Maclean was taken into the service of the new Imperial
administration.
The Danes and Swedes on account of the slave trade had established
forts on the Gold Coast in the 17th and 18th centuries,
respectively, to supply the West Indian islands with slaves. The
Swedes soon abandoned their trading forts, but Denmark still
retained four down to the middle of the 19th century, all of which
she then sold to England in 1850 for £10,000. For the same modest
payment Denmark transferred to England the protectorate over a
considerable area to the east of the Gold Coast Colony, along the
river Volta. The Dutch during the 17th and 18th centuries had
planted forts on the Gold Coast in rivalry with the English, and in
most cases alongside of them. After the abolition of the slave trade
Holland lost interest in her West African possessions. Their
existence was very awkward to the English, as it prevented the
collection of customs duties. In 1868 a partition of the coast was
negotiated between England and Holland, the Dutch taking over all
the forts west of a certain line, and the English those which lay to
the east of this boundary. In this manner the English acquired at
last the whole of the town of Accra, which is now the capital of the
Gold Coast. In 1871-2 the Dutch agreed to abandon to the English all
their remaining possessions on the Gold Coast in return for the
cession of certain British claims over Sumatra. Unfortunately, the
transfer of territory from the Dutch entailed a quarrel with the
powerful negro kingdom of Ashanti, situated behind the coast tribes
of this region but striving always to reach the sea. The Ashanti
kingdom was rather a confederacy of small negro states, with the
King of Kumasi at its head, than a homogeneous monarchy. In 1872
this paramount King of Kumasi despatched an army of 40,000 men to
invade the British Protectorate and assert his claim to domination
over the Fanti tribes of the colony. A large force of Fantis was to
some extent armed and organized by the British Government, but the
Ashantis defeated them twice with great slaughter, and then attacked
the British fort of Elmina, where the Ashanti army sustained such a
serious repulse that it avoided any further attacks on British
fortified settlements. A year afterwards, Sir John Glover (as he
subsequently became) marched with Hausa levies to attack the Ashanti
from the east, while Sir Garnet Wolseley[115], arriving in the
winter of 1873 with a strong expedition composed of British
soldiers, contingents of the West Indian regiments, British seamen,
and marines, drove the enemy back into their country, reached the
capital, Kumasi, and captured and burned that place. A somewhat
dubious peace was arrived at, the king never afterwards fulfilling
the terms of the treaty, which he was supposed to have signed with a
pencil cross; and for the following twenty-one years British
relations with Ashanti (which was also devastated by civil war) were
unsatisfactory. At last, in 1895, another strong expedition marched
on the capital without firing a shot, and took the king prisoner.
But the Ashanti people bided their time; and when, in 1900, the
British forces seemed fully occupied with the South African trouble,
three tribes of the Ashanti confederation (40,000 fighting men) rose
in rebellion just at the time when the Governor of the Gold Coast
and his wife were visiting Kumasi Fort. The rebellion broke out on
April 1, and the Governor and his wife remained shut up till June
23, only a slender relief of negro soldiers and British officers
arriving. On June 23 the Governor and his wife (Sir F. Hodgson and
Lady Hodgson) left Kumasi with an escort of 600 Hausa soldiers, cut
their way through the Ashanti besiegers (with the loss of two
British officers killed), and safely reached the Gold Coast Colony.
A slender garrison of 100 Hausa soldiers and three white officers
was left to defend Kumasi. Colonel (Sir) James Willcocks arriving
from Nigeria with a few hundred Yoruba and Hausa troops marched
through incredible difficulties of flooded lands, impenetrable
forest and lack of transport to the relief of Kumasi. In the course
of a few weeks he was reinforced by negro and Indian troops from
British Central Africa and a number of British officers and
non-commissioned officers, till at length he had a force of 3500
officers and men, besides the allied friendly tribes of Ashanti.
Kumasi was effectually relieved on July 15 (the garrison was too
weak to stand); and by the end of the year the whole of Ashanti had
been effectually conquered and annexed. A railway from Kumasi to
Sekondi on the coast, completed in 1903, sealed the pacification of
the country. Ashanti now forms a large province (some 23,000 square
miles) of the government of the Gold Coast. Beyond the forests of
Ashanti, to the north, is the considerable area (33,000 square
miles) known as the Northern Territories. This is separated from
Ashanti mainly by the course of the Volta and of its great tributary
the Black Volta. Unlike Ashanti, it contains no great area of dense
forest, but is a grassy park-like country, dry and even treeless in
the south-east. The negro population belongs mainly to the
Dagomba-Moshi group, and is largely Muhammadan in religion. These
northern territories were practically part of unknown Africa until
the eighties of the last century. They were revealed to us by the
journey of English, French, and educated negro explorers, and became
a British protectorate between 1892 and 1899. The principal products
are cattle and shea-butter (a vegetable oil).
The oldest possession in this region and the southernmost of the
three great provinces of this important British territory is the
Gold Coast Colony proper, which lies between Ashanti and the sea and
covers an area of 24,200 square miles. Celebrated for its alluvial
gold from prehistoric times onwards, it has of late become more
remarkable for its rock gold from reefs of quartz and auriferous
conglomerates. To work these more efficiently a railway was
constructed from Sekondi to the interior by 1908, with a branch
line. The average value of the gold exported annually since 1907 is
about one million sterling. Since the beginning of the 20th century
there has been a great development of cacao planting amongst the
natives, on their own land; and the importance of this movement and
its profitable results has quite changed the European conception of
African colonization. It is now realized that the native proprietor
works far harder on his own land if there is a market for his
produce than he does as a paid servant on a European-owned estate.
Although the Gold Coast is perhaps the most unhealthy of the British
West African possessions, it is prosperous in its finances, and has
made great progress in trade. In the last ten years the total value
of its trade has quadrupled, and stands now at £6,000,000 in
approximate yearly value.
The colony of Lagos came into existence in 1863[116]. It was
afterwards added to the government of the West African Settlements,
then attached to the Gold Coast; and finally in 1886 made an
independent colony. Lagos, as its name shows, was originally a
discovery of the Portuguese, who so named it from the large lagoon,
which until recently was a harbour of very doubtful value, even on
this harbourless coast, but is now by a vast expenditure of money
rendered safe for the exit and entrance of steamers at high tide. In
the days of the early Portuguese adventurers the modern territory of
Lagos was partly under the influence of Dahomé, partly under the
rule of Benin; and the Portuguese and subsequently the British came
there to buy slaves which native warfare rendered so abundant. In
prosecuting the crusade against the slave trade in the middle of the
last century the British Government came into contact with the king
of Lagos, who had become one of the most truculent slave traders on
the coast. This king, Kosoko, was expelled by a British naval
expedition in 1851, and his cousin was placed on the throne, after
having made a treaty with the British binding himself to put down
the slave trade. A British consul was appointed to superintend the
execution of this treaty, but neither the king who signed it nor the
son who succeeded him kept faithfully to its provisions. At length,
in 1861, the king of Lagos ceded his state to the British Government
in return for a pension of £1000 a year, which he drew until his
death twenty-four years later. Under British rule Lagos attained
remarkable prosperity, though unhappily its extremely unhealthy
climate caused great loss of life amongst the officials appointed to
administer the colony. Owing to the great commercial movement in its
port (the adaptation of which to ocean-going steamers proved very
difficult and very expensive) it was called, with some justice, the
“Liverpool of West Africa.”
At any time between the annexation of Lagos and, say, 1880, the
small strip of coast which separates Lagos from the Gold Coast might
easily have been taken under British protection, the only power with
any intervening rights being Portugal with one fort on the coast of
Dahomé; but the Home Government would never agree to this procedure
until it was too late and France and Germany had intervened.
Subsequently, until about 1898, there was growing trouble with
France owing to her extending her protection or colonization over
the little kingdom of Porto Novo, the large negro state of Dahomé,
and the adjoining country of Borgu. These disputes as to
delimitation of the frontier were settled in 1889 as far north as
the 9th parallel. Then ensued in 1897 and 1898 a strenuous attempt
on the part of the French to cut across the Lagos hinterland up to
the Niger, but this difference was again happily solved by the
Convention signed between the two countries in the summer of 1898.
Beyond Lagos, and indeed connected with it by half choked-up creeks,
begins the great delta of the Niger, which extends along an elbow of
the coast about 200 miles to the eastward, and ends—so far as direct
connection with the Niger is concerned—at the mouth of the river
Kwo-ibo, though there are probably creeks inside the coast-line
which would carry on the connection of the delta to the Old Calabar
estuary. These innumerable branches of the Niger stream were taken
to be independent rivers (which indeed they are to some extent,
receiving as they do many streams rising independently of the main
Niger) until well into the present century, when it was at last made
clear that they constituted the outlets of the third greatest river
of Africa. Together with the adjoining rivers of Old Calabar and the
Cameroons, they became known as the “Oil Rivers,” because they
produced the greater part and the best quality of the palm oil sent
to the European market. The Portuguese first came here in the 17th
and 18th centuries (after falling out with the king of Benin) to
trade in slaves; and the English followed them at the end of the
18th century and displaced them altogether. Evidence of former
Portuguese interest in the Niger Delta is sufficiently shown by the
fact that some of these rivers have Portuguese names, or Portuguese
corruptions of native names. The remaining names are chiefly those
of naval officers or ships that surveyed them, or occasionally a
native designation more or less corrupted.
By the time the slave trade was rendered illegal, the wonderful
virtues of palm oil had been discovered, chiefly in connection with
its value as a lubricant for machinery (especially locomotives) and
as a material for making candles and soap. Therefore the development
of railways in Britain and other European countries, the new
cleanliness, which coincidently was preached as a British gospel,
and the spread of education and love of reading made the fortune of
the Oil Rivers and those merchants who settled there at imminent
risk of death from fever. Already in the forties of the last century
British trading interests had become so important in the Niger Delta
that a consul was appointed. The first consul, Captain John
Beecroft, was a most notable personality, as an explorer and
peacemaker. To him Great Britain owes the definite establishment of
her influence on the Cross River and at Old Calabar. The British
Government, for the purpose of putting down the slave trade, had,
with the consent of Spain, occupied during the first half of the
19th century the Spanish island of Fernando Pô; and the
administration of this island was for some time connected with the
consular post for the Bights of Biafra and Benin[117]. Afterwards,
when Spain resumed the possession of Fernando Pô, the British consul
for the Bights was also consul for the Spanish island; but little by
little his duties obliged him to reside more on the “Oil Rivers”
than on the adjoining island. With the exception of the brilliant
Richard Burton, who for four years was consul for the Bights of
Biafra and Benin, the post was usually held by a gentleman who had
been to some extent previously connected with African trade, and
whose purview was not much extended politically; but in 1880 Mr E.
H. Hewett, formerly Vice-Consul in Angola, and a man of some
distinction, was appointed to the post. He took up his residence at
Old Calabar, and his reports aroused great interest in the
Government of that period, which was disposed to accede to the
petitions of the chiefs and to take all the coast under British
protection from Lagos to the Gaboon. But the plans of the Ministry
were not fully settled until the end of 1883; and when Mr Hewett
returned to the coast with full powers he was delayed by ill-health
and still more so by the beginning of the Niger Question, and the
importance of securing a hold over the lower Niger. Consequently he
left the Cameroons region to a later visit; and the German
representative at Duala, the celebrated traveller, Dr Nachtigal,
taking advantage of this omission, suddenly concluded a treaty with
a chief at the mouth of the Cameroons estuary. The British flag was
erected over all the remaining territories in South Nigeria, the
Cross River district and the north-west Cameroons. But Germany was
determined to have a fair slice of West Africa, and the British
Government thought it wiser to deal with German aspirations
liberally. The British flag was therefore withdrawn from the
vicinity of the Cameroons river and mountain. The last patch of
Cameroons territory which was given up to Germany was the
interesting little settlement of Ambas Bay, on the flanks of the
mighty Cameroons mountain, founded in 1858 by the English Baptist
Mission when expelled from Fernando Pô. Mr Hewett annexed this
territory in 1884, and (Sir) H. H. Johnston administered it from
1885 until the time of its surrender to Germany in 1887.
The limits of the “Oil Rivers Protectorate” were then drawn at the
Rio del Rey on the east, and the boundary of Lagos Colony on the
west. The eastern boundary was subsequently extended by agreement
with Germany to the upper waters of the river Benue. This
acquisition—now known as the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria and
merged into the one great government, almost an Empire, of British
Nigeria—was at first administered by consular authority, amongst
others by the author of this book; and these consular administrators
were obliged to face a serious difficulty in the determined
opposition of certain coast chiefs to the carrying on of direct
trade with the interior. These were the “middle men,” who had for
several centuries prevented the penetration of Africa from the West
coast by Europeans, in the dread that they would lose their
lucrative commission on the products of the interior which they
retailed on the coast. Some of these chiefs were of long established
ruling families; others again had commenced life as slaves and had
risen to be wealthy merchant-kings with incomes of £10,000 to
£20,000 a year, derived from their profits on the goods from the
interior which passed through their hands. Foremost among these
obstructive individuals was Jaja, a slave from the Ibo country, who
as servant, trader and counsellor to chiefs of Bonny had risen to
such a position of wealth and influence that he had armed a large
force of fighting men and a flotilla of war canoes, and made himself
the most powerful chief in the Niger Delta. He resided on the river
Opobo, and was very jealous of his independence, only signing a
qualified treaty of protection with the British Government, from the
well-grounded fear that, if he did not do so, the French would take
his country as an access to the Niger. As Jaja at last went to the
length of forcibly opposing trade between the British merchants and
the natives of the interior, Mr H. H. Johnston, then acting consul
for the Oil Rivers, removed him to the Gold Coast to be tried before
a commissioner. As a result of the trial he was deposed and
sentenced to five years’ banishment in the West Indies. With the
exile of Jaja the principal resistance of the middle-men was broken,
though at Benin and behind Old Calabar similar action had to be
taken to secure free trade.
In 1893, under Sir Claude Macdonald, a regular administration was
established over Southern Nigeria (the Niger Coast Protectorate, as
it was called until 1906). In 1896-7 a peaceful mission to the King
of Benin in the western part of the Protectorate was attacked by the
soldiers of that chieftain and the leader (J. R. Phillips) and seven
other British officials were slain, together with many of the native
porters.
Benin had been in relations with British traders since 1553. The
Dutch traded there in the 17th and 18th centuries for slaves, but
were ousted by the French, and the French (in 1792) by the British.
In 1823, Giovanni Belzoni, the Italian Egyptologist, died near Benin
city when starting from this part of the Niger Delta to reach
Timbuktu. In 1863 (Sir) Richard Burton came to Benin as British
consul to try (in vain) to persuade the king to renounce his
devastating human sacrifices, performed once a year for the king’s
“customs” of ancestor worship. (Sir) H. H. Johnston, after making an
agreement with the king’s viceroy, Nana, on the coast, explored the
Benin river in a gun-boat, but was refused permission to proceed to
the capital. This was accorded to (Sir) H. L. Gallwey in 1892; and a
treaty was then made.
After the massacre of Mr J. R. Phillips and his companions on
January 1, 1897 (only two Englishmen escaped) a British punitive
expedition was rapidly organized by Admiral Sir Harry Rawson; and a
month afterwards the city of Benin was taken, its king was exiled,
and the worst offenders among his chiefs were executed. A second
punitive expedition ranged through the Benin country in 1899, since
when this ancient kingdom has been peaceful. The Benin expedition
revealed to us, in a far more extensive degree than had hitherto
been realized, the marvellous art which had sprung up in that
blood-guilty city, an art chiefly manifested by bronze castings in
the _cire perdue_ process. A splendid series of examples of this
work has since been exhibited at the British Museum. In all
probability this art of working brass and bronze reached the Lower
Niger and parts of the Niger Delta, such as Benin on the one hand
and Old Calabar on the other, from the central Sudan, where it was
introduced by Arab craftsmen, teachers and traders from Egypt and
Tripoli; though some writers of late have argued an even earlier
introduction of copper, bronze, and brass work emanating from Egypt
prior to the Arab conquest, and extending from east to west across
the central Sudan to the Upper Niger. In any case, this art had
taken root in Benin, where it had acquired a special and national
development. Concurrently with this had arisen an exquisite taste in
the carving of ivory, almost oriental in its grace and finish.
In 1906 the Niger Coast Protectorate which had come under the
Colonial Office in 1900, was fused with the contiguous colony of
Lagos under the name of Southern Nigeria. It had previously (1900)
united its east and west halves by acquiring the whole deltaic
course of the Niger from Idda to the sea, after the Royal Niger
Companies’ territories had been taken over by the British
Government. Several small native wars were necessary between 1900
and 1910 for the subdual of the Arõ tribe (whose cruel fetish
rites—the “long juju”—demanded constant victims) in the
north-eastern part of the delta, and the Ibo people in the north;
but the prosperity of Southern Nigeria has been notable. Its total
trade averages in the year a value of £11,000,000. A railway now
proceeds inland from Lagos to the Niger and from the Niger to Kano,
about 850 miles. In 1912, the government of Southern and Northern
Nigeria were united under a joint Governor-General.
Lagos, the delta of the Niger and the lands of the Cross river (Old
Calabar), have thus been united at last in peaceful and prosperous
development under the British flag. But strong as were the British
claims to control the lands along the main stream of the Niger, they
were vigorously contested by France in the second half of the 19th
century. The Niger had been discovered from its source to the last
rapid at the head of its seaward navigability by Mungo Park, one of
the greatest of British explorers, and by later travellers from
Sierra Leone. The rest of the exploration from Busa to the sea had
been completed by other British adventurers and officials; from the
point of view of discovery the whole Niger was British from source
to mouth. The navigation of the river from the sea to above its
confluence with the Benue was first organized in 1832 by a
Scotchman, MacGregor Laird, who has been rightly called “the father
of British trade on the Niger.” Laird between 1832 and 1859 spent
about £60,000 vainly in developing Nigerian commerce. In 1841, 1854
and 1857 the British Government despatched or supported various
expeditions to explore and make treaties; they also established a
consulate at Lokoja, where the Benue meets the Niger, but the loss
of life from the effects of the climate was so great in those days
that the British Government became discouraged. The most
distinguished of their consuls at Lokoja was Dr W. B. Baikie, who
between 1854 and 1864 established the beginnings of British
Nigeria[118]. But the consulate at Lokoja was abolished in 1868; and
in another direction no attempt whatever was made to attach to the
interior of Sierra Leone the rich countries lying beyond the sources
of the Niger. But for independent action on the part of British
traders the Niger would have become either entirely French, or in
the main a French river with a German estuary. During the eighties
the French Government of Senegal pushed forward to the Upper Niger.
Earlier still, by the influence of Gambetta, two powerful French
politico-commercial companies were formed to establish trading
houses all along the Lower Niger. In spite of much discouragement,
however, the numerous British firms that traded with the Niger had
stuck to the river; but although they were, doing a great deal of
trade their profits were reduced by excessive competition. From the
British point of view, the hour had come to strike for the Niger;
but where was the man? Captain George Goldie-Taubman[119] (a Royal
Engineers’ officer) had been left several thousand pounds’ worth of
shares in one of these small Niger Companies. Having spent some time
in Egypt, he resolved to go to the Niger (1877) and see whether his
shares were worth retaining. Like an analogous great man in South
Africa, he decided on working for amalgamation. With untiring energy
and great tact he brought about the consolidation of all the British
companies trading on the Niger. Then he bought out the French
company, discouraged as they were by Gambetta’s death, and boldly
applied to the Imperial Government for a charter, being able to show
them that no other trading firm but his own existed on the Niger.
Britain was just about to take part at that time in the Conference
of Berlin. She lost the Congo but won the eastern Niger. When the
British claim to a protectorate was acceded to in principle at the
Berlin Conference, a charter was granted to the National African
Company founded by Captain Goldie-Taubman, who changed the name of
his association to that of the Royal Niger Company. The main course
of the river Niger down to the sea was placed under the
administration of this chartered company, but the Benin district to
the west, and the Brass, Bonny, Opobo, and Old Calabar districts to
the east were, as already related, eventually organized as the Niger
Coast Protectorate under direct Imperial administration, because in
these countries the Niger Company had no predominating interests.
When Sir George Goldie’s Company had expended nearly all its
available capital in buying out the French and purchasing governing
rights from the native chiefs, a fresh obstacle had to be overcome:
German rivalry came into play. The Germans had just taken the
Cameroons but had failed to secure the Oil Rivers, on which in
1884-5 they made several attempts. Herr Flegel was sent to obtain
concessions beyond the limits of the Royal Niger Company’s immediate
jurisdiction in the Nigerian Sudan. But Flegel was forestalled in
his principal object by the explorer Joseph Thomson, who most ably
conducted a mission to the court of Fula Sultan or the Emperor of
Sokoto, and secured a treaty with that important potentate which
brought his territories under British influence. In 1890 the British
claims to a vast Niger empire were recognized by France and Germany.
But the French recognition was allowed to remain too vague in regard
to the northern, western, and eastern boundaries of British Nigeria;
thus rendering it possible for France in the ensuing eight years to
strive to cut into the British sphere from two directions, if not
three. On the north it was sought to push back the boundary of the
empire of Sokoto, so as to bring the French sphere as far as
possible to the south, though this assertion went little beyond
map-making. On the south, the Benue basin, Lieutenant Mizon made the
most persistent, and, as it would seem, unpractical attempts to
secure for France a large sphere of influence on the river Benue,
which could hardly be approached from French territory because the
German sphere would stand in the way. Finally as the delimitation in
the Anglo-French agreement of 1890 merely carried the British
boundary from Lake Chad to Say on the middle Niger, and did not
provide a western boundary, the French (though unofficially
according the British in 1890 a straight line drawn from Say due
south to the boundary between Lagos and Dahomé) gradually pushed
their acquisitions eastward from Senegambia until they had secured
all the right bank of the Middle and Lower Niger as far as Busa,
which is at the end of the Niger cataracts and at the commencement
of its navigability seawards. A British protectorate over Busa
having been announced to France in 1894, this act on the part of the
French was considered a distinct trespass on British rights and
caused considerable excitement at the time; but, as may be seen by
the 1898 convention, the French finally yielded to British claims.
They had some time before tacitly disowned the enterprise of
Lieutenant Mizon, which had been rendered the more hopeless, firstly
by the agreement between England and Germany in 1893 (which provided
for a continuous Anglo-German boundary from the Rio del Rey on the
coast to the southern shores of Lake Chad), and secondly by the
subsequent Franco-German agreement of 1894 by which a wedge of
German territory was interposed between the French claims in
Congoland and on the river Shari, and the British sphere on the
Benue; though nevertheless the Germans admitted the French to a
point on the extreme upper waters of the Benue in return for German
access to the Sanga, one of the Congo tributaries.
Besides being hampered by the conflicting ambitions of other
European powers, the Niger Company had to conduct a difficult
campaign against the Amir of Nupe. Like most great Muhammadan
empires, Sokoto consisted of a bundle of vassal states owing a
varying degree of allegiance to the dominant power. British Nigeria
then contained four important civilized negro peoples, and an
indefinite number of savage tribes who were politically of no
account whatever. These four great peoples are the _Songhai_ on the
north-west, the _Hausa_ occupying all the centre, the _Bornu_ or
Kanuri on the north-east, and the _Nupe_ on the south-west. Over
three of these (excepting the Kanuri) the Fula conquests of a
century ago had established Fula rule with its head-quarters in the
Hausa States. But the kingdom of Nupe, though ruled by a Fula
dynasty, held its allegiance to the court of Sokoto but cheaply, and
requested at the hands of the Niger Company a recognition of its
complete independence, which for political reasons the Company could
not give. This powerful kingdom, however, stood in the way of all
access to Sokoto, and in its defiance of the Niger Company raided
for slaves far down on the Lower Niger. Unless a way was to be
opened for successful foreign intrigue by allowing Nupe to assert
its independence of Sokoto and the Royal Niger Company, it was
necessary to subdue its pretensions. Therefore Sir George Goldie,
with the aid of a staff of British officers, of Hausa troops and
machine guns, inflicted a crushing defeat on the forces of Nupe
(mainly Fula), captured their capital, and successfully asserted the
sovereign rights of the Company as conferred on them by the Sultan
of Sokoto. Subsequently other turbulent and slave-raiding tribes
were dealt with, and the Company gradually rendered itself master of
a great riverain dominion in west-central Africa.
But the whole position was a false one so far as Great Britain was
concerned. The British Government at the Berlin Conference on the
affairs of Africa had pleaded everywhere the cause of Free Trade;
yet here, in the British Nigerian sphere, a chartered company had
secured the virtual monopoly of trade. Above Abo on the deltaic
Niger it was practically impossible for anyone to carry on commerce
except the natives and the Royal Niger Company. Yet the British
Government was already called upon to protest against King Leopold’s
monopoly of trade in the interior of the Congo State and the French
exclusion of British merchants from French Congo. So the step was
taken in 1899 of buying out the administrative rights of the Royal
Niger Company; and on January 1, 1900, the British Government
commenced the direct rule of “Northern Nigeria,” a territory of
approximately 256,400 square miles (as delimited by the
1890-1898-1902 conventions with France and Germany—338,000 square
miles with Southern Nigeria) which stretched from the confines of
the Sahara Desert and Lake Chad to the Upper Benue, the Central
Niger, Borgu, and the Cameroons frontier. In three and a half years’
time (1900-04) practically the whole of this enormous area had been
brought under effective British control—thanks to the courage and
indomitable energy of its first Governor, Sir Frederick Lugard (who
had won Borgu and Illórin for the Niger Company in 1897-99). Colonel
T. L. N. Morland commanded a force of 800 negro soldiers with
British officers and non-commissioned officers, which with its light
pieces of artillery and maxim guns defeated the large forces of
cavalry brought against it by the Fula princes. In a campaign which
lasted from the autumn of 1902 to the early summer of 1903 Colonel
Thomas Morland marched from Nupe to Bornu, and Bornu to Sokoto,
capturing the great Hausa city of Kano by the way. The inimical Fula
Sultan of Sokoto was deposed, and a relative raised to the throne,
who could be more depended on to work loyally with the British in
suppressing the slave-trade and in discouraging those slave raids
which were fast depopulating Northern Nigeria. It is pleasant to
record that in the course of these operations the dynasty of the
Kanemi Sheikhs of Bornu (the founder of which had been so good to
the trans-Saharan expeditions sent out from England in the first
half of the 19th century) was restored to the headship of that
country. They had been driven out of Bornu in an extraordinary
invasion of the Central Sudan by Rabah, a former slave of Zobeir
Pasha in the Egyptian Sudan. Rabah, deserting the crumbling Dervish
power of Omdurman, had marched to the west and entered Bornu in 1895
at the head of a large army. Rapidly he made himself master of the
regions between Hausaland and the Congo basin. Ultimately he and his
son, Fadl-Allah, fell in battle with the French; and the British,
when they took over Bornu as the result of Colonel Morland’s
victories, replaced as Sheikh or native ruler of that ancient
kingdom the great-grandson of Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi, the man
who so befriended Denham and Clapperton in 1822-4.
The Fula power[120] is not extinct in Nigeria. Far from it. The more
intelligent Fula princes and aristocracy now assist the British as
great chiefs, and in minor administrative posts. The trade of
Hausaland is reviving, and a considerable mining development (mainly
tin) is going on in the hilly country of Bauchi. A railway now links
up Kano with Lagos on the Gulf of Guinea, and a branch of this great
trunk line turns southward into Bauchi and may some day reach the
upper Benue; just as the Kano line will in the future, far or near,
join the French Trans-Saharan line and carry passengers from the
Central Sudan and the eastern Niger to the Mediterranean ports of
French North Africa.
An interest in the trading possibilities of the Central Sudan was
evinced by the British Government early in the 19th century, quite
apart from the Niger problem; and it was at the expense of Great
Britain that expeditions set out from Tripoli across the Sahara
Desert in 1818 and 1822 to discover Lake Chad. This move was
partly occasioned by the successes of a remarkable man,
Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi[121], who had become the virtual ruler
of Bornu and had opened up relations with Tripoli. Clapperton, a
member of the 1822-25 expedition, traversed Hausaland and reached
the court of the Fula Emperor at Sokoto. Denham nearly lost his
life in joining a Bornu army which went to attack the Fulas of
Mandara. Another expedition sent out from Tripoli in 1849 under
Consul Richardson was mainly carried through to its ultimate
purposes by one of its members, a German, Dr Heinrich Barth, who
reached Timbuktu on the west and the Upper Benue on the
south-east. So that Great Britain laid the foundations of her
future Nigerian Empire both from the direction of the
Mediterranean and by ascending the Niger and Benue from the Gulf
of Guinea.
At one time British influence was so strong with the
semi-independent Basha of Tripoli, that it seemed possible British
protection might be accorded to this Barbary state, seeing that
France in a similar manner had ignored equally valid Turkish claims
to the suzerainty of Algiers. But the uprising of Muhammad Ali in
Egypt awakened the Turks to the necessity of reinforcing their
claims to Tripoli, and British projects in that direction were
abandoned.
As regards Morocco, the Portuguese fortress of Tangier had been
ceded to England in 1662, the British having desired it as giving
them a port of call close to the Straits of Gibraltar. It was found
difficult however to maintain it against the continual attacks of
the Moors, and it was therefore surrendered to the Emperor of
Morocco in 1684. It is not impossible that it may return one day to
British keeping.
-----
Footnote 108:
Made from various aromatic seeds, such as those of true pepper
vines (_Piper subpeltatum_, _Piper guineense_), and of the fruits
of (_Xylopia æthiopica_).
Footnote 109:
The seeds of the _Aframomum_, a zingiberaceous plant, of the same
order as cannas, bananas, etc. These early English voyages are
described in detail in my book on _Liberia_ (2 vols, 1906).
Footnote 110:
It was this company that sent out in 1618 George Thompson in
charge of a trading expedition. Thompson was killed in some
quarrel with his men at Tenda on the Upper Gambia. In 1620-21, his
companions were rescued, and his explorations continued by Captain
Richard Jobson, who ascended the Gambia as far as it was navigable
from the sea, came into contact with the Fula and Mandingo
peoples, and on his return wrote an account of his experiences in
a book called _The Golden Trade_. This work—recently republished
in the unabridged form of the MS.—is one of the most vivid
pen-pictures of Negro Africa ever penned.
Footnote 111:
They rise at the highest to 2000 feet.
Footnote 112:
‘Maroon’ was a corruption of the Spanish “Cimarron,” an outlaw
frequenting the summits (Cimas) of the mountains.
Footnote 113:
Properly ‘Hwida.’
Footnote 114:
All this period in the history of the Gold Coast, including
Bowdich’s mission, is described in detail in my book, _Pioneers in
West Africa_ (Blackie, 1911).
Footnote 115:
Afterwards Viscount Wolseley.
Footnote 116:
The territory was ceded by its king to Great Britain in 1861.
Footnote 117:
The powerful kingdom of Benin—remarkable for its development
of the arts of sculpture, ivory carving, and of
bronze-casting—extended its power seaward to the mouth of the
Benin branch of the Niger Delta, and gave its name to this
great bay or bight of the low-lying coast. Biafra was a native
name given by the Portuguese to the opposite (eastern) bight
between the Niger Delta and the Cameroons.
Footnote 118:
British Nigeria and the exploration of Africa generally—its
botany, anthropology, and languages—owe much to the work of
William Balfour Baikie, a native of the Orkney Islands, who
between 1854 and 1864 served the British Government on the Niger
and succeeded the equally remarkable John Beecroft as Consul.
Baikie founded Lokoja in 1860. Lander, Laird, Beecroft, Baikie,
and the black Bishop Samuel Crowther were the principal creators
of British Nigeria.
Footnote 119:
Afterwards the Right Hon. Sir George Taubman Goldie, P.C.
Footnote 120:
The Fulas, as already stated, are a semi-white race, who
originally came from the Western Sahara, and colonised much of
Senegambia and the Upper Niger basin, penetrating as far south as
Borgu, and south-east to Adamawa, Mandara, Bagirmi, and Darfur. In
the early 19th century, under a great leader, Othman Dan Fodio,
they conquered Sokoto and much of Eastern Nigeria, stopping short
of Bornu, where they were arrested by the power of the Kanemi
Sheikh of Bornu. A succinct account of the different Fula kingdoms
and conquests is given in a footnote on p. 201.
Footnote 121:
This man was no doubt a negroid Arab religious teacher from the
country of Kanem, north-east of Lake Chad. He settled in Bornu
early in the 19th century and became the adviser of the king of
that country, a phlegmatic descendant of a great and ancient
dynasty of Berber or Hamitic origin. Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi
assisted the Bornu sovereign and people to beat off the Fula
invasion and became the virtual ruler of Bornu. He bore the title
of Sheikh of Bornu.
CHAPTER IX
THE FRENCH IN WEST AND NORTH AFRICA
It has been asserted with some degree of probability that certain
seamen-adventurers of Dieppe found their way along the West coast of
Africa as far as the Gold Coast in the 14th century, a hundred years
before the Portuguese; and that they established themselves on the
Senegal river, built two or more settlements (Little Paris, and
Little Dieppe) on the Liberian coast, and established trading
stations at “La Mine d’Or” (Elmina), at Accra, and at Kormantin, on
the Gold Coast. The Dieppois station at Elmina was said to have been
founded in 1382; and the legend runs that forty years later, owing
to the wars in France having distracted Norman commerce from
over-sea enterprise, these settlements were abandoned. There may
have been some truth in these accounts of Norman discoveries on the
West coast of Africa set forth in the second half of the 17th
century. A Norman adventurer undoubtedly rediscovered the Canary
Islands in the 14th century; and it is probable that the Rio d’Ouro
and even the whole coast of West Africa as far as the Gulf of Guinea
were known to Italian seamen before these features were placed on
the map by the Portuguese. When, three centuries later, the French
founded a settlement at the mouth of the Senegal, they are said to
have discovered the remains of a Norman fort (built by adventurers
from Dieppe) and to have made it the nucleus of the modern town of
St Louis.
At any rate, soon after the Portuguese had laid bare the coast of
Guinea, ships began to sail from the Norman ports to resume or to
commence the West African trade, though no attempt was made to
establish any political settlements; for in the matter of founding
colonies in Africa, France was considerably behind Portugal,
Holland, and England. However, in 1637, a young Frenchman named
Claude Jannequin de Rochefort was pacing the quays at Dieppe with
vague aspirations to be “another Cortes.” Happening to ask where a
certain ship was going, and being told in reply that she was bound
for the “Senaga” river in Africa, near Cape de Verde, he instantly
resolved to go, and before many hours were over was entered on the
ship’s book as a soldier; he afterwards performed the duties of
clerk to the captain. It would seem that this vessel, which had not
only soldiers but monks on board, must have been despatched by some
far-seeing authority, since before the Sieur de Rochefort joined its
company it had been determined to stop on the West African coast
north of the Senegal river, cut down trees, build a small boat, and
use it to explore the Senegal. This plan had been formulated in
complete ignorance of the fact that the coast north of the Senegal
and south of Morocco contains no timber for boat-building. Finding
this to be the case, the Dieppe expedition, under the command of
Captain Lambert, with the Sieur de Rochefort among its soldiers,
went on to the Senegal and put together a small boat out of timber
which had been brought from France. Into this small vessel was
transferred a portion of the crew, including De Rochefort; and the
Senegal river was explored for 110 miles from its mouth. Although
the Dieppe adventurers were said to have built a fort on the site of
St Louis in 1360, and the Portuguese had a few trading posts on its
lower reaches in the 15th century, there were no Europeans on the
river when it was visited by De Rochefort, though the Dutch had
established stations on the coast not far off. After obtaining
concessions from the natives, Captain Lambert’s expedition returned
to France, experiencing many delays and adventures on the way; and
six years after he had started from Dieppe De Rochefort published an
interesting account of their adventures.
But this pioneer expedition was not soon followed up, owing to the
hostility of the Dutch. The Norman Company sold its rights to the
French West India Company, and the latter again transferred them to
a subsidiary association afterwards called the “Royal Senegal
Company.” In 1677, the French navy (France being at war with
Holland) captured the Dutch ports on the Senegal coast—Rufisque,
Portudal, Joal, and Goree Island—this last, famous in the history of
West Africa, being named after a little island on the Dutch coast,
and commanding the now important harbour and capital of Senegal,
Dakar. In 1717, Portendik, south of Cape Blanco, and in 1724,
Arguin, an islet north of Cape Blanco, were also taken from the
Dutch, who had earlier still acquired them from the Portuguese.
The Royal Senegal Company sent out in 1697 a very able man to attend
to its affairs—André de Brüe—who made his head-quarters at Fort St
Louis, which had been founded by De Rochefort’s party. This
remarkable person, Brüe, combined the qualities of a man of science
and a far-sighted trader, and may be said to have really laid the
foundations of the French empire in West Africa. Brüe made two
important journeys up the Senegal and into the interior. He remained
eighteen years on the coast of Senegal, and visited the Gambia in
1700, finding English, Portuguese, and Spanish there, the
first-named trading at the mouth of the river, and the two last
settled some distance up its course as flourishing slave-traders.
According to Brüe, the Portuguese slave-trading settlements
exhibited some degree of civilization, but also of rowdiness among
the European element, not unlike the proceedings of the “Mohocks” in
the streets of London. In his writings Brüe expresses his amazement
at the enormous number of bees inhabiting the mangrove swamps and
coast-lands of Guinea. In 1716 Brüe sent out agents to extend French
influence up the Senegal and towards the “Gold” country of Bambuk,
the mountainous region on the upper Senegal. Brüe finally returned
to France in 1715 and lived quietly for a long time afterwards on
the large fortune he had accumulated. His is a name to be well
remembered in the annals of the French Empire. He was a far-sighted,
cultivated man, who had also the gift of choosing and employing good
associates. Among these may be mentioned the Sieur Campagnon, the
_beau-idéal_ of a good-tempered, good-looking, supple, kind-hearted,
valorous Frenchman. Only the charm of Campagnon’s winning ways
enabled him to penetrate the recesses of Bambuk, whose secrets as a
gold-bearing country were jealously guarded by the natives. One
little incident of Campagnon’s life on the Senegal depicts his
disposition. Walking round the outskirts of St Louis he came across
an unfortunate lioness that had belonged to an inhabitant of the
town, but had been thrown out on the rubbish heaps to die. The
unfortunate beast had been suffering from some malady of the jaw
which would not permit mastication, and was therefore nearly dead
from hunger. When Campagnon saw the lioness, her eyes were glazing
and her mouth was full of ants and dirt. He took pity on the
unfortunate creature, washed her mouth and throat clean, and fed her
with milk. This saved her life, and the grateful animal conceived a
warm affection for him, and would afterwards follow him about like a
dog and take food from no one else. Dr Robert Brown, who unearthed
this charming anecdote, further informs us that after his romantic
career in Africa Campagnon returned to France, and died, after a
long and prosperous life, a master-mason and undertaker in Paris.
The French continued to develop their Senegal settlements with some
prosperity until 1758, when they were captured by the British, who
held them until 1778, and acquired them again for a time by the
peace of 1783; after this they were in British hands a few years
longer, but were French again by 1790. In 1800 the British took the
island of Goree, which the French had acquired from the Dutch in
1677. By the peace of 1783 the English had secured from the French
the exclusive right to trade with the Arabs or Moors of Portendik
for gum. Portendik was a place on the Sahara coast about 120 miles
north of St Louis. All the French possessions in Senegal which were
held by the British from time to time during the Napoleonic wars
were given back to France two years after the peace of 1815, though
at that time the British hold over the Gambia was more clearly
defined, the French only retaining one post on that river, given up
in 1857 in return for the British trade monopoly with Portendik. The
French had already resumed their explorations of Senegambia at the
end of the 18th century; and after the final recovery of the Senegal
river in 1817 these researches were pushed with some degree of
ardour. In 1818 Mollien discovered the sources of the Gambia, and De
Beaufort explored the country of Kaarta. In 1827 René Caillié
started from the river Nunez with help derived from the colony of
Sierra Leone (for which he was subsequently ungrateful) and
descended the Niger to Timbuktu, thence making his way across the
desert to Morocco. His journey, however, did not do much to lure the
French Nigerwards at that time, especially as a great Fula conqueror
had arisen, Al Hajji ’Omaru, whose conquests not only blocked the
way to the Niger, but later on threatened the very existence of the
French settlements on the Senegal. But after a long period of
inaction and lack of interest, the French colony of the Senegal was
to receive great extension. General Faidherbe, who for political
reasons was rather distrusted by the newly-formed Second Empire, was
exiled to Senegal in 1854 in the guise of an appointment as
Governor-General. He was a man of great enterprise and intelligence,
and immediately began to study the resources and extension of the
Senegal colony. He first punished severely the Moorish tribes to the
north of the river Senegal, who had again and again raided the
settled country. Before he had been a year in Senegambia, Faidherbe
had annexed the Wuli country, and had built the fort of Medina to
oppose the progress of Al Hajji ’Omaru. ’Omaru sent an army of
20,000 men against Medina, but they were repulsed by the officer in
command, and finally had to retreat before Faidherbe’s advance.
Following on the repulse of the Fulas came the annexation of many
countries along the Upper Senegal, and in the direction of the
Gambia. A year later the country between St Louis and the mouth of
the Gambia, past Cape Verde, had been annexed. Then the Casamanse
river, between the Gambia and Portuguese Guinea, was taken; then, in
the sixties, the coast between Portuguese Guinea and Sierra Leone
was added to the French possessions, under the name of “Rivières du
Sud.” In 1864, a French expedition under the gifted Lieutenant E.
Mage (who was drowned off Brest in 1869) reached Segu on the Upper
Niger and was detained there for two years by the suspicious Fula
Sultan—Tidiani, nephew of the Emperor Al Hajji ’Omaru[122].
A suspension of French activity occurred after the disastrous
Franco-German war, but it was resumed again in 1880. Captain
Galliéni surveyed the route for a railway to connect the navigable
Senegal with the Upper Niger, which he reached in that year at
Bamaku. By 1883 the post of Bamaku on the Upper Niger had been
definitely founded and fortified. But General Borgnis-Desbordes,
Galliéni, and other French officers had to contend with the imposing
forces of king Ahmadu bin Tidiani, the grand-nephew and successor of
Al Hajji ’Omaru, who ruled over the country between the upper
Senegal and Jenné on the Niger. However Ahmadu was constrained by
General Borgnis-Desbordes to make a treaty in 1887 which placed his
territory under French protection. Nevertheless war with the
Toucouleur (Takrur) Fulas followed in 1890 (and also with a vestige
of the Masina Fulas under Ahmadu Abdulei); and the French occupied
the great country of Kaarta (where Mungo Park suffered so greatly)
in 1891, Segu on the Niger (also associated with Mungo Park) in
1892, Jenné and Timbuktu in 1893. The French as early as 1881 had
taken under their protection the ancient Fula kingdom of Timbo or
Futa Jallon. Their activities in this direction brought them into
conflict with the forces of Samori, a negro (probably Mandingo) king
who had risen from a very humble position to that of conqueror and
ruler of the countries about the source of the Niger. Samori, like
Al Hajji ’Omaru, commanded hordes of Mandingo negroes, whose
conquests were often undertaken from propagandist motives, and who
were to some extent in sympathy with the Muhammadan tribes of the
Upper Niger. Samori’s forces were mainly recruited from among the
Mandingo tribes between the Upper Niger and the hinterland of Sierra
Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast. In 1885-6 a campaign had been
undertaken by Colonel Frey against Samori, which did something to
check the power of that raiding chief; but after the destruction of
the Fula power in 1892 the attacks of Samori on the French outposts
redoubled and nearly embroiled France with Britain over the affair
of Waima. By 1888, a railway had been constructed which facilitated
access to the Niger; and a small armed steamer having been put on
that river at Bamaku, the Niger was for the first time since the
last voyage of Mungo Park navigated beyond Segu. In 1887 this
gunboat (named _Le Niger_) actually reached Kabara, the port of
Timbuktu, but the hostility of the natives prevented its commander,
Lieutenant Caron, from visiting the city. The gunboat returned
without effecting more than an ominous reconnaissance.
In 1888 Captain Louis G. Binger commenced an exploring journey for
France which had the most remarkable results. He was the first to
enter the unknown country included within the great northern bend of
the Niger. He secured by treaty for French influence Tieba, Kong,
and other countries lying between the Niger and the Ivory Coast.
Colonel Archinard, by his brilliantly conducted campaigns against
Ahmadu bin Tidiani, added to the French West African dominions
Kaarta, Bakhunu, Segu and Jenné, and thus freed from obstruction the
road to Timbuktu. Later on Colonel Archinard defeated the
raider-king Samori and occupied his capital, Bisandugu, near the
frontiers of Liberia. An attempt was made in 1894-5 to attack him in
the new kingdom which he soon conquered in the lands between the
main Upper Niger and the Black Volta; and Colonel P. L. Monteil (who
had previously, 1891-2, journeyed from Senegal to the Niger, and
from the Niger to Bornu, and thence overland to Tripoli) led a
military expedition against him from the Ivory Coast. Colonel
Monteil was very unsuccessful, and was recalled by the French
Government. Samori then attempted to advance northwards to the
central Niger, as the last hope of breaking through the ring of
French power with which he was being surrounded. Colonel Bonnier cut
him off from that direction, however, in 1895; and Captain Marchand
(of Fashoda fame) wrested from him the important town of Kong. In
1897 Samori had pushed eastwards, so that he was hovering about the
northern boundary of the British Protectorate of Ashanti; and here
his force attacked a small British surveying party, killed the
native escort, and carried off the officer, Lieutenant Henderson.
After a compulsory visit to Samori, Lieutenant Henderson was
released; and the chief relieved himself from all responsibility for
the wanton attack on the British party by saying, “It was the will
of God.”
At length, in October 1898, the French military authorities on the
Upper Niger made a determined attempt to abolish the power of this
bandit king, who had begun his career as a religious mystic and who
ended by organizing his disciples—“Sofas” or Sufis—into a tremendous
slave-raiding army. They also determined to break the fighting
strength of the Mandingos, as they had previously crushed that of
the Fula and the Tawareq. By a brilliant feat of arms Samori was
brought to bay and his forces routed by Lieutenant Woelfel. The
Mandingo king was taken prisoner by Lieutenant Jacquin and Sergeant
Bratières, and was exiled to the Gaboon.
During the reign of Louis Philippe a somewhat feeble revival of
colonial enterprise had taken place, in which France made
half-hearted attempts to establish herself in New Zealand, and
secured New Caledonia and Tahiti in the Pacific. At this time also
she thought of extending her possessions in unoccupied districts
along the West Coast of Africa, and had acquired rights over Grand
Bassam and Assini to the west of the British Gold Coast. During the
sixties some efforts were made by Napoleon III to develop French
trading and political influence in the Bight of Benin in Africa; and
Porto Novo, near Lagos, was accorded French protection in 1868.
These claims, however, had been allowed to lapse to some degree; and
the places acquired would at one time have been willingly handed
over to England for a small compensation. But in the scramble for
Africa that commenced in 1884 they suddenly acquired immense value
in the eyes of the French as footholds upon which to commence an
expansion northwards from the Gulf of Guinea to the Niger empire of
which France had begun to dream. In 1884 therefore Grand Bassam and
Assini, on the Gold Coast, and Porto Novo, a tiny vassal kingdom of
Dahomé, were effectively occupied. The journeys of Colonel Binger
between the Niger and the Gold Coast in 1888-91 gave Grand Bassam a
hinterland; and the consequence was that the Ivory Coast between
Grand Bassam and Liberia (including the Rio Pedro district of
Liberia) was annexed by France in 1891. Hitherto this coast, the
interior of which was then and till the close of the 19th century
one of the least known parts of Africa, had been of great importance
to British trade, which was carried on chiefly by Bristol sailing
ships. Moreover, from the Ivory Coast came the bulk of the
celebrated Kruboys, who are the best labour-force obtainable along
the West Coast of Africa from the Gambia to the Orange River.
Nevertheless, although the petty chiefs of the Ivory Coast had often
offered their friendship and vassalage to Great Britain, no steps
were taken on the part of the British Government, and therefore no
protest was offered when France annexed the Ivory Coast and became
next neighbour to Liberia. In 1892 a somewhat stringent treaty was
concluded between France and Liberia, by which, in the event of the
latter coming under the influence or protection of any other power,
France would have the reversion of much of her hinterland. The
occupation of Porto Novo soon led to a quarrel with Dahomé, a
kingdom of singular bloodthirstiness, which had defied both England
and Portugal at different times, and had laughed at our futile
blockades of its coast. After a preliminary occupation of the
Dahomean coast towns and the imposition of a somewhat doubtful
French suzerainty, the king, Behanzin, compelled the French to make
their action more effective. A well-equipped expedition was sent out
in 1893 under General Dodds, who had conducted the first operations
in 1891. For the first time Dahomé was invaded by a well-organized
European force; and after a fierce struggle the entire kingdom was
overrun and conquered, and the king was captured and sent to the
West Indies.
In the meantime, the French forces marching step by step along the
upper Niger had captured the important town of Jenné in 1893—Jenné,
the focus of Nigerian civilization, and the mother of Timbuktu. From
Jenné at the close of 1893 Colonel Archinard directed a march to be
made to Timbuktu—it is said, without or contrary to orders from the
Governor of Senegal. Two squadrons marched overland, and a river
flotilla of gunboats under Commandant Boiteux steamed to the port of
Timbuktu, Kabara. The flotilla of gunboats and lighters arrived at
Kabara in advance of the military forces, and caused considerable
perturbation in Timbuktu. The civilized inhabitants of the town were
willing to surrender it to the French, only fearing their hated
masters—the Tawareq. The Tawareq, hearing of the coming of the land
expedition, left the town to meet it; but the Niger being remarkably
high, Lieutenant Boiteux was actually able to take two lighters
armed with machine guns up the back-water, which in seasons of flood
reaches the walls of Timbuktu. After a little deliberation the town
surrendered to the French. Shortly afterwards the Tawareq attacked
the naval station formed at Kabara on the Niger, killing a
midshipman. Lieutenant Boiteux, hearing that firing was going on,
rode out of Timbuktu with one other European, accompanied by his
little garrison on foot, arrived at Kabara and routed the Tawareq.
This was a truly gallant action, worthy to be recorded. After
standing a short siege in Timbuktu and making a successful sortie,
the little naval expedition was relieved from the anxiety of its
position by the arrival of the first column under Colonel Bonnier on
the 14th of January, 1894. Timbuktu was thus captured by the French
with nineteen men, seven of whom were French, and the remainder
Senegalese negroes. But a slight reverse was to follow. Over-rash,
Colonel Bonnier started with a small force to reconnoitre the
country round Timbuktu and rid the neighbourhood of the Tawareq. Too
confident, they marched into a trap. Their camp was surprised by the
Tawareq at early dawn, and almost all the French troops were
massacred, only three French officers and a handful of men escaping
to tell the tale. Twenty-five days afterwards, a second column under
Colonel Jouffre arrived on the scene, and collected the remains of
the unfortunate Frenchmen for interment at Timbuktu. It then set out
to follow up the Tawareq, whom the French surprised in turn at night
in their encampment, and of whom Colonel Jouffre believed his
soldiers to have slain many. From that time the French have had no
serious fighting near Timbuktu. French merchants are established
there already and French missionaries—the White Fathers—from
Algeria. A curious episode in the French conquest was an appeal,
when hearing of the French approach, by the notables of Timbuktu to
the Emperor of Morocco to intervene. After a year’s delay the
Moroccan Sultan replied that upon receiving proofs of the vassalage
of Timbuktu he would march upon the French and drive them away.
Subsequently the French patrolled the Niger far to the south of
Timbuktu, and found it much more navigable than was at first
believed. They established a post at Say, and Lieutenant Hourst
explored that small portion of the river between Say and Gomba which
till then had remained marked by dotted lines on the map. Numerous
expeditions came across the bend of the Niger from its upper waters
to its middle course, incessantly making treaties and extending the
rule of France. Again, following on the conquest of Dahomé, the
French marched northwards across the 9th parallel, which had
hitherto marked the limitation between the French and British
possessions, and occupied the country of Nikki, which had previously
been acquired for the Royal Niger Company by Major, now Colonel Sir
Frederick, Lugard. A bolder step still was taken by the occupation
of Busa (already declared to be in the British protectorate), at a
time when Sir George Goldie and his little army were winning
victories over the forces of Nupe in the vicinity. This step however
roused such a strong expression of popular feeling in England that a
conference was formed in Paris to negotiate a settlement between
England and France; and eventually France gave way on the point of
Busa, though she kept Nikki, and was able to extend her control of
the west bank of the Niger to Ilo, a considerable distance below
Say. She thus united her Dahomean conquest to the rest of her
Nigerian dominions. There is now no great native monarch or
independent people existing in the vast area of French West Africa,
though there are many kings and chiefs ruling their people peaceably
and humanely under the eyes of French resident officers. There has
been no serious breach of the peace in the Senegambian and Nigerian
territories since 1900, with the exception of the fighting in the
region to the north of the Senegal which is rather ineptly styled
“Mauretania.” Here France had concluded treaties of protection with
the chiefs of the Moorish and Arab tribes in 1903-5; but in 1905 the
French Commissioner, Coppolani, was murdered in the far interior.
Between 1908 and 1909 a force under Colonel Gouraud conquered all
Mauretania and especially the hilly country of Adrar Temmur. The
oasis of Air and Asben (which contains the old Songhai town of
Agades) came under French control in 1905-6, and Bilma—farther east,
in the Tibu country—at the same time.
In 1902-4 an administrative reorganisation of French West Africa
took place, in which (and in the additional acts of 1909) the
following divisions were recognised: _Mauretania_ (344,967 sq.
miles), bounded on the north by the Spanish protectorate of Rio de
Oro and the 22° N. latitude and on the south by the river Senegal;
_Senegal_ colony and protectorate (74,000 sq. miles), bounded by the
Senegal and Faleme rivers and Portuguese Guinea; _French Guinea_
(95,000 sq. miles), bounded by Portuguese Guinea, Sierra Leone, and
Liberia; the _Ivory Coast_ (130,000 sq. miles), between Liberia and
the British Gold Coast; _Dahomé_ (about 40,000 sq. miles), a narrow
strip between Borgu, the Niger, and the Gulf of Guinea; and lastly
the enormous “_Colony of Upper Senegal and Niger_,” which, with its
military territories, has an area of something like 1,268,400 sq.
miles. It is bounded on the west and south by the other divisions
and by foreign possessions, and on the north by the Algerian and
Moroccan protectorates. This last division of French West Africa
stretches eastwards from the Faleme branch of the Senegal River to
Lake Chad.
In Senegal and French Guinea, the ports of Dakar and Konakri have
received a remarkable development, and are admitted to be the most
splendid and civilized towns on the West Coast of Africa, far
superior in sanitary arrangements and outward aspect to anything
which as yet exists in the somewhat sluggish British West African
possessions. From Konakri a railway has been constructed on to the
healthy uplands of Futa Jallon and to the Upper Niger at Kankan.
Nearly in front of Konakri is the little archipelago of the Isles de
Los[123]. These islands until the beginning of 1904 belonged to
Great Britain, but under the Anglo-French Convention of 1904 they
were very properly ceded to France, as they no longer commanded a
coast which could become British.
The development of Senegal since the commencement of the 20th
century has not been limited to the making of Dakar (now the
residence of the Governor-General and the metropolis of French West
Africa) a first-class port, but a great advance has also been made
in railway construction. Landing at Dakar, which is only eight days’
steam from Bordeaux or Marseilles, the traveller journeys 165 miles
by rail to St Louis (the old capital), there embarks in a river
steamer on the Senegal and journeys to Kayès, enters the train again
at Kayès and travels on 344 miles to Kulikoro on the Niger, whence
he can proceed by river steamer to Timbuktu, the whole journey from
Timbuktu to Paris being reduced to a possible nineteen days.
Timbuktu the inaccessible, twenty to thirty years ago, is now only a
ten days’ journey from an Atlantic seaport. Timbuktu is connected
with Algeria (as well as with Dakar) by overland telegraph.
Dahomé and the Ivory Coast Colony have both shared in the
development of French Africa. Dahomé is contented, peaceful, and
prosperous under French rule. A railway due north from Kotonu to the
Niger, beyond Borgu, is under construction, about half the line (200
miles) having been finished in 1910. On the Ivory Coast there has
been a certain amount of financial depression owing to the failure
to discover gold or other minerals in profitable quantities. A
number of companies, mostly British, had been formed for developing
the mineral resources of the Ivory Coast; but, in spite of the
vigorous work of the French in opening up communications with the
interior, no great degree of commercial prosperity has as yet come
to that portion of French Africa. A serious native rising had to be
suppressed in 1910. In 1910-11 the contiguous frontiers of Liberia
and the French possessions in Guinea and on the Ivory Coast were
settled, greatly to the advantage of the French possessions.
The total area of French West Africa to-day (1912) is approximately
1,952,000 square miles, with a negro and negroid population of about
12,000,000, and some 8000 whites. It does an annual trade of about
£16,000,000, mainly with France; for France in her colonial policy
still pursues the selfish policy of protection. But unlike what has
happened in French Congo, the territories of Senegal, Guinea,
Nigeria, the Sahara and Dahomé have enormously benefited from the
imposition of French rule at the close of the 19th century. For the
first time in their long, blood-stained history the industrious
negro and Fula agriculturists and herdsmen of these tropical
regions, and the semi-nomads of the Great Desert, know what it is to
experience continual tranquillity, safety and commercial prosperity.
During the three centuries following the Turkish conquest of
Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, France, like most other Christian
nations in the Mediterranean, suffered greatly at the hands of
Moorish corsairs—suffered so much that, not being able to defend her
own coasts sufficiently, it probably never entered into her head to
conquer and possess the corsairs’ country; though under Francis I
she tried, in rivalry with the Genoese, to obtain a trading and
fishing station off the east Algerian coast, “Bastion de France,”
near La Calle (about 1544). So far as political aspirations went,
her eyes were turned fitfully towards Egypt. At the end of the 17th
century Louis XIV not only attempted to enter into political
relations with Abyssinia (his envoy was murdered in Sennar, 1704),
but was advised by Leibnitz to make a descent on Egypt, and to hold
it as a station on the way to India. The idea was not adopted, yet
it lay dormant in the French archives, and was probably discovered
there by the ministers of the Directory after the French Revolution.
Either it was communicated to Napoleon Bonaparte with the idea of
sending him off on a fool’s errand, or the notion had occurred to
him independently as a means of striking a blow at the English. At
any rate, with a suddenness that startled incredulous Europe, the
Corsican General, fresh from the triumphs of his first Italian
campaign, eluded the British fleet, and landed in Alexandria in 1798
with a force of 40,000 men. He met and defeated the Mamluk Beys, who
ruled Egypt under Turkish suzerainty, and eventually chased them
into Upper Egypt. He then established himself at Cairo, and sought
to win over the Muhammadan population by professing more or less
Muhammadan views of religion. But Nelson destroyed his fleet at
Abukir Bay. A Turkish army landed in Egypt, but was cut to pieces
and driven into the sea by the infuriated Napoleon, who then
endeavoured to conquer Syria, with the stupendous idea that he might
carry his arms to Constantinople, and possibly proclaim a revival in
his own person of the Eastern Empire. He was foiled again by the
British, who assisted the Turks to hold Acre. Napoleon, though
victorious elsewhere in Syria, eventually drew back shattered by the
unsuccessful siege of this fortress. He then abandoned his eastern
conquests with disgust, and sailed for France. His able lieutenant,
Kleber, was assassinated. A British and Turkish army settled the
fate of the remaining French forces in Egypt, which after a
capitulation were sent back to France. But this daring inroad on the
East by Napoleon had far-reaching effects. It brought Egypt
violently into contact with European civilization, and prepared the
way for its detachment from the Turkish Empire. Moreover, it caused
France to take henceforth an acute interest in the valley of the
Nile, an interest which on several occasions brought her dangerously
near rupture with a Power even more earnestly concerned with the
Egyptian Question.
In 1827 the Dey of Algiers (a country which remained under nominal
Turkish suzerainty), insolent beyond measure in his treatment of
Europeans, because hitherto all European states had failed to subdue
his pretensions, signalised some difference of opinion with the
French Consul by striking him in the face with a fly-whisk. France
brooded over the insult for three years, when the tottering
government of Charles X sought to prop up the Bourbon dynasty by a
successful military expedition, and in June 1830 landed 37,000
infantry, and a force of cavalry and artillery at Sidi Ferruj, near
Algiers. Considering their renown as fierce fighters, the Algerians
do not seem to have made a very sturdy resistance; though perhaps in
the lapse of time since their last war with a European power the
superiority of European artillery began to be felt. At any rate,
three weeks after the French landed they had taken the town of
Algiers and the Dey had surrendered. A week afterwards the Dey was
banished to Naples. Great Britain then asked for information as to
French projects, and was assured that within a very short time the
French forces would be withdrawn when reparation had been made. But
these assurances were as well meant and as valueless as Russian
assurances in Central Asia, and our own repeated and unsolicited
declarations that we hoped to be able to leave Egypt in six months.
The government of Charles X fell, and the new Orleanist dynasty
could hardly draw down on itself the odium of a withdrawal. But an
unwise policy nevertheless was pursued towards the Arabs, a policy
dictated by ignorance. The inhabitants of Algeria had not taken a
very strong part in the defence of the Dey, who in their eyes was a
Turk and a foreigner; but when they began to realize that their
country was about to be taken possession of by Christians, and
Christians who at that time did nothing to soothe their religious
susceptibilities, they found a leader in a princely man, Abd al
Kader[124]. From 1835 to 1837 the French sustained defeat after
defeat at his hands. In 1837 however a truce was made, by which Abd
al Kader was recognized by the French as Sultan over a large part of
western and central Algeria. Two years after war broke out again
between the French and Abd al Kader. An army under Marshal Bugeaud
attacked Abd al Kader with unwavering energy—perhaps with some
cruelty. In 1841 the national hero had lost nearly every point of
his kingdom, and fled into Morocco, from which country he afterwards
returned with a large army, only to be again and again defeated,
though he occasionally inflicted great losses on the French.
Finally, to save his own special district from ruin, he came to
terms with the French Governor-General, who gave him permission to
retire to Alexandria or Naples. But the French Government repudiated
the terms granted to Abd al Kader, and kept him a close prisoner for
some years in a French fortress. When Louis Napoleon became Emperor
he released him and allowed him to live at Damascus, where he died
in 1883.
At the time when the French invaded Algeria that country was by no
means under a homogeneous government. There were the Dey of Algiers,
the Dey of Oran, and on the east the Bey of Constantine (who ruled
over much of eastern Algeria); whilst the Berber tribes in the
mountains and on the verge of the desert were practically
independent. Constantine was an extremely strong place, and in their
first wars with its Bey the French failed to take it. It was not
finally captured till 1847. By this time France had warred against
Morocco, and had crushed any attempt on the part of the “Emperor of
the West” to interfere in the affairs of Algeria. They had overrun
and to some degree conquered all Algeria north of the Sahara desert.
Therefore, in 1848, the Government felt justified in declaring the
new African acquisition to be French territory, divided into three
departments, to be ruled as part of France, and to possess the right
of representation in the French parliament. Under the Second Empire
this constitutional government, which was quite unsuited to what
Napoleon III fitly termed ‘an Arab kingdom,’ was set aside in favour
of military government. But this was not organized on suitable
lines, and proved a failure. In 1858 an attempt was made to imitate
the change then taking place in the government of British India. An
Algerian ministry was formed in Paris with Prince Napoleon as
Minister; but this form of administration also was a failure, and
was abolished by the Emperor when he returned from his visit to
Algeria in 1863. The country was then governed by a military
governor, generally with absolute powers, and attempts were made to
conciliate the Kabail or Hill Berbers, whom utter mismanagement had
driven into revolt. The country nevertheless continued to be
afflicted with unrest; and in 1870, as the Empire was dying, a
commission sat to enquire into the state of the colony, and to
suggest remedies which might be applied to its misgovernment. By a
vote of the Chamber military government was again abolished in
favour of civil rule, but owing to an insurrection in Eastern
Algeria which followed on the Franco-German War, the recommendations
of this commission were not fully carried out till 1879, when the
first civil governor was appointed. One of the first acts of the new
French Republic at the end of 1870 was to bestow the franchise on
the Jews of Algeria, an action, which by discriminating between the
Jews and Arabs has since caused a great deal of trouble.
From 1848 to 1880 numerous attempts were made to induce French
people to settle in Algeria, nor were the colonists of other nations
discouraged. At one time young soldiers would be selected from the
army, would be married to poor girls dowered by the State, and sent
off to settle in Algeria, where they were given grants of land; but
often as soon as the dowry was spent the newly-wedded wife was
deserted by her husband, who made the best of his way back to
France. In 1871 nearly 11,000 natives of Alsace and Lorraine were
granted land in Algeria, and subsequently some 25,000 other French
colonists were settled in the country at a cost of 15,000,000
francs. But despite failures, frauds and fickleness, the French
settlers in Algeria increased in numbers by immigration and births,
so that by the beginning of the 20th century there was a French
element in the European population of Algeria of more than a quarter
of a million (298,000 in 1910). Meantime, the peace and security of
trade introduced by the French had attracted large numbers of
Italians and Maltese to the eastern part of Algeria, and still
larger numbers of Spaniards to the western department of Oran—so
much so, that even at the present day Spanish is the common language
of Oran, and Italian is as often heard as French at Bona,
Constantine, and even inland as far as Tebessa. Several thousands of
Maltese also settled in eastern Algeria, and became naturalized as
French subjects. It is probable that in this way Algeria will be
eventually colonized by Europe, not by the nations of the north, but
by those Mediterranean peoples who are so nearly akin in blood to
the Berber races of North Africa. The French type that prospers most
is that drawn from the south of France; yet the fair-haired
Alsatians are doing very well[125]. There has been a certain
intermixture between the French and the native races, and between
these again and other European settlers. It is the present writer’s
opinion, based on recent visits to Algeria, that a remarkable degree
of fusion between these elements is being brought about. The Arabs
and Berbers in the settled parts of the country are approximating
more and more in their costume and their mode of life to the
Europeans, while the latter are becoming to some extent Arabised.
There is scarcely an Algerian in any town who cannot talk French,
and there is scarcely a French settler in Algeria who cannot talk
Arabic, while among the lower classes an ugly jargon is springing
up, in which both languages are represented, mixed with Italian and
Spanish words.
In 1863 the Emperor Napoleon brought about the passing of a law
which exchanged for a tribal holding of land the recognition of the
indigenes as individual proprietors of the soil. This law has to
some extent broken up the tribal system, has corrected nomad
tendencies, and has done much to settle the Berbers on the soil with
loyalty to the existing government. Of course, outside the
relatively well-watered, fertile districts the nature of the country
induces a wandering, pastoral life amongst the sparse population;
and here a warlike spirit still shows itself from time to time in
revolts of ever diminishing extent. During the eighties of the 19th
century the French were obliged to bring large forces into the field
to suppress a serious insurrection under Bu Amama, a leader who
represented the more-or-less Arab tribes inhabiting the steppe
country, far to the south of Oran, on the borders of Morocco. Their
turbulence was only finally subdued by the building of a railway
into the heart of their country—a railway now reaching to
south-eastern Morocco and destined to be prolonged across the Sahara
to Timbuktu.
At the close of the 19th century the Jewish question gave rise to
disturbances. The Jews, equally with the Christians in Algeria, are
electors, while this privilege is granted to only a few Arab
proprietors. As in Tunis, the Jews are greatly given to usury, and
they were formerly disliked in Algeria with an intensity which is
but little understood in England, where the Jews are scarcely to be
distinguished from other subjects of the Crown in their demeanour or
practices. But the fact is that parliamentary government, so far as
Algeria and its connection with France are concerned is somewhat of
a farce. Algeria will demand in future fuller measures of
self-government, and less dependence on the selfish policy of French
manufacturers and distillers. But the country nevertheless owes an
immense debt of gratitude to France for its noble public works, its
security, tranquillity and its successful battles against the forces
of nature—drought, locusts and desert sands.
An example of a successful retention of native forms of government
is to be seen in the adjoining country of Tunis, which under the
ægis of a Turkish prince is governed despotically, ably, wisely, and
well by a single Frenchman. Tunis, which, like Algeria and Tripoli,
had since the close of the 16th century been more or less a Turkish
dependency—that is to say, a country governed at first by Turkish
officers, who finally became quasi-independent rulers, with a
recognized hereditary descent—soon began to feel the results of the
conquest of Algeria in an increase of interest felt by the French
regarding its condition. At first the relations between France and
Tunis were flattering to the latter country. The relatively
enlightened character of the Husseinite Beys[126] was recognized,
and when France was in difficulties with Abd al Kader and the Bey of
Constantine, proposals were even made to Tunis to supply from its
ruling family two or three princes who should be made Beys of
Constantine and Oran under French protection; but the idea was not
carried out. In 1863 the Bey of Tunis went in state to visit the
Emperor Napoleon at Algiers. Nevertheless, during the ’50’s and
’60’s Great Britain firmly maintained the independence of Tunis, at
whose court she was represented for many years by a sage
diplomatist, Sir Richard Wood. The disenchantment which Algeria
caused in the early sixties diminished the interest which France
felt in Tunis; and during this time, under the fostering care of Sir
Richard Wood, British enterprise had acquired so large a hold over
the Regency, that at the beginning of the seventies it would have
been reasonable to have extended British protection to the Bey. But
another factor had come into play—the newly-formed Power of United
Italy. The finances of Tunis had from the time of the Crimean War
onwards got into a disarray resembling in a minor degree the
condition of Egypt under Ismail. Not only was the Bey extravagant,
but still worse, his ministers, mostly of servile origin, robbed the
country shamelessly, and loans were obtained over and over again
merely to swell their ill-gotten gains. At last the Powers had to
intervene, and in 1869 the finances of Tunis were brought under the
control of a tripartite commission with representatives of England,
France, and Italy. During the early ’70’s, however, British
commercial interest waned, and the enterprise of France increased,
with the result that France obtained permission to erect telegraphs,
and took over an important railway concession which had been
accepted and then abandoned by a British firm. It was becoming
obvious that the native government of Tunis could not continue much
longer without a definite European protector. Whatever right England
may have had to assume such a position, she quietly surrendered it
to France through her official representatives at the Congress of
Berlin. The only other rival then was Italy; and Italy, though she
would have dearly liked to resume control in the name of Rome over
the Roman province of Africa, shrank from the danger of thus defying
France. A small British railway which had been made from the town of
Tunis to the port of Goletta was sold to an Italian company in
1881[127]. At the same time, a British subject, really acting as a
representative of the Tunisian Government, attempted on a point of
law to prevent a very large estate in the interior of Tunis from
falling into French hands. The French Government determined to delay
action no longer. Taking advantage of the very insufficient plea,
that a Tunisian tribe (the Khmirs or “Kroumirs”) had committed small
robberies across the Algerian frontier, a strong force invaded
Tunis, and wrung from the Bey in his suburban palace the treaty of
Kasr-es-Said, by which he placed his territories under French
protection. When the news spread into outlying districts there were
uprisings against the French or against the Bey’s government which
had placed the country under French control. The French troops had
practically to conquer much of the south of Tunis, but in a year’s
time tranquillity had been restored. In 1883 the treaty of
Kasr-es-Said was replaced by another agreement which brought the
Tunisian Government under complete French control. In this year the
other Powers surrendered their consular jurisdiction, and recognized
that of the French courts. By 1897 all former commercial treaties
with the Bey were abandoned in favour of fresh conventions made with
France. From the commencement of 1898, Tunis became emphatically an
integral portion of the French Empire.
Through accident or design—let us hope the latter—a succession of
able men was appointed to direct the affairs of France in Tunis.
Several of these had a relatively long tenure of power, and were
therefore able to carry out a continuous policy. Ablest amongst
these French residents have been M. Jules Cambon, and M. René
Millet. Tunis has been an example of almost unqualified success in
French colonial administration. Of late, however, the protectionist
policy which finds favour with the French Government has to some
extent striven to secure the commerce of the Regency for France, a
policy which may tend to qualify the praise which otherwise would be
bestowed on a remarkable development of the country under French
direction.
The extension of Senegal under General Faidherbe, and the occupation
by the French of oases in the Sahara, such as Wargla and Golea,
early suggested an overland connection between the two French
possessions, and the “Chemin de fer Trans-Saharien” was hinted at,
half in joke, during the sixties and became a subject of serious
consideration in the seventies. But in 1881 the massacre of the
Flatters expedition in the Sahara Desert, and the obvious hostility
of the Tawareq to any further advance of the French across the
desert temporarily discouraged the idea; though the main
discouragement no doubt arose from the thought of the enormous cost
of such a railway, and the unfruitful character of the country it
would traverse. Still France, when the word “hinterland” was
creeping into political terminology, began to feel anxious that no
other European Power should intervene between her North African
possessions and her empire on the Niger; and in 1890 she secured
from the British Government a recognition of this important point,
the British recognition carrying the French sphere of influence to
the north-western coast of Lake Chad as well as to the Niger. In
1898 it was resolved to take effective possession of all this
portion of the north-central Sudan, and three great expeditions
converged on it; one from Algeria under Commandant Lamy with Mons.
F. Foureau as political officer, one from French Congo (as to which
more will be written when that region is considered), and the third
from Senegal, under Captains Voulet and Chanoine. Unfortunately
these last-named officers belonged to a type which in the closing
years of the 19th century came into prominent notice in the French
and Belgian operations in Central Africa, while it was not entirely
unknown in the British and German records of that period, as
colonial and “Congo Atrocity” scandals testified—a type which became
recklessly cruel and immoral through the possession of unlimited
power and the belief that its doings would never be heard of in
Europe. But the mistreatment of the natives in the Niger Bend did
come to the knowledge of the French authorities in Senegal, and
Lieut.-Colonel Klobb was sent eastward to catch up with the
Voulet-Chanoine column and take command. Klobb overtook these
officers in the Sokoto country. Voulet ordered his men to fire on
the officer sent to supersede him. Klobb fell dead. Then Voulet and
Chanoine marched away with most of their troops to found an
independent state in the heart of Africa, leaving their junior
officers and the remnant of the negro soldiers to do as they
pleased. But their own Senegalese troops, on reflection, objected to
outlawry and permanent banishment from their homes. They held a
rough court martial, sentenced Voulet and Chanoine to die, shot
them, and then returned to the command of Lieut. Pallier, who had
succeeded Klobb in command of this mis-managed expedition. Pallier
bravely and adroitly (for the tragedy took place nominally on
British territory and the natives were arming to punish these
marauders) led the reorganized expedition to Zinder in northern
Hausaland (July, 1899) where four months afterwards Foureau and Lamy
arrived. From this time onwards the Sahara desert was occupied and
pacified and is now traversed by several lines of telegraph wires.
The Tawareq and Tibu have ceased to raid and devastate peaceful
agriculturists in the oases, or the long caravans of traders.
Between 1899 and 1903 French forces (chiefly native cavalry under
French officers, and the Foreign Legion) had occupied all the
prominent oases and centres of population in the Moroccan Sahara,
from Figig and Beshar on the north to Tuāt, Tidikelt, Gurara and
Insalah in the south.
The work of the 1890 and 1898 conventions between Britain and France
was completed by the Agreement of 1904, in which the British
Government acknowledged Morocco to be a sphere of exclusively French
political influence, with the exception of Tangier and the portions
which might be claimed by Spain on the Riff coast. But in 1905 the
German Government showed its displeasure at this agreement by an
ostentatious recognition of Moroccan independence. European
diplomacy arranged the compromise of the Algeciras Conference in the
spring of 1906, at which the thirteen assembled delegates drew up
some regulations of a stop-gap nature for the policing of the
Moroccan Atlantic ports, the re-establishment of Moroccan finances,
the position of foreigners, etc. In 1907 however the disorder in
Morocco became acute and French and English officials were captured
or killed by the natives. To mark her displeasure, France occupied
Ujda (Oudjda), a border town of north-east Morocco and advanced her
troops to the Muluya river (which will probably be fixed as the
theoretical boundary of “Morocco” in the north-east). Soon
afterwards the tribesmen round Casablanca (Dar-al-baida) attacked
and slew some European masons engaged on the harbour works. France
(after the plunder of the town by the Shawia tribesmen) finally
landed a force of 15,000 men and forcibly occupied the Shawia
country all round Casablanca. More fighting took place in South
Morocco (1907-8) and French expeditions traversed and occupied the
regions south of the High Atlas. In 1908 occurred the civil war
between the Sultans Abd-al-aziz and Mulai Hafid, which resulted in
the defeat of the former, in spite of his English military advisers
and non-commissioned officers[128]. Germany seemed rather to espouse
the cause of Mulai Hafid, but in any case the complication was
unravelled by the abdication of Abd-al-aziz and the recognition of
Mulai Hafid by France and the other signatory powers of the
Algeciras conference.
But in 1909 the temporary peace in Morocco was again rudely broken
by Spanish activity round Melilla—the building of a railway to
secure a new post, La Mar Chica, and to reach and work mineral
deposits. The Riff tribes attacked the Spaniards with results
already described in Chapter V. The ferment among the Moors against
European intervention next took the shape of attacking the Sultan
Mulai Hafid at Fez (1910). To save the Sultan and the Sultan’s
Government (the “Makhzen”) and the European residents from possible
destruction, the French Government sent an expeditionary force from
the Shawia coast region to reach and relieve Fez. This was
accomplished after some difficulty in the spring of 1911, and a
small army or government guard was organized for the Sultan under
French officers.
This and other actions once more aroused German resentment and
intervention on the grounds that France was creating a virtual
protectorate over Morocco without Germany’s consent, and without
compensation to Germany for the possible loss of a profitable field
of commercial development. So the German war vessel, the _Panther_,
was sent to Agadir in the Bay of Sūs to “protect German interests”;
these interests being the mineralogical researches and acquisition
of concessions of the firm of Mannesmann. If we brush aside
diplomatic fictions, the kernel of the matter was this. Germany had
long fixed her desires on the Bay of Sūs or Agadir, that
semi-circular bight of the Moroccan coast south of the Atlas range
and opposite the River and Country of Sūs which is the nearest
approach on the whole Atlantic coast of Morocco to a large and good
harbour protected from the north wind. It was believed in Germany
that Great Britain was too much involved in domestic agitation to be
prepared to go to war over Morocco; and that France would be willing
to stave off trouble with Germany and obtain her consent to the
acquisition of nearly all Morocco by agreeing to a German
protectorate over the Sūs country and Anti-Atlas, thus admitting
Germany as a territorial power in North Africa.
Spain gave Germany some encouragement in this intervention, having
already found the French very grudging in their allotment of Spanish
spheres of influence in the north of Morocco and opposite the Canary
Islands. But had Germany succeeded in her demand for the Sūs country
Spain would have been the first to suffer. The Cape-Jubi-Bojador
region and the Canary Islands might ere long have become German
also.
An attempt was made in Germany to enlist European sympathy on her
side by advancing the plea that this intervention at Agadir stood
for free trade in Morocco. But this important principle had already
been secured by the Anglo-French Convention of 1904 and the
Algeciras Act of 1906; moreover the whole of the bargaining between
France and Germany, since 1906, bore reference to the selfish
advantages which German concessionaires and traders were to obtain
in Morocco to the detriment of (let us say) British, American, or
Belgian competitors. Of course France, in the use she has made of
North, West, and Central Africa and of Madagascar, has been
inexcusably protectionist. She has adopted the thoroughly selfish
policy of colonial exploitation characteristic of Spain and Portugal
in the 16th-18th centuries and of Britain in the 17th to early 19th
centuries. Nevertheless she has spent blood and treasure without
stint in the redemption of North Africa; and in spite of her
protectionist tariff the non-French, European trade with Algeria and
Tunis is very considerable. But a question of even greater
importance than a selfish French use of Morocco rose before Great
Britain in 1911. Not to support France in this diplomatic struggle
meant the establishment of Germany on the Atlantic coast of Morocco,
meant that the Emperor Wilhelm’s half jesting description of himself
at that period as “Admiral of the Atlantic” would become a reality,
with all the consequences which might flow from such a position.
Germany realizing her false position shifted her ground, asked for
reasonable “compensations in Central Africa,” got them, and in
return recognized definitely a French Protectorate over Morocco.
With the exception of the Riff Coast, of Tangier, and of the region
opposite the Canary Islands (which with the exception of Tangier
will become Spanish) France will soon be mistress of Morocco in
name, but probably not in actuality and entirety till many years
have passed. No sensible person need regret this. The condition of
Algeria and Tunis under French direction are a sufficient guarantee
for the future prosperity and happiness of the most interesting
country in Africa—Morocco—under French guidance.
As already related, France, or rather—the State being then but the
king—Louis XIV, had become interested in the affairs of Abyssinia
early in the 18th century. This interest was reawakened in the
middle of the next century by the remarkable researches of the
brothers Antoine and Arnaud d’Abbadie, who though of partly Irish
origin were French subjects. The elder brother had explored Brazil,
the younger, Algeria; but both were attracted by the little-known
civilization of Ethiopia and started together in 1838 for Abyssinia.
Between 1838 and 1853 their researches were carried on from Masawa
in the north to the little-known country of Kaffa in the far south;
and, though the results were not entirely published until 1890 (the
publication began in 1860), they gave to France a legitimate claim
(together with the subsidized travels of Borelli in 1890) to an
interest in the affairs and the future of Abyssinia.
In 1857, jealous of the British establishment at Aden, France had
intended to seize the island of Perim, at the mouth of the Red Sea,
but was forestalled by the British. She therefore turned her
attention to the coast opposite Aden, and there purchased from a
native chief (in 1862) the Bay of Obok. This place was not
effectively occupied till 1883, after the break-up of the Egyptian
Sudan empire. France then rapidly pushed her possessions southward
to curtail as much as possible similar British operations in
Somaliland. She thus secured the important bay of Tajurra, French
territory now stretches inland to the vicinity of Harrar. On the
north it is bounded by the Italian colony of Eritrea and in the
interior by Abyssinia and British Somaliland. French Somaliland, as
this possession is called, is about 5,790 sq. miles in extent and is
chiefly important for the comparatively good harbour of Jibuti and
for the fact that it controls the easiest access to Abyssinia.
Indeed the only existing railway which enters Abyssinia and connects
that country with the sea coast starts from Jibuti and is
constructed to the Abyssinian capital, Adis Ababa (275 miles), with
a branch to the old Semitic city of Harrar (altogether about 192
miles of rail on French territory). It was an unfulfilled aspiration
of France in the last decade of the 19th century that a French
Empire should extend across broadest Africa from Senegal to
Abyssinia and the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. This project was to
be essayed in a tentative manner by an expedition organized in the
French Congo in 1894-5 (despite warnings from Great Britain that
such action would be regarded as unfriendly) and led by an officer
who had been very successful in the wars of Upper Nigeria, the brave
Major J. B. Marchand, who advanced (mainly along the course of the
Djur River) with a force of about 150 Senegalese and nine French
officers to Fashoda, on the White Nile. Here they were saved from
possible destruction at the hands of a large force of Dervishes by
Lord Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman. In consequence of the protests
of the British Government, Major Marchand in November 1898 was
instructed to leave Fashoda and retire through Abyssinia to French
Somaliland. This journey up the valley of the Sobat River was
successfully accomplished; and at the end of May 1899 Marchand and
his officers reached Paris, where they received a great ovation.
French interest in the Congo region began in the 18th century,
mainly because of the importance of the servile labour of Congoland
to the French West Indies and the desirability of preventing the
Portuguese from regaining their monopolist hold over the Kongo
kingdom and its commerce. The French Government contrived moreover
to have French Catholic missionaries sent to the Congo and Loango in
place of the Italian Capuchins. The Napoleonic Wars and the
abolition of the slave trade suspended further action; but the idea
of a French control over “Lower Guinea” revived in 1839, at the time
when the government of Louis Philippe was making half-hearted
efforts to found French settlements on the West Coast of Africa. At
this date King ‘Denis’ of the Gaboon, who had shown favour to Roman
Catholic missionaries and to French traders, was induced to transfer
his kingdom to France. The Gaboon, or country of the Mpongwe tribes,
lies to the south of the Cameroon region. Effective possession was
not however taken till 1844, and Libreville, the present capital,
was not founded till 1848, when a cargo of slaves was landed there
from a captured slaving vessel and set free to commence the
population of the new town. Attention was drawn to this French
settlement by the remarkable journeys of a French-American, Paul du
Chaillu, and his making definitely known the characteristics of the
largest known anthropoid ape, the gorilla. The existence of this ape
had been to some extent established by the American naturalist, Dr
Savage, from skulls sent home by American missionaries settled on
the Gaboon estuary; but the gorilla was scarcely made familiar to
the general public, until Du Chaillu came to England with his
specimens[129]. In the early sixties French explorers established
the lower half of the course of the important river Ogowé; and in
the seventies these explorations were extended by other travellers,
who carried the knowledge of the Ogowé to the limits of its
watershed, and passed beyond—unknowingly—to affluents of the Congo.
Among these explorers was the celebrated Savorgnan de Brazza, of
Dalmatian origin but born on a French ship off the coast of Brazil.
Political interest in the Gaboon languished so much on the part of
France that the country was once or twice offered to England in
exchange for the Gambia. However in 1880, the awakening desire to
found a great colonial empire urged France to extend her Gaboon
possessions up the coast, towards the Cameroons, and southward in
the direction of the mouth of that great river, the Congo, the
course of which the explorer H. M. Stanley had just succeeded in
tracing. Even before Stanley’s return, the King of the Belgians had
summoned a number of geographers to Brussels to discuss the
possibility of civilizing Africa by an International African
association. This conference brought about the creation of national
committees, which were to undertake on behalf of each participating
nation a section of African exploration. The French committee sent
De Brazza to explore the hinterland of the Gaboon. While Stanley was
commencing his second Congo expedition for the King of the Belgians
and slowly working his way up the lower river, De Brazza had made a
rapid journey overland to Stanley Pool and the upper Congo, making
treaties for France and planting the French flag wherever he went.
Soon afterwards an English missionary, George Grenfell, discovered
the lower course of the great Mubangi, and French explorers promptly
directed their steps thither. For some years there was keen and even
bitter rivalry between Stanley’s expedition, which gradually became
a Belgian enterprise, and the French explorers under De Brazza; and
when, at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-5, it was sought to create
the Congo Independent State under the sovereignty of the King of the
Belgians, the adhesion of France to this scheme could only be
obtained by handing over to her much of the western and northern
watershed of the Congo, besides giving her a promise that, if the
Congo State were ever to be transferred from the Belgian sovereign
to another Power, France should have the right of preemption. Before
the French had been many years on the Mubangi River (which is one of
the few means of communication between the southern, Bantu part of
Africa, and the northern regions, the “Sudan,” populated by
non-Bantu Negroes, Negroids, Hamites, and Semites[130]), they had
very naturally conceived the idea of pushing northwards to the Shari
river and Lake Chad. In 1890 Paul Crampel was the first European to
cross this mysterious Bantu boundary, to leave the forest regions of
the Congo and lower Mubangi, and enter the more open park-lands of
the central Sudan. But he was attacked and killed (1891) by
suspicious Muhammadan raiders on the river Shari. Another Frenchman,
of Polish descent, M. Dybowski, succeeded in chastising the
murderers of Crampel, and further exploring the Shari. A further
mission under Lieutenant Maistre continued the work of Dybowski, and
was in turn followed by a well-equipped expedition under the command
of the explorer Emile Gentil; which last succeeded in placing a
small armed steamer on the river Shari, and thence reached the
waters of Lake Chad.
By an agreement with Germany in 1892, France secured German
recognition of her sphere of influence over the river Shari, over
the Bagirmi country, and the southern shores of Lake Chad; while, by
a treaty made with the King of the Belgians in 1894, the Belgian
boundary line was drawn at the Mubangi, the Mbomu, and the Nile
watershed. Lastly, by the Anglo-French convention of June 1898,
Great Britain recognized the French sphere to the south and east of
Lake Chad. Thus France obtained European recognition for a
continuous empire stretching from Algiers to the Congo Coast, and
Oran to Dakar—a remarkable outcome of the landing of 37,000 troops
at the Bay of Sidi Ferruj, near Algiers, in the summer of 1830.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the French method of
administering the territories of the Gaboon, Loango and
Congo-Mubangi (grouped since 1888 in one government as “French
Congo”) was infected by the “concessionaire” spirit, which had
unhappily inspired King Leopold II about the same time in his
attitude towards the development of the Congo Independent State.
These monopolist, protectionist ideas were a heritage from the older
style of colonization in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The
great Berlin Conference of 1884 on the Congo question was supposed
to have vetoed them and rendered their recurrence impossible. But no
sooner was this conference over than this monopolist policy was
revived by the Royal Niger Company on the Niger-Benue, by the infant
Congo State on the Congo above Stanley Pool, by the French in
Loango, and (though much more faintly) by the British South Africa
Company in Rhodesia. But it was mainly in the case of the Royal
Niger Company that the monopoly was one which completely crushed out
other trade. That association did not theoretically forbid the
natives to trade with any foreign merchants but itself; it merely
said to outside traders: “Sorry! but this place is ours, and so is
that—in fact the whole river-bank—and we cannot have you trading on
our private land.” The King of the Belgians copied this policy
pretty faithfully on the Congo, and so did the French. The whole of
French Congo, except two or three old-established towns on the
coast, was divided up into concessions, varying from 20 square miles
in extent to 54,000 square miles. The villages and plantations
actually occupied by the natives at the time were recognized as
native property, but this recognition did not necessarily confer on
the natives the right to trade with whom they pleased.
All the coast ports of the Gaboon and Loango had long been
frequented by British merchants doing a big trade with Liverpool;
and great was the indignation when they found their commerce with
the interior cut off by French concessionaires who, it may be, had
done nothing to develop the trade of the country. In spirit, of
course, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the
commercial stipulations of the Berlin and Brussels Acts which
followed the Congo Conference of 1884-5. But the French government,
in reply to remonstrances, pointed to the monopoly of the Royal
Niger Company[131]; and the French courts of law gave decisions
adverse to British appellants.
It is only fair to quote the justification for this policy of
concessions, charters, and other documents conferring special
privileges. It is desired—in the interests of the native as well as
of the overruling European government—to attract capital to the
opening-up and the exploiting of the natural riches of Africa,
riches of which the native has remained in utter ignorance for
millenniums of years. To invite investments of capital some security
must be given that the immediate fruits of the investors’ labours
and expenditure will not be unfairly garnered by others who have not
run the like risks. No one questions the right of the native, in a
varying degree, to a fair proportion of the land; the area being
determined by his numbers, degree of civilization, energy,
intellectual capacity, and the extent to which he has already
developed its resources. It would be, for example, a ridiculous
proposition that the 322,450 square miles of German South-West
Africa should be the exclusive heritage of a few thousand nomad
Hottentot and Bushman hunters, or even of sixty thousand Bantu
cattle-keepers; that some Congo forest of ten thousand to thirty
thousand square miles should be assigned in perpetuity to a few
thousand wandering pygmies prowling over it in search of game and
wild bees’ nests; or that the whole of the Sahara with its
phosphates and salt-mines be allotted to the raiding Tawareq and
Tibu. On the other hand, to say in connection with a well-populated,
fairly well-known region like the Niger banks, the Gaboon and Loango
coasts, or the lower Ogowé river, that the natives shall only trade
with concessionaires or with the Government itself, or that one
nation shall be specially favoured in its commerce or trading
relations, is to impose a tyranny which the world at large and the
subject races will no longer tolerate quietly. It does not follow
from this that there is to be no interference with “native” rights,
that “freedom should be free to slay herself,” as has often been the
case in wild countries, where the unthinking inhabitants destroy the
resources of the country without thought for the morrow. It is quite
permissible ethically for the French, the British or any other
government to take possession of some thoroughly backward or very
sparsely populated country in a more or less savage condition, and
rule that country impartially for its own benefit and for its
general usefulness to humanity at large. Under such conditions they
certainly are not obliged by any moral law to attribute to the
nearest native community of savages some large area of uninhabited
forest or metalliferous rock. Such a source of future wealth they
are entitled to administer as a trustee might deal with an estate
for the benefit of a minor or of an imbecile; but only on the
condition of putting the profits derived therefrom into the treasury
of the state or country thus administered, not into the funds,
private or public, of a distant European nation. King Leopold II or
the French Republic were quite justified in declaring the
uninhabited, unexploited, uncultivated forests of French and Belgian
Congo to be “State domains”; but not with the sole purpose in the
one case of swelling the revenues of his own privy purse, and in the
other of enriching political partisans or public servants. The
wealth of these regions need not have gone to some native chief or
tribe dwelling in the vicinity who had had nothing whatever to do
with the getting of the wealth, but should have been attributed to
the whole community of the state or colony in which these forest or
mining areas were situated.
Another grave defect in the earlier administration of French Congo
was the handing over of thousands of natives as veritable serfs of
the glebe to these European concessionaires. This was a wicked
return for the trust they had placed in envoys of France like De
Brazza, who had obtained their adherence to French dominion by
treaty. The result of this policy was that gross abuses ensued,
followed by native risings. At length the French Government was
constrained by European opinion (largely awakened by Mr E. D. Morel)
to look into the affairs of French Congo; and in 1905 the virtual
creator of this dominion, De Brazza, was sent out as a commissioner
to investigate the charges brought against the officials and the
concessionaires. It is believed that De Brazza was horrified at much
of the devastation and depopulation which he saw, as were some other
high-minded French officials who had the courage to publish their
impressions. But De Brazza died at Dakar on his way home, and his
report was never published, though the French Government made
afterwards some changes in matters of administration.
In 1911 Germany, in return for acknowledging a French Protectorate
over Morocco, obtained from France important territorial advantages
in French Congo—about 107,000 square miles—giving Germany (1) a
strip on the south of Corisco Bay and a large piece of the Osheba
country, which permits her to surround the Spanish possession of Rio
Muni (she also acquired from France rights of pre-emption over the
Rio Muni); (2) a long strip down the valley of the river Sanga to
the main Congo River opposite Lukolela; (3) the Laka and Baya
countries east of the Cameroons watershed; and (4) a strip of land
communicating with the Mubangi river. In return, Germany ceded to
France a piece of land (6450 sq. miles) along the left bank of the
lower Shari. It was generally rumoured that Germany had asked for
the whole left bank of the Mubangi from Libenge down to the Congo,
and the whole of French Congo between the Mubangi, the Congo and the
Atlantic coast. If she did so, other circumstances caused her to
modify her demands. In any case she has succeeded in cutting off
French Congo from the Mubangi-Shari-Chad territories, so far as
uninterrupted land communication is concerned. She has ringed the
tree in the hope that it may some day fall to her. But if it does,
it will only be in return for an equivalent in some other direction,
perhaps a rectification of the Lorraine frontier.
Even with the loss of her Gaboon-West Congo territory, France would
still possess a magnificent and compact African Empire exceeding in
extent that of any other European Power, or at any rate superior in
continuous area—an empire of something like 3,100,000 square miles,
stretching from Senegal and Morocco to the frontiers of Egypt and
the Egyptian Sudan, from Algiers and Carthage to the Belgian Congo
and the vicinity of Uganda; besides her valuable foothold on the
Gulf of Aden, and the possession of Madagascar (presently to be
described), which compensates her for the want of colonies in South
and East Africa. In the regions north of the Mubangi-Wele—a river
which Germans, Englishmen and Belgians were the first to discover,
but the whole of the north bank of which from the Mbomu confluence
to the Congo confluence is now owned by France—Frenchmen have reason
to be proud of their country’s record. As already related, it was
French explorers who first solved the mystery of the passage from
the Congo watershed to that of the Shari-Chad; and several French
explorers paid with their lives for their temerity. To enquire into
and avenge the death of Paul Crampel, a French commissioner, Emile
Gentil (subsequently, until 1908, Governor of French Congo) had
penetrated down the Shari River, from the Congo basin, till he had
reached the far-famed country of Bagirmi. Here he induced the
much-harried native sultan to accept French protection, and placed a
French resident at his court. Bagirmi was then invaded by Rabah
Zobeir, who had made himself Sultan of Bornu. The Bagirmi sultan and
the French resident had to flee before the army of Rabah; but after
two years’ fighting, in which at first the French met with several
reverses, Rabah was defeated and slain in a great battle in which
the Foureau-Lamy[132] expedition, which had come from Algiers, were
joined by the remnant of the Voulet-Chanoine column from Senegal,
and a river flotilla from the Mubangi-Congo. For two years more,
however, the French forces in Bagirmi had to fight Rabah’s sons and
successors; but the last of these was defeated and slain (on the
borders of Bornu) in the early part of 1902.
The next enemy to be grappled with and overcome—the last, so far as
one can foresee, of the strong Mussulman states of Central
Africa—was the country of Wadai, situated to the north-east of
Bagirmi and a region which had been for a century or more the chief
focus of slave-raiding and trading in Central Africa, besides being
singular in that region for its secular hatred and distrust of the
white man, in whom the Arabized ruling classes of Wadai saw not only
the hated Christian infidel but the eventual opponent of the slave
trade, out of which Wadai had amassed wealth since the seventeenth
century. The French entered into relations with Wadai in 1900, and
interfered in its civil wars. But incited by the agents of the
Senussi sheikh[133], the Wadai ruler attacked the French outposts on
the Shari in 1904 and carried off many negro prisoners. Another
motive for their hostility was that France had given refuge to a
claimant for the Wadai throne—Asil, subsequently Sultan of Wadai.
Between 1904 and 1911 fighting between the French and a section of
the Wadaian peoples—mostly the Maba negroids and the Massalit
Arabs—continued until the French had conquered the whole country and
installed Asil on the throne of Wadai under the guidance of a French
resident who has since (1912) deposed him for cruelty. They
themselves took over the direct government of the southern
provinces, the negro countries of Dar Runga and Dar Sila, so long
the hunting-grounds for the slave-raiders; so much so, that their
once abundant negro population was reduced to a few thousand
miserable savages. In this long warfare against the strongest and
most fanatical of Muhammadan negro states, the French lost numerous
officers of note and displayed qualities of resource and heroism
that promise well for a nation which can produce at the present day
such officers and non-commissioned officers. As in the case of the
British, the rank and file of their armies on these campaigns were
Africans, mainly Senegalese.
The conquest of Bagirmi and Wadai naturally secured to the French
the more sparsely populated country of Kanem, inhabited mainly by
those Tibu negroids whose race extends right across the Sahara to
the hinterland of Tripoli. Now that Italy is in occupation of
Cyrenaica, and Turkey can no longer supply arms and ammunition to
Wadai for the campaign against the interfering white man, it is
unlikely that French rule will be seriously contested any more in
the heart of the Central Sudan; so long, that is, as Britain rules
to the eastward. Quite possibly a great strategic future may lie
before Kanem and Wadai, and the lands of the French Mubangi
province; for through these regions may pass the trunk line of
Trans-African railways, the route which will connect South Africa
with Tangier and with Alexandria. The conquest of Wadai by the
French has been the final and the most crushing blow directed at the
African slave trade of Islam, and it has been carried out with a
lavish expenditure of money and bravery at a distance of something
like 1,500 miles from the nearest civilized base, a feat almost
without parallel in African history. It may well serve as a pendant
and an effacement to that brief lapse from the policy of a civilized
Power during which something like a new form of slavery was
established by France in Western Congoland.
----------------------------------------------------------------
FRENCH AFRICA
Plate IV.
[Illustration]
W. & A.K. Johnston, Limited, Edinburgh & London.
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[gray] _Area of French Possessions in 1880_
[pink] ” ” ” _Colonies and Protectorates in 1912_
----------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Footnote 122:
It might be advisable at this juncture to explain clearly about
the Fula power in French Nigeria and Senegambia. The Ful or Fulbe
people appeared first in the 13th century in West African history
as peaceful cattle-keepers on the lower Senegal; but as a matter
of fact they had probably reached the Upper Niger and Senegal many
centuries before. The Western Fulbe had become Muhammadans at
quite an early date—between the 12th and 15th centuries. Those in
the more eastern part of Nigeria remained pagan in some
settlements down to the 19th century, and are pagan even still.
About the 16th century those of the Senegal began to emigrate as
cattle-keepers into the cooler highlands of Futa Jallon, and
became the ruling power on this upland two hundred years later. At
the same period—the beginning or middle of the 18th century—they
likewise founded dynasties of Muhammadan kings in Futa Toro and
Bondu (south of the Upper Senegal). In 1802, a Fula religious
mystic and _imam_ or religious preacher, Othman Dan Fodio, arose
like a Mahdi in Eastern Nigeria (Sokoto), called on the Muhammadan
Fulas of the central Sudan to join with him in a holy war, and in
a few years conquered a vast Fula Empire, which was almost
conterminous with the British (Northern) Nigeria of to-day. Fired
no doubt by this example another Fula ‘sheikh’ or holy man—Ahmadu
Lobo, in the country of Masina, between Timbuktu and Jenné—about
1813 attacked with his followers the vestiges of Moorish power on
the Upper Niger, the “Roumas” (as they were called, from their
having come originally from Andalusia—“Rome”) and took all power
from them, creating in Central Nigeria between Jenné and Gao the
powerful Fula kingdom of Masina, which lasted until about 1861,
when Ahmadu Ahmadu, the last Fula Emperor of Masina, was attacked
and killed by a rival Fula Mahdi from the west.
This personage was ’Omaru bin Saidi, a Fula of Futa Toro, who had
spent some years in Mekka and Medina, and had acquired the
reputation of a holy man and a doctor of religion. On his return
to West Africa he was received with great respect by the Fula
princes of Futa Jallon, and with their support he rallied to the
cause of Islam the Fula-negro peoples of Futa Toro and Bondu—the
Takrur, Torobe, or “Toucouleurs” as they came to be called. Al
Hajji ’Omaru (as he was called), after his return from the
pilgrimage (Al Hajj) to Mekka was unsuccessful in his attack on
the French (1857), and so turned his army against his fellow
Moslems of the Upper Niger. Two years after the defeat and death
of Ahmadu Ahmadu, the Fula Sultan of Masina, ’Omaru himself
perished at Bandiagara, in the Masina kingdom. The Toucouleur
power was, however, maintained by his sons and successors till it
finally fell in 1892 with the capture of Segu on the Niger by a
French force.
Footnote 123:
It is averred that this name is a contraction of Idolos. The
islands would appear to have been named by the early Portuguese
navigators Ilhas dos Idolos from the idols or fetishes which were
very prominently in use.
Footnote 124:
Of Arab descent, born near Maskara in Western Algeria.
Footnote 125:
In 1861, there were 112,229 French settlers in Algeria, and 80,517
Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, Germans, and Swiss; in all, 192,746
European colonists, as against about 650,000 in 1910. It is a
common mistake among British writers on political economy to
assert that the French are not good colonizers, though they have
Eastern Canada, Louisiana, Algeria and Tunis before their eyes.
There are now some 340,000 thriving French inhabitants of Northern
Africa between Morocco and Tripoli, who will play a considerable
part yet in Mediterranean politics.
Footnote 126:
This title arose of course from the Bey (Beg) or Colonel
commanding the Turkish army of occupation. The present dynasty was
founded in 1706 by the Bey, Hussein bin ’Ali, who was really a
renegade Cretan Greek.
Footnote 127:
This now forgotten bone of contention was, in the autumn of 1898,
sold by the Italian Company to the French Railway Company of
Bône-Guelma-et-Tunisie.
Footnote 128:
Some of the latter performed really gallant services, and
afterwards passed into the military and police forces organized by
the French.
Footnote 129:
Now in the British Museum of Natural History.
Footnote 130:
The Mubangi is the name given to the western and southern course
of the river which is known as the Wele in its upper waters, and
was discovered by Schweinfurth in 1871.
Footnote 131:
The invidious analogy of the Royal Niger Company was soon
afterwards disposed of by its charter being redeemed for £900,000,
and the Niger being thrown open to general trade.
Footnote 132:
Major Lamy was killed in the battle which also cost Rabah his
life.
Footnote 133:
At the end of the 18th century there was born at Mostaganem in
West Algeria from an Arab family in that place, Muhammad-bin-Ali,
further named As-Sanusi (Senussi), after a celebrated saint of
Tlemsan. He went as a young man to Mekka, and there achieved a
reputation for holiness and learning. Here also he made the
acquaintance of Muhammad Sharif, a negro prince from Wadai, who
afterwards became Sultan of that country. In the middle of the
19th century As-Sanusi returned to N. Africa and settled in the
Cyrenaica, but finding the Turks suspicious he changed his
head-quarters to Jaghbub in 1860, just inside the Egyptian
borders, thirty miles from Siwa. Here he died soon after his
arrival, and as a religious leader he was succeeded by his second
son, Al-Mahdi. Al-Mahdi Senussi II renewed the relations with
Wadai, where his father’s sect numbered many adherents, and in the
last quarter of the 19th century removed his head-quarters to Al
Jof in the Kufra oasis, midway between Cyrenaica and the Sudan.
Senussi refused to countenance the revolt of the Mahdi in the
Egyptian Sudan, but between 1899-1902 interfered strenuously in
the Central Sudan to prevent the advance of the French, especially
towards Kanem and Wadai. But his efforts were fruitless, and he
died in or near Wadai in 1902. His nephew and successor, Senussi
III, wandered about for some time in the borderland between Wadai
and Kordofan, and finally betook himself to the Kufra oasis in the
Libyan desert, where he now resides. The Senussiites profess a
purified form of the Muhammadan faith, are rigid abstainers from
alcohol and tobacco, but are above all an honest, industrious
folk, who have done much of late years to improve the conditions
of life in the Saharan and Libyan oases.
CHAPTER X
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS
If I were writing this book for dramatic effect and less with a view
to historical sequence, I should have been disposed to put this
chapter next to the one dealing with the slave trade, as an
effective pendant; for if Europe has dealt wickedly in enslaving
Africa, she has sent thither a high-minded army of men and women,
who, acting nearly always from noble and unselfish motives, have
raised the African from a callous ignorance to a distinctly higher
stage of civilization. And whether or not Britain was a greater
sinner than other white peoples in the thoroughness with which she
prosecuted the slave trade, she at any rate deserves credit for a
degree of missionary effort far surpassing that attributable to any
other nation.
The Portuguese were the first European nation to send missionaries
to Africa. Their zeal was great, and, with one or two exceptions,
wholly praiseworthy. Portuguese priests and Jesuit fathers
accompanied most of the early expeditions to Africa; in fact hardly
any explorer or conquistador sailed without chaplains in his
company, who raised the cross and preached Christianity as soon as
they set foot on shore. In the chapter on the Portuguese in Africa I
have touched upon the introduction of Christianity into Congoland in
1491. But any race of purely negro blood accepts and loses
Christianity with great facility. The Negro (unless he be
Muhammadanized) is easily converted, and as easily relapses into
gross superstition or a negation of all religion, including his
former simple but sound ideas of right and wrong. In order that
Christianity may become permanently rooted in a negro race it is
necessary for it to be maintained by a European power for a long
period as the religion of the State. If the negro kingdoms which
remained independent retained their Christianity it was in an
unrecognizable form. It is not so with Muhammadanism, the
explanation being that Muhammadanism as taught to the Negro demands
no sacrifice of his bodily lusts, whereas Christianity with its
restrictions ends by boring him, unless and until his general mental
condition, by individual genius or generations of transmitted
culture, reaches the average level of the European. As instances of
the former, one might mention some ten or a dozen individuals living
at the present time, who are priests and deacons of Christianity in
Africa; while for examples of permanently rooted Christianity as the
result of inheritance it is only necessary to point to the two or
three millions of really good negro men and women to be found in the
United States, the West Indies and Cape Colony. Portugal, however,
never attempted to rule the Kingdom of the Congo till the last
quarter of the 19th century; so after more than three centuries of
propaganda[134] the Ba-kongo fell away from Christianity, and in
less than a hundred years had absolutely relapsed into Heathenism,
when once more, against their wishes, missionaries returned to
Western Congoland.
Jesuit priests also accompanied Portuguese conquerors to the Zambezi
and the south-east of Africa. Here they met with relatively little
success, though they left their traces on Zambezia in the most
marked manner by founding a settlement at Zumbo high up the Zambezi
and even establishing stations beyond in the little known Batoka
country, where their presence is attested to this day by the groves
of fruit trees descended from those they introduced. Tete, the
modern capital of Portuguese Zambezi, also began as a missionary
station. Elsewhere, in Portuguese East Africa, the priests had very
little success, as Muhammadanism had already got a hold. Indeed the
first missionary explorer of Zambezia, who visited the court of the
King of Monomotapa, was martyred there at the instigation of the
Arabs[135].
Portuguese priests also travelled over Abyssinia during two
centuries after the Portuguese discovery of that country at the end
of the 15th century. Christian Abyssinia—the most probable origin of
the myth of the Kingdom of Prester John—attracted a good deal of
attention from Portugal since she commenced her exploration of the
outer world. But the Portuguese priests were quite unsuccessful in
converting the Abyssinians from their debased form of Greek
Christianity to the Roman Catholic Church; and after bitter quarrels
with the native clergy these missionaries had been either killed or
expelled from the country by 1633.
The French traders who frequented the Senegal coast between 1550 and
1650 nearly always took a missionary chaplain with them.
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian priests vainly attempted at
different times to convert the Moors of North Africa. Finding this a
hopeless task, they directed their efforts towards relieving the
sufferings of the unfortunate Christian captives of the Barbary
pirates, and practically continued this work down to the French
occupation of Algeria.
The Protestant peoples did little in the way of missionary work in
Africa till quite the end of the 18th century; though the good
Huguenots, who went out to South Africa, endeavoured, somewhat to
the surprise of the Dutch, to treat the Hottentots as fellow men
fitted for baptism; and the Moravians, attracted by the Hottentots,
began evangelizing work at the Cape of Good Hope in 1732, but were
soon checked in their efforts by the Dutch Company.
Wesleyan missionary work was begun at Sierra Leone coincidently with
the establishment of that place as a settlement for freed slaves in
1787. The London Missionary Society was founded in 1795, and the
Edinburgh Missionary Society in 1796; the Glasgow Missionary Society
soon afterwards. By the end of the 18th century these three bodies
had sent out missionaries to Sierra Leone and the adjoining Susu
country. In 1821 the Glasgow Missionary Society sent the first
Presbyterian missionaries to South Africa. The Church Missionary
Society was founded in 1799. It furnished missionaries for Sierra
Leone, and after a long interval extended its operations to Lagos
and the Niger Delta, where it is still the leading Christian
mission. In 1830 this mission sent its first agents to teach
Protestant Christianity in Abyssinia, and began to consider the
possibility of evangelizing East Africa. In common with other
English missionary societies at that time, and for reasons not
altogether clear, it preferred to employ German evangelists, though
from the results achieved few can find fault with the choice made.
The Church Missionary Society introduced to us men of the stamp of
Krapf and Rebmann. Dr Ludwig Krapf is justly a great name in African
exploration, African philology, and African Christianity. Despatched
by the Church Missionary Society to prospect Abyssinia in 1834, he
was obliged to decide in 1842 (in Shoa), after disappointing
experiences, that there was no field there for Protestant
Christianity, and therefore directed his steps to the Zanzibar
coast. Being a tactful man, and meeting with kindness at the hands
of Sayyid Sa’id, the ‘Sultan’ of Zanzibar[136], he established
himself at Rabai, near Mombasa, and there founded the work of the
Church Missionary Society, which endures and prospers to this day.
Dr Krapf will also be referred to in the chapter on explorers. The
Church Missionary Society educated the first Protestant negro
bishop[137] in the person of Samuel Crowther of the Niger. Its work
met with some success on the West Coast of Africa as regards the
number of adherents; but, like most Christian missions, it has not
achieved rapid progress in more or less Muhammadanized East Africa.
This mission stands out conspicuous for the magnificent philological
work done by its agents in Africa; especially notable among whom
have been Dr S. W. Koelle, Mr Reichardt, the Rev. James Frederic
Schön, Bishop Crowther, Krapf, Rebmann, and J. T. Last.
The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society was founded in 1813, and
devoted its first efforts to South Africa, Namakwaland, and
Kaffraria. The Primitive Methodist Society was started in 1843, and
continued the evangelization of Fernando Pô, which had been carried
on by the (British) Baptist mission from 1844 to 1859. They also
went at the same time to South Africa. The prospects of this mission
in Fernando Pô were affected by the resumption of the administration
of that island by the Spanish Government, which at that time
discountenanced Protestant missions in its territory. Some
arrangement was come to, however, and the mission still continues to
work there, and to work at the present time without any very marked
restriction.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel became a distinctly
missionary body in 1821, and worked chiefly in South Africa.
The British Baptists organized a missionary society early in the
19th century, and sent out missionaries as far back as 1840 to
Fernando Pô. Owing to their expulsion from the island by the Spanish
Government, they moved across to the Cameroons, where they
established the flourishing settlement of Ambas Bay, and made
English almost the second language of the Cameroons people. The
splendid work of this mission in the Cameroons was chiefly done
under the late Edward Saker, whose name is still venerated on the
Cameroons river for the great good that he did to the country by
spreading the knowledge of many useful arts and industries and
educating the Duala people to a remarkable degree. From the
Cameroons the mission, under the guidance of the Rev. Thomas Comber
and the Rev. Holman Bentley, moved on to the Congo[138], where this
Baptist mission now has numerous stations. One of its missionaries,
the Rev. George Grenfell, made himself famous by discovering the
great Mubangi river, the most important of the Congo tributaries,
and known in its upper waters as the Wele, besides making a
remarkable survey of the main Congo and several of its leading
tributaries, thus earning the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical
Society and a number of other distinctions. Though several times
offered posts of responsibility under the Congo Government he
preferred remaining a missionary till his death in 1906. The
linguistic work done by this Baptist mission was important, and
included an illustration of the language of Fernando Pô by Mr John
Clarke, a like service rendered to the Duala language of the
Cameroons by Mr Saker, a valuable Congo dictionary and grammar by
the Rev. Dr H. Bentley, and work of far-reaching interest and
importance by the Rev. W. H. Stapleton.
Roman Catholic missions entered North Africa soon after the conquest
of Algeria. Lyons, in France, became a great centre of missionary
activity. It is the head-quarters at the present day of a powerful
French Roman Catholic Missionary Society—that of the Holy Ghost and
of the Sacred Heart of Mary—which of recent years has been doing a
good work in Portuguese Angola and on the coast region of the Congo,
and also in Senegambia and German East Africa. In 1846 missionary
enterprise in Roman Catholic Austria decided to take advantage of
Muhammad Ali’s conquest of the Sudan to push its way into the heart
of Africa through Egypt. In 1846 these Austrian Catholic
missionaries chose Cairo as their starting point, and this mission
continued to work in the Egyptian Sudan until the uprising of the
Mahdists. Most of the readers of this book have heard of the
adventures of Father Ohrwalder and the nuns who escaped from the
clutches of the Khalifa in 1896. This mission, amongst other
philological studies, illustrated the interesting Bari language of
the upper White Nile, and did excellent work in countries so remote
as Kordofan and Sennār. Italian priests—before the disasters which
befell the colonial enterprise of Italy in 1896—worked amongst the
Galas of Abyssinia. Roman Catholic missions (French) had been begun
in Tigré (N. Abyssinia) about 1830. In 1847, at the request of the
Prince of Shoa, Pope Pius IX sent a Roman bishop-missionary,
Monsignor Massaia, to Shoa, who remained there some years, and may
be said to have started Italian mission work in that field.
In 1878 the late Cardinal Lavigerie having created the Mission of
the White Fathers, which was to convert the Sudan and all Congoland
to Christianity, Pope Leo XIII gave them a rescript directing them
to evangelize all Central Africa. They had settled in Tunis (as well
as in Algeria), on the Congo, on Tanganyika, and in West Africa
(Senegambia), and finally they directed their energies towards
Uganda shortly after the Church Missionary Society had established
itself in that country. Cardinal Lavigerie was a type of prelate
somewhat characteristic of the last quarter of the 19th century,
given to sonorous declamation, who posed as the denunciator of
slavery and the slave trade without ever making personal
acquaintance with its horrors. He endeavoured to obtain in the Roman
Catholic world the glory of a Livingstone without going through
Livingstone’s hardships. Moreover, hand in hand with his desire to
spread religion amongst Arabs, Berbers and Negroes was an equally
ardent desire to make them at the same time French or
French-protected subjects. His strong political bias has somewhat
discoloured his strenuous efforts for the evangelization of Africa,
since his work is now seen to have been by no means disinterested.
No doubt—as foreign critics point out—British missionaries often
come as precursors to British rule; but they do so unconsciously,
and indeed frequently prove inconvenient champions of native
independence. But the missionaries of Cardinal Lavigerie’s order
aimed in earlier days at advancing the political interests of France
almost before they had secured the conversion of their pupils; and
this somewhat detracted from their value as missionaries of
Christianity. The determined hostility shown by these men to the
British protectorate over Uganda provoked a terrible civil war;
though since 1898 (when a section of their work was taken up by a
British Roman Catholic mission) this political aspect of their work
has entirely ceased and they have won hearty commendation from
British, German and Belgian administrators. The White Fathers wear
an Arab costume—a red fez and a long white cassock tied round the
waist with a girdle. Their churches and schools were formerly built
in a Moorish style of architecture. It was Cardinal Lavigerie’s idea
that an approximation in dress and architecture to the Arabs might
induce that people to give a hearing to his propagandists.
About eighteen years ago the Jesuits decided to resume their work on
the Zambezi, which had been interrupted for more than a century by
native troubles and by the expulsion of the Jesuits from the
Portuguese dominions by the orders of the Marquez de Pombal. At
first the efforts of the Jesuits resulted in utter disaster. They
established themselves on the upper Zambezi, in the Batoka country,
near the Victoria Falls, and all those who did not die of fever were
massacred by the Batoka. Then they restricted their efforts to the
vicinity of the Portuguese settlements at Zumbo and Tete and at
Boroma. Near the last-named place they have a most prosperous and
well-conducted establishment where a good technical education is
given to the negroes of the Zambezi. At the invitation of the
Portuguese Government they directed their attention to Nyasaland,
but their establishment there being sacked and burned by Muhammadan
Yaos, they retired from work in that direction. They have
subsequently established mission stations in Mashonaland, besides
resuming work in Madagascar.
Roman Catholic missionaries met with but poor success in Madagascar
until French influence became dominant there a few years ago. The
priests who attempted repeatedly to establish themselves on the
coast of Madagascar in the early days of French colonial experiments
either died from fever or were killed by the natives. The Jesuits
who proceeded to the Hova Plateau during the sixties of the 19th
century, and who were maintained there by subsidies granted by the
French Imperial Government, met with so little success that they
almost abandoned their work. At the present time, however, being
strongly supported by the government of this French colony, they are
obtaining an ascendancy over the Protestants.
Protestant missionary work, chiefly conducted by the London
Missionary Society, and subsequently by the Quakers and the
Norwegians, began in Madagascar in 1818. The missionaries of the
London Missionary Society met with great success in converting the
natives of Madagascar to an undenominational form of Protestant
Christianity; but their efforts were suddenly checked by the
reactionary policy of Queen Ranavalona I, who persecuted and killed
the native Christians, and compelled the missionaries to leave the
island in 1836. After various attempts—which proved futile—to come
to an understanding with the old heathen queen, the Protestant
missionaries returned in full force at her death, and since that
time until the French annexation of the island they may be said to
have converted the mass of the Hovas to Christianity, and to have
established a strong Protestant native Church in friendly
co-operation with the Anglicans, who, under a Bishop of Madagascar,
became established in the island from 1863 onwards.
The London Missionary Society, which has done such striking work in
Madagascar, and was indeed the pioneer missionary society in South
Africa, was attracted to the open field of Tanganyika at the time
when the Church Missionary Society, stirred up by Stanley’s appeal,
sent its emissaries to Uganda. The first missionaries of the London
Missionary Society, crossing Tanganyika from east to west, made
their first establishment on the Kavala islet on the west coast. By
means of the African Lakes Company of Nyasa, they conveyed a steamer
in sections to the waters of Tanganyika, a steamer which has plied
successfully on the lake since it was launched in 1885.
Subsequently, however, the London Missionary Society retired from
those parts of Tanganyika which were under foreign flags, and
directed their attention to the south shore of the lake, which was
placed under British protection by the author of this book in 1889.
A Swiss Protestant mission was founded at Basel in 1815, and soon
afterwards commenced work on the Gold Coast, a work which produced
the most remarkable and beneficial results in the industrial
training of thousands of Gold Coast natives, enabling them thus to
earn good wages and to fulfil many of the tasks hitherto assigned to
Europeans. The Basel mission is now also established in the
adjoining German territories of Togoland. The Moravian Protestant
Missionary Society was founded as far back as 1732, and sent out the
first trained Christian missionaries to South Africa. At the present
day this mission has flourishing establishments in that part of the
continent. The Berlin Missionary Society was founded in 1823, the
Rhenish Missionary Society in 1829, and the North German (Bremen)
Society in 1836. The two first-named German Protestant missions
directed their attentions to Damaraland, and to the Hottentot
country in South-West Africa; the Bremen Mission sent its agents
chiefly to West Africa. Several of these societies, together with
the Moravians, have established mission stations in German
Nyasaland, to the north of Lake Nyasa. A Bavarian Roman Catholic
mission has commenced work in the coast regions of German East
Africa.
The French Evangelical Church began its important missionary work in
Africa as far back as 1829. Its agents—noted almost universally for
their single-minded earnestness and dissociation from all attempts
to procure political influence—have made remarkable progress in
Christianizing Basutoland and the adjoining Bechuana peoples in
South Africa. Following the Bechuana race movements, they were
gradually directed to the Upper Zambezi, and to the Barotse Kingdom.
Here, under the distinguished leadership of M. Coillard, they have
carried out a work of civilization amongst the Barotse deserving of
the highest praise, though they have suffered severe losses among
their agents by ill-health. Sweden, not to be behind other
Protestant states, founded a missionary society in the early part of
this century, which devoted itself to the still unoccupied field of
Galaland, attacking this country both from the Abyssinian side and
from British territory on the East Coast of Africa, whence it is
easier penetrated at the present day. Though the work of this
society has resulted in important additions to our philological
knowledge, its efforts to propagate Christianity amongst the
Galas—who were either obstinate Muhammadans or equally obstinate
Pagans—have been unsuccessful. The Swiss Calvinist Church has sent
missionaries among the Basuto in South Africa, and at a later date
into Angola. The Dutch Reformed Church has done a good deal of
missionary work in South Africa, and of late in Nyasaland. The
American Presbyterian Church started an African missionary society
in 1831 and sent its emissaries to Liberia, where it has many
adherents.
British Presbyterians have established several important missionary
bodies. The earliest (among existing societies) to commence work was
the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which established a
mission at Old Calabar, on the West Coast of Africa, in 1846, and
has since made great progress in converting the natives of Old
Calabar and the Cross River to Christianity and a certain degree of
civilization. It is mainly owing to the work of this mission that
Old Calabar has become an important centre for European enterprise,
and the capital of the eastern half of Southern Nigeria. The
Edinburgh and Glasgow Missionary Societies of the early part of this
century, which sent out missionaries to South Africa, were
dissolved, and took shape in other forms as the foreign missions of
the Free Church of Scotland and the Established Church of Scotland.
The former, which was organized in the fifties, established strong
missions in South Africa, and there founded the educational
establishment of Lovedale, whence many hundreds of South African
negroes have gone out into the world with a practical education.
When Livingstone had directed attention to the Zambezi, the Free
Church of Scotland thought of establishing a mission there, but
after the report of its commissioner decided that the time was not
come for such an enterprise. But in 1875, after Livingstone’s death,
the Free Kirk sent out an expedition to Nyasaland for the
establishment of a mission, which now has stations all along the
west coast of that lake[139]. The Established Church of Scotland
followed suit in 1876, when a settlement was made on the Shiré
Highlands, to the south of Lake Nyasa; and the headquarters of the
mission was styled “Blantyre” after the little town in Lanarkshire
were Livingstone was born. Blantyre is now in many respects the
principal town in the Nyasaland Protectorate. The Norwegian Church
sent out missionaries to Zululand (1842) and to Madagascar in later
years.
Besides the American Presbyterian mission in Liberia, other American
missionaries (Baptists, Episcopal Methodists, and undenominational)
settled in the Gaboon and on the coast between the Cameroons and the
French colony, on the Congo, in Angola, and, above all, on the
highlands of Bihé, behind Benguela. Among the agents of these
American missions, remarkable for the linguistic work they have done
in African languages, were the Rev. J. L. Wilson, who, together with
Preston and Best, wrote on the languages of the Gaboon coast; Dr
Sims, who compiled valuable vocabularies of Congo languages; Mr Héli
Chatelain, whose work in connection with the Angola language was of
exceptional value; and lastly, the Rev. W. M. Stover, who ably
illustrated the Bihé language.
Besides the Church Missionary Society, the Anglican Church has been
represented in Africa by the well-known “Universities’ Mission,”
founded in 1856 as the result of an appeal by Livingstone to the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge. While the Church Missionary
Society is mainly supported by the Evangelical side of the English
Church, the Universities’ Mission is the outcome of the missionary
enterprise of the High Church party. Its first establishment in
Nyasaland under Livingstone was unfortunate, and resulted in the
death of Bishop Mackenzie (the first missionary bishop of Central
Africa) and most of the missionaries with him. His successor, Bishop
Tozer, resolved to suspend work in Nyasaland, and concentrate the
efforts of the mission upon Zanzibar, which thenceforward became its
principal seat in Africa; but later on, when he was succeeded by
Bishop Steere, another and a successful effort was made to reach
Nyasa. From the beginning of the eighties to the present day, though
at times much harassed by the Muhammadan Yaos, this mission has
taken a firm hold in Nyasaland, besides establishing and maintaining
a number of mission stations in German East Africa. In Nyasaland it
occupies chiefly the east coast of the Lake, and has one station on
the west coast, having chosen to work mainly among those populations
which have been to some degree under Arab or Yao influence. To this
mission is due the erection of a fine cathedral at Zanzibar; and
much valuable linguistic work has been done by the late Bishop
Steere, Mr Madan, and the late Bishop of Likoma (better known as
Archdeacon Chauncey Maples[140]).
The Plymouth Brethren have established a mission in South-Central
Africa, across the Zambezi-Congo water-parting.
The Scotch Baptists began a mission to S.W. Nyasaland and also on
the Zambezi in 1895. There, also, is the Zambezi Industrial Mission
(undenominational), which was founded in 1893, and endeavours to be
self-supporting by its industrial work. A few American missionaries,
mostly under Bishop Hartzell of the American Episcopal Church, have
attempted settlement in the Portuguese possessions on the West and
the South-east coasts of Africa; and there are also unattached
American missionaries in the Congo basin carrying on work on their
own account, without being connected with any special society.
Finally, Plymouth Brethren and other English Protestants of
different denominations organized a Protestant missionary,
enterprise in North Africa as the “North African Mission,”
established in 1886. This mission has numerous representatives in
Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli, and Egypt. As it devotes itself
mainly to the conversion of Muhammadans, it has had but slight
success at present from the propagandist’s point of view, but it has
achieved more than any other a preparation of the Moslem mind for
the consideration of Christian ethics, and its educational work of
late has been warmly appreciated by the French authorities. This
mission has numerous women members who visit the harims for
educational and for medical purposes. Its agents have been
remarkable for their thorough acquaintance with Arabic and even with
the Berber dialects of Morocco and Algeria.
The only Christian state which existed in Africa before the
beginning of European colonization was Abyssinia, which is to some
degree dependent on the Coptic Church in Egypt, and is in communion
with the Greek Church. Christianity is said to have been introduced
here in the 4th century. The Abyssinians have usually resented the
arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries, and have not shown much
greater encouragement to emissaries from Protestant Churches.
Abyssinian Christianity is, as might be imagined, so degraded and
mixed up with fetishism that it is difficult to recognise it as a
branch of the Christian faith which is the religion of so much of
Europe and America. Russia in the latter part of the 19th century
was much concerned at the spiritual darkness prevailing in
Abyssinia, and endeavoured to send thither missionaries from the
Greek Church, the domain of which she identifies with her own
empire. But these have been propagandists of a singularly military
type—wolves in sheep’s clothing, if one may commit oneself to rather
a strong metaphor—and hardly to be classed with the unarmed
emissaries of Christianity, who, on behalf of the Roman Catholic and
Protestant Churches of Europe and America, have striven usually with
single-minded motives, almost always with deep personal
unselfishness, ever with zeal, sometimes with indiscretion, and not
unfrequently with bitter disappointments and cruel sufferings to
evangelize Africa. The ultimate effect of their work on the history
of Africa will prove to be far-reaching, important, and (I believe)
highly beneficial.
-----
Footnote 134:
For the detailed history of the Portuguese, Italian, Flemish, and
French Catholic missionaries in the Kongo kingdom see my book,
_George Grenfell and the Congo_.
Footnote 135:
Gonçalo de Silveira; killed somewhere to the south-west of Tete
about 1565.
Footnote 136:
At that time the Arab viceroy of Zanzibar was only known as
‘Sayyid’ (Lord); not as Sultan.
Footnote 137:
The Portuguese Church had produced the first Roman Catholic negro
bishop, in the 16th century. He was Bishop of the Congo, was a
member of the royal family of Kongo, and was educated at Lisbon
and Rome. Samuel Crowther was an Egba slave-boy from Lagos, who by
education acquired the intellect and outlook of a European. He was
an upright, sensible man who wrote valuable works on African
philology, and did much towards founding British Nigeria and
exploring the Niger and the Benue.
Footnote 138:
It quitted the Cameroons altogether soon after the establishment
of the German colony, the German Government having expropriated
most of its establishments.
Footnote 139:
The same body also established an industrial mission (initiated by
Dr James Stewart, the founder of Lovedale) in British East Africa,
halfway to Uganda.
Footnote 140:
Who worked for many years in Nyasaland and in East Africa, and was
drowned in Like Nyasa in 1895.
CHAPTER XI
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, II
(_South and South-Central._)
Towards the close of the 18th century Great Britain cast longing
eyes at the Cape of Good Hope, as a victualling station for her
ships on the way to India which could not remain much longer in the
weak grasp of a Dutch company and must not fall into the hands of
France. In 1795 the British Government despatched a strong
expedition with the authority of the Prince of Orange and took
possession of Cape Town, after a brief struggle with the local
authorities. Free trade, with some preference for British goods, at
once took the place of the grinding monopoly and vexatious
restrictions of the old Dutch company; and various other liberal
measures were enacted, which would have done much to reconcile the
Dutch colonists to British rule were it not that, when England at
the Peace of Amiens in 1803 restored the Cape of Good Hope to the
Dutch Republic, there followed three years of direct Dutch rule
under two most enlightened men, De Mist and Janssens, who did much
to efface from the settlers’ remembrance the justly hated
selfishness of the old Dutch East India Company. Therefore, when
Great Britain resumed, in a manner intended to be permanent, the
administration of Cape Colony in 1805, a still more decided
opposition was shown to her forces than before; and even after the
cession of this colony by Holland in 1814 there remained among the
Dutch settlers a certain lukewarmness, and a disposition to find
fault with the actions and motives of the Colonial Government and of
the British people. In 1806, when Cape Colony passed definitely
under British control, it had an area of about 125,000 square
miles[141]. The boundary on the East was the Great Fish river, and
thence a curving line which ended at Plettenberg’s Beacon, about
fifty miles south of the Orange river. The boundary on the north was
an irregular line from Plettenberg’s Beacon (dipping far south in
the middle) to the mouth of the Buffalo river (Little Namakwaland)
on the Atlantic Ocean. The population of the colony (not counting
the military forces) was about 26,000 Europeans (of whom 6,000 lived
in Cape Town), about 30,000 Malay and negro slaves, some hundred
thousand Hottentots and half-breeds, perhaps another hundred
thousand Kafirs and a few thousand Bushmen. The industries and
pursuits of the European settlers were limited to vine-growing, the
raising of grain, and the care of large herds of cattle and sheep.
The cattle were mostly the long-horned native cattle of the
Hottentots, and the sheep the hairy, fat-tailed, domestic sheep of
Africa. Ostrich farming was unknown, and although the Dutch
commissioners, De Mist and Janssens, had begun to introduce merino
sheep just before the expiration of their administration, wool had
not yet figured amongst the exports.
The first beneficial effect of British rule was felt in the stemming
of the tide of Kafir invasion. This race of Bantu negroes had during
the previous century been pressing closer and closer on the
extremity of South Africa from the northeast. The earliest branch of
the Bantu to reach South Africa were the Herero, who invaded what is
now known as Damaraland. But the desert and the Hottentots kept them
from either reaching the Atlantic coast or penetrating any further
south. Then came the Bechuana, who barely crossed the Orange river;
and then, overriding these latter, latest of all in the field, the
Zulu-Kafirs, who attempted to enter Cape Colony from the coast
region bordering on the Indian Ocean. The _first_ British-Kafir war
took place in 1811-12, and ended in the Kafirs being driven eastward
of the Sunday River, and further led to their expulsion from the
Zuurveld (the modern district of Albany), to the west of the Great
Fish river, which was then fixed as the Kafir boundary. In 1817 Lord
Charles Somerset, the Governor of the Cape, visited the Zuurveld,
and decided that the best obstacle in the way of repeated Kafir
invasions would be to settle that district with a stout race of
colonists. He therefore obtained a grant from the British Government
of £5,000 to promote emigration to the Cape; and in 1820-21, 5,000
British emigrants landed in South Africa, 4,000 of whom were settled
in the eastern districts, principally in the county of Albany. This
settlement was at first a failure. Few if any of the settlers were
skilled agriculturists; they were without any experience of life in
a semi-tropical country; the cost of land transport pressed heavily
on them; and the grants of land made to each individual were too
small. The first few years Nature played her usual tricks; for
Nature seems to hate the movement of species and the upsetting of
her arrangements. Therefore she sent blight during three years, then
floods for another season. The settlers fell into great distress,
but in time things righted themselves. Some immigrants moved to the
towns of the colony and obtained high wages as artisans; and others
who held on to the Zuurveld at last attained prosperity by extending
the area of land they occupied, and going in for sheep and cattle
runs in preference to corn-growing. The Kafirs however had poured
over the frontier in hordes under the leadership of Makana in
1817-18. They raided the Boer flocks and herds and attacked
Grahamstown; and the _second_ Kafir war which ensued ended in these
warlike negroes being driven back to the east of the Chumi or
Keiskamma river.
The immigrants of 1820 and 1821 created for the first time a strong
British element in the population of Cape Colony. They were
principally English in origin, but also included Scotch, Irish, and
Welsh, though the Irish immigrants, who had settled in the western
part of Cape Colony, did not prosper. Gradually, owing to the
distribution of the new settlers, the eastern part of Cape Colony
became English in race and language, as compared to the western and
central parts, which remained principally Dutch. The X̓osa[142]
Kafir boundary having been shifted to the Keiskamma, the frontier
district between that stream and the Great Fish river was at first
regarded as a neutral land to be possessed by neither Kafir nor
white man. Gradually, however, this system became impossible, and at
last, in 1831, the Colonial Office gave its assent to grants of land
being made in the ceded territory to respectable settlers.
Unfortunately in this despatch a distinction was drawn between
Englishmen and Hottentots on the one hand and the Dutch Boers on the
other, and the latter were not permitted to obtain land in the new
frontier district. This tactless and unjustified announcement,
together with the attacks made on the Boers by the British
missionaries, and the knowledge that the abolition of slavery was
near at hand, made many of the Dutch settlers profoundly
dissatisfied with the British Government and anxious to move beyond
its control.
An unhappy incident had occurred sixteen years previously which left
bitter memories behind. The British Governor had enrolled about 1811
a regiment of Hottentot soldiers under British officers. The
Hottentots had many grievances to avenge, dating from the former
rule of the Dutchmen; and these soldiers comported themselves with
arrogance towards their former masters. Most unwisely they were used
as policemen and sent now and again to arrest Dutch settlers who had
broken the law. From one such incident arose in 1815 the riot over
the arrest and death of the Bezuidenhout brothers in northern
Albany, and the hanging at “Slagter’s Nek” of five of the rioters—an
excessively severe punishment for which some writers have condemned
Lord Charles Somerset as the originator of a race quarrel which
lasted nearly a hundred years.
Till 1825 the Cape had been governed despotically by the Governor,
but in that year an executive council of six members, all Government
officials, was appointed to advise the Governor in his legislation.
In 1828 two colonists were introduced into this council in place of
two official members. But in 1833 the Cape received a regular
constitution as a Crown colony with a legislative council in which
the unofficial element was fairly represented. In 1827 the English
language had been substituted for Dutch in courts of law (an
additional cause of dissatisfaction to the Boers); but the
administration of justice in that year was greatly improved by the
appointment of a supreme court with judges appointed directly by the
Crown, while the lower courts were entirely remodelled, and civil
commissioners and resident magistrates were appointed. In 1822 the
number of Europeans settled in South Africa was about 60,000. In
1828, owing to the growing importance of the Albany settlement, Cape
Colony was divided into two provinces, the western and the eastern;
and the latter was for a time governed with some degree of
independence. By 1824 Cape Colony had taken what is now the southern
limit of the Orange Free State as its northern boundary.
At this time there was a slave population in British South Africa of
about 60,000, of whom less than half were Hottentots (who were
rather serfs than slaves), and the remainder Malays introduced by
the Dutch, and black negroes brought from Moçambique and from
Angola. The British Government having abolished the slave trade in
1807, the further importation of slaves ceased; but there came into
the colony a certain number of free negroes, who were rescued from
the slave ships by cruisers, and landed in South Africa. In 1833
slavery was abolished. It was however enacted that, although the
emancipation should come into effect on December 1st, 1834[143],
complete freedom should not be given to the slaves till December
1st, 1838; further, that the Imperial Government should pay
compensation to the extent of 1¼ million pounds. As this
compensation was saddled with various deductions and drawbacks, the
slave-owners—chiefly Dutchmen—did not get fair value for their
slaves, and therefore had further cause for grumbling.
At the end of 1834, shortly after one of the most distinguished of
South African Governors, Sir Benjamin d’Urban, had arrived to take
up his appointment, 12,000 armed Kafirs crossed the eastern border
into the colony with a determined resolve to oust the Europeans from
the newly settled districts. For nearly a fortnight the X̓osa clans
under Makoma and Chali had it all their own way from Somerset East
to Algoa Bay, killing many of the white men, burning their houses,
destroying or carrying off their property, and turning a beautiful
province into a desert. This raid was absolutely unprovoked, except
in so far that for years the Kafirs had been nursing a grievance on
account of their expulsion from the country west of the Keiskamma,
which they themselves had not long before taken from the Hottentots.
Prompt measures (the _third_ Kafir war) were taken to repel this
invasion and punish the X̓osa tribe. Colonel Smith—afterwards
Governor Sir Harry Smith—mustered what forces were available, and
drove the X̓osa Kafirs beyond the Keiskamma. Early in 1835 the
British forces had reached the Kei river on a counter invasion of
Kafirland. Sir Benjamin D’Urban dealt mercifully with the conquered
Kafirs; very few even of the enemy were dispossessed of their homes,
while those natives who had remained friendly were rewarded by
grants of land. Beyond the Kei river Kareli the son and heir of
Hintsa, chief of the Galeka clan (who had been killed while
attempting to escape from imprisonment), was recognized as ruler
over a section of the X̓osas; while in the new province, afterwards
to be known as British Kaffraria, British residents were placed with
the Kafir chiefs to advise them, and missionaries were encouraged to
return to their work. Yet this settlement (statesmanlike and
far-sighted in its details—which there is not space to give—as in
its general outlines) was upset, and the prosperity of South Africa
seriously damaged by the Secretary of War and the Colonies, Lord
Glenelg[144]; a sentimental doctrinaire, who had evolved from his
inner consciousness an unreal South Africa in which Kafir raiders of
oxen were noble-minded black kings, whom a harsh pro-consul was
dispossessing from their ancestral territories. He not only upset
all that was new in Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s arrangement, but even
compelled the retrocession to the Kafirs of land which had long been
occupied by white settlers, and further damaged the authority of the
popular Governor of the Cape by erecting the eastern province into a
separate governorship, over which he placed a Boer named Andries
Stockenstrom. The immediate result of this reversal of Sir Benjamin
D’Urban’s policy was ten years of intermittent war with the Kafirs
(who took generosity of treatment for weakness), and grave
dissatisfaction among those colonists of Dutch origin who had
suffered from the Kafir raids. In fact, Lord Glenelg’s blunder
proved the last straw that broke the back of Dutch tolerance of
British rule; and in 1836 a number of the Dutch colonists (who had
come to be known as the “Boers,” or farmers) trekked away from the
limits of Cape Colony across the Orange river and the Vaal river,
and south-eastwards into Natal. So far back as 1815 the Dutch
farmers, as already related, had risen against the government of
Lord Charles Somerset because it interfered with their summary
treatment of the natives, and their rising had ended in the hanging
of five of the rioters at Slagter’s Nek; but in modern historical
works dealing with Cape Colony it is reiterated that the main cause
of the shaking-off of British citizenship by so many Boer farmers
was not the resentment over the Slagter’s Nek execution so much as
Lord Glenelg’s reversal of D’Urban’s frontier settlement. The
adventures of these Boers after leaving British territory I have
dealt with in the chapter on Dutch Africa.
In 1823 a small enterprise under the leadership of Farewell and
King, officers in the Royal Navy, started from Cape Town to explore
the coast of Natal. They landed at Port Natal (now Durban), visited
the Zulu king Chaka, and obtained from him in 1824 a grant of the
port of Natal with 100 square miles of territory inland, and a
coast-line of 35 miles. Other territories in what is now the modern
colony of Natal were also obtained later on from the Zulu chief. The
purchasers of these lands proclaimed them to be British territory.
Although these adventurers were occasionally driven away by the
violent wars and disturbances going on amongst the Zulus and Kafirs,
they held on to their possessions; and in June 1834 Sir Benjamin
D’Urban forwarded to the Colonial Office a petition from Cape Colony
for the establishment of a definite government in Natal. This
petition the fatuous Lord Glenelg declined on the score of expense.
In 1835 the white element in Natal was increased by missionaries
from America, and by Captain Allen Gardiner, a pioneer of missionary
enterprise on behalf of the Church of England. These settlers drew
up the plans of a regular township, built a church, christened their
territory Victoria (in honour of the heir to the British throne),
and proposed to call the town they were laying out Durban, after the
energetic Governor of Cape Colony. In 1835 they petitioned that
their territory might be made a colony, but again the Imperial
Government refused, then, as for many years afterwards, preferring
to postpone action until it was costly and fraught with bloodshed.
The Dutch immigrants were allowed to form a republic in the interior
of Natal. In July 1838 General Napier, acting no doubt on
instructions from home, invited the British settlers in Natal to
return to Cape Colony; but a few months afterwards he sent a small
detachment of troops to keep order at the port, and again pressed
the Home Government to declare Natal a British colony, though the
following year the soldiers were withdrawn. This was taken by the
Boers to be a tacit consent to the establishment of a vassal
republic under British suzerainty. They would probably have had
their way but for imprudent dealings on their part with natives
placed under British protection. At the same time, a feeling began
to grow that the United States of America were going to have
political dealings with the territory of Natal (as another
“Liberia”); while a vessel had come out from Holland, sent, it is
true, by private persons, but seeming to convey a promise of Dutch
alliance to the Burghers of Natal. British troops had again occupied
Durban. In 1842 they were attacked by the Boers, who were eventually
repulsed, and afterwards tendered their submission to the Queen’s
authority. At length, in 1843, a Conservative ministry being in
power, it was intimated that the settlers on the coast of Natal
might be taken under British protection, with the eventual object of
constituting Natal a self-governing colony, in which the Boers were
to have a share proportionate to their numbers. After much
negotiation, Natal became a British colony with a legislative
council in 1843. The fighting Boers left the country and retired
beyond the Orange river under a somewhat indefinite assurance that
British rule would not follow them. The king of the Zulus received a
recognition of his independence, and in return recognized the Tugela
as the boundary of the British colony on the north-east. To the
south, the territory of Natal was somewhat restricted, and the
portion cut off from it became known as Pondoland, which remained an
independent Kafir state till 1884; it was finally annexed to Cape
Colony in 1894. In 1847 the mistake of Lord Glenelg was to some
extent repaired under Governor Sir Harry Smith; and the eastern
boundary of Cape Colony was once more advanced to the Kei river.
This step was taken after a very serious Kafir war (the _fourth_, or
“War of the Axe”) which broke out in 1846. In 1850, however, a war
began again (the _fifth_, or “Sandile” war) with the restless X̓osa
Kafirs. It extended far and wide, and was marked by not a few
disasters; one being the loss at sea off Simon’s Bay of the
troopship _Birkenhead_, which foundered with large reinforcements of
troops on board, 400 soldiers and seamen being drowned. At length,
in 1853, General Cathcart, who had succeeded Sir Harry Smith,
captured all the strongholds of the Kafirs in the Amatola Mountains,
and deported the Kafirs from that district, which subsequently
became (from its settlement by Hottentot half-breeds) Grikwaland
East[145]. In this native uprising the Kafirs had been joined by
over a thousand pure-blood Hottentots, dissatisfied with British
treatment and wanting to create a “Hottentot republic.”
In 1852 the Sand River Convention was concluded, by which the
independence of the Transvaal Boers was recognized; but the Orange
River Sovereignty still remained under British control, and its
difficulties with the Basuto compelled an intervention of the
British forces. The invasion of mountainous Basutoland began with a
drawn battle in which the Basuto held their own. They afterwards
secured favourable terms of peace by sending in their submission.
This incident discouraged the British Government, who decided to
abandon the Orange River Sovereignty rather than be under any
responsibility for its defence. Accordingly, independence was forced
on the settlers, many of whom were Englishmen. Basutoland, after
having frequently engaged in wars with the Orange Free State, and
having to cede a portion of its territory to them, was finally taken
under British protection in 1868. In 1871 it was annexed to the
Cape, but, owing to the turbulence of its people and the
mismanagement of the Colonial Government, it was transferred to
direct Imperial administration in 1883.
During several years prior to 1849 the Imperial Government had been
endeavouring to arrange for the despatch of British convicts to
South Africa, as it was becoming inconvenient to maintain the penal
establishments in Australia. Whenever the question came up the Cape
Colonists protested against the idea. Nevertheless, in September
1849, a ship brought over from Bermuda a number of ticket-of-leave
men to be landed at the Cape. The ship anchored in Simon’s Bay, but
the colonists took strong measures to prevent the landing of the
convicts. All were united to this end. The Governor met the
dangerous situation with great wisdom. He kept the convicts on board
ship until the order could be reconsidered in England. The Home
Government, for a wonder, did not push the point to the raising of
rebellion; the convicts were sent on to Van Diemen’s Land, while an
Order-in-Council authorizing transportation to the Cape was revoked.
By 1850 the prosperity of Cape Colony had become established. Its
population, white and coloured, at that time reached a total of
220,000. The revenue at the same period stood at about £220,000 per
annum, while the value of the colonial produce exported during that
year was approximately £800,000. Wine was no longer the principal
export, and even the export of grain had diminished; wool had taken
the first place. In 1850 it represented 53 per cent. of the total
exports. Hair from Angora goats, which had been introduced during
the thirties, was beginning to take an important place in the list
of exported products; and ostrich feathers (chiefly derived from the
wild bird, however) were also an important item. Ostrich farming,
which has now placed the ostrich—happily—on the list of
inextinguishable domestic birds, did not come into vogue till the
sixties, though the emigrant Boers at a much earlier date had been
accustomed to hatch and rear young ostriches about their farms.
On the 23rd of May, 1850, the Government and Council of Cape Colony
were authorized to prepare for the establishment of a representative
government; and three years later this was established, a Colonial
legislature being formed; but the ministry was to be responsible
only to the Governor. Responsible government, similar in many
respects to that which obtains in the daughter nations of Canada and
Australasia, was brought into force in 1872.
In 1854 the great Sir George Grey became Governor of the Cape. He,
even more than his predecessors, was anxious to build up against
Kafir invasion on the East a wall of military colonists, who should
be able to defend their flocks from raids without continually
calling on the Colonial Government for intervention. After the
Crimean War a means presented itself in the disbanding of the
Foreign Legion, which Great Britain had recruited, and which
consisted of German, Swiss, and Italian soldiers. After the
conclusion of peace it was necessary to disband this force, and they
were invited to volunteer for African colonization. The result was
that 2300 Germans accepted the terms offered, and started for South
Africa. They were settled in the Eastern Province. But trouble then
began to arise from their being unmarried men, and Sir George Grey
sought to remedy the defect by importing a large number of German
women. The Imperial Government, however, thought that this would not
be a politic step to take, to create a little Germany in British
Africa. Finally the Cape Government sent on 1000 of the German
bachelors to India, and the 1300 who remained behind found wives in
the colony, and merged their own nationality in that of British
subjects. Nevertheless, the introduction of these German settlers
led to the going out of many emigrants from Germany for some years
afterwards, and these settled in such numbers in independent
Kaffraria that there seemed a danger at one time of their invoking
German intervention.
In 1856 a terrible delusion took hold on the X̓osa Kafirs. They had
endured a good deal of misery from the destruction of much of their
cattle by an epidemic of rinderpest, and were in a mood to be
influenced by the wild sayings of their witch doctors. One of these
wizards, Umhlakazi, who had received a smattering of education at a
mission school, arose and proclaimed a strange gospel. He announced
that the dead and gone Kafir chiefs would return to earth with their
followers, and bring with them a new race of cattle exempt from
disease, and that following on this resurrection would come the
triumph of the black man over the white. The prophet had heard of
the Crimean War, and announced that the dead Kafir chiefs would
bring with them many Russian soldiers and attack the British. But
one thing was necessary to secure this millennium—the existing
cattle and crops must be destroyed. A portion of the Kafir tribes
believed this rubbish. Some of the chiefs even who knew better, and
who smiled at the imposture, encouraged it, thinking that after
taking these desperate measures their men would stick at nothing,
and would really break down the British power. Therefore, most of
the X̓osa Kafirs of the Galeka and Gaika clans, set to work to
slaughter their oxen and cut down their corn; and all looked forward
eagerly to the dawning of February 18, 1857, on which date the
resurrection was to take place. Nothing happened, however; and the
consequences of this hateful imposture were terrible. It is stated
that 25,000 Kafirs died of starvation, and nearly 100,000 others
left British Kaffraria and the territories beyond the Kei to seek
another home. Some 40,000 of these Kafirs settled in Cape Colony,
being taken into service there through the intervention of the
Government; and from them, mixed with Hottentots and emancipated
slaves, are descended the “Cape Boys,” who have since attracted
attention by their value as soldiers in suppressing the Matebele
revolt. Sir George Grey in 1858 was obliged to send a military force
(the _sixth_ Kafir war) against some of the Kafir tribes rendered
desperate by destitution, and they were driven for a time into
Pondoland; British Kaffraria being annexed to Cape Colony, and the
Transkei being taken under British protection. This Transkei
territory was subsequently repeopled, partly with Fingo[146] Kafirs,
and partly by the descendants of the Kafir tribes who were ruined by
the teaching of the false prophets. In 1877 the Galeka, a clan of
the X̓osa tribe, commenced fighting the Fingos. They were joined
later by the Gaika, another X̕osa people, who had long been dwelling
peaceably in the Eastern province, and during 1877 and 1878 the
_seventh_ and last Kafir war raged, ending inevitably in conquest
and submission.
The British had taken from the Dutch in 1651 the little island of St
Helena[147] (in the Atlantic Ocean), the Dutch having previously
occupied it in 1645. This island became of some value as a place of
call for ships passing to and from India round the Cape. In 1815 it
was selected as the place of banishment for the deposed Napoleon
Bonaparte; and to make security doubly sure, the islands of
Ascension, to the north, and Tristan d’Acunha, to the extreme
south[148], were occupied also about the same time, and have
remained British ever since. Whereas Ascension has always been
managed directly by the British Admiralty, St Helena was from 1673
until 1815, and from 1821 to 1834, governed by the East India
Company. In 1834 it became a Crown Colony. Tristan d’Acunha was
occupied by a British garrison from 1815 to 1821, of which three men
remained behind voluntarily and with some shipwrecked sailors
started the existing colony, which is a self-governing community.
St Helena was profoundly affected by the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869. She lost nearly all the shipping which formerly sought her
harbour, and three-quarters of her trade; but she is now beginning
to recover prosperity to some degree as a valuable health resort,
especially for the ships of the West African Squadron, and as a
possible coaling station in time of war.
Cape Colony might also have suffered from the opening of the Suez
Canal but that she was already beginning to build up an importance
of her own, due to her exports of wool, hides, wine, and ostrich
feathers. Moreover a happy discovery intervened which effectually
guarded against any waning of interest in South Africa. In 1867
the first diamond was discovered near the Orange river, but it was
not until 1870 that a large find of these precious stones was made
near the site of modern Kimberley. This discovery of diamonds to
the north of the Orange river, and in country of doubtful
ownership, but claimed by the Orange Free State, drove the now
awakened British Government to rather sharp practice. The
diamond-bearing land was claimed by a Grikwa (Hottentot
half-caste) chief named Waterboer. On the other hand, the Orange
Free State asserted that it had acquired the greater part of the
country from the original Grikwa owners; and the northern part of
Diamondland was claimed by the Transvaal. This last claim was
submitted to the arbitration of the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal,
who awarded most of the diamond country to the Grikwa and Bechuana
chiefs. These latter had really become the men of straw hiding the
hand of the British Government. Finally, in 1871 Waterboer and
other Grikwa chiefs ceded their rights to the British Government,
who promptly erected the diamond country into a province under the
name of Grikwaland West. The Orange Free State protested, and no
doubt the action of the British Government was rather high-handed,
and in rare contrast to the abnegatory policy usually pursued.
Finally, the claims of the Orange Free State were settled by Lord
Carnarvon, who in 1876 awarded to its government the sum of
£90,000 in consideration of the abandonment of their contention.
In 1845 Natal had been annexed to Cape Colony, but later on in the
same year it was given a separate administration, consisting of a
Lieutenant-Governor and an executive Council; though in legal
matters it still remained dependent on Cape Town. In 1848 a local
Legislative Council was created, and finally in 1856 the colony was
entirely severed from the Cape, and was endowed with a partially
representative government. Some years previously the Governor of
Cape Colony had been also created H.M. High Commissioner in South
Africa, so that he might have power to represent the British
Government outside the limits of Cape Colony. In this capacity
therefore he continued to retain some authority over the government
of Natal and its relations with the adjoining states. (The influence
of the High Commissioner now extends over all South and Central
Africa under the British flag, except, at present, the Protectorate
of Nyasaland; in other words, over Rhodesia, the South African
Union, Bechuanaland, Basutoland, and Swaziland.) The territory of
Natal was not capable for some time of any great extension, being
girt about with Boer states and negro tribes whose independence was
to some extent guaranteed by the Imperial Government. But in 1866 it
received back a small territory on the south (the county of Alfred),
which was within the original limits claimed by the founders of
Natal, but had been for a time handed over to a Pondo chief. The
settled government of Natal and the kindly attitude of the British
Colonial Government brought about the repeopling of that fertile
country by Kafir tribes.
This “Garden of South Africa” had been almost depopulated by the
Zulu kings, who had slaughtered something like 1,000,000 natives
from first to last. Before the rise of the Zulu tribe, Natal or
“Embo[149]” had been a thickly populated country. Under white rule
the native immigration and population increased so rapidly that when
the colony was only nine years old it contained 113,000 Kafirs. The
white colonists were of mixed origin, about one-third being the
original Dutch settlers, while the remainder were either emigrants
from Great Britain, Cape Colonials, or Germans. The German families
mainly came from Bremen. At first the principal article of export
was ivory, obtained from Zululand, where elephants still rioted in
great numbers; but this was not to last long, for what with British
sportsmen and Dutch hunters and the introduction of firearms amongst
the natives, big game was rapidly exterminated. Then, during the
fifties, the sugar cane and the cotton plant were introduced[150],
the export of sugar rising in 1872 to an annual value of £154,000.
These semi-tropical plantations brought about a fresh want—that of
patient, cheap, agricultural labourers. Unhappily, the black man,
though so strong in body and so unaspiring in ideals, has as a rule
a strong objection to continuous agricultural labour. His own needs
are amply supplied by a few weeks’ tillage scattered throughout the
year; and even this is generally performed by the women of the
tribe, the men being free to fight, hunt, fish, tend cattle, and
loaf. Therefore, the 100,000 odd black men of Natal[151], though
they made useful domestic servants and police, were of but little
use in the plantations. As sugar cultivation was introduced from
Mauritius, so with this introduction came naturally the idea of
employing Indian kulis, already taking the place in the Mascarene
Islands which was formerly occupied by negro slaves. In 1860 the
first indentured kulis reached Natal from India, and by the end of
1875 12,000 natives of British India were established in Natal. A
number of these had passed out of their indentures, and had become
free settlers and petty traders. Nowadays the Indian population of
Natal has risen to something like 142,000. From Natal these British
Indians have crept into the Transvaal, into the Orange Free State,
and even into Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Many of them are employed
on the Natal railways, and in the towns they form a thriving class
of petty traders. Here and there they have mingled with the Kafirs,
producing a rather fine-looking hybrid, similar in appearance to the
black Portuguese on the Zambezi, who are descended from a cross
between natives of Goa, in Portuguese India, and Zambezi Negroes.
Added to the ordinary Kuli class are traders who belong partly to
Tamul and other Dravidian races of South India and partly to coast
tribes from Western India, mostly professing the Khoja faith. The
Khojas are in a far-off way Muhammadans. The inhabitants of Natal
have with great inaccuracy taken to calling these West Coast Indians
“Arabs.”
This Indian element—already about 150,000 in number—is likely to
have its effect on the history of Natal. It is strongly unpopular
amongst the white colonists for selfish reasons. On the whole, it is
not unpopular among the blacks, but the idea of an eventual fusion
between Negro and Indian is not an agreeable one to contemplate from
the colonist’s point of view, as it would create a race strong both
mentally and physically, far outnumbering the whites, and likely to
make a dangerous struggle for supremacy. On the other hand, from the
Imperial point of view,—from what may be called the policy of the
Black, White, and Yellow—it seems unjust that the King-Emperor’s
Indian subjects should not be allowed to circulate as freely as
those of his lieges who can claim European descent. Perhaps on the
whole the solution which has been initiated in the British
protectorates north of the Zambezi is the best—namely, that Indian
immigration should be drawn rather to those countries which are
administered on the same lines as India, than to the temperate
regions south of the Zambezi, where the white man might be allowed
to expand without let or hindrance.
The first railway worked in South Africa is said to have been a line
connecting the town of Durban with the landing-place of its harbour,
which was opened in 1860. But soon afterwards a railway began to
start northwards from Cape Town to Paarl; and this was directed,
with many zigzags and with a seeming aimlessness, towards the Karoo.
The discovery of the diamond fields gave railway extension an
objective, and Kimberley became the goal which was finally reached
in 1885[152]. In 1872 the Cape Government by Act of Parliament took
over the existing railways in Cape Colony, which then only consisted
of a total length of 64 miles. Soon afterwards an expenditure on
railway extension of £5,000,000 was authorized. In Natal a
Government railway was commenced in 1876 connecting Durban with the
capital, Pietermaritzburg. This line now traverses the Colony to the
Transvaal border and in another direction enters the Orange Free
State.
The history of Natal has been comparatively peaceful and prosperous,
as compared with the weary Kafir warfare of the Eastern Province of
Cape Colony. But in 1873 the natives of Natal required a lesson. On
its north-western frontier the Hlubi refugees from Zululand had been
allowed to establish themselves under a chief of great importance,
Langalibalele. His young men had gone to work in the Diamond fields
of Kimberley, and had returned with guns, the introduction of which
into the colony without registration was prohibited. Langalibalele,
taking no notice of a summons to answer for this breach of the law,
fled into Basutoland. Fortunately the Basuto gave him no support,
and he was eventually captured and exiled for a time to Cape Colony.
But this outbreak called attention to the great increase of the
native population of Natal, and the unwisdom of allowing it any
longer to remain under the government of irresponsible Kafir chiefs.
Accordingly in 1875 Sir Garnet, afterwards Viscount, Wolseley was
sent to Natal to report on the native question, and initiated
changes which had the effect of bringing the natives more completely
under the control of the Executive, and approximating them more
towards the position of citizens of the colony.
All this time diamonds had been attracting many emigrants to South
Africa, chiefly from Great Britain, but also from France and
Germany. Among these emigrants were numerous Jews[153] belonging to
all three nationalities, who were naturally attracted to the diamond
trade. The growing interest taken in South Africa owing to the
discovery of diamonds had not only tended to make the British
Government very particular as to the exact rights it possessed in
the vicinity of the Dutch republics, but also led it to revive its
claims to the south shore of Delagoa Bay. The Portuguese Government,
foreseeing this, had commenced to reassert its right to that harbour
in its boundary treaty with the Transvaal in 1869. In 1870-71 the
British Government raised its claim in the manner I have already
described in the chapter on Portuguese Africa. In 1872 Great Britain
agreed to submit the question at issue to the arbitration of Marshal
MacMahon, whose award, delivered in 1875, was wholly in favour of
the Portuguese. But Great Britain had already secured from Portugal
a promise, confirmed by a more recent convention, that she should be
allowed the right of pre-emption over Delagoa Bay[154]. During the
fifties and sixties missionaries and traders had pushed due north
across the Orange river, through Bechuanaland, to the Zambezi, and
westward to Lake Ngami and Damaraland. In the sixties a good deal of
trade was done in the last-mentioned country in ostrich feathers and
ivory; and the Damara, who should more properly be known as the
Ova-herero[155], came under European influence. Wars arising between
the Damara and the Hottentot Namakwa, and the complaints of the
German missionaries at work in these countries, brought about the
despatch of a commissioner (Mr W. C. Palgrave) to Damaraland by the
Cape Government. He reported in 1876 in favour of extending British
protection over Damaraland; but all that Downing Street would
concede was the annexation of Walfish Bay. (Twelve little islets off
the S. W. coast had been annexed in 1867, because they were leased
to a guano-collecting company.) A little later another commissioner
was despatched from the Cape to settle the intertribal quarrels
north of the Orange river, and a further recommendation was sent
home by the Governor; but Lord Kimberley, the new Colonial
Secretary, definitely forbade the extension of any British influence
over Namakwaland or Damaraland. In 1883 Germany directly questioned
England as to whether she laid claim to territory north of the
Orange river. An evasive reply was sent, in which delay was asked
for so that the Cape Government could be consulted. Eventually the
Germans were told that England laid claim to Walfish Bay and the
Guano Islands only, but that the intervention of another Power
between the Portuguese frontier and the Orange river would infringe
legitimate British rights. The inaction of the British Government on
this occasion seems in the present day, and by our modern lights,
inconceivable. Literally the only reason they had in not politely
declaring that South-West Africa was under British protection was
the remote dread that they would have to protect German missionaries
and traders.
Yet not only Downing Street in the greater degree but the Cape
Government in the lesser was to blame for this inactivity. The Cape
Government at that time was directed by ministers who were much
under purely colonial influence, and who, discouraged by their
failure to administer Basutoland, had no very strong desire to spend
the money of the colony in annexing and administering a vast
territory mainly desert. Besides, the idea of Germany becoming a
colonial power was laughed at in those days in Government circles as
an impossibility. At length all doubts were ended by the declaration
of a German protectorate over South-West Africa in 1884.
In 1882 measures were passed in the Cape Parliament which gave equal
rights throughout Cape Colony to the Dutch language. In the same
year the “Afrikander Bond” was established, an institution with the
avowed object of building up an Afrikander Dutch-speaking nation
which should eventually be independent of the British flag. Its
principal creators and supporters were Mr J. H. Hofmeyr of Cape
Town, Mr Borckenhager of the Orange State, and Mr Reitz of the
Transvaal. Measures for bringing about a federation of the British
and Dutch states had failed (as will be subsequently narrated), and
an annexation of the Transvaal had been reversed. British influence
in South Africa seemed on the wane and the Dutch element in the
ascendant.
British missionaries during the thirties and forties had crossed the
Orange river and settled in Bechuanaland, a sterile plateau between
the Namakwa and Kalahari deserts on the one hand, and the relatively
well-watered regions of the Transvaal and Matebeleland on the other.
By 1851, British sportsmen, roving afield after big game, and the
great missionary-explorer Livingstone had reached the Zambezi, which
till then was only known from the sea upwards for about 500 miles
inland. Livingstone’s exploration of the Zambezi attracted the
attention of the British Government, which at that time was more
interested (from philanthropic motives) in acquiring territories in
Tropical Africa than in extending its influence over more valuable
regions enjoying a temperate climate. Livingstone was sent back as a
consul to the mouth of the Zambezi in 1858 with a well-equipped
expedition to explore Zambezia and discover the reported Lake Nyasa,
then known as Lake Maravi. For five years his expedition traversed
these countries, adding immensely to our geographical knowledge; but
its members suffered terribly from ill-health. Although the
Portuguese treated them with kindness and put no obstacle in their
way, still Portuguese political susceptibilities were aroused. For
this and other reasons, Livingstone was recalled, and his proposals
in regard to Lake Nyasa quashed. Nevertheless, the seed had been
sown, and produced a sparse crop of adventurers, elephant hunters,
missionaries and traders, who found their way to Nyasaland.
Livingstone himself resumed his explorations there (in 1866); and an
expedition, under Lieutenant Edward Young, R.N., which was sent to
obtain news of him (1868), kept the British in favourable
remembrance amongst the natives. Finally, Livingstone’s death
revived missionary enthusiasm; and two strong Scotch missions in
1875-6 occupied the Shiré Highlands and the west coast of Lake
Nyasa, putting a steamer on that lake. Two years later the African
Lakes Trading Company sprang from missionary loins, and the
Universities’ Mission in 1881 advanced overland from Zanzibar to the
east shore of Lake Nyasa.
In consequence of the increase of British interests in this quarter
the British Government decided to establish a consulate for Lake
Nyasa in 1883. Portuguese susceptibilities again became ruffled.
Although no attempt had ever been made by Portugal to establish
herself anywhere near Lake Nyasa, or even on the river Shiré, which
connects that lake with the Zambezi and the sea, it was felt in
Portugal that the growing British settlements in Nyasaland should be
made to contribute to the revenue of Portuguese East Africa; and
that, since through further extension they might force a way to the
coast, it would be better that they should be brought under
Portuguese control. Although the British Government was absolutely
determined if possible not to assume direct responsibilities in
Nyasaland, it was equally anxious that its subjects should be left a
free hand, and not be fettered by Portuguese control. Therefore an
attempt was made by Lord Granville (in the projected Congo Treaty of
1884) to define the sphere of Portuguese influence on the Shiré, so
as to leave the greater part of that river and all Nyasaland outside
the Portuguese dominions. Had that Congo Treaty been ratified, there
would probably never have arisen the Nyasa Question with the
Portuguese. But it was not ratified, and therefore Portugal was
equally free with Great Britain to make the best use of her
opportunities, which she did by means of several expeditions in the
manner already described in Chapter IV. But nevertheless Nyasaland,
including the Shiré Highlands, was declared to be a British
Protectorate, based on treaties with native chiefs concluded by two
consuls, (Sir) H. H. Johnston and John Buchanan; and the former,
assisted by (Sir) Alfred Sharpe, further brought within the British
sphere of influence the rest of “British Central Africa” from the
central Zambezi to Lakes Tanganyika and Mweru and the frontier of
the Congo Independent State. To this sphere of influence was shortly
afterwards added the Barotse Kingdom, made known to us by Dr
Livingstone and by the French Protestant missionaries. Treaties with
Germany (1890) and Portugal (1891) having sanctioned these
acquisitions north of the Zambezi, the administration of the new
territory was divided between the Imperial Government—which decided
to control the more organized territories round Lake Nyasa—and the
newly-founded British South Africa Chartered Company. After 1895 the
Chartered Company assumed the direct administration of its North
Zambezian territories which are now known as Northern Rhodesia.
Since 1890 much has been effected in developing and making known
these territories of British Central Africa, which are perhaps not
sufficiently healthy in all parts or void of an indigenous
population to permit of more than a restricted European
colonization, though they are already becoming of great value as
tropical “plantation” colonies and as mining districts, and will
support an abundant native population. During the seven years of the
existence of this British sphere north of the Zambezi the slave
trade had to be met and conquered. Numerous Arabs from Zanzibar had
established themselves in Nyasaland as sultans, and had
Muhammadanized some of the tribes and infused into them a dislike to
European domination. The countries west of Lake Nyasa were ravaged
by the Angoni, a people of more or less Zulu descent, the remains of
former Zulu invasions of Central Zambezia. In seven years, however,
these enemies were all subdued by means of Sikh soldiers lent by the
Indian Government, by the native levies that were drilled by the
Sikhs, and by five gunboats, which were placed on the Zambezi, the
Shiré, and on Lake Nyasa. The Right Hon. Cecil Rhodes began in 1893
his great scheme of connecting Cape Town with Cairo by a telegraph
line. In five years he had at any rate connected Cape Town with
Tanganyika through British Central Africa. The Shiré Highlands and
much else of Nyasaland and Eastern Northern Rhodesia proved
moderately favourable to the cultivation of coffee (which was
originally introduced by Scottish missionaries and planters); but
the product which will probably make the fortune of this part of
Africa is cotton—as Livingstone predicted more than half a century
ago. These countries possess other valuable resources in tobacco,
maize, and timber, in minerals, and in ivory; and are well adapted
for the growth of certain kinds of rubber. Through the middle of
Northern Rhodesia the “Cape to Cairo” railway is now built with
several branch lines; and regions unmapped and unknown when the
first edition of this work was published are now familiar to many a
sightseer and tourist, brought within a few days’ railway journey
(across the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi) of Cape Town. The Shiré
Highlands are connected by a railway with the Lower Zambezi, a line
which will before long terminate at the port of Beira in South-East
Africa and be extended northwards to Lake Nyasa. Large towns have
sprung into existence in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia; the native
population has nearly doubled in numbers since 1890; and “British
Central Africa” is well on the way to becoming one of the most
prosperous portions of the British Empire.
During the 4th Earl of Carnarvon’s presence at the Colonial Office
between 1874 and 1878 that statesman endeavoured to repeat in South
Africa the success which had attended his consolidation of the North
American colonies into one confederated Dominion. He sent out the
historian Froude to represent him at the proposed conference of
South African states. Already, Sir George Grey had tried hard to
bring about this unification of South Africa under the British flag
during the fifties; and in 1858 had pressed strongly upon the
Imperial Parliament a scheme which would have well effected this
desired end. For his pains he was recalled and sharply reprimanded,
but, mainly owing to the influence of Queen Victoria, he was sent
back to his governorship, though he was not allowed to carry out the
far-reaching policy he had formulated. In Cape Colony the Federation
Commission was appointed in 1872. But the always present, more or
less bitter divergence of sympathies between the English and the
Dutch-speaking settlers—a discord constantly discernible in the
debates of the Cape Parliament—prevented any ripening of the
federation idea; and Lord Carnarvon’s commissioner, Mr J. A. Froude,
was snubbed for his pains by the Cape Dutch. Foiled in one
direction, Lord Carnarvon sought to effect his end in another way.
He sent out Sir Bartle Frere to be Governor and High Commissioner at
the Cape. He had been chosen by Lord Carnarvon six months before as
the statesman most capable of consolidating the South African
Empire; “within two years it was hoped that he would be the first
Governor-General of the South African Dominion.” The second step in
what seemed to Lord Carnarvon to be the right direction was the
annexation of the Transvaal. With this territory of about 120,000
square miles in extent, in British hands, there would only remain
the Orange Free State as an obstacle to the unification of South
Africa. The Transvaal as an independent state had between 1853 and
1877 come to grief. It was bankrupt, and it was powerless to subdue
the powerful native tribes within its borders, some of whom had real
wrongs to avenge. Moreover, it was threatened by Zulu invasion. It
was therefore annexed by the British Commissioner, Sir Theophilus
Shepstone, in the beginning of 1877.
Unfortunately, Sir Bartle Frere’s administration, after two and a
half years of excellent work, was clouded by unmerited misfortune.
The Zulu power to the east of Natal had been growing threateningly
strong. At the beginning of the 19th century an obscure tribe of
Kafirs known as the Ama-zulu rose into prominence under a chief
named Chaka, who became a kind of negro Napoleon, and a bloodthirsty
slaughterer of all who stood in his way[156]. He and his chiefs
included in their conquests all modern Natal and Zululand, much of
the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and Amatongaland up to
Delagoa Bay[157]. Chaka’s son, Dingane, though he most treacherously
attacked the Boers, was fairly friendly in his relations with the
British, and tolerated their establishment in Natal. In fact he
seems to have allowed them to reorganize the territory of Natal
which his father had almost depopulated. Owing to the founding of
the Transvaal Republic and the Orange River Sovereignty in addition
to the colony of Natal, the Zulus were henceforth shut up in a
relatively small tract of South-east Africa represented by modern
Zululand and Amatongaland; though the Amatonga were practically
another people. Dingane was succeeded by Panda, and Panda by
C̓echwayo (Cetewayo). The last-named chief perfected the system of a
standing army of well-drilled bachelors. Anxious to find an outlet
for his energies, he openly menaced the Transvaal, and was one of
the causes of British intervention in the affairs of that republic.
Shut off from this outlet, he seemed becoming dangerous; and,
thinking it best to prick the boil before it burst, Sir Bartle Frere
forced war on him by an ultimatum. The invasion of Zululand at the
outset was not very wisely conducted, and led to a terrible disaster
in which 800 British and over 400 native soldiers were cut to pieces
at Isandhlwana; and subsequently, through mismanagement, the Prince
Imperial of France, who had come out as a volunteer, was allowed to
stray into danger, and be killed by the Zulus. After a time,
however, Lord Chelmsford succeeded in completely conquering the
country, and C̓echwayo was taken prisoner. Although Sir Bartle Frere
was in no way answerable for these mistakes in a campaign which was
eventually successful, his prestige was dimmed; and as the Liberal
Government of 1880 was inclined to pursue a reactionary policy in
Africa, Sir Bartle Frere was recalled.
The Boers, taking advantage of British discouragement and the change
of government in England, rose and demanded their independence. It
was refused by Mr Gladstone’s Administration, and troops were
hastily sent out to subdue them, with the results detailed in
Chapter VI. As to the after-history of Zululand, it may be briefly
summarized as follows. The Boers were allowed to add a large slice
of the country (“Vryheid” or the New Republic) to their reorganized
State. C̓echwayo was reinstated as king, but soon died. The country
was then divided into various native principalities; but Dinizulu,
C̓echwayo’s son, fomented an insurrection and was exiled to St
Helena. The country was then governed more or less as a British
protectorate by Sir Marshall Clarke and in connection with the
colony of Natal, the Governor of which was also made Governor of
Zululand. In 1897 Zululand was incorporated with the colony of
Natal. In 1887 British protection was extended over Amatongaland up
to the Portuguese boundary, and in 1895 this strip of coast
territory was taken under more direct administration. In 1902 the
Vryheid territory of northern Zululand was withdrawn from the
Transvaal and united once more with Zululand.
As was related in Chapter VI, the Dutch South African Republic, soon
after recovering its independence, sought to invade and absorb
Bechuanaland; but the expedition under Sir Charles Warren (1884-5)
put an end to their hopes in that direction, and a clear path was
made for the British northwards to the Zambezi. In the early
seventies, explorations of men like Thomas Baines and Karl Mauch (a
German explorer) had revealed the existence of gold in the countries
between the Limpopo and the Zambezi, countries which had come under
the sway of a Zulu king, Lobengula, son of Umsilikazi[158]. Mr Cecil
John Rhodes, an Englishman who had brought about the consolidation
of the mines of Kimberley and had acquired great wealth and a
position of political importance at the Cape, had interested himself
firstly in the settlement of the Bechuana question with the Boers;
and when Bechuanaland had been declared a British protectorate, his
thoughts turned to the possibility of gold beyond; for the gold
discoveries in the Transvaal were beginning to make a golden South
Africa dawn on men’s imaginations. He despatched envoys to
Lobengula, and secured from him the right to mine. Other individuals
or syndicates had secured mining rights in that direction, but Mr
Rhodes with patience and fair dealing bought up or absorbed these
rights, and in 1888 began to think of obtaining a charter from the
Imperial Government which would enable the Company he intended
forming to govern South-Central Africa. At one time he seems to have
thought that the De Beers diamond mining company should receive this
charter and perform these functions; for, when he had framed the
articles of association of the De Beers shareholders, he had
inserted clauses enabling the Company to take up such an enterprise.
But there were many reasons why this would not have worked well; and
it was resolved to constitute an independent company to work
Lobengula’s concession first, and to create another South African
state afterwards. Already in 1888 the High Commissioner, Sir
Hercules Robinson, had somewhat reluctantly extended a vague form of
protection over Lobengula’s country; and it had been made clear to
Germany that Great Britain would not submit to be cut off from the
Zambezi. In the early summer of 1889 a charter was granted to the
British South Africa Company, of which Mr Rhodes became and remained
the practical administrator. Mr Rhodes’ ambitions then crossed the
Zambezi, and he co-operated with Sir Harry Johnston in establishing
British influence up to Tanganyika. For several years his Company
afforded a subsidy to the administration of the British Central
Africa Protectorate as well as to the territories under the
Chartered Company’s own control. The African Lakes Trading
Company[159] was given financial support, and enabled to extend its
operations to Tanganyika.
In 1891 Mr Rhodes commenced the organization of the East coast route
from Mashonaland to the sea, and he and his friends practically
subscribed the capital for the Beira Railway. Fort Salisbury and
other settlements in Mashonaland and on the east of Matebeleland
were founded between 1891 and 1893. In the last-named year the
Matebele made an entirely unprovoked attack on the Company’s forces,
but a counter-invasion, most ably directed by Dr (afterwards Sir
Starr) Jameson, achieved a complete victory over the Matebele. King
Lobengula fled, and died soon after he had crossed the Zambezi. His
capital, Buluwayo, became the administrative capital of the
Company’s possessions, to which the inclusive name of Rhodesia
(Northern and Southern) was subsequently given. The development of
Rhodesia proceeded apace. Mr Rhodes had since 1890 been Premier of
Cape Colony; he was high in favour with the Dutch Party in South
Africa; and he was fast becoming the actual, if not nominal Dictator
of Africa, south of the Zambezi, when he made the fatal mistake of
organizing a raid into the Transvaal (see page 287).
In the general disturbance which followed, the government of
Southern Rhodesia became disorganized by a revolt of the Matebele in
the spring of 1896. They were soon joined by their former slaves,
the Mashona. The revolt was suppressed partly by hard fighting, and
partly by direct negotiation between Mr Rhodes and the Matebele
chiefs, Rhodes and a few companions going unarmed to meet the
_induna_ in the Matopo hills. But the Mashona continued fighting
until 1897. Rhodes did much to atone for his one mistake by the
enormous pecuniary sacrifices he made in pushing on the railways
from Southern Rhodesia to Beira and the Zambezi, and in constructing
the telegraph line from Mafeking to Tanganyika. There were signs
that he was recovering to a considerable extent his influence in
Cape Colony, and that he might yet play a great part in South
Africa; but the terrible events of the great South African War of
1899-1902 interrupted the great work of development on which he had
set his heart and ultimately caused his death.
In British South Africa momentous events took place after the summer
of 1899. The trouble engendered between the British and Boers in
South Africa by the policy of Paul Kruger and the Jameson Raid
culminated in the great South African War of 1899-1902. As these
episodes recede into history it has become clear to most seekers
after truth that the Jameson Raid was brought about by the following
trend of circumstances. Ever since 1884 there had been a revulsion
of feeling on the part of even Liberal and liberal-minded
politicians in Great Britain against the Boers of South Africa. Mr
Gladstone’s restoration of their independence after the brief
struggle of 1881 was esteemed a generous act. It gave the Boers of
the Transvaal an opportunity to show what they could do in wise
self-government under but the slightest control of their foreign
relations by Great Britain. Three years afterwards the Boers of the
Transvaal, in spite of treaty and other obligations, were invading
Bechuanaland and attempting to cut off the British colonies to the
south from any advance towards the Zambezi. It then began to be
realized by the British public that the Boers, besides fighting very
legitimately for their own independence in the Transvaal territory
as well as in the Orange Free State, were aiming at something much
greater—a domination over the whole of Africa south of the Zambezi.
Both Liberal and Conservative administrations set themselves to
resist this movement. At the close of the eighties Cecil Rhodes
arose as an advocate for union between Boer and Briton in the common
interests of the white man in South Africa. For a time he secured
the suffrages of both; but the gold-mining industry became more and
more powerful in the Transvaal and found the rule of a Boer
Government irksome and obstructive. The mining industry set itself
to influence public opinion in Britain and to organize in South
Africa a movement against Boer independence. President Kruger played
into the hands of the mining magnates by occasional breaches of his
agreements with Britain. Among these was the famous “Drifts”
question, by which Kruger in the summer of 1895 attempted to close
access to the Transvaal from the rest of South Africa by any other
routes than those of the Netherlands Railway, which was a privileged
corporation. Mr Joseph Chamberlain, who had become Secretary of
State for the Colonies in 1895, took up this question with vigour
and found himself fully supported by the Dutch colonists in Cape
Colony and Natal. It seemed as though there was to be war with the
Transvaal, in which case, on this question of the Drifts, Great
Britain would have been thoroughly supported by her Dutch-speaking
subjects in South Africa. As part of the plan of campaign conceived
in the case of war, was a movement from the British South Africa
Company’s territory through Bechuanaland into the western and
northern parts of the Transvaal; this in fact was the germ of the
Jameson Raid.
Kruger gave way on the subject of the Drifts when he saw how united
was the rest of South Africa against him; and it seemed to persons
in authority in Great Britain as well as in South Africa that the
great opportunity for solving the Boer question in South Africa had
gone by. Insufficient measures were taken, or no measures at all
were taken, to restrain the preparations of Dr Jameson (the
Administrator of Rhodesia) for a descent on the Transvaal.
Consequently the Jameson Raid took place—a most unfortunate
occurrence, since it put Great Britain entirely in the wrong on a
question where otherwise she could plead legitimate griefs and
annoyances.
Sir Alfred (afterwards Viscount) Milner had been appointed in 1897
to succeed Lord Rosmead (Sir Hercules Robinson) as Governor of Cape
Colony and High Commissioner of South Africa. Attempts were made
between 1897 and the spring of 1899 to solve the South African
problem peacefully by inducing the Boer Government of the South
African Republic to grant the franchise to the “Outlanders”
(foreigners) after a term of residence of a few years’ duration; but
Kruger would accept no sufficiently short term to enfranchise those
most agitating for a voice in the Transvaal administration. But the
war that broke out in October 1899 was due immediately to an
ultimatum from the Transvaal Government requiring Great Britain to
cease any preparations for offence or defence on the Transvaal
frontiers. The Orange Free State immediately made common cause with
the Boers of the South African Republic, and a Boer invasion of
Natal took place, to be followed by similar invasions of the eastern
part of Cape Colony. The British were taken unprepared. Disaster
followed disaster. Had the Boer leaders been wider in their
knowledge and more daring, they might have taken possession of Natal
and have gone far to wreck the British Empire in South Africa. But
they delayed over the siege of Ladysmith, ably defended by Sir
George White. British reinforcements on a large scale were sent to
South Africa under the leadership of Lord (afterwards Earl) Roberts
and Lord Kitchener. The British marched through the Orange Free
State to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and the Boers were finally
expelled from Natal and Bechuanaland. It seemed as though, by the
summer of 1900, the war was at an end; but after the flight of
President Kruger, Boer activities revived in such a marvellous way
that the world wondered at the tenacity of the struggle, and for
nearly two years longer the Boer forces held out against the
British, and made an effective occupation of the Orange Free State
and the Transvaal impossible. The Boers in their turn, however, were
worn out by the persistency of Viscount Kitchener and his ‘sweeping’
movements. In the summer of 1902 the Boer leaders asked for peace,
and obtained it on terms highly honourable to themselves.
Cecil John Rhodes, the promoter of so much that was adventurous and
history-making in British South Africa, died in March, 1902, the
immediate cause of his death being, not political heart-break
(though that was the cause of his weakened constitution), but
vexation resulting from a law-suit affecting his private affairs. Dr
Jameson, however, recovered from the check to his career which
followed his unsuccessful raid. He set himself in a spirit of
moderation and tolerance to grapple with the local questions and
general interests of Cape Colony, of which country he became Premier
in 1904, remaining for four years afterwards at the head of the Cape
Ministry. In 1908-9 he was one of the representatives who discussed
and settled the conditions of the South African Union. In 1911 he
was knighted as Sir Starr Jameson, and in 1912 he retired from South
African politics. President Kruger died in Holland in July 1904. In
the same year his political opponent, Lord Milner—whose seven years’
work in South Africa, though it inspired many fierce contentions,
yet cut through several Gordian knots—retired from the control of
South African affairs to enter political life at home.
But the prosperity of South Africa did not at once revive with the
conclusion of peace in 1902. It was found that the devastations of
the three years’ war had reduced much of the Orange Free State, the
eastern parts of Cape Colony, and above all, of the Transvaal to a
desert, and time was required to repair the ravages to crops and
agriculture and bring about the re-establishment of homes. So many
of the inhabitants—Boers and Britons alike—had drifted towards the
towns and there found it hard to maintain themselves under the
extravagant cost of living; which seems to be at present an
irremediable evil in South Africa, due to unwise fiscal laws,
shipping combines, and railway rates. It was hoped that prosperity
would return so soon as mining operations on the Rand could be
resumed. But the local supply of unskilled labour proved to be
insufficient for the enormous development of mining enterprise
projected by individuals and companies. The labour problem is not
yet completely solved. Some propose to meet it by drafts on the
abundant negro population north of the Zambezi, these labourers
being conveyed to and from South Africa under proper guarantees.
Others urge the throwing open of the land and the mines to white
labour, so as to increase the European population of temperate South
Africa. Many reasons have been put forward to combat the
practicability of each scheme, either the increase of the black
labour supply or the introduction of the white man in considerable
numbers. Those in power in the period 1904-6 preferred to redress
the balance by the importation under special restrictions of the
Chinaman. This step was adversely criticized by the Liberal party in
Great Britain, not because that party was inclined to deny that a
share of African development might be allowed to the Asiatic, but on
the ground that the conditions under which the indentured Chinamen
were to serve in the South African mines were not only opposed to
British ideas of freedom but were detrimental to health and
morality. Their anticipations of the bad results which might accrue
from the employment of Chinese labourers in compounds were
fulfilled; and in 1906-8 the Chinese were gradually repatriated from
the Rand (as the mining area of the Southern Transvaal is called).
The great question of the participation of the Asiatic in the
development of South Africa and East Africa depends on the
determination of the white man and the black man to be
self-sufficing for the development respectively of the tropical and
temperate districts of that continent. The black man must be less
lazy and the white man likewise, as well as less proud, if both
together are to be justified in denying to the yellow man a share of
the Dark Continent, either as a settler or a merchant. It is
interesting, however, to note that the white population of Cape
Colony showed a considerable increase between 1891 and 1904. In 1891
the population of European descent numbered 366,608. In 1904 it was
stated at 579,741. In the Transvaal the white population rose to
300,225; in Natal to 97,109; in the Orange Free State to 143,419; in
Rhodesia to 12,623; and in Basuto- and Bechuanaland to 1899. In
British South Africa the coloured (mainly negro) population was
nearly 5,500,000. In 1912, the total white population in British
Africa, south of the Zambezi, was about 1,306,400, and the negro and
negroid about 5,800,000. There were also about 192,000 Asiatics,
chiefly in Natal; and these Asiatics consisted mainly of natives of
Southern India (some 172,000), together with 15,000 Malays in Cape
Colony, a few Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, and Syrians. North of the
Zambezi, in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, there are about 2200
whites, 1000 Asiatics and nearly 2,000,000 negroes: a total
population of about 9,300,000. The area of all British South and
South Central Africa (including Walfish Bay and the islets off the
south-west coast) is 1,148,619 square miles, extending from the
frontiers of Angola and the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika and German
East Africa to the coasts of Cape Colony and Natal—an Empire which
is barely 100 years old, and which began in 1814[160] with an area
of 125,000 square miles, with a population of about 150,000, of whom
some 26,000 were whites and the remainder Negroes, Hottentots,
half-breeds, and Malays.
On May 31, 1902, the Peace of Vereeniging had brought the
fratricidal South African war to a conclusion. Only four years
afterwards the Liberal administration in Great Britain tried the
bold experiment of granting responsible government to the Transvaal
State by passing an act to that effect which came into force on
January 1st, 1907. In the following year similar powers of
self-government were bestowed on the Orange Free State (as it was
eventually re-named). These concessions to the sturdy nationalism of
the Boers were intended to pave the way for that long desired Union
of South Africa. Negotiations were conducted between the statesmen
of Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal,
which resulted in 1909 in an agreement and an Act of Union. This Act
was ratified by the British Parliament and received the sanction of
King Edward VII (who ever since his coming to the throne had striven
earnestly to bring about peace in South Africa) on September 21,
1909. The Union of South Africa includes under one, central, South
African Parliament at Pretoria, and one Governor-General, the states
of Cape Colony (with British Bechuanaland and Walfish Bay), Natal,
the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. The native states of
Basutoland, Swaziland, and Bechuanaland, and the territories of
Southern and Northern Rhodesia and the Nyasaland Protectorate remain
outside the Union for a variety of reasons most of which may not
have a permanent value. But one of these reasons is the distrust
which is felt in Great Britain as to the ability and fair-mindedness
of the white population to act as the governors of the states above
mentioned in which the negro population very greatly preponderates
over the white, or which, as in Basutoland, Bechuanaland and
Swaziland, have been more or less reserved for negro colonization
and expansion. Cape Colony, it is true, has a negro population of
nearly 1,700,000, contented and admirably governed for the most
part, possessing a large proportion of the good land, and holding
the franchise to the Cape Legislature on the same terms as white
men. But the liberal-minded Cape Colony, in which one scarcely ever
hears of native troubles or “Black perils,” is only one of the
states composing the Union; and the others, notably the Transvaal,
have shown themselves—the Transvaal still keeps up this evil
reputation—unfair and harsh in their treatment of the black man.
When the provisions of the Act of Union were laid before the British
Parliament they were found to exclude any man of colour from the
franchise[161]. British ministers expressed regret at this
illiberality, but passed the measure to end strife in other
directions. Nevertheless the “Native question” will long continue to
bar the way to a Greater South Africa, a vast confederation which
shall extend from the Belgian Congo to the Southern Ocean. It is a
question that is very complex, and one from which sentimentality,
rash legislation, arbitrary pronouncements, and race prejudice must
be carefully excluded. Had it been dealt with by far-sighted men
like Sir George Grey in earlier times when the foundations of
British South Africa were being laid, many causes of future trouble
might have been eliminated. For instance some other solution of the
Basuto claims might have been found than the handing over (fifty
years ago) to the Basuto negroes 11,000 square miles of the finest
mountain country of South Africa, a region intended by nature to
have been the Empire state of that region. Basutoland is a beautiful
mountain country, well watered, with fertile valleys and
snow-crowned peaks. Owing to its cold climate it was rather shunned
by the South African negroes until the ancestors of the Basuto were
driven thither in the early 19th century to take refuge from the
raiding Zulus. Had we offered the original ten to twenty thousand
Basutos good locations on fertile land at lower levels when we first
intervened to save them from Boer attacks (the Boers having
intervened earlier still to save them from the Zulu hordes) they
would have accepted. Now they are a well-armed people of nearly half
a-million, no longer grateful to the white man, but the possible
nucleus of a Black confederation. Their influence can only be stayed
by the fair treatment of the Black man outside Basutoland, by the
policy of Cape Town and not that of Johannesburg. The contentment of
and the hold which education is getting over the million and a half
of Kafirs in Cape Colony are valuable counter-agents to Basuto
presumption and ambition, and a proof that our oldest colony in
South Africa possesses statecraft.
After dealing with such striking events, such potent personages and
vast territories, it is rather an anti-climax to have to treat of
the little island of Mauritius, which is not as large as the county
of Surrey, and which, except under its first Governor, Sir Robert
Farquhar (who tried from this vantage ground to annex Madagascar),
has had no stirring connection with events of great importance.
Mauritius was taken by the British from the French in 1810. The
French had known it by the name of Île de France, but the British
revived the older Dutch name of Mauritius. The French had introduced
the sugar cane and other valuable plants; and these plantations were
half-heartedly cultivated by means of slave labour until the slave
trade was abolished. Then, in the fifties, Indian kuli labour was
introduced with great success; and now the inhabitants of Indian
descent in the colony number nearly 40,000, while Indian half-breeds
are also numerous. The total population in 1912 was about 370,500.
The negro, negroid and Malagasy element was important—over 50,000.
Deducting the Asiatics (20,000, mainly Indian, a few Chinese and
Arabs) there remain about 120,000 white and 160,000 half-castes and
Eurasians. The European population is almost entirely of French
descent; and the marked French sympathies of the white inhabitants
have sometimes caused a dissonance between the Governor and the
governed, though ample concessions have been made to the Mauritians
by the equal recognition afforded to French laws and the French
language. Nevertheless, in spite of these political questions, and
the occasional hurricanes which visit the island with disaster, it
is a prosperous colony in ordinary years (doing a trade with an
annual value of about £5,000,000), and only has to appeal to the
Treasury of Great Britain for assistance on such rare occasions as
when unusually great damage has been done by cyclones.
Numerous small islands in the Indian Ocean are dependent on the
Government of Mauritius. All had much the same history—discovered by
Portugal, they were eventually utilized by France, and finally
captured and annexed by England. The most important among these
Mauritian dependencies are the Island of Rodriguez, and the Oil
Islands Group (Diego Garcia). The Seychelles were formerly
associated with Mauritius, but since 1897 have been an independent
colony under a full Governor. They consist of 90 small islands in
the Seychelles group, the Almirante, Aldabra, Cosmoledo, and other
tiny archipelagoes; the total land area being only 160 square miles,
with a population white and coloured of 26,000. The Seychelles were
taken possession of by the French in 1743. Prior to that date they
were uninhabited, though there are on them the traces of ancient
habitation which may represent the halting places of Malagasy
sea-wanderers on their way from Sumatra to Madagascar. Their name of
Seychelles is a misspelling of “de Séchelles,” the surname of a
French minister of finance in 1756. The British fleet captured the
principal island (Mahé) in 1794, but allowed the French Governor to
continue to rule the islands until 1810, when they were taken
possession of definitely; partly for the reason that the French in
Mauritius and Réunion had abused the tolerance shown to them, by
directing constant privateering attacks on British shipping. It was
in Mauritius that one of the noblest heroes of British colonial
pioneering—Matthew Flinders, of the Royal Navy—was imprisoned for
six years, eating his heart out, losing all the advantages he might
have gained from his truly wonderful circumnavigating survey of the
Australian coasts[162]. To remove from the French all possible base
of operations in the Indian Ocean, Bourbon (Réunion), an island
slightly larger than Mauritius, and the most southern member of the
Mascarene group, was also occupied by the British, who on this
occupation and that of Mauritius, of Tamatave and other points on
the coast of Madagascar, founded claims to a protectorate over the
large island of Madagascar, as will be related in greater detail in
a later chapter. Bourbon, however, was restored to the French in
1816 and renamed at a later date Réunion.
-----
Footnote 141:
As against an area for all British South Africa up to the Congo
boundary of 1,152,619 square miles in 1912; all of which has grown
from the Cape Colony of 125,000 square miles annexed in 1806.
Footnote 142:
X̓osa is pronounced with a preliminary click of the tongue like a
cluck to encourage horses.
Footnote 143:
The Negro and Malay slaves then numbered in all about 39,000.
Footnote 144:
He was at that time Sir Charles Grant, and a member of the great
Reform ministry. His action in the matter was prompted by a
mischievous personality, a Dr Philip, representative of a
missionary society in South Africa, who conceived a great and
unjust hatred of the Boers, and an affection for the negro
invaders of Cape Colony, which was exaggerated and unreasonable.
Much may be learnt of his attitude towards public questions in my
_Life of Livingstone_ (1891).
Footnote 145:
“Grikwa” was the cant name (Gri-kwa) given to the half-castes
between Boers and Hottentots.
Footnote 146:
The Fingo—properly Amamfengu—Kafirs, were mostly fugitives into
Cape Colony from Natal, sent flying westward from the Zulu
slaughter-raids of Chaka and others.
Footnote 147:
Discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, its existence was kept
secret by them until 1588, when Captain Cavendish returning from a
cruise round the world suddenly lighted on it. The Dutch twice
seized it and held it each time for a few months in 1665 and 1673.
In this last year it was definitely allotted to the East India
Company.
Footnote 148:
The largest of a little group of islets in the South Atlantic,
about 1260 miles west of the Cape of Good Hope. Tristan D’Acunha
has an area of about 45 square miles, and is extremely
mountainous, rising to 8264 feet.
Footnote 149:
Or “Land of the Abambo,” the name of one of the original Bantu
tribes of the country. The root _-mbo_ is very common as a tribal
name among the Bantu, and occurs repeatedly in Central Africa.
Footnote 150:
To which were added in later years tea (a great success) and
coffee—the latter subsequently destroyed by the Ceylon coffee
disease.
Footnote 151:
Nov, 1912, nearly 1,000,000.
Footnote 152:
Twelve years later the northern railway line had traversed British
Bechuanaland and had reached Buluwayo. It attained the Zambezi in
1903, and now enters the Belgian Congo in Katanga.
Footnote 153:
The Jews, as we have seen, played a considerable part in the
development of North Africa since the 1st century of the Christian
era. They have similarly had much to do with the progress of South
Africa. Between 1840 and 1860 important Jewish houses of business
were established in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Noteworthy
amongst these firms was that of the De Pass brothers. The De Pass
family specially concerned itself with the acquisition and
development of the guano islets off what is now the coast of
German South-West Africa. They developed the copper mining
industry of Port Nolloth, were the first to manufacture ice in
South Africa, and started the sugar planting in Natal. The firm of
Mosenthal, of the Eastern province of Cape Colony, did much to
promote agriculture and stock-rearing, the introduction of the
Angora Mohair goat, ostrich farming, sheep and cattle breeding.
Other South African Jews who have taken a prominent part in
science, in the legal profession, in political, philanthropic,
industrial, and mining affairs have been the Hon. Simeon Jacobs (a
Judge of the Supreme Court), the Mendelssohns, Rapaports,
Rabinowitzes, Solomons, Lilienfelds, Kisches, Neumanns, Moselys;
Alfred Beit, Sir David Harris, Sir Lionel Phillips, and Sir George
Albu.
Footnote 154:
To which was added later, over all Portuguese Africa south of the
Zambezi.
Footnote 155:
Damara is the Hottentot name applied to these black Bantu negroes,
who call themselves Ova-herero, Ova-mbo, etc.
Footnote 156:
Dingiswayo (the “Wanderer”), a Zulu of the Abatetwa clan, may
perhaps be regarded as the founder of Zulu power. All this portion
of South African history is described in some detail in my
_History and Description of the British Empire in Africa_.
Footnote 157:
Driven out of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal by the
action of Boers, British, and Basuto, a section of the Zulus
conquered much of Portuguese South-East Africa, with nearly all
modern Rhodesia, and carried their raids past Nyasa and Tanganyika
to the vicinity of the Victoria Nyanza.
Footnote 158:
A rebellious general of Chaka’s, often known by his Sesuto name,
“Moselekatse.”
Footnote 159:
The African Lakes Trading Corporation (as it is now called) was
founded mainly by the energies of the brothers John and Frederick
Moir (sons of an Edinburgh doctor) about 1878, as an adjunct to
the missionary enterprise in the Shire Highlands. In course of
time they established trading stations on Lake Nyasa, and cut a
track or rough road over mountains and forest from the north-west
corner of Lake Nyasa to the south end of Tanganyika, conveying
over this “Stevenson Road” (so called because a Mr James
Stevenson, a director of the Company, provided the cost of this
undertaking) a little steamer in sections for the London
Missionary Society. This steamer, the _Good News_, was the first
to navigate the waters of Tanganyika. The African Lakes Company,
being established at the north end of Lake Nyasa, inevitably came
into contact with the slave-trading Arabs who had settled there
about ten years before. In 1887 the agents of the Company
intervened to protect natives from being raided by the Arabs. The
Arabs retorted by attacking the white men. Volunteers hastened to
their relief from several quarters. Amongst these were two men
afterwards to become famous as African governors—Sir Frederick
Lugard and Sir Alfred Sharpe. But the Arab question was not
definitely settled until the Protectorate had been established for
four years (1895). The African Lakes Corporation certainly did the
pioneer work of British trade in South Central Africa.
Footnote 160:
The cession of Cape Colony from Holland to Britain took place on
August 13, 1814.
Footnote 161:
The franchise is limited to men of European race and descent only;
while women are not granted the parliamentary vote, as is the case
in Australia; New Zealand; California, Colorado, Wyoming, and
three other states of the American Union; the Isle of Man;
Finland; and Norway. In these points, the framers of the Act of
Union have shown the unprogressive spirit characteristic of the S.
African Dutch.
Footnote 162:
He reached England in 1811 but was treated there with a neglect
and ingratitude by the British Government which will long remain a
scandal in our Imperial History, and for which as yet no public
reparation has been made. His only descendant is Prof.
Flinders-Petrie, the Egyptologist.
CHAPTER XII
GREAT EXPLORERS
The colonization of Africa in all its earlier stages is so closely
akin to exploration, that in several of the preceding chapters I
have seemed to deal rather with geographical discoveries than with
political settlement. But as there is much exploring work which has
not been directly connected with colonization (just as all
missionary work has not resulted in the foundation of European
states in Africa, nor have measures for the suppression of the slave
trade invariably been followed by annexation) I think it better to
devote a chapter to the enumeration of great explorers whose work
has proved to be an indirect cause of the ultimate European control
now established over nearly all Africa.
The first explorers known to history, though not, unfortunately,
mentioned by name, were those Phoenicians despatched by the Egyptian
Pharaoh, Niku II (son of Psammetik), about 600 (603-599) B.C. to
circumnavigate Africa. We receive our knowledge of them through
Herodotos, who derived his information from Egypt; but the account
given of the voyage bears the stamp of veracity and probability, and
seemed to be confirmed by some remarkable inscriptions on scarabs
discovered by French explorers of Egyptian monuments. These,
however, have been declared to be forgeries[163].
Cambyses, the Persian king who invaded Egypt in 525 B.C., is said to
have lost his life in endeavouring to trace the course of the Nile,
he and his army having disappeared in the deserts of Upper Nubia.
About 520 B.C. Hanno the Carthaginian, as already related in Chapter
II, conducted an expedition round the West coast of Africa, which
penetrated about as far south as the confines of Liberia.
The Greek Herodotos journeyed in Egypt and in the Cyrenaica about
450 B.C. Eratosthenes, a Greek, born at Kurene in 276 B.C., became
the librarian of one of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, and, although
he derived much of his information about the valley of the Nile from
other travellers, still he conducted a certain amount of exploration
himself. Polybius, a Greek, born in 204 B.C., explored much of the
North coast of Africa in the service of the Romans about 140 years
before the Christian Era.
The celebrated Strabo flourished during the reign of Augustus Cæsar,
and wrote a great work on geography about the year 19 A.C. He
accompanied the Roman governor Ælius Gallus on a journey up the Nile
as far as Philæ, though his knowledge of the Cyrenaica was limited
to a voyage along the coast. Nero sent two centurions (according to
Pliny) with orders to ascend the Nile and discover its course.
Thanks to recommendations from the king of Ethiopia, they were
passed on from tribe to tribe, and apparently ascended the Nile as
far as its junction with the Sobat, where they were stopped by
immense masses of floating vegetation (the _sudd_).
Though Pliny the Elder[164] does not appear to have visited Africa,
or at any rate to have carried his explorations farther than a trip
to Alexandria and visits to the ports along the Barbary coast, he
nevertheless did much to collect and edit the geographical knowledge
of the day; and has thus transmitted to our knowledge the slender
information which the Romans possessed of interior Africa during the
early years of the Empire. Pliny is remarkable for having handed
down to us the first mention of the Niger, which he calls Nigir or
Nigris and somewhat confounds with the humbler river Draa to the
south of Morocco.
About the middle of the second century of the Christian Era there
flourished in Egypt the famous geographer called Claudius Ptolemæus,
better known to us as ‘Ptolemy.’ Though he also was mainly a
compiler and owed much of his information to the works on geography
published by his predecessor or contemporary, Marinus of Tyre, yet
it seems probable that he travelled up the Nile for a certain
distance, and visited the African coasts along the Red Sea and the
Mediterranean. At any rate he published the most extended account of
African geography given by any classical writer. His accounts of the
Nile lakes, of the East African coast and of the Sahara Desert are
the nearest approach to actuality of any geographer before the
Muhammadan epoch.
With the decline of the Roman Empire came a cessation of
geographical exploration, and there was no revival until the
Muhammadan invaders of Africa had attained sufficient civilization
to record their journeys and observations. Masudi and Ibn Haukal in
the 10th century, and other Arab travellers whose wanderings have
not been recorded, furnished from their journeys information
embodied in the map of Idris or Edrisi drawn up by a Sicilian
Muhammadan geographer for Count Robert of Sicily in the 12th
century. By these journeys the first definite and reliable
information about the geography of Africa south of the Sahara, and
along the East coast to Zanzibar and Sofala was brought to European
knowledge. Ibn Batuta, a native of Morocco, in the 14th
century[165], and Leo Africanus (a Spanish Moor who afterwards
turned Christian), in the 16th century, reached the Niger and the
regions round Lake Chad. The geographical enterprise of the Moors
communicated itself to their conquerors, the Portuguese. Besides
their great navigators, the Portuguese sent out overland explorers,
the first, named João Fernandez, having in 1445 explored the Sahara
Desert inland from the Rio d’Ouro. It is stated that Pero d’Evora
and Gonçalvez Eannes actually travelled overland in 1487 from
Senegambia to Timbuktu; but doubt has been thrown on their having
reached this distant city; they may possibly have got as far as
Jenné. Much more real and important were the explorations of Pero de
Covilhão; who travelled in Sofala and reached Abyssinia in 1490 on
his return from India, and remained in that country for the rest of
his life. Passing over Francisco Barreto, who explored Zambezia more
for immediate political purposes in 1569 and subsequent years, we
may next note the exploration of a Portuguese gentleman named Jaspar
Bocarro, who in 1616 made a journey overland from the central
Zambezi, across the river Shiré, near Lake Nyasa and the Ruvuma
river, and thence to the east coast at Mikindani. From Mikindani he
continued his journey to Malindi by sea. In 1613-18 two Portuguese
Jesuit missionaries, Pedro Paez and Jeronimo Lobo, explored
Abyssinia, even far to the south. Paez visited the source of the
Blue Nile, and Lobo directed his travels to the quasi-Christian
states to the south of Abyssinia. In 1622, Lobo and other Portuguese
missionaries attempted to enter Abyssinia by way of Zeila
(Somaliland). They met with great misfortunes and much cruelty at
the hands of the Somalis and the Egyptian Turks. Six missionaries
died or were murdered. Lobo found his way from Mombasa to India,
and, nothing daunted, returned to the Danákil coast in 1625 and
landed at Bailul, opposite Mokha. His clothes tattered and his feet
bleeding, he passed through the rough Danákil country, climbed the
Abyssinian mountains, and reached the Jesuit mission centre at
Fremona, near Axum. He then made a really remarkable exploration of
Abyssinia, and visited the source of the Blue Nile; but the jealous
Abyssinians expelled him and the other Jesuits from Abyssinia in
1633 by handing them over as prisoners to the Turks at Masawa[166].
It was thanks to the travels of Paez and Lobo that Abyssinian
geography became so well known in Europe when all the rest of
interior Africa was a blank. Numbers of unnamed, unremembered
Portuguese soldiers and missionaries must have plunged into the
interior of Africa between 1445 and the end of the 17th century,
bringing back jumbled information of lakes and rivers and negro
states; but their information has perished—except in an indirect
form—and their names are lost to history.
In 1588 Andrew Battel, a fisherman of Leigh in Essex, was wrecked on
the coast of Brazil, seized by the Indians as a “pirate,” and handed
over to the Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro. The Portuguese decided to
deport him to Angola. The vessel in which he travelled reached
Benguela at a time when it was being ravaged by the predatory
“Jagas[167].” The Portuguese being obliged to leave a hostage with
the Jagas, left Battel behind; and in the company of these wild
people he seems to have traversed much of the Congo country behind
Angola and Loango before he eventually reached the coast again
(north of the Congo) near a Portuguese fort, where he was allowed by
the Jagas to leave them and whence the Portuguese permitted him to
return to England in 1607. He appears to have roamed over South-West
Africa for nearly 18 years, and he brought back with him fairly
truthful accounts of the pygmy races, the anthropoid apes, and some
of the big game which penetrates the interior of Benguela from the
south.
At the commencement of the 17th century, William Lithgow, a Scottish
traveller, visited Tunis and Algeria. In 1618 the London Company of
Adventurers despatched George Thompson, who had already travelled in
Barbary, to explore the river Gambia. During his absence up the
river the ship by which he had come from England was seized and the
crew murdered by Portuguese and half-caste slave traders, who
resented this invasion of their special domain. Thompson managed to
send back word of his difficulties, and the Company of Adventurers
despatched another small ship. After sending her back with letters,
Thompson continued his journeys for a distance of about 80 miles
above the mouth of the Gambia. Thompson, however, lost his head,
became fantastic in his notions, and is supposed to have been killed
by his own English seamen, who afterwards boldly walked to the
Senegal coast and were sent home in a Dutch ship. A third vessel
sailed from London, commanded by Richard Jobson, to enquire after
Thompson’s fate. Jobson’s first voyage, though he reached the point
where Thompson had disappeared, was not very successful. On his
return from Gravesend with two ships in 1620, he sailed up the
Gambia to a place called Kasson, where dwelt an influential
Portuguese who had been the instigator of the destruction of his
predecessor’s ship. This man fled at Jobson’s approach, and the
latter continued on his way till he reached Tenda, where Thompson
had disappeared. He then travelled in boats far above the Barrakonda
Rapids[168].
Then followed the journey of Jannequin de Rochefort and his
companions in Senegal, and the still more important explorations of
Brüe and Campagnon in the same region, journeys which have been
referred to in Chapter IX. During the reign of king Charles II a
Dutch or Anglicized Dutch merchant, named Vermuyden, asserted that
he had ascended the Gambia and reached a country beyond, full of
gold, but the truth of this story is open to considerable suspicion.
In 1723 Captain Bartholomew Stibbs, and later still a man named
Harrison, repeated Jobson’s explorations of the Gambia. In 1720-30
Dr Shaw, an Englishman, travelled in Egypt, Algeria[169] and Tunis,
and gave the first fairly accurate account of the Barbary States
which had been received since they became Muhammadanized. A little
later (1737-40) an English clergyman, Doctor of Laws and Fellow of
the Royal Society, Richard Pococke, travelled in Egypt and explored
the Nile as far as the first cataract. In about 1780, Sonnini, an
Italian, born in Alsace, explored Egypt, and gave a really
circumstantial account of that country which did much to incite the
French Revolutionary Government to invade it. In 1768-73 James
Bruce, a Scotchman of good family, who had been educated at Harrow,
and had spent two-and-a-half years as Consul at Algiers, travelled
first in Tunis, Tripoli, and Syria. He then entered Egypt, and,
becoming interested in the Nile question, he voyaged down the Red
Sea to Masawa, and journeyed to Gondar, the capital of Abyssinia.
Having some knowledge of medicine, he found favour with the
authorities, and was given a command in the Abyssinian cavalry.
After many disappointments, his ardent wish was granted; and he
arrived at what he believed to be the sources of the Nile, but which
really were the head-waters of the Blue Nile, to the south of
Abyssinia. He journeyed back by way of Sennār and the Nubian Desert
to Cairo. In 1793 William George Browne, a Londoner, and a member of
Oriel College, Oxford, attracted by the accounts of Bruce’s travels,
entered Egypt, and crossed the Libyan Desert from Asiut to Darfur in
1793. There he was treated extremely badly by the sultan of the
country, and practically endured a captivity of three years before
he succeeded in returning to Egypt.
During the 18th century rumours had gradually been taking the shape
of a belief that there was a great river in Western Africa on the
banks of which stood the famous city of Timbuktu. This river was
identified with Pliny’s Nigris or Nigir[170]. At first it was
thought that the Niger was the Gambia or Senegal, but at last it was
believed that the Niger must rise southward, beyond the sources of
these rivers, and flow to the eastward. Sir Joseph Banks, President
of the Royal Society, who had accompanied Cook on his journey round
the world, joined with other persons of distinction, and formed the
African Association on the 19th of June, 1788, with the special
object of exploring the Niger. At first they resolved to try from
the North coast of Africa or from Egypt; but these expeditions
proving unsuccessful, an attempt was made to march into the unknown
from Sierra Leone. Major Houghton, who had been Consul in Morocco,
was employed amongst other travellers, and he succeeded in passing
through Bambuk on his way to Timbuktu; but he was intercepted by the
Moors of the Sahara, robbed, and left to die naked in the desert.
From Egypt a German traveller named Friedrich Hornemann was
despatched by the same association. He reached Fezzan, set out on a
journey to Bornu, and was never heard of afterwards, though it is
practically certain that he reached the Niger in the country of
Nupe[171] about 1800. In 1795 the zealous Association accepted the
services of a young Scotch surgeon named Mungo Park, and sent him
out to discover the Niger from the West coast. Mungo Park started at
the age of 24, having had a previous experience in scientific
exploration as assistant surgeon on an East Indiaman, which had made
a voyage to Sumatra. Park reached Pisania, a station high up the
Gambia River, in 1795. He started at the end of that year, and after
crossing the Senegal river and going through many adventures, he
entered the Moorish countries of Kaarta and Ludamar to the
north-east. Hence, after enduring captivity and great hardships, he
escaped, and gradually found his way to the Niger at Sego, and
struggled along the river bank for a short distance farther east.
His return journey along the Niger was attended by such hardships
that one marvels at the physical strength which brought him through
alive. However, at last he reached Bamaku, and thence after almost
incredible difficulties regained Pisania on the Gambia, about a year
and a quarter after setting out thence to discover the Niger. Owing
to his return voyage taking him to the West Indies, he did not reach
England till the 22nd of December, 1797, after performing a journey
which, even if he had not subsequently become the Stanley of the
Niger, would have made him lastingly famous. London received him
with enthusiasm, but after the first novelty had worn off a period
of forgetfulness set in. Park married, and settled down in Peebles
as a medical practitioner. But in process of time the influence of
the African Association filtered even into the stony heart of a
Government department; and it was resolved by the Colonial Office
(then a branch of the War Office) to send Mungo Park back to
continue his exploration of the Niger. He was given £5000 for his
expenses, and an ample outfit of stores and arms and other
equipment. He held a Captain’s commission, and was allowed to select
soldiers from the garrison of Goree. He took his brother-in-law with
him as second in command, a draughtsman named Scott, and several
boatbuilders and carpenters. At Goree he selected one officer, 35
privates, and two seamen. The party left the Gambia in 1805. They
were soon attacked with fever, and by the time they had reached the
Niger only seven out of the 38 soldiers and seamen who had left
Goree were living. Descending the Niger past Sego, Mungo Park built
a rough and ready kind of boat at Sansanding, which he named the
_Joliba_. By this time his party had been reduced to five, including
himself. On the 12th of November, 1805, they set out from Sansanding
(whence they sent back to the Gambia their letters and journals) to
trace the Niger to its mouth. Mungo Park was never heard from any
more. It was ascertained, by the information subsequently gathered
from native traders and chiefs, that his party met with constant
opposition from the natives in its descent of the river, with the
result that he and his companions were continually fighting. After
Mungo Park entered the Hausa-speaking countries of Sokoto the enmity
of the natives increased, apparently because he was unable to pay
his way with presents. At last, at Busa, where further navigation
was obstructed by rocks, the natives closed in on him. Finding no
way of escape, Park jumped into the river with Lieutenant Martyn (a
Royal Artillery Officer), and was drowned. After Park’s death, Major
Peddie, Captain Campbell, Major Gray, and Dr Dochard all strove to
follow in Park’s footsteps from the direction of the Gambia, but all
died untimely deaths from fever, though Dr Dochard succeeded in
reaching Sego on the Niger.
The presence of the Dutch in South Africa did not lead to great
explorations. Such journeys as were made were chiefly parallel to
the coast. In 1685 Commander Van der Stel explored Namakwaland to
within a very short distance of the Orange river; but it was some 60
years later before that river was actually discovered by a Boer
elephant hunter. Its discovery was made known scientifically by an
expedition under Captain Hop in 1761. This expedition obtained
several giraffes, which were sent home by Governor Tulbagh, and were
the first to reach Europe. In 1777 Captain Robert Jacob Gordon, a
Scotchman in the service of the Dutch East India Company, discovered
the Orange river at its junction with the Vaal. Subsequently Captain
Gordon, with Lieutenant William Patterson, an Englishman, made a
journey overland from the Namakwa country to the mouth of the Orange
river, which they ascended for 30 or 40 miles. They christened what
the Dutch had hitherto called the “Great (Groote) river” the “Orange
river,” out of compliment to the Stadhouder. There is also a rumour
that two Dutch commissioners, Truster and Sommervill, went on a
cattle-purchasing expedition in 1801 beyond the Orange river, and
penetrated through the Bechuana country to the vicinity of Lake
Ngami.
Fired by the news of African discoveries, Portugal awoke from one of
her secular slumbers in 1798—as she similarly awoke in 1877—and
despatched a Brazilian, Dr Francisco José Maria de Lacerda, to the
Zambezi, to attempt a journey across Africa from East to West. The
results of this first scientific exploration of Central Africa have
been touched on in Chapter IV. It may be sufficient to mention here
that Dr de Lacerda travelled up the Zambezi to Tete, and from Tete
north-westwards to the vicinity of Lake Mweru, near the shores of
which he died. He had been preceded along this route by two Goanese
of the name of Pereira. In the beginning of the 19th century two
half-caste Portuguese named Baptista and Amaro José crossed Africa
from the Kwango river, behind Angola, to Tete on the Zambezi. In
1831 Major Monteiro and Captain Gamitto repeated Dr de Lacerda’s
journey from Tete to the Kazembe’s country, near Lake Mweru; and in
1846 a Portuguese merchant at Tete named Candido de Costa Cardoso,
claimed to have sighted the southwest corner of Lake Maravi (Nyasa).
To return again to South Africa—British rule brought about a great
development in exploration. Campbell, a Scotch missionary, in 1812
laid down the course of the Orange river on the map and discovered
the source of the Limpopo. Captain (afterwards General Sir J. E.)
Alexander made an interesting journey overland from Cape Town to
Walfish Bay; Dr William Burchell and Captain William Cornwallis
Harris[172] explored Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, and added much
to our knowledge of the great African fauna. Robert Moffat and other
missionaries extended our knowledge of Bechuanaland; Angas
investigated Zululand; Major Vardon explored the Limpopo.
In the first decade of the 19th century Henry Salt (formerly British
Consul-General in Egypt) explored Abyssinia and the Zanzibar Coast.
In 1822 Captain (afterwards Admiral) W. F. W. Owen left England with
two ships, and spent four years exploring the East and West coasts
of Africa, and the island of Madagascar. He especially added to our
knowledge of Delagoa Bay and its vicinity. He despatched vessels on
the first voyage of discovery up the Zambezi, which unhappily ended
in the death of all the British officers. The limit reached was
Sena. The East and West coasts of Africa were charted by Captain
Owen with the first approach to real accuracy. Although he was not
an overland explorer, his voyage marks a most important epoch in
African discovery, and many of his surveys are still in use.
Mungo Park and others having entertained the idea that the Niger
might find its ultimate outlet to the sea in the river Congo, an
expedition was sent out in 1816 to explore the lower Congo. It was a
naval expedition, of course, and the command was given to Captain
Tuckey. He surveyed the river to the Yelala Falls, and carried his
expedition inland to above these rapids near the modern station of
Isangila. Unfortunately, he and nearly all the officers of his
expedition died of fever; but his journey, being conducted on
scientific lines, resulted in considerable additions to our
knowledge of Bantu Africa, its peoples, languages, and flora.
Major Laing, a Scotchman, who had already, in 1823, distinguished
himself by exploring the source of the Rokel river of Sierra Leone
(practically locating the source of the Niger and ascertaining its
approximate altitude), determined in 1825 to strike out a new
departure in the search for Timbuktu. He started from Tripoli,
journeyed to Ghadames and the oasis of Twat, and thence rode across
the desert to the Niger over a route which may some day be followed
by a French trans-Saharan railway. He was attacked on the way by the
detestable Tawareq, who left him for dead, bleeding from twenty-four
wounds. Still, he recovered, and actually entered Timbuktu on the
18th of August, 1826. Being advised by the people to leave because
of their dislike to the presence of a Christian, he started to
return across the desert, but was killed at El Arwan, a few marches
north of Timbuktu, at the instigation of the Fula king Ahmadu of
Masina.
French names were scarce in the roll of explorers after the journeys
of Brüe and Campagnon at the beginning of the 18th century; though
Le Vaillant, as a naturalist, made small but very interesting
explorations in South Africa. But in the early part of the 19th
century, after the recovery of their Senegalese possessions,
Frenchmen resumed the exploration of the Dark Continent. Already, in
1804, Rubault, an official of the Senegal Company, had explored the
desert country between the Senegal and the Gambia, and the upper
waters of the Senegal. In 1818 Gaspard Mollien discovered the source
of the Gambia, and explored Portuguese Guinea. In 1824 and 1825 De
Beaufort visited the country of Kaarta to the north-east of the
Senegal. Then came René Caillé, who reached Timbuktu and returned
thence to Morocco in 1827, a journey discussed for its political
importance in Chapter IX.
In 1817 a British mission was sent to Ashanti, under the eventual
leadership of Thomas Edward Bowdich. Bowdich, who made a treaty with
the king of Ashanti, employed the opportunities of intercourse with
Hausa, Mandingo, and Moorish merchants at the court of this monarch
to collect a quantity of most valuable information as to the course
of the Niger, the fate of Mungo Park, the geography, ethnology and
languages of the heart of West Africa within the Niger bend. His
book, published in 1820, is a valuable work in African anthropology
and history.
The British Government, still pegging away at the Niger problem, was
roused to fresh exertions by the information collected. Impressed by
the success with which Laing had penetrated Central Africa from
Tripoli, it resolved to try that Regency[173] as a basis of
discovery. Mr Ritchie and Captain George Lyon started from Tripoli
in 1818, and reached the country of Fezzan. Here Ritchie died, and
Lyon did not get beyond the southernmost limit of Fezzan. On his
return a second expedition was organized under Dr Walter Oudney (who
was actually appointed Political Agent to Bornu before that country
had been discovered by Europeans!), Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton,
R.N., and Lieutenant Dixon Denham. Starting from Tripoli in the
spring of 1822, they were compelled to halt there by the obstacles
that were placed in their way. Denham, an impulsive, energetic man,
rushed back to Tripoli to remonstrate with the Basha, and receiving
nothing but empty verbal assurances, started for Marseilles with the
intention of proceeding to England, but was recalled by the Basha of
Tripoli, who henceforth placed no obstacles in his way. During his
absence the expedition had visited the town of Ghat, far down in the
Sahara. In 1823 this expedition reached the Sudan, and its members
were the first Europeans to discover Lake Chad. They then visited
Bornu and the Hausa state of Kano, where Dr Oudney died. After
Oudney’s death, Clapperton proceeded to Sokoto, and very nearly
reached the Niger, but was prevented from doing so by the jealousy
of the Fula sultan of Sokoto. Whilst Major Denham was remaining
behind in Bornu, there arrived with a supply of stores a young
officer named Toole, who had traversed the long route from Tripoli
to Bornu almost alone, and had made the journey from London in four
months. Denham and Toole explored the eastern and southern shores of
Lake Chad, and discovered the Shari river, after which the
unfortunate Toole died.
Denham and Clapperton then returned to Tripoli[174]. The British
Government sent Clapperton back to discover the outlet of the Niger.
He landed at Badagri, in what is now the British colony of Lagos. He
lost his companions one by one, with the exception of his invaluable
servant Richard Lander. Clapperton passed through Yorubaland, and
actually struck the Niger at the Busa Rapids, near where Park and
his company perished. From Busa Clapperton and his party travelled
through Nupe and the Hausa states of Kano and Sokoto; but he arrived
at an unfortunate time, when Sokoto was at war with Bornu, and the
Fula sultan was much too suspicious of Clapperton’s motives to help
him in the exploration of the Niger. From fever and disappointment
Clapperton died at Sokoto on the 13th of April, 1827. It was a great
pity that he went there at all. What he should have done on reaching
Busa was to work his way down from Busa to the sea. All his
companions, except his servant Lander, had predeceased him. Lander
now endeavoured to trace the Niger to the sea, but the Fula sultan
still opposed him, and he was stripped of nearly all the property of
the expedition before he could leave Sokoto. Eventually he made his
way back to Badagri by much the same route that Clapperton had
followed. Lander was a Cornishman, a man of short stature, but
pleasing appearance and manners. He had had a slight education as a
boy, but learned a good deal more in going out to service as page,
footman, and valet. In this last-named capacity he had journeyed on
the continent of Europe and in South Africa before accompanying
Clapperton. When he returned to England his story did not arouse
much interest, as Arctic explorations had replaced Africa in the
mind of the public. Moreover, the ultimate course of the Niger had
by a process of exhaustion almost come to be guessed aright.
So far back as 1808 Dr Reichardt of Weimar had suggested that the
Niger reached the Atlantic in the Gulf of Guinea through the Oil
rivers. Later, James McQueen, who as a West Indian planter had
cross-examined many slaves on the subject of the Niger, not only
showed that this river obviously entered the sea in the Bight of
Benin, but predicted that this great stream would some day become a
highway of British commerce. Somewhat grudgingly, the Government
agreed to send Lander and his brother back to Africa, poorly endowed
with funds. Not discouraged, however, the Landers arrived at Badagri
in March, 1830, and reached the Niger at Busa after an overland
journey of three months. Meeting with no opposition from the
natives, they paddled down stream for two months in canoes. At
length they reached the delta, but there unfortunately fell into the
power of a large fleet of Ibo war canoes. By the Ibos they were
likely to have been killed but for the remonstrances of some
Muhammadan teachers, who, oddly enough, were found with this fleet.
Moreover, a native trader of Brass, an Ijō settlement near the coast
of the delta, happened to be visiting the Ibo chief, and agreed to
ransom the Lander brothers on condition of receiving from them a
‘bill’ agreeing to repay to the ‘king’ of Brass the value of the
goods which his son had furnished for their redemption. They reached
the sea at the mouth of the Brass river, one of the outlets of the
Niger, but not the main stream. An English merchant ship being
anchored there, the Landers went delightedly on board, thinking the
end of their troubles had come. They asked the captain to honour
their bill, the amount of which the Government would repay him. To
their amazement he refused, and altogether behaved in such a
disgraceful manner that it is a pity his name has not been preserved
for infamy. However, they managed on this ship to get a passage
across to Fernando Pô, where they landed. The vessel by which they
travelled, and the master of which treated them so badly, was
afterwards captured by a pirate and never heard of again. It may be
mentioned here that Richard Lander ultimately repaid the chief’s son
of Brass the whole amount of the goods which he had spent in
redeeming the two explorers from the Ibo king’s clutches.
No great fuss was made over the Landers when they returned in 1831.
John Lander remained at home. Richard Lander afterwards joined the
MacGregor Laird expedition for opening up the Niger. This commercial
undertaking met with the most awful disasters from sickness, but
James MacGregor Laird nevertheless succeeded in discovering the
Benue, and ascended it for some distance. In 1833 Richard Lander and
Dr Oldfield ascended the Niger from the Nun mouth as far as Rabba,
and explored the Benue for 140 miles above its junction with the
Niger. After returning from a third trip up the Niger Lander was
attacked by savages in the delta, was severely wounded, and died
from his wounds at Fernando Pô on the 6th of February, 1834.
In 1840-41 Mr John Beecroft, superintendent of Fernando Pô, and
afterwards first consul for the Bights of Biafra and Benin, not only
explored the Niger, but made known for the first time the Cross
river, to the east, which he ascended from Old Calabar to the
rapids. In 1841 the British Government sent out an important
surveying expedition to the Niger under four naval officers. This
expedition was despatched at the instigation of Sir Thomas Fowell
Buxton, the philanthropist, who had thrown himself heart and soul
into the anti-slavery movement. At this period philanthropy reigned
supreme in England, and a sense of humour was in abeyance, though it
was beginning to bubble up in the pages of Dickens, who has so
deliciously satirized this Niger expedition in “Bleak House” with
its inimitable Mrs Jellyby and her industrial mission of
Borriaboola-Gha. The ghastly unhealthiness of the lower Niger was
ignored, and an item in the programme of the expedition was the
establishment of a model farm at the junction of the Benue and the
Niger. The other aims of the expedition were nicely balanced between
the spreading of Christian civilization and the suppression of the
slave trade on the one hand and the zealous pushing of Manchester
goods on the other. Numerous treaties were made, but the results of
the expedition were disappointment and disaster, occasioned by utter
ignorance of the conditions under which some degree of health might
be retained, and a muddle-headed indecision as to the practical
results which were to be secured by the opening up of the Niger. The
loss of life was enormous. Still, in spite of this check, British
traders gradually crept into and up the Niger, with the results
detailed in Chapter VIII.
In 1836 John Davidson, an Englishman of considerable attainments,
started from the Atlantic coast of Morocco for Timbuktu, but was
murdered at Tenduf, in the Sahara Desert.
In 1849 the British Government determined to make another effort to
open up commercial relations with the Niger and Central Africa, but
resolved again to try the overland route from Tripoli. After the
Napoleonic wars were finished, the British Government had sent out
various surveying parties to map the coasts of Africa; and a
well-equipped expedition under Admiral Beechey made a thorough
investigation of the coasts of Tripoli and Barka in 1821 and 1822,
and sent back the first trustworthy accounts of the Greek ruins of
the Cyrenaica. Since that time several consular representatives of
Great Britain in Tripoli had carried on explorations in the
interior. Among these was James Richardson, who had originally
accompanied Admiral Beechey, and who further made most important
explorations of the Tripolitan Sahara, discovering many interesting
rock paintings and inscriptions. He was appointed to be the head of
this overland expedition of 1849, and associated with him were two
Germans, Barth and Overweg. Dr Heinrich Barth was born at Hamburg in
the year 1821. He had travelled extensively in Asia Minor, in
Mediterranean Africa, and up the Nile.
This expedition left Tripoli in the spring of 1850, and reached
Bornu without any difficulty. Here its members separated. Richardson
died soon afterwards and was buried near Lake Chad; Overweg died in
1852, having been the first European to navigate Lake Chad[175]. He
was buried on the shores of that lake. For the next four years Barth
carried on gigantic explorations on his own account. He journeyed
from Lake Chad along the river Komadugu, and thence across northern
Hausaland to the Niger at Say. From Say he cut across the bend of
the Niger to Timbuktu, and descended the river back to Say, and
thence to Sokoto, from which he made his way to Kukawa in Bornu,
where he met Dr Eduard Vogel and two non-commissioned officers of
the Royal Engineers, who had been sent by the British Government to
reinforce his expedition. Barth had previously in 1851 made a
journey due south, and had struck the river Benue very high up in
its course. Vogel started to complete the discoveries in this
direction, and eventually to make his way to the Nile. He was
accompanied by Corporal MacGuire, but the two quarrelled and parted,
and both were murdered in the vicinity of Wadai. Dr Barth and the
other non-commissioned officer made their way back across the desert
to Tripoli and England. Barth’s journey was productive of almost
more solid information than that of any of the great African
explorers, excepting Stanley, and possibly Nachtigal, Schweinfurth
and Emin Pasha. Besides the geographical information given, Barth’s
book in five volumes and his various linguistic works on the Central
Sudan languages represent an amount of information that has not been
sufficiently digested yet. Heinrich Barth stands in the first rank
of the _very_ great explorers, a class which should perhaps include
Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Grant, Burton, Baker,
Schweinfurth, Nachtigal, Rohlfs, Grenfell, Binger and Joseph
Thomson; men who have not only made great geographical discoveries
but who have enriched us as well with that information which clothes
the dry bones of the mere delineation of rivers, lakes, and
mountains. Barth received a somewhat grudging reward for his
services in England. After some delay he was created a C.B., and
then his existence was ignored by the Government, to whom still, and
for many years to come, an African explorer, laying bare to our
knowledge hundreds of thousands of square miles of valuable
territory, was less worthy of remembrance than a Chargé d’Affaires
at the court of the Grand Duke of Pumpernickel.
In 1846 a Portuguese trader named Graça reached the court of the
Mwata Yanvo in southern Congoland, from Angola; and between 1847 and
1851 the hinterland of Angola was thoroughly explored by a
Hungarian, Ladislas Magyar. In 1853 a Portuguese trader, Silva
Porto, actually crossed Africa, from Benguela to the mouth of the
Ruvuma, passing to the south of Lake Nyasa, but not sighting it.
In 1858 a Moroccan Jew named Mordokhai[176] Abi-Serūr made a journey
from the south of Morocco to Timbuktu and afterwards resided in that
city till 1862, thenceforward repeating his journeys thither until
1869. In 1830 the Church Missionary Society had sent emissaries to
Abyssinia, who included among them latterly such men as Dr Ludwig
Krapf[177]. But these agents were expelled in 1842, and Krapf
settled on the east coast of Africa two years afterwards. Here he
was joined by Johann Rebmann, also in the service of the Church
Missionary Society. Making Mombasa their head-quarters, Krapf and
Rebmann executed some remarkable journeys into the interior of what
was then an utterly unknown country. Rebmann in 1848 saw for the
first time Kilima-njaro, the highest mountain in Africa, nearly
20,000 feet high. In 1849 Krapf not only sighted Kilima-njaro, but
pushed his way much further north, and caught a glimpse of Mt Kenya.
Besides these remarkable discoveries (the truth of which was
strongly doubted by arm-chair geographers in England) they brought
back with them such circumstantial accounts of the great Central
African lakes as to lure others on to the exploration of these
regions.
During the thirties Abyssinia and Shoa were explored by Dr E. Rüppel
(a German traveller who added greatly to our knowledge of African
natural history); during the forties and fifties by the Irish-French
brothers, Antoine and Arnaud d’Abbadie (who made the most elaborate
surveys), and by Sir W. Cornwallis Harris; and subsequently by
Théophile Le Fébvre, Mansfield Parkyns, H. Dufton, and the
geographer, Dr C. T. Beke. In 1856 Mr James Hamilton made a most
interesting journey of exploration in the Cyrenaica, and thence
travelled overland through the oasis of Siwa to Egypt.
Meantime, in South Africa Livingstone had arisen. He had settled in
Bechuanaland in 1841, and had gradually extended his journeys
further and further north, until, in company with William Oswell and
Murray, two English sportsmen, he discovered Lake Ngami. Mr Francis
Galton had attempted to reach this lake in 1851 by an interesting
but very difficult journey through Damaraland; but he did not
succeed in getting nearer to Ngami than the bed of a dried-up
watercourse, the Omuramba. Andersson, a Swede, however, in 1851 left
Walfish Bay, and travelling through Ovamboland, managed to arrive at
the shores of Ngami. Green explored the lower course of the
Okabango-Teoge in 1856. In 1851 Livingstone, accompanied by his wife
and family, and by Mr Oswell, reached the Zambezi at Sesheke.
Feeling himself on the threshold of vast discoveries, Livingstone
despatched his wife and family to England, with the monetary help of
Mr Oswell, and placed himself under the tuition of Sir Thomas
McClear, the Astronomer Royal at Cape Town. Turning his face
northward in June 1852, he reached the Zambezi again in that year,
traced it along its upper course, near to its source, and then
travelled across to Angola, which he reached in May 1854. Returning
again from Angola to the Zambezi, he followed that river more or
less closely to near its mouth, and then made his way to Quelimane
by the route always followed until the recent discovery of the
Chinde mouth of the Zambezi. From Quelimane he was conveyed by a
British gunboat to Mauritius, and arrived in London on the 12th of
December, 1856.
Somaliland had been explored in 1854 by Richard Francis Burton and
John Hanning Speke. Burton was an officer in the Indian army, and
had previously made a remarkable journey to the holy places of the
Hedjaz. In 1856 the Royal Geographical Society (which had developed
from out of the African Association in 1830) despatched an
expedition under the command of Burton, who chose Speke for his
lieutenant, to search for the great lakes which the Württemberg
missionaries reported to exist. As the result of this epoch-making
exploration Burton discovered Tanganyika (though he only mapped out
the northern half), and Speke discovered the south shore of the
Victoria Nyanza. Hurrying home before Burton, Speke got the ear of
the Geographical Society, and was at once sent back (with Captain J.
A. Grant as his companion) to discover the sources of the Nile.
Burton was rather hardly treated in the matter, but he was a man too
clever for his times, and one who made many enemies amongst those
who directed geographical exploration in the middle of the 19th
century. Speke and Grant reached the northern end of the Victoria
Nyanza and the outlet of the Victoria Nile at the Ripon Falls,
journeyed northwards and missed the Albert Nyanza; then, met and
relieved by Sir Samuel Baker, travelled down the Nile to Egypt. It
was a most remarkable journey, but in some senses a blundering one,
remarkable as much for what was missed as for what was gained in
exploration. Through not having made any survey of the vast lake
they had undoubtedly discovered and often seen, and not being able
to give much idea of its shape or area, its very existence came
afterwards to be doubted until it was conclusively established by
Stanley in 1875. Speke and Grant had left England in April 1860, and
reached Khartum on the 30th of March, 1864, and England soon
afterwards. Speke died from a gun-accident in September 1864. Grant,
afterwards made a Colonel and a C.B., accompanied the British
expedition to Abyssinia, and lived till 1892.
Prior to the journey of Speke and Grant down the Nile, that river
had been already made known up to the vicinity of the great lakes by
explorers following in the footsteps of the military expeditions
sent by Muhammad Ali to conquer the Sudan[178]. A Catholic mission
had established itself on the Upper Nile in 1848, mainly supported
by the Austrian Government. Amongst the missionaries was Dr Ignatius
Knoblecher, who in 1849 explored the White Nile beyond Gondokoro to
Mount Logwek. Other explorations were carried out by Giovanni
Beltrame, another missionary. A Maltese ivory merchant named Andrea
Debono and a Venetian named Giovanni Miani had also explored the
White Nile; and the latter was the first European to visit the
Nyam-nyam country. An English (or, rather, Welsh) ivory trader named
John Petherick had started from Khartum in November 1853, and had
ascended the Bahr-al-Ghazal River for some distance. He made other
journeys into the unknown, more or less in the region of the
Bahr-al-Ghazal and the Nyam-nyam country. Petherick, who became
British consul at Khartum, was entrusted with the mission of meeting
and relieving Speke and Grant, but by some accident failed to do so.
On one of his later journeys he was accompanied by Dr Murie, a
naturalist, as far as Gondokoro. Theodor von Heuglin, Kiezelbach,
Munzinger, and Dr Steudner were among the methodical German
explorers who travelled in the Egyptian Sudan and in Abyssinia in
1861 and 1862. The greatest explorer of these regions, however, next
to Speke and Grant, was Mr, afterwards Sir Samuel, Baker, who with
his wife conducted an exploration of the Upper Nile on his own
account with the intention of meeting and if possible succouring
Speke and Grant. Baker had previously explored the Abyssinian
tributaries of the Nile. After leaving Speke and Grant to continue
their homeward journey, he started off for the south to fill up the
blanks in their discoveries. The Nile was reached in the Bunyoro
country; and after a long detention at the court of the scoundrelly
Nyoro king, and enduring incredible sufferings, Baker and his wife
discovered the Albert Nyanza, which from various causes he took to
be much larger than it really is. The entrance and the exit of the
Nile into and out from the Albert Nyanza were visited. The Bakers
reached Gondokoro, and then returned homewards in March 1865. Their
journey down the White Nile was blocked by the obstruction of a
vegetable growth (the _sudd_). At last this was cut through, and
Egypt was eventually reached. When Baker returned to London he was
knighted for the discoveries he had made. The Albert Nyanza was
afterwards circumnavigated by Gessi Pasha, a Levantine Italian in
the service of the Egyptian Government, and by Colonel Mason Bey,
neither of whom, curiously enough, noticed the Semliki flowing into
the lake, nor did they catch sight of the snow-covered Ruwenzori.
A romantic figure in Nile and Sahara exploration was Alexandrine
Tinne. “Young and beautiful (she was only 33 at the time of her
death), remarkably accomplished, a daring horsewoman, a charming
Diana; mistress of many tongues, including Arabic, and generous to a
fault, it is little wonder that she lingered as a beautiful and
gracious demi-goddess in the remembrance of such Arabs and Nile
Negroes of the Egyptian Sudan as were not exterminated by the
Mahdi’s revolt[179].” Alexandrine Tinne, between 1858 and 1864,
devoted herself to the exploration of the Nile and the
Bahr-al-Ghazal. She was accompanied on these journeys by her mother
and aunt, both of whom died of blackwater fever. In 1868 Miss Tinne
determined to cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad, and then
travel from Chad to the Upper Nile; but on the way to Ghat, an
ancient town inhabited by very fanatical Berbers, she was killed by
the orders of a treacherous Tawareq chief, as also were her Dutch
attendants.
Livingstone’s first great journey resulted in his being sent back
with a strong expedition to pursue his discoveries in Zambezia.
During these journeys between 1858 and 1864 the river Shiré was
explored, and Lake Nyasa was discovered and partially mapped.
Livingstone was accompanied by Dr (afterwards Sir John) Kirk, who
made most valuable natural history collections, and whose subsequent
long career as Political Agent at Zanzibar and many explorations
along the East coast of Africa have caused his name to be
imperishably connected with that part of the continent.
The French occupation of Algeria and their conquests in Senegambia
had naturally produced considerable exploring work, though, as much
of this was done piece by piece, it has not resulted in the handing
down of notable names, with some few exceptions. Panet, a Frenchman,
in 1850 travelled overland along the Sahara coast from St Louis, at
the mouth of the Senegal, to Morocco. Vincent, another Frenchman, in
1860 explored the country from St Louis to the Adrar district of the
Sahara, up to what is nowadays the Spanish Protectorate of the Rio
de Oro. Paul Soleillet described the Algerian Sahara; and Duveyrier,
a really scientific traveller, made important journeys from Algeria
southward and south-eastward, adding much to our knowledge of the
Northern Sahara. Duveyrier visited the interior of western Tripoli,
and brought back considerable information about the Tawareq and
their dialects.
In 1866 Livingstone resumed his explorations of East-Central Africa.
He travelled overland south-westwards from the Ruvuma River to the
south end of Lake Nyasa, then north-west and north to the south end
of Tanganyika, thence from Tanganyika to Lake Mweru, to the mighty
Luapula River, and to Bangweulu, which lakes and river he discovered
in 1868. Again reaching Tanganyika, he joined some Arabs and crossed
the Manyema country eastward to Nyangwe, on the Lualaba-Congo. From
here he returned to Ujiji, where he was met by Mr H. M. Stanley, who
had been sent out by the _New York Herald_ to relieve the great
explorer. After travelling with Stanley half-way back to Zanzibar,
Livingstone returned to Lake Bangweulu, and died there in 1873.
Various expeditions had been despatched to his relief. One under
Lieutenant Grandy was sent out in 1873 to ascend the Congo, but the
expedition was most unfortunate, and the explorer died near São
Salvador[180]. After many changes and withdrawals, a great
expedition, organized by the Royal Geographical Society, started
from Zanzibar in 1873 to find and relieve Livingstone. It was under
the leadership of Lieutenant (afterwards Commander) Verney Lovett
Cameron. Cameron soon heard of Livingstone’s death, but pushed on to
Tanganyika, and mapped that lake for the first time accurately. He
then travelled across to the Lualaba, which his altitudes
practically determined to be none other than the Upper Congo; but,
deterred from descending it by the tremendous difficulties that
offered themselves, he struck south-westwards across a country not
very difficult to traverse—the slightly civilized Mwata Yanvo’s
empire (impregnated with Portuguese influence), and reached Benguela
in November 1875, the first Englishman to cross Africa.
At the beginning of the sixties Dr Gerhard Rohlfs, one of the
greatest of African travellers, began to explore Morocco. He had
enlisted in the Foreign Legion serving in Algeria, was a doctor of
medicine, a renegade, and had a great knowledge of Arabic. He
subsequently travelled about the southern part of Morocco, and
penetrated to the oases of Twat and Ghadames in the Sahara (1864),
and in 1865 reached Fezzan and Tibesti. In 1866 he started on a
journey to Bornu, and eventually penetrated across the Niger to
Lagos, on the Guinea coast, thus being the first European to make a
complete journey from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea. In
1873 he explored the oases of the Libyan Desert; and in 1878 he
conducted an expedition, despatched by the German Government, to
Wadai, but got no further than the oasis of Kufra. Subsequently two
Italians, Dr Pellegrino Matteucci and Lieutenant Alfonso Maria
Massari, accompanied as far as Darfur by Prince Giovanni Borghese,
travelled across Africa from east to west by way of Suakin,
Kordofan, Wadai, Bornu, Kano, and Nupe to the Niger, whence they
returned to England, where Matteucci unfortunately died (1882). They
were the first Europeans to cross Africa from east to west north of
the Equator, but their journey was not productive of much
geographical knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge acquired
and transmitted, one of the most remarkable journeys ever made in
Africa was that of Dr Gustav Nachtigal, who, after having served as
physician to the Bey of Tunis, was appointed in 1868 by the Prussian
Government to take presents to the Sultan of Bornu. Leaving Tripoli
in February 1869, Nachtigal halted at first in Fezzan, and from that
country made a very interesting journey to Tibesti, a mountainous
region in the very middle of the Sahara Desert. He was the first and
only European who has really examined this remarkable mountainous
region. Returning to Murzuk, he resumed his journey to Bornu, where
he arrived in 1870. He thoroughly explored Lake Chad and much of the
Shari River, and visited Bagirmi, Wadai (where an earlier German
traveller, Moritz von Beurmann, had been murdered in 1863, when
searching for Vogel), Somrai, Darfur, Dar Runga, and Kordofan,
thence returning home through Egypt. He brought back with him an
enormous mass of geographical and linguistic information. In his
journey from Tripoli to Fezzan Nachtigal was accompanied for a
portion of the way by Miss Tinne.
Sir Joseph Hooker, the great botanist, already famous for his
botanical exploration of the Himalayas, of Australia and New
Zealand, and Palestine, in 1871 set out with Mr John Ball on a
journey to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. This resulted in a very
great addition to our knowledge of the North African flora and
fauna, and of that still imperfectly known and appreciated range of
mountains, the highest summits of which may prove to be but little
inferior in altitude to the loftiest African peaks. G. Schaudt, a
German, explored the Moroccan Sahara in 1879-82.
On the West coast of Africa the most remarkable journeys made in the
fifties and sixties were those of Paul du Chaillu, who travelled in
the Gaboon country, and whose natural history collections almost
surpass those of any other traveller for their richness and the
remarkable forms they revealed. He will always be remembered as the
man who practically discovered the gorilla. Winwood Reade, the first
modern African traveller who was at the same time a literary man,
visited the West coast of Africa in the sixties, and travelled
inland to the source of the Niger. His exploring journeys were of
small account, but his descriptions of West Africa are the most
vivid, the most truthful, and will perhaps prove to be the most
enduring, of any that we possess. (Sir) Richard Burton of Tanganyika
fame, who had been appointed Consul at Fernando Pô, ascended the
peak of the Cameroons, and visited Dahomé and the falls of the Congo
between 1860 and 1864. The Marquis de Compiégne and Herr Oskar Lenz
explored the Ogowé River, in French West Africa, in 1873; and later
Mr George Grenfell, a member of the Baptist Mission who was
afterwards to become still more famous, considerably increased our
knowledge of the Cameroons.
In 1876, Mons. M. J. Bonnat, a French trader, travelled up the Volta
River and reached the Muhammadan town of Salagá in the Gold Coast
hinterland; thus for the first time, since the vaguely recorded
Portuguese embassies to the king of Mosi in the 15th century,
bringing Europeans into touch with the Muhammadan lands beyond the
forest belt of Central Guinea.
Livingstone’s death and Cameron’s successful crossing of Africa did
a great deal to arouse European interest in that continent. H. M.
Stanley was despatched by the _New York Herald_ and the _Daily
Telegraph_ to complete Livingstone’s explorations of the Unknown
River. In 1875 he started on that journey which in its discoveries
and its results is the greatest feat to be found in the annals of
African exploration. He circumnavigated the Victoria Nyanza and
Tanganyika, marched across to the Lualaba, and followed its course
resolutely and in the teeth of fearful obstacles until he proved it
to be the Congo, and emerged on the Atlantic Ocean in 1877.
Cameron’s journeys had aroused the Portuguese from their lethargy.
Three explorers, Serpa Pinto, Brito Capello, and Roberto Ivens, were
despatched to Angola. Leaving São Paulo de Loanda in 1877, Serpa
Pinto journeyed in zigzags to the Zambezi, and descended that river
to the Barotse country, whence he accompanied M. Coillard, the
French missionary, across the Kalahari Desert to the Transvaal.
Capello and Ivens explored the northern part of Angola and the River
Kwango. Two or three years later they started on a journey
remarkable for the importance of the geographical results obtained.
They explored much of the Upper Zambezi, tracing that river to its
source, travelled along the water-parting between the Zambezi and
the Congo, and then turned southwards again to the Zambezi, and so
out to the Indian Ocean.
In the Nile regions explorations were steadily continuing. One of
the great African travellers, Georg August Schweinfurth, a native of
German Russia (Riga), first visited the Nile valley as a botanist.
In 1868 he started on a journey of exploration up the White Nile and
the Bahr-al-Ghazal, accompanying Nubian ivory merchants. With these
he penetrated far to the southwards through the Nyam-nyam country
till he reached the Mañbettu country, and there he discovered the
Wele River, flowing to the west, which ultimately turned out to be
one of the principal feeders of the Mubangi, the great northern
confluent of the Congo. Schweinfurth returned to Egypt in 1872, and
for a long time devoted himself to the botanical exploration of
Egypt, Arabia and Abyssinia. His journeys, from the enormous amount
of material gathered together, were surpassed in importance by few
African explorations. Sir Samuel Baker (1868-73) and later General
Gordon became Governors-General of the Egyptian Sudan, a vast
dependency of the half-European state of Egypt, which naturally,
whether under European or Egyptian governors, employed large numbers
of Europeans. Amongst those who added to our geographical knowledge
were Colonel Purdy-Bey, Colonel Colston, the great General Gordon,
and Marno (a Viennese); Colonel Chaillé Long (an American), who
visited Uganda, discovered Lake Ibrahim, and actually proved that
the Nile flowed out of the Victoria Nyanza, and then into the Albert
Nyanza; and Linant de Bellefonds, a Belgian, who also visited Uganda
whilst Stanley was there in 1875, Stanley giving him a famous letter
to be posted in Egypt[181]. There were also Colonel Mason Bey and
Gessi Pasha, who circumnavigated the Albert Nyanza; poor Lupton Bey,
who explored the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Nyam-nyam country and died after
long captivity in the Mahdi’s hands; and Slatin Pasha, once Governor
of Darfur, who had a happier fate.
The establishment of missions in Nyasaland drew explorers thither.
Captain Frederic Elton, who had been appointed Consul at Moçambique,
journeyed to Lake Nyasa with several companions, explored the
northern extremity of the lake, and started to return overland to
Zanzibar, but died on the way. His successor as Consul, Lieutenant
H. E. O’Neill, crossed backwards and forwards over utterly unknown
ground between Moçambique and Nyasa, fixed many positions at the
south end of the lake and in the Shiré Highlands, and explored many
parts of Portuguese East Africa north of the Zambezi. Bishop Steere,
Bishop Chauncey Maples, Bishop Smythies, and other missionaries of
the Universities’ Mission also explored the country between Lake
Nyasa and the River Ruvuma and the Moçambique coast. South of the
Zambezi, explorations had been carried out by Baldwin, Baines,
Andersson, Eriksson, and other sportsmen-travellers. Karl Mauch and
Edward Mohr (Germans) had explored Mashonaland (1866-9); and Mauch
had discovered gold in the stream valleys, and the remarkable ruins
of Zimbabwe. In 1875 Dr Paul Pogge made a journey from Angola to the
court of the Mwata Yanvo. Two other Germans, named Reichard and
Böhm, had in the later seventies crossed Tanganyika from Zanzibar,
and explored the country to the north of Lake Mweru.
In 1877, Dr Erwin von Bary, a German explorer, travelled far into
the Sahara from Tripoli and Southern Tunis, discovering some
remarkable recently extinct volcanoes in the country of Air. He was
however killed by the fanatical people of Ghat. In 1877 also a
notable journey was made into the Bahr-al-Ghazal province of the
Egyptian Sudan by a Greek doctor in the Egyptian service, P.
Potagos, who thus crossed into the Congo basin and reached the Mbomu
affluent of the Wele-Mubangi.
A remarkable journey was made in 1878-9 by Dr R. W. Felkin, who with
one or more missionary companions of the Church Missionary Society
journeyed overland from Suakin up the Nile to Uganda. They came back
again (with the Rev. C. T. Wilson) in 1881 from Uganda _via_ the
White Nile, Bahr-al-Ghazal and Darfur to Egypt.
Between 1880 and 1887, Professor J. Büttikofer, a Swiss (afterwards
a naturalized Dutchman), conducted a very careful exploration of the
coast-lands of Liberia, revealing much that was new and curious in
the remarkable fauna of that still little-known part of West Africa.
The return of Cameron and the subsequent success of Stanley had
caused the King of the Belgians to become intensely interested in
the exploration of Africa; at first, no doubt, from a disinterested
love of knowledge, but soon afterwards with the definite idea of
creating in the unoccupied parts of that continent a huge native
confederation or state which should become dependent on Belgium. The
king summoned to Brussels distinguished ‘Africans’ from most
European countries, with the desire of forming an International
Committee which should bring about the complete exploration of
Africa. But this international enterprise soon split up into
national sections; and what the King of the Belgians had intended
should be entirely disinterested geographical work ultimately
developed into the “Scramble for Africa.” Still, it did lead
considerably to the increase of geographical knowledge. The Royal
Geographical Society sent out a well-equipped expedition to Zanzibar
to explore the country between Tanganyika and Nyasa. It was under
the orders of Keith Johnston, who died soon after starting, leaving
his task to be fulfilled by Joseph Thomson. Mr Thomson was
completely successful, and covered much new ground between Nyasa and
Tanganyika to the west of Tanganyika, and to the south, where he
discovered the north end of Lake Rukwa[182]. On the West coast the
French Section despatched De Brazza to explore what is now French
Congo. His geographical discoveries led to annexation. Antonelli and
other Italians directed their efforts to the exploration of Shoa, to
the south of Abyssinia. But the main outcome of this action on the
part of the King of the Belgians was the founding of the Congo Free
State.
H. M. Stanley was sent back to the Congo at the expense of a small
committee—eventually at the sole charge of the King of the Belgians.
While he was by degrees reascending the Congo and making many
geographical discoveries, such as the Lakes Leopold and Mantumba, a
Baptist missionary already referred to, the Rev. George Grenfell,
made known the Mubangi River, the great northern affluent of the
Congo, which Colonel A. Vangèle and other Belgian explorers
afterwards determined to be the Wele. Lieutenant Hermann
Wissmann[183] (afterwards Major von Wissmann) mapped out the course
of the Kasai and other southern affluents of the Congo, and crossed
and recrossed Africa, coming out the first time at Zanzibar and the
second at the Zambezi. Dr Ludwig Wolf was the main agent in tracing
the course of the great Sankuru affluent of the Kasai. Other
companions of Wissmann were Major von François and Dr Hans Mueller.
Together they discovered the leading southern affluents of the Congo
between 1880 and 1886; but it must not be forgotten how much they
were helped in this respect by the Rev. George Grenfell of the
English Baptist mission and his mission steamer the _Peace_.
Grenfell stands second only to Stanley as a Congo explorer. Besides
his notable discovery of the Mubangi, he explored the Kwango (also
mapped in the middle of its course in 1880 by the Austrian, Major
von Mechow), the Kasai, Busira, Lulongo, Lomami, Aruwimi, and Ruki
rivers. W. H. Stapleton, Thomas Comber, Dr Holman Bentley, and
William Forfeitt, other members of the Baptist mission, and S. P.
Verner, an American, also explored the Congo basin in the last
quarter of the 19th century. J. R. Werner (an English engineer)
contributed some surveys of the Mongalla and the Northern Congo; and
Capt. Sidney Hinde (afterwards an English official in East Africa)
explored the Lualaba in 1892-3. The Belgian explorers who cooperated
with English and Germans in the great work of laying bare the
intricate mysteries of the Congo basin were, besides the estimable
Vangèle, Georges le Marinel, L. van Kerckhoven, A. Hodister, Paul le
Marinel, Dr Cornet, Alexandre Delcommune, Captain Baert, and Baron
Dhanis.
In 1879 Dr Oskar Lenz, an Austrian who had previously explored the
Ogowé, journeyed from Morocco to Timbuktu, and from Timbuktu to
Senegambia. Subsequently Dr Lenz ascended the Congo, and crossed
over to Tanganyika, returning to Europe by the Zambezi, on a more or
less futile attempt to discover the whereabouts of Emin Pasha. In
the earlier eighties another Austrian explorer, Dr Holub, travelled
in South Africa and made a journey into Central Zambezia. The
celebrated hunter of big game, Mr F. C. Selous, not only added much
to our knowledge of South-Central Africa (the Rhodesia of to-day),
but penetrated north of the Zambezi into the valley of the Kafue
river, his explorations in that direction having only been “caught
up with” quite recently. Mr F. S. Arnot, a missionary, made a
remarkable journey from South to Central Africa, exploring the
southern part of the Congo basin (Katanga) and reaching the west
coast at Benguela. In 1884 Lieutenant Giraud, a Frenchman, carried
out an interesting exploration of the Tanganyika plateau and Lake
Bangweulu, which he was the first European to map with any degree of
accuracy. In 1882 the Earl of Mayo, accompanied by (Sir) Harry
Johnston, explored the River Kunene, in South-West Africa.
Subsequently Johnston travelled through Angola and up the River
Congo, and on his return journey to England visited that little
known part of Africa, Portuguese Guinea. He was subsequently sent on
an expedition to Mt Kilima-njaro, in East Africa. Amongst other
geographical work he visited little known parts of Tunis in 1880 and
1897; discovered (with Dr Cross) the southern end of Lake Rukwa, in
East-Central Africa, in 1889; in 1886-88 explored the Cameroons and
the Niger Delta; made numerous journeys in “British Central Africa”
(Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia) in 1889-95; and added a little to
geographical knowledge in East Africa, Uganda, and on Mt Ruwenzori
in 1899-1901.
In 1883, Joseph Thomson, already famous as an African explorer, was
sent on a most important mission by the Royal Geographical Society.
He was to cross the nearly unknown country separating the Mombasa
littoral from the east coast of the Victoria Nyanza, between the two
great snow mountains of Kenya and Kilima-njaro (Kilima-njaro since
Krapf’s and Rebmann’s reports had been thoroughly mapped by Baron
von der Decken; it had also been ascended nearly to the snow level
by Mr Charles New). Joseph Thomson practically rediscovered Kenya
(Krapf’s account being so vague that it had become regarded as
semi-mythical), and photographed this second loftiest snow mountain
of Africa. After some difficulties he succeeded in penetrating the
Masai country, and described the great Rift valley of Lake Naivasha
(reached a year or so earlier by the German explorer, Fischer);
discovered Lake Baringo and Mount Elgon, and finally reached the
northeast coast of Victoria Nyanza—a most remarkable expedition,
resulting in great additions to our geographical knowledge. Thomson
subsequently made a journey from the mouth of the Niger to Sokoto,
explored the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, mapped much fresh country
in Central Zambezia, and died, still a young man and much regretted,
in 1895. The Hungarian, Count Samuel Teleki, who followed in
Thomson’s footsteps, discovered Lakes Rudolf and Stephanie.
Lieutenant Höhnel, who went with him, conducted other expeditions in
the same direction and accomplished admirable surveying work.
Then came the last epoch-making journey of Stanley—the search for
Emin Pasha. After the British occupation of Egypt and the loss of
the Sudan, Emin Pasha had retreated to the Equatorial Province.
Through Dr William Junker (a Russian traveller, who had made
journeys in the western watershed of the Nile, reached the Nepoko
affluent of the Aruwimi, and brought back great additions to our
geographical knowledge of the Nile-Congo water-parting) he managed
to communicate with Europe by way of Uganda, making known his
condition, and appealing for help. Stanley was placed at the head of
a great British expedition which was to go to his relief. He
travelled by way of the Congo, and at the junction of the Congo and
the Aruwimi entered the unknown. He crossed that always difficult
barrier, the Bantu borderland—in this case an almost impenetrable
forest. After overcoming innumerable obstacles, Stanley met Emin
Pasha on the Albert Nyanza, and eventually escorted him to the coast
at Zanzibar. In the course of this journey Stanley discovered
Ruwenzori, the third highest mountain in Africa, the Edward Nyanza
(one of the ultimate lake sources of the Nile), and the Semliki
River, which connects the Edward with the Albert Nyanza. Stanley’s
explorations were much assisted in this journey by his excellent
lieutenant, Captain Stairs, who was the first to attempt Ruwenzori
and who subsequently explored Zambezia and Katanga.
In West Africa, which had for some time been neglected as a field
for exploration, there still remained gaps to be filled up—in the
great bend of the Niger and behind the Cameroons. In the last-named
country German travellers—Dr Zintgraft, Lieutenants Morgen, Kund and
Tappenbeck, Von Stettin, Uechtritz and Dr Passarge—explored the
mountainous country between the Cameroons and the Benue watershed,
or traced the course of the great and hitherto quite unknown rivers
of Lom and Mbam, which unite and form the Sanagá, a river which
enters the sea on the south side of the Cameroons estuary. Dr Oskar
Baumann[184] also explored the neglected island of Fernando Pô. In
the bend of the Niger various French explorers and one or two
Germans and Englishmen filled up the blanks. Notable among these was
Captain (afterwards Colonel) L. G. Binger, who was the first to make
known much of the country between the Upper Niger and the Gold
Coast; and Colonel P. Monteil, who travelled across from the Upper
Niger to the Central Niger, and thence to Lake Chad and Tripoli
(1890-1). Colonel Binger’s journeys may be placed in the first rank
of African explorations. They were undertaken between 1886 and 1889,
and the results were published in 1892 (_Du Niger au Golfe de
Guinée_). Together with the work of Colonel Monteil, of Commandant
Georges Toutée, and of the German G. A. Krause, the English Captains
R. L. Lonsdale and Brandon Kirby, the Gold Coast native explorer G.
E. Ferguson, and Colonel H. P. Northcott, Binger’s surveys showed
the comparative narrowness of the Niger basin in the great bend of
the Niger. Much of the enclosed land is drained southwards into the
Gulf of Guinea by the Black and the White Volta, two streams uniting
after very long courses to form the main Volta. This is an important
river constituting the boundary (except at its estuary) between
German Togoland and the British Gold Coast. Binger did for this
region what Grenfell and Wissmann did for the secondary mysteries of
the Congo basin. The eastern half of the Niger course, from its
mouth upward to Sokoto, had been carefully explored in 1880-1 by the
German E. R. Flegel; and this last most noteworthy explorer in
1882-4 traversed the unknown southern basin of the Benue, and traced
that river to its ultimate source near Ngaundéré. The gap between
the basin of the Congo and Lake Chad was filled up between 1890 and
1900 by the explorations of Paul Crampel, Dybowski, C. Maistre, E.
Gentil, A. Bernard, F. J. Clozel and other French travellers.
Between 1889 and 1895, Sir Alfred Sharpe (afterwards Governor of
Nyasaland) gradually mapped Lake Mweru, discovered the large salt
marsh between that lake and Tanganyika, explored the Luapula and the
Luangwa, and made other interesting additions to the map in
South-Central Africa, discoveries supplemented by the survey of Lake
Bangweulu by Mr Poulett Weatherley. Captain Hore, an agent of the
London Missionary Society, made a survey of Lake Tanganyika between
1878 and 1889; and his discoveries in its water fauna were so
remarkable that Mr J. E. Moore (a scientific zoologist) was sent out
in 1896 to study the prawns, jelly-fish and water molluscs of
Tanganyika, the remarkable character of which had first been noted
by Böhm (1879) and Hore. Moore afterwards explored the snow-crowned
volcanoes of Mfumbiro (Virunga) and thence proceeded to Ruwenzori
(Mubuku valley) and Uganda. He had previously explored the water
fauna of Lakes Shirwa and Nyasa. Count Goetzen explored the unknown
country between Lake Edward Nyanza and Tanganyika, discovering the
lofty volcanoes of Virunga and Lake Kivu; and Mr Scott Elliott
journeyed from the east coast to Mt Ruwenzori, and thence to British
Central Africa for botanical purposes.
The great eastern horn of Africa, Somaliland and Galaland, was long
left unexplored after Burton and Speke’s journey to Harrar in the
fifties. At the beginning of the eighties its exploration was again
attempted. Messrs F. L. and W. D. James, with three companions,
penetrated Somaliland as far south as the Webbe Shebeili River. They
were succeeded in exploration by Révoil (a Frenchman), by Ruspoli,
Bricchetti-Robecchi and Bottego (Italians), and by Borelli (a
Frenchman). The last-named made a most important journey south from
Abyssinia, and discovered the Omo River. His account of his travels,
published by the French Government, is an almost perfect exemplar of
what such a work should be. Mr W. Astor Chanler, an American,
afterwards made an important rough survey of Galaland, north of the
Tana River. Dr J. W. Gregory, of the British Museum, travelled to
Lake Baringo and Kenya, which mountain he ascended higher than any
preceding explorer. Dr Gregory’s journey was productive of much
information regarding the geology of the countries traversed. Dr
Donaldson Smith (an American) travelled in 1894-5 over these
countries between Somaliland and Bantu East Africa, bringing back
much new material for geography. Captain (now Colonel) H. G. C.
Swayne explored the interior of Somaliland; Colonel Seymour
Vandeleur surveyed Uganda and Unyoro; Colonel Sir J. R. L. Macdonald
in 1897-9[185] conducted a most important expedition, which for the
first time traversed the mountainous country between Mt Elgon, Lake
Rudolf and the Mountain Nile, revealing much new geography and
ethnology; and Mr H. S. H. Cavendish in 1897-8 made a remarkable
journey across the eastern horn of Africa from the Gulf of Aden to
Lake Rudolf and Mombasa.
In 1899, Mr H. Mackinder ascended the snow peak of Kenya to its
highest summit. Nine years previously the great extinct volcano of
Elgon (Equatorial East Africa) had been climbed to its highest point
(14,000 ft.) by an expedition under Messrs F. J. Jackson and Ernest
Gedge. C. W. Hobley also added a great deal of detail to our
knowledge (geographical and ethnological) of inner East Africa, from
Elgon to the German frontier in the south, between 1896 and 1912.
The main features of German East Africa had already been discovered
before Germany took possession politically of the region between the
Zanzibar Coast and the great Lakes; but in 1889, Dr Hans Meyer
achieved the great feat of ascending the highest mountain in
Africa—Kilima-njaro—to its summit (19,321 feet). Oskar Baumann (a
Viennese) examined in some detail the northern parts of German East
Africa between 1888 and 1893, visiting the ultimate sources of the
Nile (the headwaters of the Kagera river) near the north-east coast
of Tanganyika and discovering or describing for the first time
tribes with puzzling linguistic affinities, such as the Sandawi. The
journeys of Dr Franz Stuhlmann both alone and with Emin Pasha,
especially in regard to the Tanganyika-Congo-Nile water-partings
were of great interest both to geography and ethnology. Honourable
mention must also be made of Captain Paul Kollmann, whose travels
round the south shores of the Victoria Nyanza and its islands
resulted in an admirable book on the people and languages of that
district.
Between 1884 and 1900, much important exploring work was done in
German South-west Africa by H. Schnitz, Dr von Passarge, Drs A.
Schenk and Stromer von Reichenbach. Togoland in West Africa was
explored during the early nineties by Dr R. Büttner (already known
for his journeys in West Congoland), by L. von Bunnon and N. Seidel.
Renewed interest in Morocco was shown during the last quarter of the
19th century. Besides the bold journey of Joseph Thomson to the
Atlas mountains in 1888, there was the really remarkable exploration
of nearly the whole Moorish empire in 1883-6 by Charles de Foucauld,
a Frenchman travelling in disguise. Walter B. Harris crossed the
Atlas into Tafilalt in 1895. In Central Africa Colonel J. B.
Marchand and his companions performed a wonderful journey in 1895-9.
Entering French Congo from the Loango coast, Marchand travelled up
the Congo and Mubangi Rivers till he paused for a further
organization of his mission near the Congo-Nile water-parting. Then
he transported his little steamer in sections to the Suë, a
confluent of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and thence navigated the western
confluents of the Nile till he reached the main stream. Pursuing his
journey east and north, he reached the old Egyptian station of
Fashoda on the White Nile, where he established himself, and where
he defeated a small body of Dervishes sent against him by the
Khalifa of Omdurman. The advent of the British and Egyptians under
Lord Kitchener rendered the evacuation of Fashoda by Marchand
necessary. The gallant French explorer therefore continued his
journey eastward by following up the Sobat River as far as it was
navigable, and thence struck across hitherto unknown countries, and
travelled through Shoa and Somaliland to the French port of Jibuti,
on the Gulf of Aden. From the point of view of distance traversed,
without great loss of men or material, Marchand deserves to rank as
a hero of African adventure.
The only travellers in Madagascar who achieved important results in
geography and physical science were the English missionary, the Rev.
J. Sibree (1868-85), and above all Dr Alfred Grandidier (1875-1900),
E. F. Gautier (1892-9), and Dr G. Grandidier (1898-1902). To the
last-named is mainly due the recent discoveries of semi-fossil
extinct lemurs described in the publications of the Zoological
Society of London. To Alfred Grandidier we owe the magnificent work
in 28 volumes which completely describes this strange island.
At the close of the 19th century France began to take definite
possession of the Sahara; and several expeditions, scientific and
political, traversed this desolate region and revealed all its
leading physical characteristics. Prominent among French explorers
was Fernand Foureau, who concluded ten years of varied explorations
by a magnificent journey in 1898-9 from Algeria to Zinder and Lake
Chad by way of Ahaggar, Air and Damerghu. G. B. M. Flamand explored
the important oasis of Tuat in 1900. Much exploring work went on in
the Niger Bend and the Ivory Coast hinterland; and the expedition
(1898-1900) of M. Hostains and Captain d’Ollone revealed great
mountains and the courses of numerous rivers in north-east Liberia.
This record brings us down to the beginning of the 20th century. The
least-explored parts of Africa that then remained were: (1) the
interior of Liberia; (2) the region between the Benue and Cameroons
watersheds; (3) Lake Chad and the country between Lake Chad, the
Shari, and the Nile; (4) the Western Sahara; (5) the Libyan Desert
and Tibesti; (6) Wadai; (7) the region between the Shari, the Benue,
and the Mubangi; (8) that between the Cameroons, the Sanga river,
and the Mubangi; (9) South-west Congoland; (10) South-east Angola;
(11) the Moςambique hinterland, between Moςambique and Lake Nyasa;
(12) South-west Galaland and the region between the Sobat River and
Lake Rudolf.
In regard to the first-named area, a good deal has been added to our
knowledge by the Dutch survey officers, Naber and Moret, by Mr John
Parkinson and Messieurs A. Chevalier and Maurice Delafosse; the
last-named having accomplished a remarkable language survey of West
Africa. In No. (2), must be recorded the journeys of Captain E.
Lenfant (who proved the connection between the Upper Benue and the
Shari system by way of the Tuburi marshes); of Colonel L. Jackson;
of P. Amaury Talbot (Benue, Cross River, and Ekoi country); and of
the German explorers F. Hutter, F. Bauer, and O. Zimmermann. As
regards No. (3)—Lake Chad—this first-discovered of all African lakes
was never properly investigated and mapped until the beginning of
the 20th century, when this work was accomplished by the expeditions
of Captain Lenfant, Colonel Destenave, Mons. A. Chevalier, and
Captain Tilho. It was also examined with much minuteness by
Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, whose Niger-Benue-Mubangi-Nile journey in
1905 greatly added to our knowledge of the Chad region. In No. (4),
the Western Sahara and Southern Morocco, we have had the important
explorations of the French officers or civilians, La Perrone,
Arnaud, Paul Blanchet, Edmond Doutté, Cortier, Niéger, and Gautier
(this last specially studied the rock-engravings and archaeology);
and the noteworthy journey of the Englishman, Captain A. H. Haywood,
who travelled from Sierra Leone to Algiers. No. (5), still remains
one of the blankest parts of Africa, though the Eastern Sahara from
Tripoli to Bilma was crossed by Mr Hanns Vischer of British Nigeria
in 1906. The Libyan Desert is also being explored by W. Harding King
and other British explorers coming from Egypt. In Wadai, which was
traversed by Lieutenant Boyd Alexander in 1910 (he was killed on the
Darfur border), the French military occupation will soon produce a
detailed survey. In No. (7), there have been the detailed
explorations of Captain E. Lenfant, and Messrs E. F. Gautier and R.
Chudeau, on behalf of the French Government. The principal blanks in
No. (8) have been filled up by an English traveller, Mr G. L. Bates
(a remarkable field naturalist who has made very important
discoveries of new vertebrates in West Equatorial Africa), by O.
Zimmermann and other German explorers. In South-west Congoland a
great explorer and anthropologist has come to the front, Mr Emil
Torday, a Hungarian, whose admirable works on the Bushongo and the
tribes of the Kwango, Kwilu, Kasai, and Sankuru rivers, have been
published in English and French. Mention should also be made of the
journeys through central and northern Congoland of an Austrian,
Franz Thonner, which have been of great value in determining the
intricate distribution of language families in that region.
South-west Angola still remains very little known, though the work
of the Lobito Bay-Katanga railway is gradually casting a light on
the geography of this region; while in Barotseland and Northern
Rhodesia there have been the first-class surveys of Major A. St Hill
Gibbons, Frank Melland, and other officials of the British South
Africa Company. A good deal of accurate surveying and geological
investigation is needed in No. (11). In No. (12) (Southern Galaland
and the Sobat to Lake Rudolf), there have been since 1900 the
remarkable explorations and surveys of Oskar Neumann (a German),
Captain M. S. Wellby, Captain H. H. Austen and Captain P.
Maud—English officers travelling on their own behalf or on that of
the British Government.
Dr Richard Kandt, a German, between 1901 and 1906, made a thorough
and careful survey of Lake Kivu, of the plateaus at the northern end
of Tanganyika, and of the Kagera (the ultimate Nile source) and its
tributaries. Between 1900 and 1904, Commander B. Whitehouse mapped
the entire coastline of the Victoria Nyanza Lake, making many new
discoveries and remedying many old errors of delineation.
The long-talked-of journey from the Cape to Cairo was accomplished
first in 1900 by Mr Ewart Grogan, followed soon afterwards by Mons.
Lionel Décle. Many tourists and officials subsequently have repeated
this feat, rendered comparatively easy now by the development of
railways and river-steamboat navigation. A noteworthy journey
however was that in 1911 of Mr Frank Melland and a companion on
bicycles, from Rhodesia to Egypt. German officers have motored
across Africa, from German East to German South-west Africa.
Noteworthy feats in exploration, though they may not have revealed
much that was new in cartography, have been the journeys and
studies of Lieut. P. H. G. Powell Cotton (Abyssinia, East Africa,
Congoland and Portuguese Guinea—1900-11); Auguste Chevalier, the
French botanist (Central Sudan, Upper Niger, West Congoland and
Liberia—1898-1910); Alexander Whyte, a Scottish botanical
collector (British Central Africa, East Africa, Uganda, and
Liberia—1891-1904); Dr W. A. Cunnington (Tanganyika, 1904-5);
H.R.H. the Duke of the Abruzzi, who in 1906 made the first
complete survey of the Ruwenzori range and ascended all the
highest peaks; A. Savage Landor, who crossed Africa at its
broadest, mainly on foot, from Somaliland to Senegal (1906);
Theodore Roosevelt (East Africa and Egyptian Sudan, 1909-10); and
Sir David and Lady Bruce (Uganda, Nyasaland, and Northern
Rhodesia—1903-11).
The heroic stage of African exploration finished with the 19th
century; and it is impossible to record the names of all the
military and civil officials who have since been quietly,
painstakingly, and usefully filling in the details between the broad
outlines drawn (at the cost of terrible fatigue, severe ill-health,
and danger from savage natives) by the great explorers of the past.
There are still many high mountains to be ascended—in the Atlas, in
Tibesti, on the north Liberian border, on the south-eastern limits
of the Niger basin, in the Cameroons, south-west Moçambique,
south-east Angola and northern Galaland; there are lakes to be
plumbed, geological formations to be determined, zones of vegetation
and distribution of the rapidly-disappearing fauna to be defined.
Archaeology in South-east Africa, in the Sahara, in Morocco and
Somaliland, still has some surprises in store for us. The
palaeontological exploration of Africa is merely beginning; and
already in Algeria, Egypt, East and South Africa, and Madagascar
research has produced evidence of an amazing vanished fauna of giant
buffaloes, giant dinosaurs, giant birds, big horses, small
dinotheriums, of the remote ancestors of the elephants, whales,
sirenians, hippopotami, giraffes, monkeys, and anthropoid apes. A
more careful search after living types has already revealed since
1900 the okapi in the north-east Congo forests, the big black pig of
Equatorial Africa, and several new antelopes and monkeys. Botanical
research has, since 1900, shown the existence in Africa of some
thirty sources of good rubber, and of many valuable gums and
oil-nuts. Gold has been found in the north-east Congo basin, tin in
Nigeria, and diamonds in German South-west Africa, in south-west
Congoland, and in Liberia. Africa will probably remain in the
future, what it has seemed to the Caucasian since he began his
historical colonization—the most interesting and mysterious of the
continents, always producing something new.
-----
Footnote 163:
See the article of Professor Flinders-Petrie in the _Geographical
Journal_, November, 1908.
Footnote 164:
Caius Plinius Secundus: born at Verona or Como 23 A.C. His
geographical publication or _Natural History_ was published
(according to Sir E. Bunbury) in 77 A.C.
Footnote 165:
He visited the Upper Niger in 1352.
Footnote 166:
The subsequent adventures of this heroic man, Lobo, are summarized
in my book, _The Nile Quest_, 1903.
Footnote 167:
Probably identical with the Ba-jok or Va-kioko between the rivers
Kwango and Kasai.
Footnote 168:
See my _Pioneers in West Africa_, 1911.
Footnote 169:
Where he was British Chaplain.
Footnote 170:
Pliny and one or two succeeding classical geographers mention the
Ger or Gir and the Niger as rivers of Western Africa, the former
being possibly the river Draa. Both words may be derived from
Berber roots.
Footnote 171:
See my work, _Pioneers in West Africa_, for details of Hornemann’s
journey and the possible date and place of his death.
Footnote 172:
Afterwards Sir William C. Harris. He explored Shoa (South of
Abyssinia) in 1841-2, and was knighted for concluding a treaty on
behalf of the Government of India with the King of Shoa.
Footnote 173:
Then nearly independent of Turkey, and ruled by the Karamanli
dynasty of Turkish pashas.
Footnote 174:
Denham, who had really rendered great services in the cause of
exploration, was rewarded somewhat inadequately with the post of
Secretary to the colony of Sierra Leone and Superintendent of the
slave settlement at Fernando Pô, where he soon died.
Footnote 175:
In a patent collapsible boat.
Footnote 176:
His name is spelt by the French “Mardochée.”
Footnote 177:
Ludwig Krapf, like his colleagues in East Africa, Rebmann and
Erhardt, was a native of Württemberg, having been born near
Tübingen in that South-German kingdom.
Footnote 178:
These in order of achievements were: Frédéric Caillaud (French)
who explored the Nile as far as Khartum and the Blue Nile to
Fazogl (1819-23); Adolphe Linant (Belgian) who in 1827 penetrated
150 miles above Khartum; Thibaut (French consul at Khartum), who,
with one of Muhammad Ali’s expeditions reached as far south as Bôr
(6°, 30′ N. Lat.); and Ferdinand Werne (German) who got as high up
the Mountain Nile as Gondokoro (4°, 20′) and mapped the whole
course of the river from Khartum to Gondokoro in 1841.
Footnote 179:
For a detailed account of Miss Tinne’s work and terrible death,
see my book _The Nile Quest_ (1903).
Footnote 180:
Dr Bastian had explored the Lower Congo in 1858; and the region of
Loango was examined by a German scientific expedition in 1875-80,
by Bastian, Pechuel Loesche, Falkenstein, and other German
explorers.
Footnote 181:
This was the letter which Stanley wrote to England appealing to
missionaries to come out and settle at the court of the King of
Uganda. It was taken away by Linant de Bellefonds to be posted in
Egypt. After leaving Uganda, de Bellefonds was killed by the Bari
on the Upper Nile. Stanley’s letter was concealed in one of the
boots of the corpse when it was recovered. It was handed to
General Gordon, and transmitted by him to England.
Footnote 182:
Sir Harry Johnston and Dr Cross discovered the south end of this
lake in 1889.
Footnote 183:
Wissmann was a lieutenant in the Prussian army, born at
Frankfurt-on-the-Oder. He played subsequently a great part in
German East Africa.
Footnote 184:
Baumann made a careful examination of the mountainous country of
Usambara in East Africa, and mapped the lands due west of the
Victoria Nyanza.
Footnote 185:
Sir J. R. L. Macdonald (then Captain Macdonald, R.E.) had
conducted with Captain Pringle, R.E. a very remarkable railway
survey at the beginning of the nineties, from Mombasa to the
Victoria Nyanza, a survey which was really a geographical
exploration of the East Africa Protectorate.
CHAPTER XIII
BELGIAN AFRICA
It has been already related in the preceding chapter how the
geographical ardour of the King of the Belgians resulted in the
sending of Stanley with an important expedition to explore the
Congo. Previous to this enterprise, however, King Leopold II had
shown himself deeply interested in the fate of Central Africa.
Following on the successful crossing of the continent from the
Zanzibar to the Benguela coast by Commander V. L. Cameron, R.N., and
his revelation of the richly endowed territories of the Southern
Congo basin, King Leopold had summoned to Brussels under his own
presidency a conference of geographers, which created an
International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of
Central Africa and for the abolition of the Slave Trade which then
was really ravaging that region. This International Association soon
separated into a number of National Committees; that of Belgium was
founded in November, 1876, and in 1877-79 Belgian Expeditions were
sent out _via_ Zanzibar to Tanganyika. By August, 1879, Capitaine
Cambier (an excellent pioneer), had founded the station of Karema on
the south-east Coast of Tanganyika. Captain E. Storms established
himself here (together with the White Fathers’ Catholic Mission) in
1880, and set to work to unite the Tanganyika tribes in self-defence
against the Arab slave raiders. Storms became quite a hero after
beating off the Arab forces with merely native material, hastily
drilled as soldiers. By 1885, he had become recognized as the great
White Chief and Protector of southern Tanganyika.
In 1879 from out of the Belgian branch of the African International
Association there grew the Comité d’Études du Haut Congo, which
projected the idea of Stanley’s concluding in its name treaties with
the paramount chiefs of the Congo region, treaties by means of which
these chiefs should agree to join in a sort of confederation for
purposes of mutual support, while at the same time they admitted
into their territories the traders who would be sent out by the
Committee, which was in some sort to become the suzerain of this
Congo Federation. Mr Stanley appears to have been under the
impression that the final protectorate over the central Congo would
be a British one; until 1884 few people seemed to think that the
King of the Belgians would make himself the sovereign of the Congo.
In the early eighties a kind of Anglo-French duel had taken place on
the Congo, De Brazza representing the French cause and Stanley the
British. When it began to dawn on the British Government that the
King of the Belgians was working for purely Belgian interests, it
occurred to them that there was no reason why England and Portugal
might not come to terms, at any rate about the Lower Congo. So the
abortive treaty of 1884 was drawn up, but not ratified. Believing
that this was a preliminary to a British Protectorate of the Congo,
France and Germany joined hands; and a Conference on African affairs
was convened at Berlin, the first of a long series of actions taken
jointly by the other states of Europe to check the extension of
British influence.
At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 the Congo Independent State[186]
was recognized by all the leading powers of Europe as a sovereign
state with the King of the Belgians at its head. The boundaries were
not definitely fixed, but the west coast of Tanganyika was made the
eastern limit; and Captain Storms, to his great chagrin, was
recalled. Before giving her consent, however, France reserved to
herself the right of preemption over these Congo territories,
besides securing by an agreement with the King of the Belgians a
large portion of western Congoland. Mr (afterwards Sir Henry)
Stanley then ceased to administer the Congo State, and was succeeded
first by Sir Frederick Goldsmid, and then by Sir Francis De Winton,
who governed for the King of the Belgians, but gave a distinctly
English tone to the administration. Mons. Camille Janssen, however,
succeeded Sir Francis De Winton in 1886; the international character
of the state was dropped; and the British, French, Portuguese,
Swedish and German officials were gradually replaced by Belgians, so
that by 1891 the entire administration was Belgian. Stanley,
however, had once more intervened (in 1887) in the affairs of the
Free State, which had got into great difficulties owing to the
attacks of the Zanzibar Arabs on the Upper Congo. Stanley
temporized, seeking to gain time for the young state, and recognized
Tipu Tipu[187], the leading Arab, as Governor for the King of the
Belgians over the Upper Congo. Tipu Tipu withdrew about 1890, when
the Arab revolt against the Germans had caused grave tension between
the Arabs and Europeans in Central Africa. After his withdrawal, the
Arabs, who had now become extremely powerful on the Upper Congo,
attacked the Belgians in 1892, murdering a trader, Hodister, and the
unoffending Emin Pasha, and imprisoning and eventually killing the
Belgian resident and his assistant at the Arab capital (Kasongo),
besides massacring the men at several outposts. The forces of the
State—largely composed of Congo natives with a few Hausas from
Nigeria and one or two noteworthy Liberian negroes—were ably led by
nineteen Belgian and one English officers, and commanded by
Commandant (afterwards created Baron) Dhanis. The English officer
referred to was Captain (originally Surgeon) Sidney L. Hinde,
afterwards a British official in East Africa.
Dhanis commenced, in July 1892, a most noteworthy campaign from a
base—Lusambo—on the Sankuru river. His little army marched through
forest paths to the Lomami and thus took the Arabs in flank. From
the Lomami the Belgian force gained the banks of the great
Lualaba-Congo, and, victory succeeding victory, they captured
Nyangwe (the great Slave City of Livingstone’s day) on March 4,
1893, and carried Kasongo (the Arab stronghold) by assault on April
22, 1893. The story, as told by Captain Sidney Hinde[188], of the
capture of Nyangwe and Kasongo reads like episodes in an impossible
Rider Haggard romance. It was one of the greatest feats of arms, of
endurance and splendid courage that the history of Africa can show.
By the beginning of 1894, the Belgians had achieved the conquest of
the whole of the country up to the west shores of Tanganyika, and
the death or expulsion from Congoland of all the Arab leaders. This
brilliant episode in Belgian Congo history was however sullied by
the judicial murder, in September, 1893, of Gongo Lutete, the great
Manyema chief who at the commencement of the struggle with the Arabs
had come over to the Belgian side and whose alliance alone made
victory possible to the Belgian force. The execution of this warrior
chief—without respite or appeal, on no credible evidence of
treachery—following a drumhead court-martial presided over by a
young Belgian lieutenant, is as painful to read as the preceding
campaign of Baron Dhanis against the Arab slave-traders is a source
of satisfaction to all interested in the welfare of Africa. The
Belgians were eventually to pay dearly for this miscarriage of
justice. The remembrance of the death of Gongo Lutete smouldered
amongst the negro soldiery he had raised for service with the
Belgians; and in 1895 they broke out into open mutiny at Luluabourg
and killed their Belgian commanding officer. Baron Dhanis composed
this mutiny by punishment and negotiations; but in 1897 the mutiny
broke out again amongst those Manyema and Batetela soldiers who had
been transferred to the Lado enclave of the Nile basin. The revolt
spread far and wide and was not at an end till 1900.
In 1892, King Leopold II, alarmed by the progress of the British
South Africa Company, sent out an expedition under Captain Stairs
(Stanley’s former Lieutenant—a Nova-Scotian) to occupy in his name
the territory of Katanga, which was a debateable land, to some
extent under British missionary influence, but claimed as lying
within the boundaries of the Congo State. Its king (Msidi) was an
Mnyamwezi adventurer and slave trader; nevertheless he had ruled his
country with a certain degree of wisdom, and had permitted British
missionaries to settle there and British travellers to explore;
therefore it was learned with some regret that he had been summarily
shot for refusing to hand over his territory to the Belgians. Not
content with the gigantic dominion already under his control, the
King of the Belgians aspired to extend it to the banks of the White
Nile. In 1894 an agreement was concluded with the British Government
by which, in exchange for a strip of territory which would enable
the latter to connect the northern end of Tanganyika with Uganda,
the King of the Belgians took over on lease the administration of
territories as far north as the Bahr-al-Ghazal and the White Nile.
But this settlement was practically annulled by the subsequent
Belgian convention with France, which restricted the northern
boundary of the Congo Independent State to the Mbomu affluent of the
Wele River, while the King of the Belgians retained for a time the
lease of a small patch of territory on the west bank of the White
Nile, opposite Lado.
Another event in the recent history of the Congo State, which has
caused some anger in England, was the summary execution of the
unfortunate Charles Stokes by a Belgian officer named Lothaire. Mr
Stokes (who was an Ulster Irishman) had once been a missionary, and
used to travel backwards and forwards to Uganda. He then set up for
himself as a trader, and, although a British subject, he was
sufficiently international in his sympathies to work for the Germans
in helping to found their East African colony. In the course of his
ivory-trading expeditions he entered the Congo State. It was
suspected by Lothaire that he was furnishing the Arabs with powder;
he therefore sent a messenger to Stokes, summoning him to his camp.
Stokes came unsuspecting. He was put through a cross-examination
over-night, and in the early morning taken out of his hut and
hanged. In plain language, he was murdered; for not only did he
receive no trial, but at that time British consular jurisdiction was
maintained in the Congo State, and no sufficient evidence was
brought forward to show that Stokes had sold any powder to the
Arabs, or done anything worthy of death. Major Lothaire was tried
for the murder of Stokes both at Boma and again at Brussels, but was
pronounced not guilty at each trial, and was regarded by a portion
of the Belgian press as having been a national hero. He was,
however, eventually dismissed from the service of the Congo Free
State, and an indemnity of £6000 was paid to the child of Stokes.
In July 1898, there was opened for public use (largely through the
enterprise of Colonel Thys) a railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool,
about 250 miles long, which had taken about 8½ years to construct,
but which, once finished, was of enormous aid in the development of
the natural resources of Congoland. Matadi is a port on the lower
Congo (110 miles from the sea), up to which ocean-going steamers are
able to ascend. From Léopoldville on Stanley Pool there are between
4000 and 5000 miles of navigable waterways along which steamers and
steam-launches can penetrate into the hinterland of French Congo and
the Cameroons, to within a few days’ journey of the Central Sudan
(Shari basin) and the Egyptian Sudan, German East Africa and
Rhodesia.
But the effects which followed the opening of this railway were
different from King Leopold’s anticipations. It was
discovered—slowly—by European public opinion that one of the boldest
outrages on international law and equity known to history had been
perpetrated by the man who had posed before Europe in 1876 as a
disinterested philanthropist desirous of devoting his spare funds to
the realization of Livingstone’s ideals, and to the regeneration of
Negro Africa. By means of Stanley he had between 1879 and 1885
founded his Congo Independent State, basing his right to call
himself “Roi-Souverain” of this vast dominion on a number of
treaties made by his agents in the region now known as French Congo,
and also along both banks of the main Congo river from the sea
upwards to the Kwa-Kasai confluence; that is to say, over only
one-fortieth part of the area he claimed to govern by the assent of
its native chiefs as well as of Europe.
Two of the numerous conditions imposed on his government of the
Congo were freedom of trade throughout the Congo basin, and the
right of missionaries to travel, to settle, and to build where they
would, without hindrance. Yet no sooner was King Leopold II
acknowledged internationally as King-Sovereign of the Congo State
than he began to set on one side all such stipulations of the Act of
Berlin as fettered his intentions of self-enrichment and
unquestionable autocracy. Freedom of trade, except at the mouth and
along the estuarine Congo, became an impossibility. By 1890, in the
Congo basin above Stanley Pool, ivory had been constituted a State
monopoly; and rubber was soon placed in much the same category.
Commerce was chiefly restricted to the State, and to one Dutch and
various Belgian firms, though commercial agencies on the Lower Congo
were still maintained by merchants of other nations. This policy on
the part of the Congo State, which on the strength of its
philanthropic assurances had obtained permission in 1891 to levy
import duties, was much criticized, and led to some alienation of
sympathy in England. Added to this were the extraordinary stories of
atrocities which began to be spread by British, American, and
Swedish missionaries. It was said that, to enforce the payment of
tribute in ivory and rubber, the Belgian officials ordered their
negro subordinates to cut off the hands of all who refused payment.
It was stated that the natives were plunged into a slavery worse
than anything the Arabs had introduced, that they were shot down for
trifling causes, and that the negro police and soldiers of the State
were allowed without hindrance to devour the bodies of the slain in
battle. These charges in some cases were scarcely credible as
applied to the actions of civilized human beings; King Leopold in
1896 instituted a committee of missionaries to enquire into them,
and to offer suggestions for better methods of administration. But
the committee was fettered in many ways and prevented from obtaining
evidence. The charge of permitting cannibalism has been
substantiated by the accounts of Captain S. L. Hinde, already
referred to, and by other British officers in the Congo service. The
fact was, that a territory nearly as large as Brazil had been handed
over to be governed by a number of young Belgian officers and the
employés of a few concessionaire companies. The subordinates whom
they employed in their administration and warfare were savages
barely reclaimed from the most barbarous practices; and just as, in
a far less degree, the Matebele police of the British South Africa
Company were guilty of malpractices that the Company would never
knowingly have allowed to be perpetrated, so the negro soldiers of
the Congo State committed appalling outrages before their officers
could become cognizant of their intended actions and prevent them.
But nothing can be said in excuse or mitigation of the behaviour of
certain agents of privileged companies and even persons employed on
the private domain of King Leopold, whose actions as recorded in
undisputed evidence were almost those of devils.
In July 1885 the King-Sovereign of the Congo State issued a decree
that all vacant land within the boundaries of the State were the
“private property” (the _Domaine privé_) of the Government; the
Government being then and for twenty-five years afterwards the
despotic King-Sovereign. Little objection was raised to this measure
at first, the general idea (very similar to announcements made then
and later by other European Powers in their African possessions)
being that King Leopold wished to protect the rights of the natives
from being hurriedly and foolishly sold to private speculators in
land, or concession-hunters. But in 1891 a “secret decree” was sent
out from the King’s cabinet, reserving to the State all elephants
and their ivory and all wild rubber and forest-produce on the
“vacant lands” of the _Domaine privé_. The officers of the State
were enjoined to organize the collection (as a form of taxes) of all
the ivory and rubber procurable; and the natives of Congoland
(except the small western strip near the Atlantic) were obliged to
sell all their produce to the State only. By a later decree they
were actually forbidden to leave their villages without a special
permit. In short, so far as the King-Sovereign’s writ ran, the whole
population of Belgian Congo—nearly a million square miles—was
virtually enslaved, and this by the man who in 1876 stood up before
Europe and announced that he was going to devote such of his time
and money as he could spare from Belgium to the abolition of slavery
in Central Africa and the raising of the Negro to a condition of
freedom and enlightenment.
In 1896 another “secret decree” created the _Domaine de la
Couronne_, and carved out for King Leopold II an area of 112,000
square miles in the very heart of Congoland, between the Sankuru and
the Busira rivers. This region, amazingly rich in wild rubber, was
to be privately administered by Leopold II without rendering any
account to the State exchequer, and of course without laying its
enormous revenues (wrung from the inhabitants by cruelties and
stress scarcely surpassed by the recently-revealed horrors of the
Putumayo) under any contribution towards the annual expenses of
public administration in the Congo State. In addition, the whole
rest of the _Domaine privé_ (except always the exhausted strip along
the Congo banks between Stanley Pool and the sea) was divided up
into regions strictly reserved for a State monopoly of products, and
others which were farmed out to concessionaire companies, in which
either the State, or King Leopold, or both, were partners in
profits. To these concessionaire companies were at first given
almost unlimited powers over the natives, from which resulted the
frightful abuses that shocked the conscience of Europe and
Anglo-Saxon America. One foreign trading-house which might have
protested was squared by being given part of the plunder; most other
old-established trading houses on the Lower River were prevented
from trading inland; influential Englishmen (not forgetting several
connected with the press) were admitted to this profit-taking; and
for some twelve years these truly iniquitous proceedings were
ignored, in spite of the missionary protests which began in 1898,
and of Mr Fox-Bourne’s trenchant attack[189] on King Leopold’s
policy published in 1903—ignored, that is to say, by the governments
of the States which had taken part in the Berlin Conference of 1884.
Statesmen of probity found it impossible at first to believe that
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, grandson of Louis Philippe, cousin
of Queen Victoria, husband of an Austrian Archduchess, a devoted
upholder of the Roman Church, and a very rich man, could for a
moment lend himself to a policy at once infamous, flagrantly unjust,
exceedingly cruel, and incredibly mean[190]. The gallant actions of
many a Belgian pioneer on Tanganyika and on the Lualaba—even on the
fringe of that Egyptian Sudan which Great Britain then lacked the
resolution to enter—were pointed to. The great record of Storms was
unearthed from missionary records, and public opinion was asked “Is
it possible that the man who sent out such officers as these, who
quenched the slave traffic which Livingstone abhorred but was
powerless to arrest, who brought relief from Dervish tyranny to the
harassed natives of the Bahr-al-Ghazal, could wish to enrich
himself, and himself alone, with the produce of all Congoland, could
tolerate the collection of rubber or the obtaining of ivory by
methods of compulsion only to be parallelled in the worst records of
Spain in the New World?” Yet it was true. Side by side with this
devastation of the Congo basin—a devastation which has left Arab
slave-raids far, far behind, which has reduced the native population
in fifteen years (sleeping sickness aiding) from an approximate
twenty millions to a bare nine millions—a work of civilization as
good in its way as anything that Britain or France has done in
Uganda or Nigeria was going on. Wherever Belgian officers could get
a free hand, and were not the mere agents of this singularly
heartless man, they built up native communities anew, and were even
loved and honoured by the natives. It was not the Belgian nation, so
much, that was to blame, or Belgian men who failed in those great
administrative qualities which are possessed by so many other
European nations; it was the system imposed on them by a being born
out of due time, a personality that had stepped unaltered from the
16th century into the 19th. Yet, to be just, this conception of
“African colonization” was not peculiar to Leopold II. It was the
ideal of some English minds and was still more the vogue with a
certain type of French Colonial administrator or minister. As we
have seen, French Congo had a history very like that of the Belgian
Congo.
King Leopold preserved himself long from attack and warded off many
a blow from the British Parliament by pointing to British companies
and British monopolies in Africa. And we had—it seems—no statesman
sufficiently adroit to indicate to him the cardinal difference. In
none of her permanent arrangements and at no time even in theory did
Great Britain tolerate in her African dominions or spheres of
influence monopolies which limited the trade of the country to one
or more privileged organizations, or which obliged the natives to
confine their commerce to any particular firm or individual trader.
Great Britain did acknowledge (usually where it was impossible to do
otherwise) that certain pioneer companies or persons held by
purchase under fair conditions large areas of land in “new” Africa;
but the natives’ rights to the land they occupied and used were
respected, provision was always made for their expansion, and in
most cases the whole of the vacant land was vested in the British
Government. But not on lines parallel to those which were followed
by Leopold II, not with the result of enriching the private revenues
of Queen Victoria or King Edward, or of endowing Margate with a
bandstand, Bournemouth with an opera house, or London with a new
museum. The British Government has regarded itself as holding the
vacant lands in trust for the infant state and for all its future
inhabitants, without distinction of colour, except it be that a more
liberal treatment is to be shown to black than white. All the
revenues derived from the state lands in British Africa are
accounted for annually and are applied to the service and for the
benefit of the country from which they are derived. Therein lies the
radical difference between the spoliations of King Leopold (or of
the old Spanish Colonial Empire) and the policy of Great Britain and
most other modern European powers in Asia and Africa. It may or may
not be a good thing that one half of the land in Uganda or in
Nigeria is the property of the State, a state mainly administered at
present by Europeans. But at any rate all the revenue derived from
the land can be ascertained by any native sufficiently educated to
read annual reports; and all this revenue is spent—usually with the
knowledge and advice of native counsellors—on Nigeria or Uganda, as
the case may be, and not on any other land. King Leopold, it is
true, while he took unto himself all the revenues, direct and
indirect, derived from the Congo State, had, prior to 1890,
supported out of his privy purse the cost of creating and
maintaining the Congo State (a total amount about £500,000 in value)
and probably spent in addition up till 1901 another £400,000. But
even after allowing him interest at 4 per cent, (in theory) on this
outlay of £900,000 and adding to that a theoretical Civil List at
£20,000 a year as King-Sovereign, he was still owing the Congo State
an amount understated at £4,000,000, when that State was annexed by
Belgium in 1909. That is to say, he profited by his intervention in
Congo affairs at least to that amount, and probably to an extent
much greater. And his great riches were obtained at a cruel cost in
human lives and human misery.
I desire to present all aspects of this astounding episode in the
history of the colonization of Africa. Therefore I would state that
King Leopold employed a small percentage of the profits above
computed—say £100,000—in promoting the scientific investigation of
his territories and subject peoples, with the result that our
knowledge of the fauna, flora, meteorology and above all ethnology
of the Congo basin were immensely increased. Also, however unfair in
regard to solemn treaty stipulations were his concessions and his
monopolies, these did much to enrich Belgium and Antwerp in
particular. It can well be imagined that, when so many of the king’s
subjects were raking in large and small fortunes out of Congo
rubber, ivory, and palm oil, when churches were rising from Congo
donations, museums were endowed, kiosques and public gardens were
being presented to Belgian towns from out of the fringe of this
profit-taking, Belgians (very ignorant as a rule about Africa or
Colonial policy or subjects outside Belgian life) should have been
enthusiastic about their monarch, his “slimness,” and his Congo
milch-cow. And notable English potentates in shipping and finance
were partners with King Leopold, whose press department further
stifled criticism in the journals of America, France, and Germany.
Few stories therefore are at once more romantic—and will seem more
incredible to posterity—than that which relates how this Goliath was
overcome by a David in the person of a poor shipping clerk in the
office of a Liverpool shipping firm which was amongst the partners
of King Leopold.
This shipping clerk—E. D. Morel—was sent over to Antwerp, and
Belgium generally, because he could speak French, and could
therefore arrange all the minutiae of steamer fares and passenger
accommodation, and the scales of freights for goods and produce,
with the Congo State officials. In the course of his work he became
acquainted with some of the grisly facts of Congo maladministration.
He drew his employers’ attention to these stories and their
verification. The result was his dismissal.
Almost penniless, he set to work with pen and paper to enlighten the
world through the British press and British publishers on the state
of affairs on the Congo. From African merchants, not quite so
callous as his late employers, he received support, which also came
slowly and at first grudgingly from the public. He succeeded in
interesting the Government of the day; for his charges were amply
borne out by the British consuls sent to Congoland to report (the
best-known of whom was Sir Roger Casement). Morel had to face the
insults and even the personal assaults of paid opponents at his
meetings, and the calumnies of King Leopold’s subsidized press; but
he roused public opinion in Britain, Belgium, the United States,
Switzerland, France and Germany. The first notice Goliath took of
David was—very reluctantly—to appoint a Commission of enquiry
consisting of a Belgian, an Italian, and a Swiss jurist of
distinction and honesty. Their report, though its publication was
only partial, was a virtual admission of the truth of the
allegations made by Morel and the British consuls and missionaries.
King Leopold, in fact, had no defence to offer; and although,
exerting his powers as King, as the relation of Kings and Emperors,
as a rich man, to the utmost, he managed to prolong discussions and
negotiations as long as possible, the end was inevitable. The Congo
was taken from him and was annexed by Belgium on November 14, 1908.
On December 17, 1909, King Leopold died. Stanley, “Bula Matadi,” the
real creator of the Congo State, had predeceased him by five years,
dying in 1904, the last few years of his life saddened by the
disheartening conviction that the immediate effect of his life’s
work had been a sordid scandal and the most monstrous piece of
hypocrisy ever perpetrated by Europe in Africa[191].
Leopold II found many champions in England and the United States,
even among men and women travellers of good repute, incapable of
being bribed or cajoled. But the explanation of this seeming
anomaly, in contrast to the withering denunciations of Morel, of
British, American, Swedish, and Belgian missionaries and publicists,
lies in the fact that these apologists or eulogists of the King or
of his Belgian officers never entered the vast _Domaine de la
Couronne_ (a territory larger in area than the United Kingdom) or
penetrated far into the jealously-closed concessions of the Belgian
companies; and also from the strange ignorance many of such
travellers showed in the elementary ethics of native rights. They
saw—as the present writer did—order taking the place of disorder,
improved cultivation, handsome buildings, Arab slavery at an end,
education spreading among and through the native soldiery, and many
other beneficent signs of civilization, and they never examined into
what was going on away from the stereotyped travel routes. Or if
they were of the Emil Torday class of scientific explorer, they
penetrated at great risk into remote parts of south-west, north, and
north-east Congoland wherein the native tribes were too powerful to
be enslaved and constrained to gather rubber or to confine their
trade to the King’s agents and concessionaires. Fortunately such
districts escaped the Leopoldian ravages and are now ripe for a
well-ordered civilization to be imparted to their peoples through
Belgian agency.
Any historian who omitted to dwell on the devoted and usually poorly
paid work of many a Belgian officer and civilian in Congoland
amongst quarrelsome or cruel native tribes, the achievements for the
good of the natives of many a Belgian engineer, doctor, planter,
road-maker, stockman, and schoolmaster, would indeed be unjust. The
destruction of Arab tyranny will always remain a feat of
extraordinary courage and of lasting good to Central Africa; and
fortunately it was not in the regions rescued from Arab sway that
the wrong-doing of the King and his concessionaires took place. The
Arab-conquered portions of the Congo basin have never gone back in
prosperity and well-being of the natives since they became Belgian
provinces; and much the same might be said about Katanga, which
under its usurping Wa-nyamwezi chiefs had been soaked in blood. But
the Congo basin is still governed by Belgium under a régime which
fails to conform precisely to the conditions laid down by the Act of
Berlin or to satisfy those who desire justice of treatment for
native races leading a settled agricultural life.
The present King of the Belgians (Albert I) visited the Congo
territories in 1907, traversed Congoland from Katanga to the mouth
of the Congo, and resolved that his policy as King-Sovereign should
be on lines radically different from those of his predecessor.
Already a current of free trade is permeating the dominion and
bringing with it freedom in other directions. The greater native
chiefs are now encouraged to work with the Belgian Government and to
look after the immediate interests of their own subjects. Railways
have been rapidly pushed forward in eastern Congoland, which will
some day link up Northern Rhodesia with Uganda, with the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the French Sudan.
There should be a great future, commercially at any rate, before the
Belgian Congo, which in wealth of vegetable and mineral products and
length of navigable waterways resembles Brazil and Guiana; and,
theoretically, there should be no reason why Flemings and Walloons
as guardians of this rich Central African state should not play as
great a _rôle_ in the Dark Continent as they have done in the
industrial and artistic history of Europe. Yet little Belgium has a
tremendous task before her in raising this immense territory to the
condition of Brazil or Java; and the regret naturally felt by
English, German, and French writers that this wealthy territory was
more or less disdained by their Governments in the days of Cameron’s
and Stanley’s earlier journeys and advertisements of its
capabilities, no doubt stimulates on their part a destructive
criticism of Belgian efforts and capabilities. It is sometimes
hinted that this unwieldy state will not long outlive as a political
entity the monarch who founded it, and that its southern provinces
will fall to England, its northern to France, and its western to
Germany. But predictions in regard to the evolution of African
history are very uncertain of fulfilment, and the Congo State may
yet become and remain a Belgian India.
-----
Footnote 186:
It was never officially styled the Congo “Free” State. The meaning
of the French words was “the Independent State of the Congo”; and
unhappily it was no more “free” in its subsequent history than in
name. _Bula Matadi_ was its local title in Congoland, such being
Stanley’s nickname (Rock-breaker).
Footnote 187:
Hamed bin Muhammad bin Juma, nicknamed Tipu Tipu or “Tippootib.”
Footnote 188:
_The Fall of the Congo Arabs_, Methuen, 1897. This campaign is
also described in my book _George Grenfell and the Congo_.
Footnote 189:
_Civilization in Congoland._
Footnote 190:
The direct trading agents of King Leopold and his concessionaire
companies, and the ofttimes worthy and gallant servants of the
Congo State, were miserably underpaid.
Footnote 191:
Sir Henry Morton Stanley (John Rowlands) was born in 1842 at
Denbigh in North Wales, the son of a farmer’s daughter who was
very poor. He became eventually a work-house boy, but managed to
acquire a passable education and to find his way twice to the
United States, where he pursued many careers till at length he
became a press reporter and a special correspondent. In this
capacity he “found” and relieved Livingstone and prolonged
Livingstone’s life by two years. In 1899 Stanley, who had been in
Parliament since 1895, was made G.C.B. by the British Government.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BRITISH IN AFRICA, III
(_Egypt and Eastern Africa._)
Ever since the first year of the 19th century, when Britain expelled
the French from Egypt, she herself had longings to assume the
control of that country. One reason for this desire was very clear:
across Egypt lay the shortest sea route to India. Even without the
Suez Canal, a day’s journey on a railway or three days’ journey by
canal and carriage would transfer one from Alexandria on the
Mediterranean to Suez on the Red Sea. Two hundred and thirty-four
years ago, in the reign of Louis XIV, and one hundred and fourteen
years ago, in the dawning empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, when steam
was unknown as a motive power, the idea was conceived and born that
Egypt controlled the back door, the garden gate of India. But when
steam came into vogue on the sea, and later on the land, and people
contrasted the saving of time the Egyptian route offered, compared
with the weary three months’ voyage round the Cape, it became
apparent to British statesmen, that British influence must have full
play if not exclusive control in Egypt.
Subsequent on the withdrawal of the French, a simple major of
artillery from European Turkey—Muhammad Ali—had suddenly risen to
power by procedure which was faithfully copied 80 years afterwards
by Arābi Pasha. He had inspired such energy and bravery into the
military forces of Egypt that in 1806-7 his soldiers defeated a
British force which landed at Alexandria and Rosetta, and attempted
to take possession of the country. Thus was staved off for 76 years
the British occupation of Egypt, an occupation which in 1806 would
have been far more rapidly converted into annexation than it could
possibly be at the present day[192].
Britain respected Muhammad Ali’s sturdy resistance, and although she
opposed his attempt to conquer the Turkish Empire, and—in opposition
to the foolish encouragement he received from France—seemed at one
time his enemy, she nevertheless saved him from downfall, and
assisted him to establish a dynasty in Egypt which has ruled,
directly or indirectly, for a century. Still, knowing British
hankerings, the Tsar Nicholas I offered Egypt and Crete to Britain a
short time prior to the Crimean War in return for a free hand at
Constantinople. Great Britain declined, dreading to see Russia, with
a new base at Constantinople and the locked Black Sea behind her,
becoming the strongest Power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Then came
the making of the Suez Canal by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the influence
of which, however, was somewhat counteracted by the fact that all
the Egyptian railways were British. Nevertheless, British influence
never stood so low in Egypt as at the opening of the Canal, when the
heir to the British Crown was lost amid a galaxy of reigning
sovereigns headed by the effulgence of the Empress of the French.
But although French influence had grown so strong in Egypt, the
French Government did not—overtly at any rate—strive for more than
an equal voice with England in the affairs of Egypt, partly owing to
a feeling of loyalty to the British alliance, which Napoleon III
displayed whenever he could, and, later, to the enfeeblement of
France after the German War. In 1871 something like a thousand
British steamers passed through the Suez Canal, the enormous
importance of which became so apparent that in 1875 the British
Government purchased the Canal Shares held by the Khedive of Egypt,
and thus became a controlling factor in the Canal Company.
For between 1862 and 1877, Egypt had been ruined and reduced to
bankruptcy by a reckless borrowing of money on the part of her
native ruler, the Khedive Ismail. This prince at great cost
purchased his country’s practical freedom from Turkish control;
indeed, by 1873, he was virtually an independent sovereign. He
extended Egyptian rule into Equatorial Africa, reorganized his
customs’ service, carried through important public works; but he
also built palaces in profusion, and was guilty of needless
extravagance and waste. As the result of Egyptian bankruptcy, there
came into existence in 1877 the Dual Control of Britain and France
over Egyptian finances. Ismail instigated a rebellion against this
interference with his government and was deposed in 1879 by the
Sultan of Turkey. The Dual Control was re-established (Lord Cromer,
then Major Evelyn Baring, being one of the controllers) under the
new Khedive Taufik; but in 1881 occurred the revolt of the army
headed by Colonel Ahmed Arābi. France under the influence of
Gambetta pursued the same policy as Britain, namely, the delivering
of verbal warnings at intervals without the display of force. At
last, in June 1882, there was a riot and a massacre of Christians at
Alexandria. When the British fleet prepared to take action the
French withdrew, a hostile vote of the Chamber having dissolved the
Dual Control. Britain then intervened in Egypt against Arābi’s
revolt, bombarded the port of Alexandria (July 11, 1882), and seized
the Suez Canal. Lord Wolseley, of Ashanti fame, fought the battle of
Tel-el-Kebir, occupied Cairo (September 15), and reconquered the
country for the Khedive. When this had been done, the British
Government was in a dilemma. Had it, say some, on the capture of
Cairo, declared Egypt to be a British protectorate outright, it
would have only done what all the Powers of Europe expected. On the
other hand, this bold step would have meant the tearing up of
treaties and the partitioning of the Turkish Empire. Perhaps this
might have been got over by direct negotiation with the Sultan and
assurances of the continuance or composition of the tribute.
From about 1853 an interest was taken in the development of the
Sudan by the British Government. A Glamorganshire mining engineer,
John Petherick, after his contract of service with the Egyptian
Government was over, established himself at Khartum as an ivory
trader and was made British Consular Agent. In the sixties the
journeys and explorations of Speke and Grant, and of Sir Samuel and
Lady Baker, brought the Egyptian Sudan prominently into notice. In
1869 Sir Samuel Baker was made Egyptian Governor of the Equatorial
Province (Gondokoro to the Albert Nyanza). In 1874 he was succeeded
by Colonel Charles George Gordon, who became Governor-General over
the entire Egyptian Sudan in 1877. Between 1877 and 1879 Gordon
devoted himself, with the Italian Romolo Gessi as lieutenant, to the
defeat and suppression of the “Nubian” or “Bazinger” slave-traders
and raiders on the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Darfur. Unsuccessful wars of
conquest against Abyssinia took place during the seventies, and
equally unsuccessful attempts to secure the Mombasa coast and the
kingdom of Uganda—attempts opposed by the British Government. Gordon
was replaced by a Turk as Governor-General in 1880; and civilized
rule over the Egyptian Sudan began to decline, though Emin Pasha
(Eduard Schnitzer, a German of Silesia) ruled well and wisely over
the Equatorial Provinces till about 1886.
In the autumn of 1882, the British Government was probably sincere
in declaring its intention presently to evacuate Egypt; but it
seemed as though fate had ordained that the British garrison should
remain in that country. In 1881 the Mahdi’s revolt had broken out in
the Sudan[193]. In November 1883 Hicks Pasha’s force was cut to
pieces in the wilds of Kordofan. General C. G. Gordon was sent to
relieve and remove the garrisons, instead of doing which he remained
at Khartum in the vain hope of restoring before he left it some kind
of order to the country that he loved. An army under Viscount
Wolseley was sent to rescue him. It arrived a few days too late, yet
might even then have retaken Khartum and put down the revolt; but
Russia was threatening to impinge on the borders of India, and Great
Britain could not afford to lock up many soldiers in Central Africa.
Not being able, therefore, to settle the Sudan question, the British
were forced to remain in Egypt to prevent that country from being
overrun by the Mahdists. An attempt was made in 1885-6 to negotiate
terms of withdrawal with the Sultan, but the proposed convention was
not ratified, owing to the opposition of France and Russia.
Gradually, owing to the ability and truly British calm of the
British Agent and Consul-General, Sir Evelyn Baring (who became Lord
Cromer in 1892), the situation grew into a possible one. A moderate
British garrison was retained. The Exchequer was placed under
British control, as were public works, the administration of
justice, the organization of the army, posts and telegraphs, and
other departments where an infusion of order, honesty, and economy
was necessary. The Khedive of Egypt continued to reign with British
support and under British advice. In 1890 the conclusion of the
Anglo-German agreement for delimiting the British and German spheres
of influence in East, West, and Central Africa had secured from one
European Power, at least, recognition of an eventual British control
over the former Equatorial provinces of Egypt. From this event and
from the contemplation of maps arose the idea of “the Cape to
Cairo[194]”; and British ministries began slowly to contemplate the
reconquest of the Sudan. The Mahdists aided the growth of this
resolve by their fatuous hostility and constant attacks on Suakin
and on the Wadi Halfa boundary to the south of Egypt proper, behind
which the Egyptian forces withdrew in 1885. In 1886 the Mahdists
attempted to invade Egypt by following the Nile, but sustained a
crushing defeat at the battle of Sarras. Three years later, again
led by Wad-an-Nejumi the conqueror of Hicks Pasha and of Khartum,
they were completely routed at Toski by Lord Grenfell, and
Wad-an-Nejumi was killed. In 1894-5 the vicinity of Suakin was freed
from these marauders and the eastern Sudan reconquered, Italy
greatly aiding by her gallant capture of Kasalá[195]. The terrible
disaster which befell the Italian arms in Abyssinia in 1896 caused
the British Government to press forward the conquest of the Sudan in
order to distract the Dervishes from attacking the Italians. The
Egyptian commander-in-chief—Sir Herbert Kitchener, now Lord
Kitchener of Khartum—had thoroughly reorganized the native Egyptian
army under British officers; and with this material and a small
contingent of British troops he reconquered the province of Dongola
during the summer of 1896. In 1897 (Battle of the Atbara) and the
early part of 1898 the advance up the Nile valley was continued; and
on the 2nd of September, 1898, occurred the decisive battle of
Omdurman, in which a mixed army of British and Egyptian regiments,
under Sir Herbert Kitchener, finally shattered the Khalifa’s power
and avenged Gordon’s death. Anglo-Egyptian control was rapidly
extended eastward to the Abyssinian frontier and southward to the
Sobat river, but a half-expected obstacle came to light which
imposed a temporary check on the southward advance towards Uganda.
Major Marchand had reached Fashoda, near the confluence of the White
Nile and the Bahr-al-Ghazal, and had hoisted the French flag over
that abandoned Egyptian post. Before the determined attitude of
Great Britain, France, after two months’ delay, withdrew Major
Marchand, and later on in 1899 concluded with Great Britain a
supplement to the Niger Convention (p. 222), by which, broadly
speaking, the whole western Nile basin and Darfur were admitted to
be an exclusively British “sphere of influence.” Although France had
not yet specifically recognized the peculiar position of Great
Britain in Egypt, she had prepared the way for the Convention of
1904, in which this recognition was given in return for a similar
acknowledgement of French interest in Morocco. This 1904 Convention
definitely closed the long era of Anglo-French rivalry and
diplomatic conflict in Egypt; and thenceforth the British met with
no obstacle from any outside nation but Turkey in their task of
reforming and rehabilitating the country of the Pharaohs. Turkey in
1906 attempted to withdraw the greater part of the Sinai peninsula
from Egyptian rule, to bring Turkish posts down to the vicinity of
the east bank of the Suez Canal, and to hold both shores of the Gulf
of Akaba. It required a virtual ultimatum from Great Britain before
Turkey would give way; and this crisis (which ended by the definite
inclusion of all the Sinai Peninsula within the Egyptian dominions,
while the Turks as definitely regained those former Egyptian posts
in the land of Midian held by Egypt since 1832) gave occasion to the
British Government to assign to the British occupation of Egypt a
more definite and permanent character than it had hitherto been
accorded in diplomatic documents.
But from this period (1906) onwards there was much “national” unrest
in the towns of the Nile Delta, chiefly Cairo and Alexandria. The
prosperity which Egypt was enjoying, the spread of a modern,
European type of education, the downfall of Sultan Abd-al-Hamid in
1908, and the promise of a constitutionally governed, modernized
Turkey, were conditions which caused the Muhammadan Egyptian
townsfolk—mostly the professional classes—to think the time had come
for the establishment of a completely constitutional régime in
Egypt, coupled with a removal of British control and military
occupancy. This movement had begun in 1892 with the accession of the
young Khedive, Abbas Hilmi; but of late years the Khedive has
dissociated himself from attacks on, or even coldness towards, the
British occupation. His approximation to the British point of view
was more apparent after the Earl of Cromer’s retirement in 1907. Sir
John Gorst, Lord Cromer’s successor, sympathized to some extent with
“nationalist” ideals, but he regarded the Christian Copt as being
just as much an Egyptian as the Muhammadan Arab, Egyptian or Turk.
Copts were enabled to rise high in the public service of Egypt. In
1908 a Copt—Boutros Pasha—became Prime Minister of the Khedive’s
Government. Christian ministers of state—Armenians, Copts,
Levantines—were no novelty in Egypt; but the idea was most repellent
to the aggressive “Pan-Islamism” of the Muhammadan “nationalists,”
and the excitations of the Nationalist Press excited a student, Al
Wardani, to murder Boutros Pasha in February 1910—an event which so
deeply affected Sir John Gorst (a sincere friend towards real
“nationalism” in Egypt) that he contracted an illness which caused
his death a year later. Viscount Kitchener of Khartum succeeded him
as British representative in Egypt. In 1911-12 the “nationalist”
agitation was resumed, and a plot was arranged for the nearly
simultaneous assassination of the Khedive, Lord Kitchener, and the
Egyptian Premier. It must be remembered by all who are disposed to
sympathize with the growth and achievement of nationalism that Egypt
contains, in addition to some 10,500,000 Muhammadans (only about 5
per cent. of whom are literates), a million Christians of Egyptian
and of European race, who represent—for the most part—the brains and
wealth of the country. Until this important minority is regarded by
the Nationalist party as equally entitled to full Egyptian
citizenship, until the Muhammadanism of Egypt sheds its intense
fanaticism and its contempt for science, sanitation, for ancient
history and modern learning, the British Government in its capacity
of guardian over the land of the Pharaohs, the land of deathless
history which the Arab, Turk, and Circassian have done so much to
destroy and deface, is right in withstanding a movement which is not
strictly national, in the Egyptian sense, but a revival of Islamic
intolerance and civic dishonesty.
The Anglo-French Convention of 1904 having accorded a limited but
distinct recognition on the part of France to the British control
over the Egyptian Khediviate, various important reforms in finance
and administration followed, and the way was paved for the abolition
of the capitulations, of the last vestiges of mistrust felt by
Europe for the tribunals of a Muhammadan nation. Since 1876, the
separate consular courts in Egypt had been done away with in favour
of the mixed tribunals on which were conferred the powers formerly
attributed to the consular courts and which now try all civil and
criminal cases in which foreigners are concerned. These foreign
tribunals may be succeeded in time by national Egyptian courts. At
any rate, the Anglo-French agreement of 1904 tends in that
direction. Owing to this agreement Egypt is now allowed to apply her
surplus, after the service of the Funded Debt has been provided for,
to any purposes she may deem advisable in the interests of the
country, either for the extension of public works or the diminution
of taxation. Prior to the facilities accorded by this agreement,
however, the Earl of Cromer (the creator of modern Egypt) had, with
the financial assistance of Sir Ernest Cassel and the engineering
skill of Sir William Willcocks and others, commenced those great
irrigation works above Assuan which will triple the productive
capabilities of Lower Egypt and proportionately increase the
prosperity of the Khedive’s country. Under the British control
(since 1882) the Funded Debt has been diminished by 12 millions
sterling; taxation has been greatly reduced, yet the revenue has
increased by 4 millions of pounds; the total trade of Egypt has more
than doubled; and the population has risen from 6,832,000 in 1882 to
nearly 12,000,000 in 1912. Forced labour has been abolished; the
position of the peasantry has been enormously improved; twice the
former area of land is cultivated and under cultivation; and the
boundaries of the country have been definitely extended to the
frontier of Syria and to the Cyrenaica.
In the Sudan great changes followed the victories of Lord Kitchener
in 1898. A convention with Egypt in January 1899 determined the
constitution of the, henceforth, Anglo-Egyptian-Sudan south of Wadi
Halfa. This was to be a joint dominion of Britain and Egypt. The
Governor-General was to be selected by the British Government and
appointed by the Khedive. By a stroke of the pen the cumbersome
system of Consular or Mixed Tribunal Courts which had formerly
existed in the Egyptian Sudan was abolished and the direct
jurisdiction of the Anglo-Egyptian Government substituted. By 1900,
the reconquest of the Egyptian Sudan, begun in 1896, had been
effectually completed. In November 1899, after Lord Kitchener had
been despatched to South Africa, his successor in the Sudan, Sir
Reginald Wingate, pursued the fugitive Khalifa into the recesses of
Kordofan; and this successor of the Mahdi lost his life on the field
of battle of Om Dubreikat, on November 25, 1899. Osman Digna, the
other great Dervish leader, was taken prisoner in the Tokar hills
near Suakin on January 19, 1900. Gradually in the succeeding years
the boundaries of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan were adjusted with
Abyssinia. Darfur remains a semi-independent kingdom, accepting
somewhat grudgingly an Anglo-Egyptian suzerainty. The region of the
Bahr-al-Ghazal was occupied by the Sudan Government in pursuance of
the claims of Egypt over this region and in opposition to the
aspirations of the King-Sovereign of the Congo State, who at one
period (1894) had received permission from the British, without
prejudice to the dormant claims of Egypt, to exercise control over
this region. The King did not take immediate advantage of this
opportunity; and in the interval Egypt had revived her claims to the
original dominions of the Egyptian Sudan after the shattering of the
Khalifa’s forces at Omdurman. But, although the Congo State was not
allowed to exercise authority over the Bahr-al-Ghazal, it maintained
its sway in the smaller Lado enclave between the Congo frontier and
the western bank of the White or Mountain Nile by a lease which
terminated at the death of Leopold II in 1909, when the Lado enclave
passed under the control of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Government in
1910.
Apart from the Arabs, the British have had but little trouble in
imposing their supervising rule over the natives of the Sudan, the
government of which is directed from Khartum. The only tribe that
adopted a hostile attitude towards the British, prior to 1904, was a
section of the Dinka people between the Mountain or White Nile on
the west and the affluents of the Sobat on the east. But in the
autumn of 1904 a strong expedition had to be directed against the
powerful Nyamnyam tribes of the Western Bahr-al-Ghazal. This people,
armed with about 20,000 modern rifles obtained by purchase or
pillage from the Belgian stations, was disposed to question the “Pax
Sudanica” and to resume its former slave raids. In 1903, another
Mahdi—a Tunisian Arab—arose in Kordofan, but he was promptly
captured and executed. In 1908, yet another fanatic, an Arab of the
Halawi tribe in Sennar, declared himself to be Jesus Christ,
returning to earth to expel the European from the Sudan. He murdered
a British official but was caught soon afterwards and hanged for his
crimes. In 1911-12 two expeditions were rendered necessary against
the Annaks, a Nilotic negro tribe on the Sobat river. The Annaks had
armed themselves with thousands of French rifles sold by French
merchants on the frontiers of Abyssinia and passed on to the Annaks
in trade by the Abyssinians. From this direction much more trouble
may occur eventually.
A good deal of commercial development has taken place in the
northern regions of the Egyptian Sudan and in Southern Egypt owing
to the resumption of gold-mining operations which had been dormant
since ancient Egyptian days, or at any rate since the Muhammadan
conquest, and the great increase in cotton planting. The advance of
the Sudan towards prosperity is only hampered by the present dearth
of indigenous population. It has been computed that the Mahdi’s
revolt and the Khalifa’s massacres must have cost the Sudan
something like three millions of lives, this loss being entailed by
direct massacre (at some places on the Nile 70,000 people—men,
women, and children—were killed in the course of two or three days),
by the unchecked spread of disease, by starvation owing to the
destruction of crops and the neglect of agriculture, and by loss in
battle against the Anglo-Egyptian forces. Efforts are being made by
the enlightened administration which rules from Khartum to encourage
agriculture and to educate the people. The Gordon College was
founded at Khartum in 1899 with the special purpose of giving a
practical and secular education to the Arabs and negroes of that
dominion. One splendid feat, among others, due to British courage
and tenacity of purpose was the cutting through the _Sadd_ (as it is
pronounced, or Sudd as it is ordinarily written), the dense growth
of floating water vegetation which from time immemorial has blocked
the courses of the Mountain Nile and its tributaries between Boz and
the 6th degree of latitude, and the confluence of the Sobat. At
intervals between 1871 and 1882 this _sadd_ had completely barred
the way to steamer or boat journeys between Khartum and the
Equatorial provinces. The great work of cutting through the _sadd_
was finally achieved under the direction of Sir William Garstin
between 1899 and 1904 by Major Malcom Peake, Lieut. Drury, R.N., and
Major G. E. Matthews. Since that time the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan has
been completely linked up by a steamer mail service with the British
Protectorate of Uganda.
The area of this vast dominion, between Wadi Halfa on the north,
Gondokoro and the 5th degree of latitude and the Nile-Congo-Shari
waterparting on the south, is 984,520 square miles; yet the
population is still only estimated at 2,600,000, though it is
capable of supporting 50,000,000 black or brown men and is healthy
in a few parts for Europeans.
Aden, at the south-west extremity of Arabia, was occupied by the
Indian Government in 1839 in view of the opening up to steam-ships
of the Egyptian route to India. To Aden were added in 1840, by
treaties of purchase or exclusive influence, Zeila and Musha Island
on the Somali coast, the island of Perim in 1858, and the island of
Sokotra in 1876[196]. Egypt in 1875 had annexed the coast of
Somaliland opposite Aden, with the exception of the French post of
Obok. When the Egyptian dominion of the Sudan collapsed, it was
necessary to our interests that the Somali coast opposite Aden
should not come under the influence of another European power; so a
British protectorate was established there (1884-89) by accord with
France and Italy, France extending her Obok territory to meet the
British Somali Protectorate, while the town of Harrar in the
interior, which was likely to be a bone of contention, was
transferred to Abyssinia together with a small adjoining piece of
territory in 1897.
In 1898, a considerable slice off the south-west portion of British
Somaliland was surrendered to the Empire of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) by
the Rennell Rodd agreement made in 1897. The Italians between 1889
and 1892 had acquired rights over all the sea-board east and south
of British Somaliland, but, as time went on, the interior—never well
disposed towards Europeans—became disturbed. The eastern and
southern parts of this Protectorate were ravaged between 1899 and
1904, and again between 1908 and 1910, by a Somali leader, Muhammad
bin Abdallah, called most inappropriately the Mad Mullah. This man—a
native of southern Ogadein Somaliland—appears at first to have been
the exponent of legitimate grievances on the part of some of the
coast Somalis. The British administration of Somaliland during the
close of the 19th century was not fortunate in its dealings with a
turbulent and fickle people. Some of the earlier officials seemed to
be more interested in the hunting of big game than in acquiring
knowledge as to the predilections, traditions, and general affairs
of the Somali tribes under their government. Gradually Somali
opinion grew restless under restrictions which were seemingly not
backed by adequate force, and leant towards the side of their
national leader, the Mullah. The latter attacked successfully those
tribes on the coast which remained faithful to the British rule. A
succession of expeditions against the Mullah culminated in an
elaborate and expensive campaign conducted by the British War Office
in 1903-4. The Mullah was repeatedly driven into Italian territory,
and the permission of Italy was obtained to use the coast of Italian
Somaliland as a fresh base of operations against the Somalis.
Somewhat dubious and half-hearted assistance was also supposed to be
rendered by Abyssinia. As the result of these operations, the Mullah
and his forces were repeatedly defeated (after more than one
disaster had happened to the British troops), and he was driven out
of British territory into the no-man’s-land in dispute between Italy
and Ethiopia. Between 1905 and 1908, there was peace, the Mullah
being content to settle down under Italian supervision. Then he
broke out again and finally attacked the tribes under British
protection. Previous Somali wars (1900-4) having cost the British
government the lives of many British officers and negro and Indian
soldiers, besides over two million sterling expended in maintaining
armies of 7000 men, it was decided to leave the interior of British
Somaliland—a barren and sparsely inhabited region—alone, and confine
the British occupation to the coast towns. This decision was carried
into effect in 1910. The Mullah Muhammad bin Abdallah is still at
large, but the interior tribes are gradually asserting themselves
against him. The area of the Protectorate is about 68,000 square
miles. Prior to 1902, this territory, alone amongst the British
Protectorates in Africa (excepting Zanzibar), paid its own way
without a subsidy, the revenue being derived from the considerable
receipts at the Customs Houses. Unfortunately, the war destroyed so
much in the way of live-stock as to make it difficult for years to
come for Somaliland to recover the partial prosperity it enjoyed in
earlier days. But nevertheless considerable towns are springing up
on the coast-line, where they can be easily defended by garrisons of
Indian troops and Somali police.
After the Portuguese had been expelled by the Arabs from Zanzibar
and Mombasa, all the East coast of Africa from Somaliland to the
Ruvuma river came under the control of the Imam of Maskat, who
usually deputed a brother or some other relation to be his viceroy
at Zanzibar. Owing to internecine quarrels which arose in the
princely family of Maskat, the British Government intervened in
1861, and definitely separated the Sultanate of Zanzibar from the
Imamate of ’Oman or Maskat. As the French were beginning to take a
keen interest in the affairs of Zanzibar and Maskat, the British
Government at that time (1863) concluded a treaty with the French
Empire by which both powers bound themselves to respect the
independence of Zanzibar and Maskat. Many years previously, in 1824,
a Lieutenant Reitz, by the orders of Captain W. F. W. Owen, had
hoisted the British flag at Mombasa, and had endeavoured to occupy
that town for the East India Company, but his action was disallowed.
Nevertheless, British influence at Zanzibar grew very strong through
the Political Agent whom we established at the court of the Sayyid
or representative of the Imam of Maskat (known later as the Sultan
of Zanzibar)[197], and the powerful squadron of cruisers which were
maintained in Zanzibar waters to put down the slave trade. In 1866
Dr, afterwards Sir John, Kirk, who had been Livingstone’s second in
command on the Zambezi, was appointed Vice-Consul and gradually rose
to be Consul and then Political Agent and Consul-General. He threw
himself zealously into the task of suppressing the Zanzibar slave
trade, which had become an outrage on humanity. The British
Government supported him; and in 1873 Sir Bartle Frere was sent to
Zanzibar to negotiate a treaty with the Sultan.
The Sultan (Barghash) was recalcitrant, and even went to the length
of offering his territory to France. Finally, however, before a
threatened British bombardment could take place or the French
squadron arrive, Sir John Kirk had persuaded the Sultan to sign the
treaty, after which Sayyid Barghash bin Said resolved to visit
England, which he did in 1874. It is said that even at that date he
had some idea of invoking German protection, provided he were
allowed to tear up the slave-trade treaty. However, the wisdom and
tact of Sir John Kirk did wonders for British influence at Zanzibar;
and in 1876 the Sultan offered the lease of nearly all his
continental territories to Mr, afterwards Sir William, Mackinnon,
the chairman of the British India Steam Navigation Company. But Mr
Mackinnon was an over-cautious man. Instead of accepting, and then
forcing the hand of the British Government, he refused to take the
Sultan’s concession unless he could first obtain a British
guarantee, an action to which the Government was naturally unwilling
to commit itself. In 1881 Sir John Kirk thought of another plan,
that of inducing the Sultan to employ capable Britons, who would
develop his territories as governors or commissioners. He secured
the services of Mr Joseph Thomson to develop the resources of the
Ruvuma Province, an appointment which might have effectually
prevented any future German intervention; but Mr Joseph Thomson was
too pessimistic and perhaps shortsighted. The country seemed to him
poor in resources, though it has long since been shown to be more
productive than he thought. He bluntly told the Sultan so and
therefore was relieved of his appointment. In 1883 Sir John Kirk
returned from England, having induced the Government to appoint a
number of salaried vice-consuls at various points in the Sultan’s
territories. It must be noted that at this period a very large
proportion of the Zanzibar trade was in the hands of British
subjects, natives of British India.
In 1882-4 took place the remarkable exploring journey of Mr Joseph
Thomson under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society.
Thomson travelled from Mombasa to the verge of Busoga, on the north
coast of the Victoria Nyanza, and revealed all the most striking
features of British East Africa. Sir John Kirk had also about the
same time entered into friendly relations with Mandara, a chief on
Mt Kilima-njaro, and had urged the sending out of a scientific
expedition, to the leadership of which Mr H. H. Johnston was
appointed in 1884, in order to explore that mountain. After some
months’ stay on Kilima-njaro Mr Johnston reported the great
advantages this region possessed as a sanatorium, and, while waiting
for instructions from Sir John Kirk, concluded treaties with several
chiefs. The response of the British government was favourable to the
establishment of British interests in this direction; but various
obstacles arose which required consideration, amongst others the
remembrance of the 1862 agreement with France. Another European
power, however, was bound by no such agreement, and had no such
scruples, as will be related in Chapter XIV. Although Mr Johnston’s
treaties with Chaga (South Kilima-njaro) and Taveita (the eastern
slopes) proved the basis on which the British East Africa Company
was eventually founded, the actual mountain district of Kilima-njaro
finally fell to Germany. By 1885, the British Government had more or
less indicated to Germany that portion of the Zanzibar dominions
which must come under British influence if there was to be a
division of those territories; and after several years of diplomatic
conflict, the whole question was settled with fairness to both
parties by the 1890 Convention between Great Britain and Germany,
and by a secondary agreement with France, which definitely allotted
to Great Britain the northern half of the Sultan of Zanzibar’s
dominions, the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, and a sphere of
influence in the interior which included Uganda and Lake Albert
Nyanza.
The British East Africa Company, organized in 1886, was chartered in
1888, and undertook the government of the vast territories lying
between the Mombasa coast and the Victoria Nyanza. For the first two
years things went smoothly. The company possessed a capable
administrator, Mr (afterwards Sir) George Mackenzie, who solved the
slavery difficulty by redeeming the slaves of the Arab gentry and
then setting them free. This no doubt prevented the coast Arabs from
attacking the British régime at a time when they had nearly
destroyed that of Germany in the regions farther south.
But the Imperial British East Africa company had undertaken a task
far too great for its resources in capital. It was expected by the
people and government of Great Britain to maintain and defend
British interests over a vast hinterland. The country of
Uganda[198], on the north-west of this greatest of African lakes,
had been allotted to the British sphere by the German Convention;
but unfortunately for British interests the country had been entered
by French Roman Catholic missionaries of Cardinal Lavigerie’s White
Fathers’ mission (cf. pp. 245-6), who were such ardent Frenchmen
that they rather forgot the religious purpose for which they had
come, and fomented serious quarrels between the king and the
Protestant missionaries who had preceded them. The great King Mtesa
died in 1884, peevish and disgusted with the missionary disputes and
religious recriminations that buzzed in his ears, and longing for
the old, easy, pagan life he had led before pressing Stanley (p.
326) to send him Christian teachers. After his death, the Arab party
prejudiced his son Mwanga against the Christian foreigners and
native converts. Bishop Hannington, of the Church Missionary
Society, newly appointed to East Equatorial Africa, persisted in
entering Uganda along Mr Thomson’s route by what the king called the
“back way.” Frightened lest the bishop might be coming to take the
country by the methods which the Germans had employed farther south,
the king ordered him to be murdered in Busoga, not far from the
Victoria Nile. Soon after this, the missionaries, Protestants and
Catholics, were expelled from Uganda. Then later on there was a
Muhammadan revolt, which drove Mwanga flying. He took refuge with
the Catholic missionaries at the south end of the lake, and became a
Christian. He was restored to his throne by the aid of Mr Stokes,
who was afterwards hanged by Major Lothaire (p. 347). Then the
French missionaries got control over the king, and attempted to
prevent the country from becoming a British protectorate—if it could
not be French, at any rate let it be German; and Dr Peters arriving
on the scene strove to make it German; but his efforts were annulled
by the 1890 Convention. After this, to prevent the country from
falling under the sway of the Muhammadans, who might have joined the
Mahdists or become French, the British East Africa Company was
obliged by public opinion to intervene, although it did not possess
sufficient funds to administer such an expensive empire. Captain,
now General Sir Frederick, Lugard not long returned from the Arab
war in Nyasaland, was sent there as their agent in 1890-1, and in an
exceedingly able and courageous manner restored order, obtaining
from the king a treaty with the Company, and putting down revolts of
the Roman Catholic Christians and of the Muhammadans. But the East
Africa Company was obliged to appeal to the British Government to
come to its assistance lest Uganda should swallow up all its
resources. The late Sir Gerald Portal, Agent and Consul-General at
Zanzibar, was sent to Uganda to report on the advisability and the
means of retaining this country under British influence. Unhappily,
he died soon after his return to England in 1894, but his report led
to the establishment of a British protectorate. Through the
intervention of the Pope, some appeasement of bitterness was
obtained in regard to the White Fathers’ mission, whose field of
work was bounded on the east by the Victoria Nile. A new Roman
Catholic mission under Bishop Hanlon, an Irishman, supported by
English, Irish and Dutch priests, has since carried on the
conversion and teaching of the natives in the eastern half of the
protectorate on harmonious terms with the British administration;
though indeed since 1900 all bitterness of feeling between the White
Fathers’ mission and the British officials or the native chiefs is
completely at an end. The French missionaries were compensated in
1895 for the destruction of some of their stations in the civil war
by a payment of £10,000.
After the withdrawal of Emin Pasha from his Equatorial province a
number of his former Sudanese soldiers volunteered for employment in
Uganda, and were eagerly recruited as a capable fighting force. But
they were Muhammadans, and always inclined to intrigue against a
Christian power. Added to this, Mwanga, the Kabaka or King of
Buganda, was the most unstable of men, and an exceedingly bad
character to boot. His vices and his cruelty had made him so hateful
in the eyes of his subjects, that without British support he would
probably have been deposed or killed. As it was, the presence of the
British prevented this, but did not arrest his intrigues with that
section of the populace which disliked European intervention. After
an undecided behaviour which lasted several years he finally
attempted to massacre a few of the British officers and
missionaries, but was defeated, and fled across the German border.
Then the Sudanese troops revolted, seized a fortress and some guns,
and for nearly a year set the British and the loyal Baganda at
defiance. Finally, a detachment of 450 Sikhs reached the country (a
handful of these splendid soldiers had already enabled the European
officers to face the Muhammadan mutineers), order was to some extent
restored, and a determined effort was made to capture the truant
king Mwanga and that aged scoundrel Kabarega, the King of Bunyoro,
who has been justly hated by Europeans since Speke and Baker’s
time[199]. This capture was achieved by Colonel John Evatt in June,
1899. The British Government having decided that the military and
civil organization of Uganda should now be settled definitely,
decided in the same year to dispatch Sir Harry Johnston as a Special
Commissioner to frame and inaugurate a suitable scheme of
administration in these countries round the Nyanzas and the Upper
Nile[200].
Prior to these troubles, continual warfare was carried on for some
years with the Bunyoro kingdom to the north, which was finally
conquered and eventually annexed to the Protectorate. In these wars
with Bunyoro (commencing with unprovoked hostilities on the part of
Kabarega) Major A. B. Thurston greatly distinguished himself. This
gallant officer and able linguist was afterwards killed by the
mutineer Sudanese soldiers (1897). Major ‘Roddy’ Owen had hoisted
the British flag at Wadelai, on the White Nile (in 1894), but this
action was not confirmed by the British Government. Nevertheless,
with the movement towards Khartum in prospect, and the eventual
reconquest of the Sudan, it was decided to send out a well-equipped
surveying expedition under Colonel (Sir) J. R. L. Macdonald which
should explore thoroughly the lands between the Victoria Nyanza and
the Mountain Nile. It was partly the demand that this expedition
should be escorted by a Sudanese battalion which precipitated the
mutiny of these discontented soldiers. Sir James Macdonald
cooperated in breaking the chief resistance of these mutineers and
then proceeded on an epoch-making survey which revealed new
mountains, new lakes, new peoples and new languages, and laid the
foundations of British influence on the northern part of the Uganda
Protectorate.
The Special Commission of Sir Harry Johnston arrived in Uganda at
the close of 1899, when the Sudanese mutiny and other troubles were
nearly over. As the results of this Special Commission the
boundaries of the Uganda Protectorate were carried northward to
Gondokoro on the Mountain Nile, to the 5th degree of N. latitude and
to Lake Rudolf; the state of Ankole on the south-west was also
included up to the German frontier. A definite constitution was
given to the kingdom of Buganda. The native ruler of Buganda
received the title of His Highness the Kabaka[201]; the native
Parliament or Lukiko was recognized; and the kingdom was divided
into a number of administrative counties. A land settlement was
arrived at, by which at least half of the land of the kingdom of
Buganda was secured to native owners. Settlements somewhat similar
to that effected in the province or kingdom of Buganda have been
carried out in the adjoining provinces of Ankole, Toro, and Bunyoro.
In 1903, the Eastern (Masai) province was transferred to the
administration of the adjoining East African Protectorate, thus
reducing the total area of the Uganda Protectorate at the present
day to 117,681 square miles, with a population—almost entirely
negroes—of about 2,900,000 (650 Europeans).
In the summer of 1901 a new portent appeared in Uganda—the terrible
disease known as sleeping sickness. This is a malady caused by the
injection into the human system through the proboscis of a Tsetse
fly of trypanosome animalcules which after swarming in the blood
reach the spinal marrow and then kill the patient—negro or European.
This terrible disease, which has existed for centuries in West
Africa, penetrated from the Congo forest into Uganda in 1901-2 and
killed many thousands of the natives year after year along the
shores and islands of the Victoria Nyanza. It is being carefully
studied with a view to its extirpation.
After the Zanzibar Sultanate had been placed under British
protection it was necessary to reorganize its administration. The
islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remained under the more or less direct
rule of the Sultan, who, however, appointed English ministers to
control the various departments of state, and was at the same time
subject to the advice and financial control of the British Agent and
Consul-General. Several Sultans succeeded one another and died in a
few years; and on the occasion of the death of Sultan Hamid bin
Thwain (1896) a palace revolt occurred, occasioned by a disappointed
claimant to the throne. This revolt, however, was really a premature
outbreak on the part of the Arab party, who frankly disliked British
interference which entailed the abolition of the slave trade and
even the disappearance of slavery, and were sufficiently foolish to
imagine that they were strong enough to resist a European nation. A
few hours’ bombardment of the Sultan’s head-quarters quelled this
rebellion. Since that time, by degrees, and with a wise system of
gradation, slavery is being abolished, and will soon cease to exist
as a recognized status. In 1911 the young Sultan of Zanzibar (Ali
bin Hamūd) abdicated for reasons of health; and his son, Sū’id bin
Ali, was proclaimed under a regency, the Regent-and-First Minister
being a British official. Between 1903-5 there was considerable
local dissatisfaction with the methods of government employed in
Zanzibar, and a deputation of Zanzibaris came to London to make
representations on the subject; but since reforms were instituted in
1906 the people of Zanzibar and Pemba have been quiet and
prosperous. The total area of these two islands is 1020 square miles
and the population (200,000) mainly negro, with about 10,000 Arabs,
10,000 Indians, and 300 Europeans. Zanzibar Island is a great
rendezvous for shipping and is the head-quarters of a great ocean
cable company; apart from this, it produces cloves and other
tropical vegetable products, and Pemba is rich in cattle.
On the mainland between the Umba river and Mombasa on the south and
the Juba river and Somaliland on the north, the Imperial British
East Africa Company continued to rule until 1894. But as soon as the
British Government had undertaken to govern Uganda as a Protectorate
(1894) it was evident that the company’s rule over the intervening
district from Kikuyu to the coast could not continue. Accordingly in
1894 the company’s charter was annulled and they were compensated
with £450,000. On July 1, 1895, Sir Arthur Hardinge took over the
administration of the British East Africa Protectorate.
The new administration had scarcely been installed on the Mombasa
coast than it found itself obliged to deal with the question of the
Mazrui Arabs. It has been mentioned elsewhere in this work that
early in the 18th century the Arab power on the coast between the
Rufu River on the south and Malindi on the north was exercised
nominally on behalf of the Imam of Maskat by an Arab family known as
the Mazrui. Various explanations are given of this name and of the
origin of this clan, some deriving them from an old colony of
Egyptian Arabs (_Masr_ is the Arab name for Egypt); but more
probably they came from Southern Arabia, or even from Oman, prior to
the arrival of the Portuguese, who dispossessed them for a time. In
the 17th century they had made common cause with the Arabs of Oman
in attacking and expelling the Portuguese, but, when it came to
their accepting the Imam of Maskat as their sovereign lord, they
usually evaded the direct issue by partial compliance. In the early
part of the 19th century they had defied the representative of the
Imam at Zanzibar and had attempted to place Mombasa under British
protection. During the latter part of the 19th century the Sultan of
Zanzibar, backed by Sir John Kirk, had asserted Zanzibar rule over
the coast strip as far north as Somaliland. He held, indeed, all the
principal ports of what is now Italian Somaliland, as well as Lamu,
Malindi, and Mombasa. In the hinterland of Lamu was another
semi-independent Arab Sultanate, that of Vitu, on the Ozi River;
while the Mazrui clan between Mombasa and the German frontier was
represented by a line of Sultans usually called Sidi Mubarak or
Mbaruk (_Sidi_ means lord, the rest of the name is a varying form of
the Arab word for blessing). The Germans in their dealings with East
Africa had early appreciated the dissidence between the Sultan of
Zanzibar and the independent Arab powers on the mainland; and, when
Germany and Britain were striving in the eighties for an East
African dominion, Germany had recognized the independence of the
Sultanate of Vitu. By the 1890 agreement Vitu was transferred to the
protectorate of Great Britain, much against its will. It was a
country rendered inaccessible by an extravagant growth of forest
nourished by the delta of the Rivers Ozi and Tana, but was
nevertheless captured in the late autumn of 1890 by a naval
expedition under Admiral Sir E. Fremantle, to punish the Sultan for
resuming the trade in slaves and ordering a party of German
timber-cutters to be massacred. A little further action on behalf of
British officials resulted in the tranquillity of this small state
being re-established with a reasonable degree of self-government.
Sir Arthur Hardinge, on assuming the control of British East Africa,
found that he had first of all to fight a long war of skirmishes,
ambushes, and repelled raids, against the Sultan Mubarak, whose
strongholds were a series of small Arab towns in the hinterland
regions, south-west of Mombasa. This difficulty was not finally
disposed of till the following year, 1896, when Mubarak after
several defeats inflicted on him by the negro and Indian troops of
the British, took refuge on German territory. Since that time there
has been no further difficulty with the Arabs in this part of East
Africa.
The Masai of the East African hinterland, who, it was thought, would
give the most serious trouble to any overruling power, very soon
acquiesced in the idea of a British protectorate and have really
been the allies of the British in many of their difficulties with
recalcitrant tribes. In the Kikuyu forest country, which was once
the western borderland of the East African Protectorate, a few
police operations had to be carried out, as the industrious Kikuyu
people, suspicious after many years of raiding by the Masai, at
first looked upon the white man as another enemy, and attacked
British settlers or big-game hunters in the neighbourhood of their
country.
In 1902-3, as already mentioned, the Protectorate of East Africa was
extended over the eastern province of Uganda up to the shores of the
Victoria Nyanza, the slopes of Mount Elgon, and the south-west coast
of Lake Rudolf. On the south it was of course bounded by the
Anglo-German frontier, which last was accurately defined between
1903-5. On the north, after long negotiations with Abyssinia, its
boundaries were so drawn as to admit the Abyssinian Empire to the
north-east corner of Lake Rudolf. From this point the East African
boundary is drawn along the Goro escarpment to the Juba River, which
it then follows down to the sea. The total area of the Protectorate
is about 200,000 square miles, and the total population at the
present day is guessed at 4,040,000[202]. It consists mainly of
negroes and negroids, the negroids being the result of ancient or
modern intermixture between the Hamitic tribes of Ethiopia and
Somaliland and the negroes of Equatorial Africa. The Gala, a
handsome and interesting Hamitic people, displaying their kinship
with the white man by their use of the plough, by their possession
of a sex-denoting language, and by many other features, inhabit a
portion of the northern parts of the Protectorate, coming as far
south as the Tana River. In the north-east, on either side of the
Jub or Juba River, are the Somali clans chiefly belonging to the
group known as Ogadein. These southern Somalis are much mixed with
negro blood, and are not such a handsome or Caucasian people as
those of Northern Somaliland. Alike to the Italians and to the
British—and perhaps even more markedly towards the British—they have
shown themselves inimical from the very first. It will be remembered
how cruelly they treated in older times the Portuguese Catholic
missionaries who attempted to travel through their country into
Abyssinia. Since 1896 they have murdered several British officials
stationed at Kismayu, or other places in their territory; and
punitory expeditions have been directed against them in 1898 and in
1901. This last expedition ended somewhat disastrously for the
British arms, but was wisely not followed up by an expensive
avenging campaign, as the country is not at present worth
conquering, and is only inhabited by semi-nomad, warlike Somalis,
who are, however, by the lure of commerce gradually settling down
into a peaceable condition. In the Borān Gala country in the
northernmost parts of the Protectorate, raids of Abyssinian soldiers
take place from time to time and are particularly exasperating by
the reckless damage which is done to the big game of the country. In
this portion of East Africa the big game is being rapidly
exterminated by the Abyssinians.
Big game, indeed, has been found to be one of the assets of this
East African Protectorate. The writings of Joseph Thomson, H. H.
Johnston, F. G. Jackson, Count Teleki, and Lieutenant
Höhnel—explorers of this region between 1882 and 1888—revealed to
the world the amazing wealth of mammalian life in this region,
formerly so abundant as to rival in this respect the South Africa of
the early 19th century. Not long after the definite establishment of
a British administration, measures were taken to preserve this
wonderful fauna from a too rapid extinction at the hands both of
European and of native hunters; and game reserves were established.
But perhaps the most important feat performed by the British
Government, and one which has irradiated good as an exemplar and as
a transport agency over all East and Central Africa, was the
building of the Uganda railway between 1897 and 1903. The railway
commences at Mombasa, with another station at the great harbour of
Kilindini on the south side of Mombasa Island, and pursues a course
of 585 miles till it reaches the head of Kavirondo Gulf on the
north-east of the Victoria Nyanza. Before long it will no doubt be
extended through Kavirondo and Busoga till it attains the Victoria
Nile and links up with railways which are being made from the
birthplace of that river to the Albert Nyanza and Gondokoro. The
Uganda railway, so early as the commencement of the 20th century,
enabled European tourists and settlers to penetrate far into Eastern
Africa, and thus brought to public notice what had for some time
past been realised by a few individuals—the fact that a good deal of
the interior of British East Africa is a high and healthy plateau,
possessing a very good climate, a kind of mild, perpetual summer,
but invigorating, genial, and sufficiently rainy to support an
abundant vegetation, In British East Africa there are, in fact,
scattered areas of relatively-uninhabited, healthy upland amounting
in all to about 30,000 square miles, uninhabited at the beginning of
the 20th century because the native population had either been
dispersed or exterminated by intertribal wars and famines, or found
the climate too cold and preferred the lower-lying lands. At one
time there was a project of offering a region about the size of
Wales, carved out of these plateaus, to the distressed Russian,
Rumanian, and Galician Jews through the Jewish Territorial
Organization Committee. But the offer was foolishly declined by that
body, and it is most unlikely it will ever be renewed, for, no
sooner was the South African War over, than Boer settlers to the
number of 600 or 700 with their wives and families proceeded to this
interior part of East Africa and began to take up land from the
British Government. Before and subsequent to their arrival there
came not a few British for the same purpose, and at the present day
there is a settled white population in British East Africa numbering
at least 2000. Without injustice to the indigenous peoples, there is
no reason why some 30,000 square miles of East Africa should not be
set aside for white settlement and nourish in course of time a
sturdy population of three or four millions, which might prove to be
a very potent factor in the politics of Equatorial Africa. It is not
to be supposed that this region is without disease, but the disease
arises not from the climate, but from the co-existence of black men
with germs in their blood, and mosquitoes, ticks, and tsetse flies,
whose odious purpose in life is to transfer these germs from the
blood of one man to that of another. But the mosquito is often
absent from both the high and the dry parts of East Africa, and in
that case germ-diseases cannot be spread, or it is possible by
cultivating the land to get rid of this and other pests. No doubt
also in the plans which will be adopted for the eventual settlement
of the whole country, some policy of segregation will be adopted,
separating to a certain extent the colonies of the white man and of
the British Indian. For, amongst other things which are happening as
the result of the British development of East Africa, is the
in-pouring of a number of British Indian colonists, and even of
Persians; and this Asiatic population shows every sign of
prospering. It would be more reasonable, however, to reserve for
Asiatic colonization the vacant lands near the coast and in the more
northern parts of the Protectorate, which are hot and low-lying, and
therefore unsuited to European settlement, but which would be well
adapted for the cultivation of cotton and grain crops and the
rearing of cattle by agricultural colonies of Asiatics.
----------------------------------------------------------------
BRITISH AFRICA
Plate V.
[Illustration]
EXPLANATORY NOTE
Colonies, Protectorates, Spheres of Influence or Control
[red] _In 1815_ (_This darker colour in Cape Colony represents the
extreme extent of Dutch South Africa when taken over by
the British_)
[pink] _In 1912_ (_Pink bars imply uncertainty of possession_)
----------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Footnote 192:
The dynasty of Muhammad Ali may be said to have begun in 1841, in
which year it was recognised and made hereditary by Turkey; but
Muhammad Ali was the ruler of Egypt (as Pasha) from 1811, after
the slaughter of the Mamluk Beys. His sons and son-in-law
conquered for him Syria and Western Arabia and the northern part
of the Sudan. The conquests west of Sinai were given up in 1841
but in that year he became the Vali or Viceroy over Egypt and the
Sudan, the succession to that post to fall to his male
descendants. His immediate successor was his grandson Abbas bin
Tusūn; then followed the rule of his favourite son, Said bin
Muhammad. Said was succeeded in 1863 by his nephew Ismail, son of
Ibrahim, the reputed eldest son of Muhammad Ali. But according to
some accounts Ibrahim, the great conqueror, was only the adopted
son of Muhammad Ali. The present Khedive of Egypt is the
great-grandson of Ibrahim, but he is also descended from Muhammad
Ali through his mother, Princess Amina, who was the
great-great-granddaughter of Muhammad Ali through Tusūn. The title
of Khedive (a Persian word meaning prince) was conferred on the
Pasha or Viceroy of Egypt in 1867.
Footnote 193:
This was a revolt against Egyptian rule, taxation, and
interference with the slave trade, started by an Arab fanatic born
in the Dongola district who was named Muhammad Ahmad, but called
himself the Mahdi or Messiah. His first successes were amongst the
ignorant Muhammadans of Kordofan who had grown to loathe the
exactions of Turkish (i.e. Egyptian) rule. Muhammad Ahmad died in
1885 and was succeeded by his Lieutenant, the Khalifa
Abdallah-al-Taaisha. His fanatical followers were usually called
the “Dervishes.” Muhammad Ahmad’s forces captured Al-Obeid the
capital of Kordofan in January 1883, and overwhelmed nine months
later a force of 10,000 men under Hicks Pasha sent by the Egyptian
Government to recover the Western Sudan from anarchy. Hicks Pasha
(Colonel William Hicks) was an officer of the Indian Army who had
served with distinction in the Mutiny and had fought in the
Abyssinian campaign of 1867-8. In 1882 he entered the Khedive’s
service as Chief of the Staff in the Sudan, recaptured the Sennar
country from the Mahdists, and might have suppressed the whole
rebellion and obviated Gordon’s mission and all subsequent
disasters if he had been allowed a free hand by the Egyptian
ministry at Khartum. Out of his force of 8000 fighting men and
2000 camp followers, all but 300 were slain at Kashgil on the
fatal day of November 5, 1883.
Footnote 194:
This phrase first made its appearance in a pamphlet issued by the
late Sir Edwin Arnold in 1876 and was revived by the author of
this book in an article in the _Times_ of August 10, 1888.
Footnote 195:
Taken by the Italians from the Dervishes in 1894 and restored to
Anglo-Egyptian control in 1897.
Footnote 196:
Placed under British protection in 1884.
Footnote 197:
The first British Agent (for the East India Company) and Consul
General at Zanzibar was appointed in 1841.
Footnote 198:
Uganda will probably continue to be the general name for this
protectorate; but the correct form of the word is _Buganda_. This
rendering is now reserved for the native kingdom or province of
Buganda, while the Swahili version of the term—Uganda—is applied
to the whole protectorate of five provinces.
Footnote 199:
Kabarega was the son and successor of the Kamasi who had so
persecuted the Bakers, Emin, Casati and other travellers.
Footnote 200:
The work of this Special Commission was additional to and
confirmatory of the efforts of Sir Henry Colvile, Mr Ernest
Berkeley, Mr F. G. Jackson (since Governor of Uganda), Mr George
Wilson and Colonel Trevor Ternan (Commissioners or Acting
Commissioners) to found a stable confederation of warlike and
peaceful negro peoples, to combat famine and disease caused by
intertribal wars, and to extend the boundaries of this
protectorate northwards to the navigable Nile.
Footnote 201:
The Kabaka of Buganda has been, down to 1912, a minor under a
native regency. He is descended from a dynasty which has
apparently ruled in Buganda since a period contemporary with the
reign of Henry IV in England. This dynasty, like most others in
Equatorial East Africa, appears to have been founded by a man of
Gala descent.
Footnote 202:
The Protectorate now contains seven provinces and a northern tract
of territory not yet organized. The narrow coast-belt from Lamu to
the Umba River is leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar for a payment
of £17,000 per annum.
CHAPTER XV
THE ITALIANS IN AFRICA
The part played by Italy in the colonization of Africa after the
submergence of Roman civilization in that continent under the Arab
invasion was remarkable; it was not, however, a part attributable to
Italy as a whole, but to some of her component states. The little
principality of Amalfi had early dealings with the Saracens, and
imported from them some knowledge of the new navigation, and of that
newly-introduced group of fruit trees—the orange family—which was to
find a second home in Italy. Pisa, Genoa, and Venice alternately
warred and traded with the north of Africa. Naples obtained from
Egypt the domestic Indian buffalo so early as the 13th century.
Sicily was finally conquered by the Saracens in 832 A.C.; and
Sardinia from 712 became intermittently a Saracen possession for
more than three centuries until it was definitely rescued by the
Pisans after 1015 A.C. Consequently Sicilian and Sardinian renegades
figure in the early Muhammadan history of Tunis, Tripoli, and
Algeria. But the two states which before the Portuguese era shared
most prominently in the commerce of North Africa were Genoa and
Venice. Genoa had most to do with the Tunis littoral; she had
intermittent establishments at Tabarka and Bona, besides
occasionally holding Mehdia on the coast of Tunis. Genoa sent
several noteworthy seamen to explore the Atlantic, the north-west
coast of Africa, the Azores and Canary Islands; and it is believed
that Genoese ships may even have found their way along the west
coast of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea as early as the 14th century;
for in a volume of eight maps—the famous Laurentian Portulano,
executed by a Genoese about 1351 (and subsequently acquired for the
Laurentian Library at Florence), Africa for the first time in
history is delineated as a continent with a great western
projection, a tapering southern extremity and its bold eastern horn
of Somaliland. (This information, however, may have been derived
from Arabs during the Crusades.) Venice cultivated a friendship with
Egypt during and after the Crusades, and in this way obtained
control over the Indian trade, until the Portuguese discovered and
utilized the Cape route. Even then the interest of Italy in Africa
did not slacken. It was displayed chiefly in Rome during the 16th
and 17th centuries, when the Roman pontiffs took up geographical
research into the problems and possibilities of Africa with some
eagerness, especially with regard to the Congo, Abyssinia, and the
northern Sudan. Noteworthy amongst the Popes who promoted African
studies were Leo X, who encouraged the Italianized Moor, Johannes
Leo (“Leo Africanus”), to write in Italian a description of his
travels through the Nigeria and Northern Sudan[203]; Sixtus V, who
caused his chamberlain Filippo Pigafetta to publish much valuable
information from Portuguese travellers and missionaries concerning
the Congo and Abyssinia; Paul V, who sent a mission to the King of
Kongo in 1621 to report on that West African kingdom; and Urban
VIII, who in 1640 erected the Kongo Kingdom into an Apostolic
prefecture dependent on the Roman See and despatched many Italian
missionaries thither. His efforts were revived in 1652 by his
successor, Innocent X.
During the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Abyssinian Christian
students frequently journeyed to Rome and lived in Italy more or
less as pensioners of the Popes. Similarly, during the 17th and 18th
centuries so many Italian craftsmen, surgeons, physicians,
naturalists, and botanists, travelled in and through Tunisia and
Egypt, and stayed there permanently, that (besides the innumerable
Italian slaves captured by the pirates and absorbed into the
Muhammadan community) there grew up the great Levantine communities
in the principal towns of Egypt and Barbary. In 1600, an Italian
surgeon named Federigo Zeringhi killed two hippopotamuses at
Damietta, at the eastern mouth of the Nile; and in 1658 other
Italian travellers noted the extinction of the hippopotamus in the
Nile Delta. Italian influence sank to its lowest ebb in the late
18th century, but after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt many Italians
were employed in the service of that country, under Muhammad Ali.
Thousands of Italians (many of them Jews) also emigrated to Eastern
Algeria and Tunis in the first half of the 19th century and financed
the sponge fisheries off Tripoli. United Italy, in 1862, began to
assert herself at first in Tunis. During the sixties of the 19th
century the affairs of Tunis, instead of being debated only between
France and Britain, were submitted to the consideration of a third
power, the Kingdom of Italy; and in 1869 a triple control of these
three powers had been established over its finances. Then Britain
ceased to claim a consultative voice in the control of this
tottering Turkish regency, and France and Italy were left face to
face. Italy had to give way in 1881. She had, however, for some time
been cultivating an interest in Tripoli, where she had established,
as in Tunis and Egypt, “Royal schools” for the gratuitous teaching
of Italian; but a too vivid display of her interest in the affairs
of Tripoli after the French occupation of Tunis caused the Sultan of
Turkey to reinforce his garrison there by 10,000 soldiers, and Italy
decided that the time was not then. Italian influence of a more or
less Levantine, denationalized stamp had become well established in
Egypt before the British occupation, and had to a great extent
replaced that of France, the Italian language being employed as a
kind of Lingua Franca. The present writer can remember, when first
visiting Egypt in 1884, that most of the letter-boxes at the
post-offices had on them “Buca per le lettere,” while Italian was
much better understood in the towns than French, English of course
not being understood at all at that time. So that, if it be true
that Mr Gladstone in 1882 invited Italy to take the place of France
in a dual control with England over Egypt, the proposal was not, at
the time when it was made, such a preposterous one as it might now
appear.
So far back as 1873 Italy had cast an eye over Abyssinia; and one of
her great steamship companies had purchased a small site on Assab
Bay as a coaling station. Assab Bay, in the Red Sea, was on the
inhospitable, ownerless Danákil coast, not far from the Straits of
Bab-al-Mandib. In 1875 the suspicious movements of Italian ships
about Sokotra obliged England to take that island under her
protection. From 1870 onwards Italian missionaries and Italian
travellers had begun to move about this coast, and to explore the
south of Abyssinia. In 1880 the Italian Government revived the
Italian claim to Assab Bay, but did not take actual possession of it
until July 1882, when the bombardment of Alexandria had awakened
Europe to the apprehension of a great change in Egyptian affairs. An
acrimonious correspondence took place between Italy, Egypt, and
Turkey regarding this claim to Assab Bay; but Italy received the
tacit support of England, and when the Egyptian hold over the Sudan
crumbled, the Italians rapidly extended their occupation north and
south, until Italian influence was conterminous on the south with
the French Somaliland territory of Obok (and consequently opposite
the Straits of Bab-al-Mandib), and on the north reached to Ras
Kasar, 110 miles south-east of Suakin. In this manner Italy acquired
about 670 miles of Red Sea coast, including the ancient and
important port of Masawa. This coast in its partial condition of
sterility and its terribly hot climate would be of little value did
it not possess a cool, mountainous hinterland, considerable areas of
gum forest, and fertile river-valleys, besides having much grazing
ground for camels and other livestock, and commanding the easiest
and nearest approaches to Abyssinia. In one part of the coast the
natives are practically of Abyssinian stock, and Abyssinia has
constantly striven through centuries to maintain her hold on the
seaboard, but has always been driven back to her mountains by
maritime races, such as the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks. Seeing
Italy step in, after the downfall of Egypt, to replace that power in
Masawa and elsewhere, King John of Abyssinia soon fell out with the
Italians. The Italians had occupied an inland town called Sahati,
formerly an Egyptian stronghold. Ras Alula, an Abyssinian general,
with 10,000 men attacked 450 Italian troops on their way to Sahati,
and, as may be imagined, massacred nearly all of them. Italy felt
her honour at stake, and in spite of the expense, would have been
obliged to commence an Abyssinian war but for the good offices of
the British Government. Lord Salisbury sent Mr, afterwards Sir
Gerald, Portal on a mission to Abyssinia, which had the effect of
arranging a temporary peace between the Italians and King John.
Shortly afterwards King John of Abyssinia advanced against the
Mahdists, and was killed in battle. Italy then occupied the posts of
Keren and Asmara, which gave her control over the mountain passes
leading, on the north-east, into Abyssinia. She had previously
maintained a great friendliness with Menelik, the vassal king of
Shoa in the south. (Abyssinia proper may be said to be divided into
three principal districts, which sometimes become semi-independent
satrapies or kingdoms—Tigre on the north, Amhara in the centre, and
Shoa to the south.) When King John of Abyssinia died, Menelik, as
the strongest of his vassals, seized somewhat illegally the
Abyssinian Empire. Although now viewing the Italians in a more
suspicious manner, he nevertheless concluded a treaty with them,
which enabled him to negotiate a loan and to obtain a large quantity
of war material, but contained a clause dealing vaguely with the
“mutual protection” of the contracting parties. The Italian
protectorate over Abyssinia was recognized by England and by
Germany, but not by France or Russia. In order to annoy Italy as a
member of the Triple Alliance, France and Russia commenced
encouraging Menelik to a repudiation of the Italian protectorate,
and supplied him with quantities of arms and ammunition. Russia,
indeed, for years past had shown a disposition to concern herself
about Abyssinia on the pretext that the Greek Christianity of that
country linked it specially to Russia. She sent numerous
“scientific” expeditions thither, and also a party of Cossack-monks
to stimulate Abyssinian Christianity. On one occasion these
Cossack-monks even went to the length of seizing a port on the
French coast, near Obok. This was too much, even for the French; and
force was used to expel these truculent missionaries.
In March 1891, with a view to regulating future action on the part
of Italy, England had entered into an agreement delimiting the
respective spheres of British and Italian interests in East Africa;
and by this agreement Italy was permitted, if she found it necessary
for military purposes, to occupy the abandoned post of Kasala (then
in the hands of the Dervishes), on the frontiers of the Egyptian
Sudan. Accordingly this post was occupied by Italy in 1894. In the
beginning of 1895, the Italian forces being again attacked by the
Abyssinians, the war was carried into the enemy’s country, and after
several sanguinary defeats had been inflicted on the Abyssinians,
the greater part of the Tigre Province was occupied. Menelik, whose
administrative capital still remained at Adis Ababa in Shoa,
organized a vast army, and prepared to defend his kingdom. In the
early spring of 1896 General Baratieri (in fear lest he might be
superseded, and without waiting for sufficient reinforcements)
assumed the offensive against the Abyssinians in the vicinity of
Adua, with the result that he sustained a terrible reverse. Nearly
half the Italian army (13,000 men—7,000 only Italians, the rest
natives of the coast—against 90,000 Abyssinians), was killed, and of
the remainder many prisoners were taken. This was a terrible blow to
Italy, and its effects on European politics were far-reaching.
General Baldissera somewhat retrieved the position; but all thought
of an Italian protectorate over Abyssinia was at an end, a position
frankly recognized by Italy in her subsequent treaty of peace with
Menelik. She lost but little of her original colony of “Eritrea,”
but Eritrea seemed then of small value except as the stepping-stone
to Abyssinia. The French and Russians were triumphant; and French
adulation of the Emperor Menelik was scarcely worthy of a nation in
the high position of France.
A British mission was sent in 1897 to open up friendly relations
with Abyssinia, and to establish a political agency at the king’s
court. The treaty concluded seemed at first sight not wholly
satisfactory to British interests, as it yielded a portion of
Somaliland to Abyssinia, and did not provide for any delimitation of
Abyssinian boundaries on the west; but apparently there were other
clauses not made public which subsequently ensured the friendly
neutrality of Menelik during the Khartum campaign.
Since 1897, or rather since the institution of civil government in
1900, the colony of Eritrea has made a quiet progress towards
well-being and commercial prosperity insufficiently appreciated by
historians of Africa. “Colony” remains an inaccurate designation,
since the excessive heat of the lowlands makes Italian settlement in
large numbers impossible (there are only 3000 settlers in the whole
colony), while the uplands are either barren or sufficiently well
populated by a sturdy race of negroids—a mixture of Hamites,
Semites, and Nilotic negroes. But this native population (275,000)
has prospered and increased under Italian rule. A considerable trade
is being developed in the nuts of the hyphæne palms, exported to the
approximate annual value of £50,000. Hides and cattle, wax, gum,
coffee, ivory, and salt are also exported; and the annual
trade—imports and exports—now (1912) averages £1,000,000 in value.
The area of Eritrea, which extends southward to Cape Dameirah on the
Straits of Bab-al-Mandib, is 45,800 square miles.
Finding that Germany did not intend to push claims, half-developed,
to the Somali coast, Italy in 1889 began to make treaties in that
direction, and by the end of that year had established a
protectorate over the whole Somali coast from the west side of Cape
Guardafui to the mouth of the river Jub, a claim subsequently
confirmed by agreements with Britain and with the Sultan of
Zanzibar. Italian enterprise has led to a great deal of geographical
discovery near the Jub River and the Webi Shebeili, an eccentric
stream, which after arriving within a few miles of the sea and
meandering along parallel with the coast, loses itself in a sandy
desert near the mouth of the Jub River. Several Italian expeditions
came to grief in these Somali and Gala countries, but Italy held on,
and deserves to succeed in the long run. An Italian commercial
company was founded to deal with the exploitation of the Benadir
coast—once in the hands of the Sultan of Zanzibar—where there was
still some lucrative trade to be done in products of the interior.
But complaints were made as to mistreatment of the natives by the
Chartered Company; and in 1900 the Italian Government bought from
the Sultan of Zanzibar, for £144,000, the ports (_Benadir_: plural
of _Bandar_, a sea port) of Magdishu, Brawa, Marka, and Warsheikh
which had long been appanages of the Sultan of Zanzibar. The name of
the “colony” is now “Somalía Italiana,” Italian Somaliland, and the
capital is at Magdishu—the “Mogadoxo” of the 16th century
Portuguese. Inland, Italian rule stretches along the Jub or Juba
river as far as the Gala towns of Bardera and Lugh. Farther north,
along the coast, there is the native Somali sultanate of Obbia and
then the Somali tribal territory of Nogal. The total area of Italian
Somaliland is about 140,000 square miles, and the population (Gala,
Somali, Swahili negroes, Arabs, and helot tribes) is 400,000.
About the year 1904 a _rapprochement_ took place between France and
Italy relative to a settlement of colonial “aspirations,”
coincidently with agreements, secret or avowed, entered into between
France and Britain. It was then laid down that, should Italy at any
time establish herself in place of Turkey in the Tripolitaine, the
boundaries of her sphere of influence there should practically be
conterminous with those then recognized by France as being the
Turkish limits, comprising Tripoli (as far west as Ghadamés and
Ghat), Fezzan, and Cyrenaica. It is probable also that a similar
understanding was come to with Great Britain in the early part of
the 20th century. In fact it was openly stated in the literature of
the period that Italy had “ear-marked” the Tripolitaine as her share
of the Turkish Empire should any further curtailment of the Turkish
dominions take place. No official repudiation of such an idea
emanated from Germany or Austria. Nevertheless, when Italy did move
in this direction in 1911, it was from Germany and Austria that she
received the bitterest reproaches. The explanation of this changed
attitude was no doubt that between 1909 and 1911 an idea had grown
up both in Germany and Austria that Tripoli was now considered by
Italy as practically worthless from the point of view of a future
field for Italian colonization; and that it might be possible,
through some scheme of concessions and chartered companies, for the
Teutonic allies to effect a settlement and control over the
Tripolitaine (under the Turkish flag, possibly). Thence they might
build a trans-Saharan railway which would connect this German
foothold on the south Mediterranean coast with the future Congolese
Empire which Germany was resolving to shape in course of time out of
French, Belgian, and Portuguese possessions, by purchase, exchange,
and it may be some pressure. This idea bore fruit in an attenuated
form in the concessions made to Germany by France in north-west
Congoland in 1911 (see p. 234).
Italy had nearly gone to war with Turkey in 1910 over a dispute
regarding the Italian Post Offices in the Turkish Empire, and, as
her principal means of punishing Turkey, was preparing an expedition
to land in Tripoli. But the Turks gave way before a practical
ultimatum, and Italy was left without an excuse. Then followed the
announcement that a well-equipped Austrian “scientific” mission
would start for the thorough exploration of the Tripolitaine in the
winter of 1910-1911. Italy appealed to Turkey to grant similar
facilities for an Italian expedition, but received an evasive reply.
In July 1911 came the startling incident of Agadir, with all that it
implied, both as to North African and as to Central African aims on
the part of Germany. It was felt soon afterwards that Germany, being
baulked of a foothold in Morocco, would be more than ever anxious to
establish herself on the Tripoli coast. A quarrel was therefore
picked with Turkey on somewhat vague grievances; and a declaration
of war was followed by the immediate landing of an Italian army at
the town of Tripoli on September 20, 1911. Soon afterwards, in the
autumn and winter of 1911, all the other towns on the coast of
Tripoli and Cyrenaica were occupied by the Italians, whose Senate,
on February 23, 1912, ratified a decree annexing these provinces to
Italy, as far to the west, south, and east as the spheres of France,
Britain, and Egypt. The whole of the port of Solum and its vicinity
was given over to Egypt—a _solatium_ accepted without hesitation by
the Anglo-Egyptian government.
The European conscience of course was outraged, and much sympathy
was expressed with Turkey, but no assistance furnished. No doubt the
action of Italy in theory was a political crime. In a time of
perfect peace, she delivered an ultimatum to a neighbouring European
power based on ostensible grievances of a trifling kind; and before
that power could discuss any rectification of the said grievance,
two large provinces of its territory were forcibly annexed. In
theory the action of Italy was indefensible; in practice it was
probably a matter of stern necessity. The coast of Tripoli is
immediately opposite Italy, and it is far away from Turkey. A little
hesitancy, and this littoral might have first been assigned
commercially to German and Austrian subjects and subsequently have
passed for ever beyond the scope of Italian sea-power. Italy would
then have had the ironical punishment which Fate so often allots to
those who let “I dare not wait upon I would.” As to any regret being
felt for Turkey, let us consider for a moment what were her moral
claims to these two provinces. Their coast ports were seized by
Turkish pirates in the middle of the 16th century. Eventually there
grew up a Turco-Arab dynasty of the Karamanli Pashas to whom was
delegated by Turkey in the early 18th century the government of
Tripoli and Barka (Cyrenaica). The Karamanli Pashas, though they
sent out piratical fleets into the Mediterranean to attack the ships
of powers not in treaty relations with them, nevertheless did much
to open up Fezzan and the northern Sudan to European commerce; and
their friendship with Britain made it possible for the British
expeditions to Lake Chad and Bornu to take place in 1821-3. In 1835
the Turkish Government at Constantinople, alarmed by the spreading
power of Muhammad Ali and the French seizure of Algiers, intervened
in the affairs of Tripoli and annexed it; a guerilla warfare
continued for ten years afterwards. From 1850 onwards, a great
revival of the Sudan slave-trade took place through the Tripolitan
ports; and this was still more marked after Egypt, governed by the
Khedive Ismail, ceased to export slaves. Under direct Turkish rule,
the Tripolitaine became almost impenetrable by European travellers,
several of whom were assassinated within its limits. Nothing was
done for the improvement of Fezzan, of the oases, or even of the
Tripolitan coast towns. Locusts ravaged the crops unchecked; and the
desert sands steadily advanced on the cultivable regions. No public
works worth mentioning exist to testify to any benefits derived from
Turkish rule. Turkey has been tried in the balances of Tripolitan
history and found to be utterly wanting.
By the summer of 1912, the Italians had fought many battles and
skirmishes with the Turks and Arabs of the Tripolitaine. They had
been accused of the usual inhumanities of war by the usual
Anglo-Saxon journalist, but they were in possession of all the coast
towns, and in several of their lavish public works began to
reconcile the much-tried Moorish population to the dominance of the
“Rumi”—in this case a singularly truthful term, for it really was
the “Roman” come back to rule a land which fourteen hundred years
before (prior to the Vandal descent) he had raised to a position of
considerable fertility and prosperity. In July, 1912 the chief of
the great Senussi brotherhood (see page 236) made terms of peace and
amity with the Italians; and, as this edition goes to press, peace
has been concluded (Oct. 15, 1912) between Italy and Turkey on the
basis of the retrocession to the eldest daughter of Rome of two
among the North African provinces torn from her Mother State, first
by the Vandals and next by the Arab invasion of the 7th century A.C.
When Italy is enabled to take complete possession of this area of
400,000 square miles, she will find that barely one-third is
cultivable, and that the remainder consists of naked plateaus,
mountains of sun-baked rock, and vast “seas” of drifting sand. The
sand is a less hopeless proposition than the rock, for under it
often lie layers of imprisoned water, releasable by artesian wells.
But when the claims and requirements of the natives of “Libya” (as
the Italians call their scarcely-won possession) are duly provided
for, there will not remain much agricultural land for Italian
settlement. Yet there may arise many promising industries which will
provide employment for Italians in the towns on the coast. Moreover,
with time, patience, sympathy and understanding, the Italians will
find the million of Arabs, Jews, Berbers, Tibus, negroids and
negroes who make up the Tripolitan and Cyrenaic population a people
possessing many fine qualities of physique and endurance, who under
a wise and fraternal government may cooperate with the European in
making the desert blossom as the rose.
Whether Italy will be required to halt on the verge of the Sahara
and Libyan Deserts, or whether France and Britain, declining to play
the dog-in-the-manger, will withdraw on either side the skirts of
their spheres of influence so as to admit the Italian to direct
access to the Northern Sudan, on the borders of Darfur and Kanem, is
an eventuality on the knees of the gods, and likely to remain for
long among unborn events until the sands of the Libyan Desert prove
to be valuable enough to be worth claiming and crossing.
-----
Footnote 203:
Leo Africanus, who wrote the most important work on Africa in the
16th century, was born at Granada in southern Spain in 1494, just
after the capture of that place by the Spaniards. His family
migrated to Morocco, and “Hassan ibn Muhammad al Wizaz,” surnamed
“Al-Fasi,” was educated mainly at Fas or Fez: whence his nickname.
He travelled throughout North Africa and crossed the Desert to the
Niger; visited Guinea, Mandingoland, the Niger Bend, Agades,
Hausaland and Lake Chad, Egypt, and the Nile. Captured by Italian
pirates he was sold as a slave and presented to Pope Leo X, who
converted him, christened him, pensioned him, and encouraged him
to give to the world his valuable geographical and historical
information.
CHAPTER XVI
GERMAN AFRICA
German settlement in Africa is not altogether the outcome of the
scramble for Africa in 1884; German settlements on the West coast of
Africa date back to 1683, and Prussian or German protectorates in
Africa were discussed during the sixties of the 19th century. Ships
from Emden[204] and Gretsyl, belonging to the Friesland possessions
of the Electorate of Brandenburg (the mother of the Prussian
monarchy), stole out of the North Sea and took a part in the West
African trade in slaves and gold. These ships were much harassed by
the French, Portuguese, and Dutch, but the Brandenburgers, together
with the Prussian Company of Emden, managed to establish a foothold
at the close of the 17th century on the Gold Coast, where they held
for a time Grossfriedrichsburg and Takrana. The little island of
Arguin near Cape Blanco, off the Senegal coast, was bought by
Frederic William (the Great Elector of Brandenburg) from the Dutch,
and was held for some years. The Brandenburg Africa Company was
definitely founded in 1681, but by 1720 these North Germans,
distracted by quarrels at home, had abandoned their West African
enterprise.
During the forties of the 19th century some consideration was given
in Germany to the question of colonization, but attention was
directed to unoccupied territories in America, and nothing was said
about Africa. About 1850 German steamships (under the Hamburg flag)
began to trade along the West Coast of Africa; and in that year the
celebrated House of Woermann opened its first agencies at Monrovia
(Liberia) and elsewhere on the West Coast.
Many German missionaries and colonists between 1845 and 1865 went
out to South Africa to settle chiefly in Cape Colony, Namakwaland
and Natal. Between 1860 and 1865, a Hanoverian Baron, von der
Decken, was exploring Kilima-njaro and the East coast of Africa. It
began to dawn on him that Zanzibar and the Zanzibar coast would form
a legitimate field for German enterprise, settlement, and
colonization, “especially after the opening of the Suez Canal.”
Although von der Decken was killed on the Jub River in 1865, he
transmitted his opinions to Otto Kersten, who wrote an article in
1867, stating that von der Decken had had ideas of buying Mombasa
from the Sultan of Zanzibar in order to found a German settlement.
By this time Hamburg merchants had established a flourishing trade
at Zanzibar, and until 1885 the German representative at that place
was almost invariably a Hamburg man; indeed before the unification
of the German Empire there was a Hamburg (Hanseatic) consul at
Zanzibar, rather than a German representative. Until the deliberate
intervention of Germany on the East coast of Africa, these Hanseatic
merchants practically placed themselves under British protection.
In 1878 the German African Society of Berlin was founded as a branch
of the International African Association. It absorbed two similar
societies dealing with Africa, more from a geographical than
political point of view. German “international” stations were
founded between Zanzibar and Tanganyika, and German explorers made a
careful examination of the country round Lake Mweru and of the river
Lualaba. Other German explorers (Wissmann amongst their number)
traversed and mapped the southern half of the Congo basin; and, when
the present writer visited the Congo in 1882-3, the German
explorers, nominally in the service of the King of the Belgians,
made no secret of the desire of Germany to acquire control over the
Western Congo. This, no doubt, was one reason why Bismarck opposed
the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1883-4 (pp. 89-343). But, when the
conference he had negotiated was brought about, he felt that French
and Belgian opposition, united, and the absence of German treaty
claims, made a German Congo State impossible. The energies of
Germany were then directed towards the Niger, but here they were
thwarted by the National African, afterwards the Royal Niger
Company.
Several emissaries were, however, sent out to Nigeria by the
German Colonial Society. This institution was founded at
Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1882, and at once met with enthusiastic
support.
In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, German Protestant
missionaries had established themselves in Damaraland and
Namakwaland, in South-West Africa. In 1864 some of these
missionaries bought the estates of the Walfish Bay Copper Company,
to the north-east of Walfish Bay, and here they hoisted the German
flag. So early as 1877 Sir Bartle Frere began to regard the
proceedings of the German missionaries with suspicion, and, to
combat their action, proposed adding Damaraland to the South African
Empire. But the British Government would only permit the annexation
of Walfish Bay. About 1880 the German missionaries renewed their
complaints as to the treatment they suffered at the hands of the
natives and the lack of protection they received from the British
authorities. Prince Bismarck took up these claims, and asked the
British Government whether it was prepared to protect Europeans in
Damaraland and the Namakwa country. Lord Granville repudiated any
responsibility outside Walfish Bay, and informed the Governor of the
Cape that the Orange River was the north-western boundary of Cape
Colony. In 1881 the German missionaries asked for a gunboat to
protect their interests on the Namakwa coast. The Foreign Office was
consulted, and again repudiated any British claims to this territory
outside Walfish Bay. At the beginning of 1883 Herr Lüderitz of
Bremen, acting possibly under the inspiration of the German Colonial
Society, asked the German Government whether he would receive German
protection if he acquired territories in South-West Africa. He
received a guarded consent (after the German Foreign Office had
again consulted the British Government and received a vague reply).
In April 1883 the agents of Herr Lüderitz went with a German ship to
the Bay of Angra Pequena, 150 miles north of the Orange River. The
Germans landed there, and marched inland 100 miles to the German
mission station of Bethany. The Hottentot chief of that district
sold to these agents of Herr Lüderitz a piece of land 24 miles long
and 10 miles broad, with that breadth of frontage on the Bay of
Angra Pequena, including all sovereign rights. On the 2nd of May,
1883, the German flag was hoisted on the shore of Angra Pequena Bay
over the first German colony. When the news reached the Cape, an
English gunboat, the Boadicea, went to Angra Pequena, and was met at
that place by a German gunboat, whose commander informed the captain
of the Boadicea that he was in German waters, and could exercise no
authority there. Nearly five months had apparently elapsed between
the hoisting of the German flag at Angra Pequena and this visit of
the British warship, and during that period no action had been taken
in England. Nor, indeed, could any action have been taken after the
explicit manner in which both Lord Beaconsfield’s and Mr Gladstone’s
Administrations had disavowed any British claims to the coast of
South-West Africa. Too late, Lord Granville informed Prince Bismarck
that “any claim of sovereignty or jurisdiction on the part of a
foreign power over any part of the coast between the Portuguese
boundary and the Orange River would be regarded as an encroachment
on the legitimate rights of Cape Colony.” Even then Germany did not
proceed to immediate action, but repeatedly pressed the question
whether England did or did not intend to take upon herself the
administration of this Damara coast. The British Government sought
to evade a direct reply by consulting the Cape Government. No answer
was returned by the latter till May 1884, when the Cape offered to
take over the control of the whole coast up to Walfish Bay. But in
April Germany had made a statement that she would not recognize
British protection over this coast, and on the 21st of June she
secured from England a recognition of a German protectorate. If the
action of the British authorities was blameworthy (from a national
point of view) in refusing to take Germany seriously, and in
puzzling her by declining to proclaim a British protectorate between
the Orange River and the Portuguese possessions, the blame falls
equally upon the Cape Parliament. It was the parsimony of Cape
Colony which feared to be led into expense, coupled with the
shortsightedness of the English Ministry of the day which refused to
believe in the possibility of Germany desiring colonies, that
permitted Germany to establish herself as a South African power. As
to the German Government, it behaved throughout with perfect
“correctness.” It gave the British Government ample time and
opportunity to make good any preceding rights.
Germany did not act here as she did in the Cameroons, where she
merely informed the British Government that Dr Nachtigal had been
commissioned by the German Government to visit the West coast of
Africa in order to report on the state of German commerce, and asked
that he might be furnished with recommendations to the British
authorities in West Africa. Her ambassador did, it is true, mention
that Dr Nachtigal would conduct negotiations connected with certain
questions, but the context implied that these questions were
commercial matters. Therefore the British Government, which had
already made arrangements for establishing a protectorate over the
whole coast between Lagos and the Cameroons, did not cause Consul E.
H. Hewett to return to his post with any undue hurry. Dr Nachtigal
arrived at the Isles de Los, on the Sierra Leone coast of Africa, on
the 1st of June, 1884, with the intention of taking under German
protection the River Dubreka, situated in the district which the
French call Rivières du Sud; but, as there was some doubt as to
French claims, nothing further was done at the time; and, when
afterwards the German flag was hoisted, it was at once removed on
the receipt of a French protest. On the 5th of July Nachtigal
reached a district on the east of the English Gold Coast colony, now
known as Togoland. Here arrangements were made with the native
chiefs and the country was declared a German protectorate. Then Dr
Nachtigal steamed right across to the Cameroons. Here he was just in
time. The principal chief, King Bell, had been won over by the gift
of £1000 to sign a treaty with Germany. The other chiefs refused to
do so, and Bell himself waited for a week to see if Consul Hewett
would arrive. However, when the Consul did come on the 19th of July,
King Bell had signed the treaty, and the German flag had been
hoisted over the Cameroons River. Consul Hewett was in time to carry
out the rest of his programme, and, so far as actual treaty-signing
went, the British had only lost a small piece of the coast-line they
had determined to secure; but, in order that a grudging spirit might
not be shown to Germany, she was finally allowed to take over all
the Cameroons district[205].
In East Africa Germany’s procedure may be summarized thus. Count
Pfeil, Dr Carl Peters, and Dr Jühlke arrived at Zanzibar on the 4th
of November, 1884, as deck passengers, dressed like mechanics.
Officially discountenanced by the German Consul, they nevertheless
left at once for the interior; and on the 19th of November the first
treaty was signed with a native chief, and the German flag was
hoisted in Uzeguha. Eventually other treaties were concluded in
Nguru, Usagara, Ukami, and other adjoining countries, which resulted
in a solid block of 60,000 square miles being ostensibly secured on
paper. Dr Peters hastened back to Berlin, and on the 12th of
February, 1885, he had already founded a German East African
Company, to whom he transferred his treaty rights. On the 27th of
February following, the German Emperor issued an official notice of
the extension of his protection to the territories acquired, or
which might be further acquired. In vain the Sultan of Zanzibar
protested. The British representative was instructed to support
German claims, and eventually it was decided that the Sultan of
Zanzibar’s authority was to be limited to a strip ten miles broad
along the coast between Cape Delgado and Somaliland.
In May 1885 the Foreign Office informed Germany that a British
company desired to develop the country between the Mombasa coast and
the Victoria Nyanza. The foundation for this scheme was the treaties
which the present writer had concluded on or near Kilima-njaro in
the preceding year, and which at the suggestion of the Foreign
Office had been transferred to the late Mr James Hutton of
Manchester. The Sultan of Zanzibar, however, refused to give in,
even to British representations, and made strenuous efforts to
support his claims to the hinterland of the East African coast. On
the 7th of August, 1885, a German squadron hove to in front of
Zanzibar and delivered an ultimatum. The Sultan bowed to the
inevitable, and recognized the German territorial claims, including
a protectorate over Vitu[206], a little patch of territory near the
Tana River. Gradually, however, matters settled down. An agreement
was come to in 1885 between the British and German Governments for a
recognition with France of the independence of the Sultan of
Zanzibar, and the definition of his exact dominions by a joint
commission. Eventually, in 1886, the respective British and German
spheres in East Africa were defined. In the same forceful manner the
Germans had taken Kilima-njaro. Except for the bulge of
Kilima-njaro, a line drawn from Wanga on the coast (near the river
Umba) straight to the north-east shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza is
the Anglo-German frontier in East Africa. The limit of the British
sphere on the north was the Tana River, Germany maintaining her hold
on Vitu. The German Government then came to terms with Portugal, and
agreed that the territories of the two powers in East Africa should
march together as far as the east coast of Lake Nyasa. Germany also
concluded treaties along the Somali coast.
The German Colonization Society and the German Colonial Society
subsequently united under the latter title, while the German East
African Association had been incorporated by Imperial charter.
Further subsidiary companies were organized; and by 1888 numerous
plantations had been established in the north of German East Africa,
near the coast. In 1888 the German East Africa Company obtained from
the Sultan of Zanzibar the lease for 50 years of the whole of the
Sultan’s coast territory from the Ruvuma River to the Umba. A great
development then took place in the Company’s operations, which were
more and more identified with the German Government. A staff of over
60 officials was sent out to carry on the new administration. Sir
Charles Euan Smith, who had succeeded Sir John Kirk as British Agent
at Zanzibar, warned the German administration in a friendly manner
that, unless greater care for Arab susceptibilities was shown in
replacing the Sultan of Zanzibar’s government on the coast, troubles
with the Arabs might ensue. His warning was only too well founded.
Five days after taking over the administration of the country—on the
21st of August, 1888—disturbances fomented by the Arab and Swahili
population broke out, and in another month the Germans held very few
posts on the coast or in the interior. An animosity also began to be
directed not only against the Germans, but against all Europeans,
and the situation became very serious. In 1889, the resources of the
Company having broken down, Captain Hermann Wissmann (afterwards
Major von Wissmann) was appointed Imperial Commissioner for East
Africa. With 1000 native troops, mainly Sudanese recruited with the
help of the British Government, 200 German sailors, and 60 German
officers and non-commissioned officers, von Wissmann carried on a
vigorous campaign against the Arabs and Swahili, and by the end of
1889 he had put down the revolt and captured and executed the leader
of it, Bushiri. It took six months longer, however, to quiet some of
the interior districts and those near the River Ruvuma.
In the middle of 1890 Germany concluded a very wise arrangement with
England, by which, as has already been described in another chapter,
all German possessions to the north of the British boundary at the
Umba River were given up, and a British protectorate over Zanzibar
was recognized, while the German boundaries were carried inland to
the frontier of the Congo State. On the south, Great Britain was
admitted to the south end of Tanganyika, and secured all the west
coast of Lake Nyasa. From 1890 to the present time German settlement
and the development of German East Africa have gone on without any
disagreeable check so far as the Arabs or the European powers are
concerned. In 1893 a large and well-appointed steamer, the Hermann
von Wissmann, was placed on Lake Nyasa; and the British authorities
round that lake were amply rewarded for any help they might have
contributed towards its conveyance thither by the services which the
German steamer afterwards rendered in acting as a transport for a
portion of the British forces in the last war against the Lake Nyasa
Arabs. At the beginning of the 20th century the Germans had placed a
fine war-steamer on Lake Tanganyika.
On the Zanzibar coast new quarters in the old Arab towns sprang up
like magic, the streets being widened, kept clean, and well lit.
Flourishing plantations covered many acres of what was formerly
waste land. There was fair security for life and property, even in
the distant interior. The Arabs became reconciled to German rule,
while on the other hand the German officials slowly learnt the art
of dealing tactfully with subject races. Since 1890, when the coast
strip leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar was finally purchased from
him, the whole of German East Africa has been under direct Imperial
administration. This German possession has now an area of about
384,000 square miles, with a population—mainly Bantu
negroes—estimated at 10,000,000. The Asiatic settlers are stated at
only 7000, and the Europeans (mainly Germans) at 3800. It is likely
to turn out in course of time a flourishing tropical settlement; not
a country which Germans could colonize in the sense that Australia
or Canada are colonizable, but a Ceylon, a Java, a Southern India,
where the German planter may make a competence, where the goods of
Germany may find unrestricted markets, and where the Teuton may
educate and raise into a higher state of civilization a vigorous
negro people—some tribes of which, like the Wanyamwezi and the
Waswahili, possess fine qualities. The plateau region to the north
and north-east of Tanganyika may support here and there small but
flourishing colonies of white men. British Indians are already
settling somewhat thickly in the coast towns and are exchanging
their nationality for that of German subjects.
In 1891, scarcely two years after Wissmann had broken the power of
the Arabs, the Germans found themselves fighting a more difficult,
brave and unaccountable enemy, the Wa-hehe of the plateau region
south of the Rufiji river. These people seem to have some distant
affinity with the Zulu in appearance, character, and mode of
warfare. This may be due to their having been influenced by the
Wa-ngoni further south (partly in Portuguese, partly in German East
Africa), the Wa-ngoni (under various tribal names) being derived
from Zulu clans which left South-east Africa early in the 19th
century and crossed the Zambezi, reaching northwards nearly to the
Victoria Nyanza. The German war with the Wa-hehe lasted till about
1893. Then ensued a period of comparative peace till the year 1905,
when a most serious native rising took place in the southern
districts of the colony, between North Nyasa and the Kilwa coast.
Nearly all the tribes, Muhammadan and Pagan, joined in attempting to
oust the Germans. Officials, Catholic missionaries (male and
female), planters, and traders were murdered. It took nearly a year
and a half to subdue this rebellion completely, and something like
120,000 natives (adults and children) died during this struggle, or
from its immediate results; they were killed in battle, by famine
resulting from the destruction of crops or neglect of agriculture,
or by disease. The effects of this depopulation are still to be seen
in the coast belt of Kilwa and in the Ruvuma watershed. The Wa-ngoni
(or Magwangwara as they are sometimes called) were almost
exterminated—an achievement by no means to be greatly mourned, since
they had kept East Africa (Lake Nyasa to the Indian Ocean) unsettled
by their raids, sparsely populated, and scarcely cultivated for some
fifty years previously. The Germans subdued this native rising with
a small army of German officers and non-commissioned officers, and
Masai and Sudanese soldiers, and even brought the Oceanic negro of
New Guinea face to face with his African brother for the first time
for something like three hundred thousand years! But these Papuan
and Melanesian soldiers were not altogether a success.
It was alleged that this great rising was caused by misgovernment,
and by imposing on the people labour taxes which were most
unpopular, especially when this forced labour was leased out to
conscienceless European planters. Herr Dernburg—then German Colonial
minister—came out to investigate the cause of this revolt in 1907.
Since his recommendations were adopted the whole of German East
Africa has been peaceful.
In 1890 railway construction began, firstly in a line from Tanga (a
northern port) to Usambara and eventually Kilimanjaro. This at
present (1912) has a length of 108 miles. In the early years of the
20th century a Dar-es-Salaam[207]-Tanganyika line was begun which
already reaches Kilimatinde, 240 miles inland. Another line,
starting from Kilwa on the southern coast, aims at the northern end
of Lake Nyasa.
The later history of the Cameroons has been much like that of German
East Africa—revolts, “sharp lessons,” then attacks by hostile tribes
inland, which are quelled by expeditions and the building of forts,
followed by other revolts still further in the interior, to be
succeeded by still further victories and advances; but on the whole
increasing peace and order throughout the country, and a great
development of trade. Unfortunately, as amongst some officials of
the East Africa Company and Administration, so among a few of the
Government servants in the Cameroons, there were instances of great
cruelties committed between 1887 and 1896, cruelties which led to a
serious revolt among the negro soldiery (1895). Germany wisely did
not hush up these affairs, but investigated them in an open court
and punished the guilty. It will be seen, I fancy, when history
takes a review of the foundation of these African states, that the
unmixed Teuton—Dutchman or German—is on first contact with subject
races apt to be harsh and even brutal, but that he is no fool and
wins the respect of the negro or the Asiatic, who admire rude
strength; while his own good nature in time induces a softening of
manners when the native has ceased to rebel and begun to submit.
There is this that is hopeful and wholesome about the Germans. They
are quick to realise their own defects, and equally quick to amend
them. As in commerce so in government, they observe, learn and
master the best principles. The politician would be very
shortsighted who underrated the greatness of the German character,
or reckoned on the evanescence of German dominion in strange lands.
In 1904-5 there were risings of the Bantu negroes against German
authority in the western part of the Cameroons[208] colony. These
were suppressed after much bush fighting, but the cause of them
being oppressive legislation, the Governor of the Cameroons was
changed in 1906, since which time the whole country has been
peaceful. In the far interior German influence was established over
the banks of the Shari and of Lake Chad by 1902; and about the same
time Germans began to open up relations with the “Fang” country in
the western part of the Congo watershed. Railways were begun in the
first decade of the 20th century. One from Victoria (Ambas Bay—the
original settlement of the Baptist mission—see p. 244) runs round
the southern flanks of Cameroons Mountain to Buëa, the German
capital (3000 ft. above sea-level); another from the Cameroons river
(Duala) to the Manenguba mountains and Bayoñ (this will eventually
link up with the Victoria-Buëa line and be built northwards towards
the Shari river); and a third from Duala south-eastward to the
Nyanza river.
In 1911-12, Germany obtained from France additional territory on the
south and west of the Cameroons Colony to the extent of 100,000
square miles, bringing this African dominion eastwards into the
Central Sudan, to the Mubangi river, main Congo, and north coast of
the Gaboon. Germany thus secures the whole basin of the Sanga river
(a valuable waterway into the Fang country) and now possesses in the
Cameroons—or as it is spelt in the German fashion, Kamerun—an Empire
in Western Equatorial Africa of some 292,000 square miles, with a
population of negroes and negroids numbering about 4,000,000. The
country is rich in valuable products, and already the annual trade
amounts to about £2,200,000 in value.
In South-west Africa Germany, by arrangement with Portugal and
eventually with England, secured a protectorate or sphere of
influence over a very large stretch of country—322,450 square
miles—bounded on the north by Portuguese West Africa, on the south
by the Orange River, and on the east by British Bechuanaland, with,
in addition, a long, narrow strip, which reached the Zambezi at its
confluence with the Chobe. This country along the coast-line is very
barren; it is, in fact, a hopeless desert, most hopeless of all
between the Orange River and Walfish Bay. But the interior is
mountainous, and in these mountains there are stretches of
well-watered country where cattle are kept in enormous herds.
Moreover, this mountainous country is very healthy. With the Bantu
Herero, who inhabit the northern part of German South-west Africa,
the Germans at first got on very well, thanks to the influence
exerted by the German missionaries; but with the pure-blood and
half-caste Hottentots, who inhabit the southern section of the
colony and almost all the coast-belt, the Germans have been
constantly at war. These Hottentots, many of whom have some slight
infusion of Dutch blood which renders them more warlike than their
relations in Cape Colony, are Christians of a kind, wear clothes,
and bear Dutch names. They at first found a leader in a certain
Hendrik Witbooi, who again and again inflicted defeats on small
parties of German soldiers, made treaties and broke them, and from
first to last gave the Germans a great deal of trouble. Although he
could boast of but a paltry number of followers, he fought in a
waterless, mountainous country, where concealment was easy and
pursuit difficult. In 1894 he made peace with the Germans and
remained more or less their ally till 1904. As he spoke Cape Dutch
fluently he soon mastered German, and for a time seemed really
reconciled to the Germanization of his people—already Calvinist or
Lutheran Christians.
But in 1903, the Hottentots living on the north of the Orange River
and largely mixed with Boer blood—the Bondelzwarts—rose against the
Germans; and, although they only numbered some five thousand
fighting men at most, they occupied the German forces for four years
before they were conquered, mainly by extermination. The deserts in
which they lived (yet from which they were being dispossessed) were
remote and inaccessible except from the British possessions. Whilst
the German forces were attacking the Bondelzwarts, the Bantu Damara
or Ova-herero in the far north broke out into rebellion, attacked
the German settlers and traders without warning, and murdered some
of them, destroying all the homesteads they could find. The excuse
they gave for this furious outburst was that, when they signed the
original treaties of friendship and acceptance of protection, they
had no idea they were signing away their native land; and that
subsequently much vacant land in the Damara country had been given
or sold by the German Chartered Company[209] or government to white
settlers, some of whom also on unfair pretexts had taken away native
cattle. Reinforcements came out from Germany under General von
Trotha, and the mass of the Herero army was attacked in its
stronghold, the Waterberg range of mountains in about Lat. S. 21°.
The Herero warriors were slaughtered in numbers; nevertheless, the
larger proportion of the fighting men succeeded in evading the
encircling movement of the Germans and escaped under the leadership
of a chief, Samuel Maherero, and fought against the Germans for
months after their great defeat in the Waterberg mountains in August
1904[210].
In the early autumn of that year the Hottentots broke out again with
renewed vigour, first under the leadership of a Herero half-caste,
Morenga, and a few days later under the renowned Hendrik Witbooi.
The Nama Hottentots, as a signal of their defiance of the German
power, assassinated about sixty German settlers in the south-east
part of the Colony, scrupulously distinguishing between them and the
Boers or British residing in or travelling through the country.
These (as the Herero had done, far to the north) they left uninjured
in any way. General von Trotha was baffled by the double
enemy—Hottentots and Bastards in the south, Herero in the north. He
issued proclamations of a somewhat savage tone in his exasperation,
and these being annulled by the Imperial Government he resigned and
returned to Germany in 1905. In the autumn of that year a new
governor—von Lindequist—arrived, and by reasonable measures of
conciliation and by the allotment of definite native reserves made
peace with the Ovaherero. Samuel Maherero however preferred to
remain on British territory, where he had taken refuge. Since the
close of 1906, however, there has been no more trouble between the
Germans and the Herero, who are slowly recovering from the awful
loss of life and diminution of their notable nation during this
terrible war of fierce hatred on either side[210]. The Ovambo
farther north have given signs of unrest, but are believed now to
have become reconciled to German rule.
Hendrik Witbooi died in 1905; and Morenga was finally killed by a
British police patrol, in August 1907, in the Kalahari desert. He
had fled to British territory in 1906, but had not been surrendered
to the Germans. On the contrary, he was treated as a political
refugee and given every chance of settling down peacefully. He only
abused this kindness, however, in order to organize attacks on the
Germans from the secure basis of the British frontier. Therefore his
death in a skirmish with British mounted police was entirely his own
fault.
By 1908 all these troubles were at an end, and German South-west
Africa was free from native foes. But the long war in these deserts
and bare, rocky mountains had cost the Germans the lives of over
five thousand soldiers and settlers, and an expenditure of 15
millions sterling! So that it would have been cheaper at the
commencement of this colony’s history to have carried out a fair
land-settlement which would have contented the natives and still
have left more than half the area of South-west Africa at the
disposal of the white man.
In 1908 diamonds were discovered in the sandy desert country at the
back of Luderitz Bay. Their quality was that of the Brazilian or
Liberian diamond, rather than of the type of Cape Colony or
Transvaal stone. Though as yet not large in size they were of good
“water,” and in 1909 the total value of the diamonds exported was
£771,776 in value. In succeeding years the supply fell off somewhat.
In the northern part of the Colony, at Otavi and Tsumeb, copper
mining is carried on; and the output of copper is sufficient to
warrant the construction of railways of considerable length. Cotton
cultivation has been begun, and the keeping of cattle, sheep, and
Angora goats has revived once more with the cessation of warfare.
The amount of sheep indeed is beginning to approach a total of half
a million. Cattle thrive well in the interior, especially in the
northern half. So also do horses, camels, asses and pigs. Camels
have proved most useful for the desert regions of the coast-belt and
the south.
The guano islands along the coast all belong to British subjects and
are part of Cape Colony. So also is the only really good harbour on
the coast—Walfish Bay. This little enclave of 430 square miles
belongs to Cape Colony and is British territory. It would be an act
of not wasted generosity some day to transfer this little patch to
Germany for the benefit of German South-west Africa. Its retention
by the British Empire is of the dog-in-the-manger type of policy. It
is no longer of any use to us, nor does the want of it cripple
German South-west Africa; yet its possession by Germany would
relieve her of the continued heavy expenditure needed to maintain
the adjoining Swakopmund as a landing-place for passengers and
goods.
A railway of over two hundred miles now connects the southern port,
Luderitzhafen (Angra Pequena) with the inland settlement of
Keetmanshoop, and will be extended some day to the Orange River and
the Cape railway system. Another and longer railway (359 miles) goes
from Swakopmund to the Tsumeb copper mines. A third railway (237
miles) of small gauge—the first constructed—connects Swakopmund with
the administrative capital, Windhoek. There is also a short line
between the Otavi copper mines and Groot Fontein. So that, between
1900 and 1912, Germany has constructed over 1000 miles of railway in
her colony of South-west Africa.
This indeed comes nearer to being a real colony than any other
possession of Germany in Africa. Out of a total population of not
quite 100,000, nearly 11,000 are Germans, the rest of the twelve to
thirteen thousand whites being Boers and British. (The negro
population—Bantu, Hottentot, Bushman, and half-castes—only numbers
about 85,000 since the wars of 1903-7.) The climate is nearly
everywhere healthy for the white man, and the tsetse fly is almost
completely absent from the entire colony of 322,450 square miles.
Only in the extreme north, near the Kunene River, the Kubango, and
Kwando is there malarial fever. In the interior, more or less
parallel with the coast, are mountain ranges rising to considerable
altitudes—8972 feet is the highest point. They enclose fertile
valleys, and their mists and rains nourish perennial streams, which
however do not send their waters to the sea except in flood time.
Indeed over much of this central and northern mountain region the
average yearly rainfall, between October and April, is only 20
inches.
Germany has made far from a bad bargain with Fate in investing in
what was thought at the time by ignorant statesmen in England and
Cape Colony to be a derelict portion of South Africa. Like parts of
the French Sahara, German South-west Africa may turn out to be a
singularly healthy and wealthy tract of land. But can it remain long
a German Colony? Will not the attraction of the South African Union
be more powerful than the fiat of governments five thousand miles
away in London and Berlin? The parallel instances of Texas, Florida,
and the United States may be quoted some day, very appositely. But
such a movement, if it ever does come about, will be a peaceful one
because it will be irresistible; and it may be coeval with a very
close alliance in Europe, Asia, and Tropical Africa between Germany
and her oldest Colony—Britain.
Togoland, between the Gold Coast and Dahomé, became a German
protectorate in 1884. It has an area of 33,700 square miles and a
negro population of about 1,000,000. Its boundaries were finally
settled with France and Britain in 1899, and the neutral sphere,
which contained the towns of Yendi and Salagá, was divided between
Germany and Britain. Togoland stretches northward to the 11th degree
of N. Lat. (its boundary with France) and includes the important
Muhammadan towns of Yendi and Sansanne Mangu, in which the trading
population is mainly Hausa. The administrative capital is Lome on
the very narrow coast-belt. High and less unhealthy land for
European settlement has been discovered in the interior; there have
been no disturbances with the natives, and German trade has
prospered. The annual total of imports and exports is now (1912)
about £900,000. There is a railway, in all of about 130 miles, which
links up Lome with other coast stations and with the hill stations
in the interior. Togoland is the only German colonial possession
which is self-supporting and does not require an annual subsidy
towards its upkeep. The land has not been taken from the natives,
and the native “Kings” and chiefs not only remain in power but are
much consulted by the German government. Consequently there has
never been any native rising or discontent with the white man’s
over-rule.
Germany now possesses an African Empire of 1,032,000 square miles
with a population of about 14,500,000 negroes and 30,700
whites—mainly Germans.
----------------------------------------------------------------
GERMAN AFRICA
Plate VI.
[Illustration]
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[red] _Area of German Possessions in 1885_
[yellow] ” ” ” _1912_
----------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Footnote 204:
East Friesland.
Footnote 205:
Perfunctory regret for such concessions may be spared when it is
borne in mind that the United States of Europe (as they would have
become in an Anti-British League) would hardly have allowed even
Free-trade England to acquire _all_ the coast-line of the Dark
Continent.
Footnote 206:
The concession of Witu, or Vitu, had been obtained by the Denhardt
brothers on the 8th of April, 1885, and a German protectorate was
declared on the 27th of May. For subsequent history see page 384.
Footnote 207:
Dar-es-Salaam is the capital of German East Africa.
Footnote 208:
Kamerun is the official spelling of the old Portuguese name for
this region (Camarões) which we render “Cameroons.”
Footnote 209:
In the early days of the colony, when Germany rather despaired
about the unprofitable region she had annexed on the map, she
brought into existence the German South-west Africa Company in
order to introduce capital into the country. To this company were
given extensive land and mineral concessions without any regard
whatever for native rights or sentiment. Hence, when these rights
were exercised, arose much trouble with the settled negro
population.
Footnote 210:
There are said to be only about 20,000 Herero people now living in
Damaraland. It would be a great pity if this intelligent, strong
race of Bantu negroes disappeared. They must have an interesting
history behind them, which is being slowly pieced out by tradition
and by the etymology of their remarkable language, by some
regarded as the “Sanskrit of the Bantu.” They seem to have
emigrated almost direct to South-West Africa from East Equatorial
Africa some fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago, bringing their
long-horned cattle with them.
CHAPTER XVII
THE FRENCH IN MADAGASCAR
The Island of Madagascar is possibly alluded to by the Alexandrian
Greek geographer, Ptolemy, who wrote during the 2nd century after
the birth of Christ, as “Menouthias[211],” and by other classical
geographers as Monouthis or Menoutheseas; though it is more probable
that at most Pemba, Zanzibar or one of the Komoros was meant both by
Ptolemy’s informants and the unknown authors of the Periplus of the
Erythræan Sea who first used the term “Menouthias” a century earlier
(about 50 A.C.). Then comes a break, and when the study of geography
is resumed in Europe the allusions to this island are more obvious,
and evidently come through post-Islamic Arabs; a large island in the
Indian Ocean is alluded to as “Albargoa,” and “Manutia-Alphil.”
Older Arab names were rendered in medieval European geography as
Serandab, Phenbalon, Quambalon. Later an allusion is made to it in
Arab writings as “Jazirat-al-Komr”—“Island of the Full Moon”; but
this name more probably applies to what are still called the Komoro
Islands, an adjoining archipelago. On the maps of the Venetian
geographers Fra Mauro and Andrea Bianco, between 1457 and 1459,
wherein use has been made of Arab information, the Cape of Good Hope
is indicated (forty years before the discovery of Diaz) as Cavo di
Diab(olo), and Madagascar is given as a triangular island to the
north-east, and has on it the names of Sofala and Xengibar. From
Arab sources we learn that an Indian dau in 1420 rounded the
southernmost point of Africa—“Cape Diab”—and, turning again
eastward, sailed back past Madagascar, on the shore of which island
they discovered a rukh’s egg[212]. Madagascar was mentioned and
described in much fuller detail and with allusions to the gigantic
bird (whose fossil remains were discovered in the 19th century) by
Marco Polo the Venetian explorer at the beginning of the 14th
century. Polo obtained his information from Arab sea-captains of the
Persian Gulf. More authentic news of Madagascar was sent to Portugal
near the end of the 15th century by Pedro de Covilham, whose
journeys overland to India have been alluded to in Chapter IV. On
the 1st of February, 1506, a Portuguese fleet sent out by King
Manoel, under Francisco de Almeida, discovered the east coast of
Madagascar; but the island had already been sighted by a Portuguese
sea-captain on the 10th August, 1500, and named “São Lourenço,”
because the discovery was made on St Laurence’s Day. In 1507 its
west coast was visited and its shape more clearly defined by Gomez
d’Abreu. The name “Madagascar,” like the adjective “Malagasy,” is
probably of native origin, the former having been introduced in its
present form by Marco Polo and the Portuguese, and the latter by the
French.
It was not until 1540 that any Portuguese actually settled on the
island, and those who made this venture at its south-east extremity
were nearly all massacred in 1548. At the end of the 16th century
the Dutch visited Madagascar, and about the same time Dominican,
Ignatian, and Lazarist monk-missionaries made an unsuccessful
attempt to obtain a hearing for Christianity. Between 1618 and 1640
English and Dutch adventurers nibbled at Madagascar, but the hostile
and treacherous attitude of the natives and the unhealthy climate of
the island coasts caused these attempts to end invariably in
disaster. In 1642, however, the French “Company of the East” was
formed under the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu with the main
object of colonizing Madagascar. Pronis, a French Protestant of
dissolute habits, was sent out as Governor. Two years later a rival
project for the same purpose was started in England under the
presidency of Prince Rupert, and a small station was founded at St
Augustine’s Bay; but this was soon after abandoned, and the Company
broken up on account of the Civil War in England.
The name of the first French settlement at the south-east extremity
of Madagascar was “Fort Dauphin.” Pronis, whose immoral life shocked
the French settlers, was replaced as Governor by Flacourt, but the
fortunes of the settlement were chequered. The parent Company got
into trouble, and its charter was abolished. The royal concession of
Madagascar was then bandied about from nobleman to nobleman, and was
finally sold to Louis XIV, who, having reassumed these rights on
behalf of the crown, sent out the Duc de la Meilleraye. One of the
officers of the staff of the Duc de la Meilleraye was Vacher de
Rochelle, who explored the country, and acquired the rare advantage
of winning the friendship of the Malagasy. Vacher de Rochelle, for
some unknown reason nicknamed and ordinarily known as La Case[213],
was admired by the natives for his courage, and was invited to marry
the heiress of a powerful native chief. He did so, and becoming
dissatisfied with the mismanagement of the French settlement retired
into the interior, and became King-Consort of the state of Ambole at
the death of his father-in-law. Nevertheless, when the French got
into difficulties with the natives and were hard pressed, Vacher de
la Rochelle came to their assistance with great bravery. This
remarkable person, whose life should be written by some framer of
romances, died about 1671, assassinated by a native.
In 1664 the French East India Company was founded, and took over
Madagascar amongst other concessions under the pretentious title of
Gallia Orientalis. As if to punish them for this overweening
assumption, a great massacre occurred eight years afterwards,
leading to the almost entire extinction of the French settlers round
Fort Dauphin. The few survivors fled to the Island of Bourbon, which
the French had taken in 1638-43. Nevertheless, in spite of this
disaster, the French Government calmly annexed Madagascar by an
Order in Council of 1686, which was confirmed in 1719, 1720, and
1725.
At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century,
European pirates—English, French, and Dutch—who had begun to infest
the eastern seas, and to trade in defiance of the commercial
monopolies given to various Chartered East Indian companies,
gradually made Madagascar their headquarters, and formed several
strongly fortified settlements hidden away up creeks or inlets or
the mouths of rivers. Some of these pirates founded a cosmopolitan
city of freedom which they called “Libertatia,” on the island of St
Marie, off the east coast of Madagascar. They were swept away by
British and French war vessels in 1722-23. Numerous half-caste
offspring—known as _Malata_ by the Malagasies—arose from these
unions with the native women; and men of this hybrid type sometimes
became powerful chiefs.
In 1750 the French East India Company created a settlement on the
island of St Marie de Madagascar, which underwent violent
vicissitudes of fortune for the first few years of its life. In 1768
Fort Dauphin was for a short time reoccupied. In that year a man of
superior scientific attainments, M. Poivre, was appointed Governor
of Mauritius and initiated a scientific investigation of Madagascar
by sending thither a French naturalist, Philibert Commerson, who, as
the result of his brief examination of the flora and fauna, pointed
out the isolated character of Madagascar. In 1774 the French
naturalist Sonnerat[214] visited Madagascar, and discovered the
Ravenala or “Traveller’s Tree,” and that extraordinary aberrant
lemur, the Ayeaye (_Chiromys_).
In 1772 Madagascar was visited by a type of adventurer then very
uncommon, an Austrian Pole, called Benyowski, who alternately
offered his allegiance to France and England, and ultimately tried
to carve out for himself a native Malagasy principality, as the
result of which he was killed by the French in 1786.
Allusions were made in the first two chapters of this book to the
Malay invasion of Madagascar. This great island seems to have at
first been peopled by negro or negroid races from East Africa, while
Arabs had from very early days settled for trading purposes in the
adjoining Komoro Islands[215] and in the north of Madagascar. But at
a period of time probably antecedent to the Christian era Madagascar
was invaded by a people of Malay stock, coming thither from the
Malay Archipelago. Despite the vast distance which separates Java
and Madagascar, there is a current always streaming from the Sunda
Islands towards the east coast of Madagascar and the Komoro Islands;
another flows more towards Ceylon, the Maldivs, and the Seychelles.
Aided by the east Trade Winds, Malay outrigger canoes with sails
might conceivably be driven across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar in
a few weeks. Even of recent years cases have been known of Javanese
junks being stranded on the Komoro Islands, in one case with a
Javanese crew on board. However, numbers of Malays or rather
Polynesians must have invaded Madagascar simultaneously in order to
be able to overcome and absorb the previous negro inhabitants. It
would almost seem as though we had here an instance of deliberate
over-sea colonization on the part of this interesting race, which at
the same time was pushing eastward, almost further from its base, to
the Hawaii Islands. When the term “Malay” is used to describe these
Asiatic invaders of Madagascar it does not necessarily imply the
direct descendants of the Malays of the Malay Archipelago, but those
of an older race, from which Malays, Polynesians, and other
non-Papuan peoples of the Pacific are descended—a divergent branch
of the Mongol stock intermixed with an Indonesian (Caucasian)
element, perhaps also tinged with the Melanesian[216].
About the middle of the 18th century there was a tribe dwelling on
the high plateau of East-central Madagascar, known as the Hovas but
really bearing the name of Merina (Imerina) or even calling
themselves “Malagasy.” They were more recent colonizers of
Madagascar from across the sea, who, having landed on the coast of
the great island, some hundreds or even a thousand years ago, left
as quickly as possible the malarial coast region and forced their
way through the forests to the cool and open plateaus of Imerina.
Here they were much harried by the more mixed races around them, who
were of stronger physique. At last, driven into a corner, they
turned at bay, and from being the persecuted became the persecutors;
by means of much better military organization they pursued and
conquered the tribes which had harassed them; and their conquests,
spreading to the east coast and the south, brought them into contact
with European traders and settlers.
In 1792 the National Assembly of France sent M. Lescallier to visit
Madagascar. In 1801 Bory de St Vincent went thither and announced
that the colonization of Madagascar would atone to France for the
loss of San Domingo. In the following year Mr Inverarity, of the
Honourable East India Company’s service, made a survey of Bembatoka
Bay, a harbour on the west coast, since better known by the name of
its principal town, Mojanga. Lord Keith, a British admiral cruising
in these waters, visited the place in 1791, and directed the
attention of the Indian Government to the worth of Madagascar. In
1807 the French, in spite of British hostilities, made a determined
attempt to settle at Foule Point[217]. In the following year,
Impoina, the most powerful Hova chief on the Imerina plateau, died,
leaving the supreme Hova chieftainship to his second son, Radama.
When the British had seized Mauritius, Bourbon, and the Seychelles
Islands, it was determined to finish the work of clearing the French
out of the Indian Ocean by taking the trading stations which still
remained in their possession on the east coast of Madagascar,
namely, Tamatave and Foule Point. In 1811 this was effected, and
Tamatave was occupied by British soldiers. This capture was ratified
by the definite treaty signed at Paris on May 30, 1814, which ceded
the settlements in Madagascar as “one of the dependencies of
Mauritius[218].” The Island of Bourbon was, however, restored to
France by this treaty. (In 1848 it was re-christened Réunion.) Sir
Robert Farquhar, a very enterprising governor of Mauritius, obtained
soon afterwards a large concession from the native chiefs of the
north-east of Madagascar, which included Diego Suarez Bay. Various
proclamations were issued in the _Mauritius Gazette_ claiming
Madagascar as a British possession. On the other hand, it had been
agreed that all French possessions in Madagascar which were in
existence in 1792 were to be restored to France by England; but as a
matter of fact, in 1792 France held no post in Madagascar, all
places having been abandoned. Tamatave was not founded till 1804.
All this confusion was due to the ignorance of local geography, then
most characteristic of both British and French Government offices.
Nevertheless, it is clear that France imagined that she still had
rights over Madagascar, because in 1817 the French Governor of
Bourbon protested against the British proclamation declaring
Madagascar an appendage of Mauritius, and the French protest was
further supported by the reoccupation of the island of St Marie de
Madagascar. While Sir Robert Farquhar was in England on leave of
absence, the Acting-Commissioner, a military officer named Hall,
deliberately undid much of Sir Robert Farquhar’s work, and thereby
prejudiced any further insistence on British claims over Madagascar.
Subsequently, when Sir Robert Farquhar returned, he deemed it the
better policy to back up the efforts of the Hova king Radama to
conquer the whole of the island, and proclaim himself king of all
Madagascar, in spite of a protest from the French, which was
absolutely disregarded.
In 1818 the first missionaries of the London Missionary Society
arrived, and established themselves on the Hova Plateau. Radama was
much helped in his conquests by the loan of several English soldiers
and non-commissioned officers, amongst whom one made himself
specially prominent, a Mr Hastie. By degrees Radama took possession
of Tamatave (held for some years by a French mulatto, Jean René),
and of all other French posts on the mainland of Madagascar,
including Fort Dauphin. Here he cut down the French flag and
deported the small French garrison to the island of St Marie de
Madagascar. Radama died in 1828, and was succeeded in a very
irregular, Catherine-the-Great manner by his senior wife,
Ranaválona. But her policy was not that of her great prototype in
Russia, for it was a reactionary return to barbarism. She persecuted
the native Christians and the missionaries, showed the greatest
enmity to any foreign influence, and so flouted the French that the
latter were compelled to take some notice of her hostility. In 1829
the Government of Charles X decided to send a small expedition
against Madagascar, which was to be largely composed of Yolof
soldiers from Senegambia—a new departure in European warfare in
Africa to be afterwards largely followed. The French bombarded
Tamatave successfully, but were repulsed at Foule Point, though they
made a successful attack on another Hova post. Still, the results of
the expedition were ineffective, though the Prince de Polignac wrote
to the Queen of Madagascar proposing a French protectorate, with
French stations at Diego Suarez, St Augustine’s Bay, and other
places on the coast. But the Government of July reversed this
policy, and evacuated all French posts on the mainland of
Madagascar, after which there was not for years a Frenchman on
Madagascar soil, with the exception of a remarkable personage named
Laborde, originally a French shipwrecked sailor, who had been sent
up to the Queen of Madagascar for her to decide on his fate. From
his comely appearance he found great favour in her eyes, and was the
only European tolerated at her court, where he attained a very
influential position. In 1833 a French surveying party had
pronounced Diego Suarez Bay to be a very suitable place for a
settlement.
During the thirties of the last century Queen Ranaválona had made
herself infamous by her persecution of the native Christians and by
forcing all European missionaries to leave the island; in addition
to which her soldiers, in exacting tribute and in emphasizing their
conquests over the Sakalavas, committed the most atrocious cruelties
and wholesale slaughters. The Queen of Madagascar, feeling at last
even in her remoteness that she was banned by Europe, sent an
embassy in 1836 to William IV of England, but the envoys effected
nothing in the way of renewing friendly relations.
In 1840 the Sakalavas[219], driven to desperation by the Hova
attacks, placed themselves under French protection, with the result
that France, to enforce her protectorate, occupied the islands of
Nosi Mitsiu, Nosi Bé, and Nosi Komba, as well as the island of
Mayotta, in the Komoro Archipelago. In 1845 the Hova Government
intensified its unfriendliness to Europeans by expelling all foreign
traders from Tamatave. This action roused the French and English
Governments, who replied by a joint bombardment of Tamatave.
Unhappily, the bombardment was followed by a landing party, which
met with a most disastrous repulse, which neither France nor England
thought fit to revenge otherwise than by breaking off all political
and commercial relations with Madagascar. Between 1847 and 1849 the
French had abolished slavery in Réunion and in their Madagascar
possessions; but this philanthropic action subsequently caused
outbreaks among the Sakalavas, who were angry at having their
slave-trading operations interfered with by the French.
Between 1847 and 1852 the queen’s son, Rakoto, heir-apparent to the
throne, applied at intervals for French protection, in order that he
might depose his mother and put an end to her ferocious policy. No
very definite answer was made to these appeals (which possibly were
not genuine, but fabricated for their own purposes by the Frenchman
Laborde, who still lived at the Malagasy capital, and by a M.
Lambert, who visited Madagascar as a slave-trader); nor were they
followed up by any action on the part of the French Government. In
1853 the merchants of Mauritius, finding that the Madagascar
Government continued to refuse to pay the indemnity demanded by the
British Government for the disaster of Tamatave (in consequence of
which refusal trade with Tamatave was forbidden), subscribed amongst
themselves and paid up the indemnity to the extent of £3125. Trade
was then reopened. In 1855 the French adventurer and
ex-slave-trader, Lambert, visited Tanánarivo, the Hova capital, and
after an interview with Prince Rakoto, conveyed from him to the
French Government fresh proposals for a French protectorate; but
these were rejected by the Emperor Napoleon III, because he was
loyal to the British alliance and would do nothing in Madagascar
which might seem unfriendly to Great Britain.
In 1856 Mr Ellis, one of the pioneers of the London Missionary
Society’s agents, who, after many years of work had left Madagascar
in despair in 1836, was invited to return thither to confer with the
Queen, and went out as an informal messenger of the British
Government. His mission resulted in nothing, however. Lambert, the
French adventurer, returned to Madagascar in that year, and escorted
to the capital Mme Ida Pfeiffer (one of the earliest of women
travellers, the Mrs Isabella Bird of her day). Lambert plotted a
_coup d’état_ which should place Rakoto on the throne under French
influence, with Lambert himself as Prime Minister. But Rakoto was
frightened, and kept his mother informed of the conspiracy. It was
therefore nipped in the bud, and Lambert and Laborde were promptly
expelled from the country, the latter after many years’ residence
losing in one day all his property in lands and slaves. But in 1861
this ferocious old Queen, who had ruled Madagascar with a rod of
iron for 33 years, and had successfully set Europe at defiance,
died, and was succeeded by her son Rakoto, who took the title of
Radama II.
If Ranaválona, his mother, was like Catherine of Russia, Radama II
resembled in his brief career Catherine’s predecessor, the unhappy
Peter III. He reversed the Queen’s anti-Christian policy, abolished
customs’ duties, and was such an enthusiastic reformer as almost to
suggest flightiness. He invited and received an English envoy in
1861. Laborde and Lambert returned, and were received by him with
almost extravagant affection. The foolish King signed without
hesitating a deed presented to him by M. Lambert which gave the
latter the most extravagant concessions in Madagascar. He is also
supposed to have created Lambert “Duc d’Emirne,” a title, however,
which the ex-slave-trader soon found it wiser to drop owing to the
ridicule it entailed. At this time also Roman Catholic
missionaries[220] came out to settle in the Hova country. Mr Ellis
also returned, and brought letters of congratulation from the
British Government. The English missionaries re-established
themselves, and in 1862 British and French Consuls were established
at Tanánarivo. The French Consul was Laborde, who had resided for so
many years in Madagascar. But the Hovas were profoundly dissatisfied
with their King’s reforms and extraordinary generosity to Europeans.
A palace revolution took place in 1862, and the unhappy Radama was
strangled. A female cousin, Rabodo (Rasohérina), was proclaimed
Queen, but was dominated by the Prime Minister, as have been
subsequently all the remaining queens of Madagascar. The French
treaty was denounced on account of Lambert’s claims. These last were
compounded for finally by the payment of £36,247. 7_s._ in silver.
The concession was returned to the Malagasy envoys, and solemnly
burned at Tamatave.
The whole procedure of the French Government in supporting Lambert’s
unfair claim profoundly affected the Hova people, and caused them to
be suspicious in future of all European enterprise. Queen Rasohérina
died in 1868, and was succeeded by her cousin, Ranaválona II, who
established Christianity as the state religion. In her reign arose a
very powerful Prime Minister, afterwards to be famous as the
opponent of the French, Rainilaiarivóny. In 1872 the French
Government again allowed its influence in Madagascar to wane, and
withdrew its subsidy from the Jesuit missionaries; but with
returning energy, and in the dawn of the new phase of colonial
activity, it resumed a more active policy at the beginning of the
eighties. Laborde, the French Consul, died in 1878, but the Malagasy
Government opposed his landed property passing to his heir on the
plea that he was only a life tenant, and that no land could be
alienated in Madagascar. The French Government supported the claims
of Laborde’s heirs, and disputed the matter between 1880 and 1882,
at the same time reviving the idea of a French protectorate over the
Sakalava of North-west Madagascar. The situation becoming strained,
the Madagascar Government sent a mission to Europe, but it was
unsuccessful in obtaining assurances of support. The Malagasy argued
with some justice that the French treaty of 1868 recognized the
Queen’s rule over the whole mainland of Madagascar, and made no
mention of any French protectorate over the Sakalavas. But we know
in the fable that the lamb’s arguments availed but little with the
wolf. The French had endeavoured in 1881 to find cause for a quarrel
in the murder by the Sakalavas of four French subjects on the west
coast of Madagascar, and claimed an indemnity from the Hova
Government; which, logically, they could not have done if the
country had been under a French protectorate. The Malagasy
Government promptly paid the indemnity demanded; but, when later on
they endeavoured to strengthen their authority over the Sakalavas,
they were forbidden to do so by the French. In the following year,
1882, a French protectorate over the northern coast was distinctly
asserted, and the demand was made that the Hova flag should be
withdrawn from those territories. The demand was refused, and the
French Commissioner left Tanánarivo. Lord Granville in 1882
protested against the assertion of French claims to the North-west
coast of Madagascar, but received no immediate reply, nor was the
opposition of the British Government deemed an obstacle worth taking
into account, seeing that we had already tied our hands with the
occupation of Egypt. It was, however, asserted by the French with
some degree of truth that a certain Sakalava chief opposite Nosi Bé
had concluded protectorate treaties with France in 1840 and 1843.
Another cause of complaint which France urged against Madagascar was
the passing of a law in 1881 forbidding the Malagasy to sell their
land to foreigners; but in 1883 this complaint was somewhat obviated
by other edicts facilitating the transfer of land on perpetual
leases[221]. Nevertheless in May 1883 war broke out between France
and Madagascar, and the French fleet under Admiral Pierre captured
Mojanga. Subsequently Admiral Pierre steamed round the island, and
anchored in the roadstead of Tamatave, where he found H.M.S. Dryad,
Commander Johnstone, already watching events. The French admiral,
after delivering an ultimatum, which was rejected, bombarded and
occupied Tamatave, and destroyed other Hova establishments on the
East coast. Mr Shaw, an English medical missionary, was established
at Tamatave, and, beyond rendering medical assistance to the wounded
natives, took no part in the struggle. Nevertheless, his dispensary
was broken into, and he was arrested, accused of poisoning French
soldiers[222], and closely confined as a prisoner on the French
flag-ship. The British Consul, Pakenham, who had gone down to
Tamatave and was very ill, was ordered to quit the town in 24 hours,
but died before this time elapsed. Anglo-French relations were
severely strained by the attempt of the French to intercept Captain
Johnstone’s mails. When the news of French action reached England Mr
Gladstone made a very serious speech in the House of Commons
regarding Mr Shaw’s arrest. The French Government, feeling its
agents had gone too far, made a conciliatory reply. Mr Shaw was
released, and given an indemnity of £1000. In the meantime the Queen
of Madagascar died, and was succeeded by another Queen, Ranaválona
III. Admiral Pierre also fell ill, and died just as he reached
Marseilles. His successor, Admiral Galiber, did much to restore
cordial relations between the British and French officials by his
courteous manner. In 1884 an Englishman named Digby Willoughby, who
had been a volunteer in the Zulu war, succeeded in running a cargo
of arms and ammunition across to the south coast of Madagascar, and
in reward for his energy was taken into the service of the Malagasy
Government, made an officer in their army, and finally rose to be
their Commander-in-Chief. The war dragged on through 1885, causing
some dissatisfaction and lassitude in France. It is probable that
the French Government would not have insisted on the protectorate
but for German action on the adjoining coast of Africa, which caused
the French to feel that in the African scramble they should be
fairly represented. At last a treaty of peace was negotiated, and
finally concluded in January, 1886. General Willoughby represented
the Malagasy Government at Tamatave, and concluded a treaty in their
name. This agreement gave France a virtual protectorate over
Madagascar—at any rate, a control over her foreign relations—an
establishment at Diego Suarez Bay, and an indemnity of £,400,000.
A few months later, in June 1886, France declared her protectorate
over all the Komoro Islands, of which she had already annexed
Mayotta in 1840.
In 1890, England, in return for the waiving of French opposition to
a British protectorate over Zanzibar, recognized a French
protectorate over Madagascar. But the Malagasy themselves had been
sullenly refusing their recognition of any such protectorate and
endeavouring to shake themselves free of the trammels of the 1886
treaty. It was believed in England and in France that the conquest
of Madagascar would be an extremely difficult undertaking, that the
opposition of the Hovas would be a determined one, and that their
warlike energy combined with the terribly unhealthy climate would
make success doubtful or dearly purchased. For some nine years,
therefore, the French Government put up with many a rebuff from the
powerful Prime Minister of Madagascar. But at last the French were
obliged either to let their protectorate become a dead letter or
enforce their right to a predominant influence at the Malagasy
court. Their ultimatum in 1895 was rejected. A powerful French
expedition was sent—over 10,000 French soldiers, and an equal number
of Senegalese. The idea of landing at Tamatave and forcing a way up
to the capital through dense forests and across steep mountain
terraces was wisely abandoned, and in preference the forces entered
Bembatoka Bay (Mojanga), on the west coast, and were transported up
the Ikopa river. From the point where its navigability came to an
end they started overland for Tanánarivo, which was captured after
the feeblest resistance on the part of the Hovas[223].
At first an attempt was made to continue the government of the Queen
of Madagascar under French protection, but this only led to
treachery and intrigue on the part of the Hovas. The Prime Minister
was exiled, the Queen was deposed, and exiled first to Réunion and
subsequently to Algiers. In 1896 the island was annexed to France,
and became a French colony. At the same time, and by this act of
annexation, the commercial treaties of other nations with Madagascar
were annulled; the coasting trade was confined to vessels flying the
French flag; and the fiscal policy adopted was that of the severest
Protectionist type, the commerce and enterprise of other nations
being practically excluded from Madagascar. These actions gradually
came to be apprehended and resented in England, where in the
previous recognition of the French protectorate no intention
whatever had existed of abandoning British commercial rights.
The Hova rule was bloody and barbarous, and more recent by quite a
hundred years than the first establishment of European influence.
But it at least established freedom of religion[224], and complete
freedom of commerce and enterprise for all civilized nations. By
pursuing this retrograde policy in commerce and religion France has
somewhat alienated the sympathy and interest with which one might
otherwise have watched her resolute intention to civilize
Madagascar. But from all accounts—British and French—the persistent
efforts of the first great administrator of Madagascar (General
Galliéni) to restore law and order and to open up this island of
228,000 square miles to cultivation and civilization produced
favourable results between 1897 and 1905[225]. The slaves have been
emancipated (in 1896); Tanánarive (the French, as it was the Hova
capital) has been transformed into a fine town of European aspect.
Roads are being rapidly made, canals have been dug to connect the
coast lagoons with the sea and the mouths of rivers, and railways
into the interior are in course of construction[226]. Already the
connection of Tamatave, the principal port on the East coast, by
railway with Tanánarivo the capital is nearly complete. Gold, iron,
copper, lead, silver, zinc, and many other metals and minerals are
being worked. Agriculture has not been neglected, and of late
Madagascar has begun to export rice. Rubber, wild and cultivated, is
entering into the list of exported products, of which the principal
are gold, cattle, hides, coffee, vanilla, cloves, and silks. The
land has not been taken from the natives, and the native population,
said to have at first decreased under French rule, has of late shown
a distinct increase. In 1911 it was found by census to number
3,054,658; of whom only 13,539 were of European race (7606 being
French). Forced labour in the public service was abolished in 1901.
The natives are a good deal governed by their own elected chiefs and
notables, and of late years very little local legislation has been
enacted without taking the leading native authorities into
consultation.
The mass of the Malagasy people are growing in contentment and
well-being under the paternal rule of a French governor-general, but
the volume of trade has not markedly increased and remains at about
an annual value of £3,000,000. And nearly the entirety (£2,300,000)
of this is done with France or French possessions, differential
duties and other forms of protection having greatly hampered foreign
trade with Madagascar since 1896.
As already mentioned, France had annexed the Mascarene Islands of
Mauritius (Ile de France) in 1715 and Réunion (called Bourbon from
1649 to 1848) in 1643. Both were taken from her by Britain in the
Napoleonic wars; but, though Mauritius was kept by the British,
Réunion was restored to France in 1815. (Both islands had been held
by the French East India Company till 1767, when they became
appanages of the Crown.) Réunion has an area of 965 square miles and
a population—nearly all white—of about 174,000.
The Komoro Islands to the north-west of Madagascar (area, about 760
square miles, population of Muhammadan negroids about 100,000) were
finally annexed to France in 1910 and are now under the Madagascar
government.
-----
Footnote 211:
There is stronger evidence to show that Menouthias was a little
island—Zanzibar, probably—close to the African coast. Menouthias
is repeated in the Arab name _Manutia_, and Al-phil means
“ivory”—the ivory island or market.
Footnote 212:
Almost certainly this was an egg of the gigantic _Æpyornis_. The
Æpyornis, a ratite bird as large as, or larger than, an ostrich
and distantly allied to both ostriches and cassowaries, lived on
in Madagascar to the human period—say two thousand years ago or
even later. It was quite possibly seen alive by the earliest Arab
visitors to the island.
Footnote 213:
But by the natives as Andrian Potsy, i.e. “White King.”
Footnote 214:
Already famous for his discoveries in India; a beautiful jungle
fowl is named after him.
Footnote 215:
The Malay immigration into the Komoro Islands was relatively
slight. The bulk of the population here is composed of East Coast
negroes, speaking a Bantu dialect allied to the tongues spoken on
the Zanzibar coast. There was a large influx of Arabs, however;
and this mingling with the negroes produced the present race of
the Komoro Islanders, a very fine type of the successful results
that attend the mixture of the Semite and the negro.
Footnote 216:
The Hovas, or Merina, as they are properly called, of Central
Madagascar bear a strong physical resemblance to the Javanese.
They seem to have reached east Madagascar much later than the
ancestors of the Sakalava and Betsi-misáraka, and subsequently to
the Arabs. The Merina ruling caste is very “Malay” or Mongoloid in
appearance.
Footnote 217:
A post a little to the north of Tamatave on the east coast.
Footnote 218:
Further confirmed by the treaty of the 13th of November, 1815.
Footnote 219:
The tribes of the western half of Madagascar, a finer race
physically than the Hovas owing to their greater intermixture with
negroes. They now number about 156,000.
Footnote 220:
In 1840 Jesuit priests had again endeavoured to establish
themselves in Madagascar, on the north-west coast, but they all
died from fever.
Footnote 221:
This law was completely abrogated by the French in 1896, and
foreigners can now acquire land as easily as natives.
Footnote 222:
Who had made themselves ill by appropriating and drinking his
claret—that was all.
Footnote 223:
Whether the Hovas had overlooked the Mojanga route and had decided
to concentrate all their resistance on the approach from Tamatave
is not known; but after their repeated boasts as to the determined
resistance they would make to an invader, the collapse of their
defence and the feebleness of the resistance they offered to the
French are matters of considerable astonishment. It must have been
mainly due to the fact that the Hova rule over the bulk of the
island was hated, and that the other tribes were not inclined to
fight for its maintenance.
Footnote 224:
Since the annexation to France, and the consequent dominating
influence of the Roman Catholic missionaries, many natives have
been constrained to exchange their Protestant faith for Roman
Catholic Christianity.
Footnote 225:
Particulars as to General Galliéni’s reforms and the resulting
condition of Madagascar are given in an article “French Policy in
Madagascar,” in the October _Journal_ of the African Society,
London, 1904.
Footnote 226:
The French occupation of Madagascar has resulted in great gains to
science. Noteworthy are the investigations in palæontology of the
two Grandidiers and of M. A. Jully, which have revealed a
marvellous extinct fauna of lemurs, hippopotami, carnivores,
birds, and giant reptiles.
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCLUSIONS AND FORECASTS
We have now seen the result of these race movements during three or
four thousand years, which have caused nations superior in physical
or mental development to the Negro, the Negroid, and the Hamite to
move down on Africa as a field for their colonization, cultivation,
and commerce. The great rush, however, has only been made since
1881, and may be said to have begun with the French invasion of
Tunis. Now there remain but two small portions of the map of Africa
which are uncoloured, that is, attributed to the independent
possession of a native state. These tracts, theoretically
independent, or the overlordship of which is international, are the
Negro Republic of Liberia on the West coast and the Ethiopian Empire
in North-east Africa. The whole remainder of the continent is now
allotted to the dominion, overlordship or exclusive political
direction of some one European, Christian power: Britain, France,
Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, or Spain. Morocco, on the extreme
north-west of the continent, the bulk of whose trade was formerly
with England, and whose principal seaport was once in English hands,
has now France for a protector, educator and disciplinarian, and
Spain for recolonizer. There is Egypt, in the occupation and under
the control of Britain, though still nominally a tributary state of
the Turkish Empire. Since this book was first published in 1898, the
truculent Muhammadan state of Wadai has been annexed and conquered
by France, together with Baghirmi and Kanem, Aïr and the Saharan
oases. Darfur is under Anglo-Egyptian suzerainty; Tripoli,
Cyrenaica, and Fezzan are annexed to Italy as the future “Colony” of
Libya; and British rule has been made very real over the eastern
Fula States of Nigeria and Bornu. The South African Republic and
Orange Free State are part of the Union of South Africa. Even
Liberia has recently entrusted its finances to the indirect control
of its original parent, the United States. Only Abyssinia—now the
Empire of Ethiopia in very fact, since 1900—remains theoretically
independent; and even Abyssinia is aware that three European
powers—Britain, France, and Italy—while guaranteeing her
independence, have in a sense agreed to take joint action if she
should abuse that independence to the commercial or political injury
of their interests. Abyssinia, for many reasons connected with her
history, her religion, and her sturdy assertion of independence
deserves more than any other state of Africa to preserve her
national self-respect and her sovereign status, provided she will
abstain from offence, and recognize her geographical and racial
limitations. But if through ambition she should attempt to arm and
to lead the peoples of the Sudan against the new order of things
which is being patiently introduced by Great Britain, she will find
herself restricted once more to the African Switzerland which has
been the nucleus and the last refuge of this Semitico-Hamitic
people. Liberia by studiously following American advice and
educating herself on the right lines to be an African Negro State
and not an African parody on a tiny scale of the vast United States
of North America, may play an important part some day in the
political development of West Africa.
What is Europe going to do with Africa? It seems as though there
were three courses to be pursued, corresponding with the three
classes of territory into which Africa falls when considered
geographically. There is, to begin with, that much restricted
healthy area lying outside the tropics (or in rare instances, at
great altitudes inside the tropics), where the climate is salubrious
and Europeans can support existence under much the same conditions
as in their native lands. Here they can freely rear children to form
in time a native European race; and in these regions (except in
parts of South Africa) there is no dense native population to
dispute by force or by an appeal to common fairness the possession
of the soil. These lands of the first category are of relatively
small extent compared to the mass of Africa. They are confined to
the districts south of the Zambezi and the Kunene (with the
exception of the neighbourhood of the Zambezi and the eastern
coast-belt); to the fifty thousand square miles on the mountain
plateaus of Northern Rhodesia, and about a hundred and thirty
thousand on the highlands of Nyasaland, Katanga, South and Central
Angola, Uganda and British East Africa; to the northern half of
Tunisia, a few districts of north-east and north-west Algeria and
the Cyrenaica (northern projection of Barka); and to parts of the
northern projection of Morocco. The second category consists of
countries like much of Morocco, Algeria, southern Tunis, and
Tripoli; Barka, Egypt, Abyssinia and parts of Somaliland; where
climatic conditions and soil are not wholly opposed[227] to the
healthful settlement of Europeans, but where the competition or
numerical strength or martial spirit of the natives already in
possession are factors opposed to the substitution of a large
European population for the present owners of the soil. The third
category consists of the remainder of Africa, mainly tropical, where
the climatic conditions make it impossible for Europeans to
cultivate the soil with their own hands, to settle for many years,
or to bring up healthy families. Countries lying under the first
category I should characterize as being suitable for European
colonies, a conclusion somewhat belated, since they have nearly all
become such. The second description of territory I should qualify as
“tributary states,” countries where good and settled government
cannot be maintained by the natives without the control of a
European power, the European power retaining in return for the
expense and trouble of such control the gratification of performing
a good and interesting work, and a field of employment and
profitable enterprise for a few of her choicer sons and daughters.
The third category consists of “plantation colonies”—vast
territories to be governed as India is governed, autocratically but
wisely and as far as possible through native chiefs and councils,
with the first aim of securing good government and a reasonable
degree of civilization to a large population of races at present
inferior in culture and mentality to the European. Here, however,
the European may come, in small numbers, with his capital, his
energy, and his knowledge to develop a most lucrative commerce, and
obtain products necessary to the use of his advanced civilization.
It is possible that these distinctions may be rudely set aside by
the pressure of natural laws one hundred, two hundred years hence,
if the other healthy quarters of the globe become over-populated,
and science is able to annul the unhealthy effects of a tropical
climate. A rush may then be made by Europeans for settlement on the
lands of tropical Africa, which in its violence may sweep away
contemptuously the pre-existing rights of inferior races. But until
such a contingency comes about, and whilst there is so much healthy
land still unoccupied in America and temperate Africa, it is safer
to direct our efforts along the lines laid down in these three
categories I have quoted. Until Frenchmen have peopled the north of
Tunis and the Aures Mountains of Algeria, it would be foolish for
their Government to lure French emigrants to make their homes in
Senegambia or on the Congo; until Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange
Free State, the Transvaal, and Rhodesia south and north of the
Zambezi are as thickly populated with whites as the resources of the
country permit, it would be most unwise to force on the peopling by
Europeans of Sokoto or the coast lands of British East Africa. On
the other hand, however healthy the climate of Egypt may be, it is a
country for the Egyptians, and not for Englishmen, except as
administrators, instructors, capitalists, or winter tourists. Since
we have begun to control the political affairs of parts of West
Africa and the Niger basin our annual trade with those countries,
rendered secure, has risen from a few hundred thousand pounds a year
to about £10,000,000. This is sufficient justification for our
continued government of these regions and their occasional cost to
us in men and money.
In the north of Africa the white Berber race will tend in course of
time to weaken in its Muhammadan fanaticism, and to mingle with the
European immigrants as it mingled with them in ancient times and in
the middle ages, when it invaded Spain and southern Europe. The Arab
will gradually draw aloof, and side with those darker Berbers, who
will long range the Sahara wastes unenvied; or else he will betake
himself to the Sudan, and lead a life there freer from European
restrictions, even though it be under a loose form of European rule.
The Egyptians will probably continue to remain the Egyptians they
have been for untold centuries, no matter what waves of Syrian,
Libyan, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Turkish, French or
English invaders swept over the land; but they will probably come
within that circle of confederated nations which will form the
future British Empire—nations of every origin, colour, race,
religion, united only by one supreme ruler, and the one supreme bond
of peace, mutual defence, and unfettered interchanging commerce. The
Negro or Negroid races of all Africa between the Sahara Desert, the
Red Sea, and the Zambezi will remain negro or negroid, even though
here and there they are slightly lightened with European blood, and
on the east are raised to a finer human type by the immigration of
the Hamites, the interbreeding of Arabs, and the settlement of
Indians. It is possible that there may be a considerable overflow of
India into those insufficiently inhabited, uncultivated parts of
East Africa now ruled by Britain and Germany. Indians will make
their way as traders into British Central Africa, but these
territories north of the Zambezi will be governed also in the
interests of an abundant and powerful negro population, which before
many years have elapsed will be as civilized and educated as are at
least a million of the negro inhabitants south of the Zambezi at the
present day. South of the Zambezi great changes will take place. The
black man may continue to increase and multiply and live at peace
with the white man, content to perform for the latter many services
which his bodily strength and indifference to health permit him to
render advantageously. But as the white population increases from
one to twenty millions it will tend to reserve to itself all the
healthy country in the south of Africa, and inland on that great
central plateau which stretches up to and beyond the Zambezi; and
the black man will be pushed by degrees into the low-lying, tropical
coast regions of the south-east and of the Zambezi valley—regions
which with much of Bechuanaland and Nyasaland must for an indefinite
period be regarded as a Black Man’s Reserve.
The European nations or national types which will predominate in the
New Africa are the British (with whom perhaps Dutch will fuse), the
French and the French-speaking Belgian, the German, the Italian, the
Greek, and the Portuguese. The Spaniard may be met with on the
North-west coast and in Morocco and Western Algeria; the Portuguese
may have in Angola a second Brazil, but this dream will dissolve
disenchantingly unless this nation can soon recover national energy
and divert her thousands of emigrants annually to Portuguese Africa
rather than to Portuguese- or English-speaking America. Portugal
itself requires colonists and ought to be able to support not a
discontented six but a prosperous fifteen millions of people.
Italy’s share of colonizable territory may be comparatively small
under her own flag, and Greece may have none at all, but the north,
the north-east, and north-central parts of Africa will teem with
busy, thrifty, enterprising Italian and Greek settlers, colonists,
merchants and employés[229].
The great languages of New Africa will be English, French, Italian,
Portuguese, Arabic, Hausa, Swahili, and Zulu. It is doubtful whether
German will ever become implanted as an African language any more
than Dutch has taken root in the Malay Archipelago. It is true that
Dutch in a corrupted jargon has become a second language to the
Hottentots and a few Bantu tribes. But Dutch is simpler in
construction, and easier of pronunciation to a negro than German. I
have observed that in the Cameroons the Germans make use of the
“pigeon” English of the coast as a means of communication with the
people when they do not speak in the easily acquired Duala tongue.
In East Africa, on the other hand, they use Swahili universally,
just as the Dutch use Malay throughout their Asiatic possessions.
English may not become the dominant language in all countries under
British influence in Africa. It will certainly become the universal
tongue of Africa south of the Zambezi, and possibly, but not so
certainly, in British Central Africa, where, however, it will have
the influence of Swahili to contend with. In British East Africa, in
Zanzibar, and in Uganda the prevailing speech will be the easy,
simple, expressive, harmonious Swahili language, a happy compromise
between Arabic and Bantu. In Somaliland, Egypt, the Sahara, and the
Sudan Arabic will be the dominating language; but Italian, French,
and English will be much used in Lower Egypt. Italian, Arabic, and
French will remain coequal in use in Barka, Tripoli, Tunis, and
Eastern Algeria; French and Arabic (French perhaps prevailing) in
Algeria; and French will make its influence felt in Morocco (though
it will contend there with Arabic and Spanish), and right across the
Western Sahara to Senegambia and the upper Niger. English will be,
as it is now—either in jargon or correctly spoken—the language of
intercommunication on the West coast of Africa from the Gambia to
the Gaboon. French, Swahili and Portuguese will prevail in the Congo
basin; Portuguese in Angola; and Hausa in Nigeria and around Lake
Chad. In Madagascar French will predominate, mingling in the Komoro
Islands with Swahili.
Paganism will disappear. The continent will soon be divided between
nominal Christians and nominal Muhammadans, with a strong tendency
on the part of the Muhammadans towards an easy-going rationalism,
such as is fast making way in Algeria, where the townspeople and the
cultivators in the more settled districts, constantly coming into
contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent to the more
inconvenient among their Muhammadan observances, and are content to
live with little more religion than an observance of the laws, and a
desire to get on well with their neighbours. Yet before
Muhammadanism loses its savour, there will probably be many
uprisings against Christian rule among Muhammadan peoples who have
been newly subjected to control. The Arab and the Hamite for
religious reasons may strive again and again to shake off the
Christian yoke, but I strongly doubt whether there will be any
universal mutiny of the black man against the white. The negro has
no idea of racial affinity. He will equally ally himself to the
white or to the yellow races in order to subdue his fellow black, or
to regain his freedom from the domination of another negro tribe.
There may be, here and there, a revolt against the white rule in
such and such a state; but the diverse civilizations under which the
African will be trained, and the different languages he will be
taught to talk, will be sufficient to make him as dissimilar in each
national development as the white man has become in Europe. And just
as it would need some amazing and stupendous event to cause all Asia
to rise as one man against the invasion of Europe, so it is
difficult to conceive that the black man will eventually form one
united negro people demanding autonomy, and putting an end to the
control of the white man, and to the immigration, settlement, and
intercourse of superior races from Europe and Asia. Difficult, this
conception may be, in the light of past history, and because
language counts for so much, but not impossible. Any repetition of
Leopoldian tactics on a large scale, any gross oppression of the
negro in South, East, West or Central Africa might fuse all culture
differences, blend black and yellow men of diverse religious beliefs
and superstitions in one blazing rebellion against the white race
which might avail to wreck the new and the growing European
civilization now spreading so fast over Africa. But otherwise the
indigenous races of Africa will grow up into being black or brown
British subjects (unless we deny them all suffrage), Frenchmen,
Portuguese or Germans. Great white nations will populate in course
of time South Africa, North Africa, and Egypt; and rills of
Caucasian blood will continue, as in the recent and the remote past,
to circulate through Negro Africa, leavening the many millions of
black men with that element of the white-skinned sub-species which
alone has evolved beauty of facial features and originality of
invention in thought and deed. But the black—or, as it will be in
the future, the brown—race will, through bowing to many an influence
and submerged by many an invasion, in the long run hold its own
within limits, and secure for itself a large proportion of the soil
of Africa. All predictions as to the future of the Dark Continent
seem futile in face of the unexpected, the strange, the unlooked-for
which arises in Africa itself. A new disease may break out which
destroys the negro and leaves the white man standing; or
unconquerable maladies may be evolved which sweep the white man away
or make it too dangerous and unprofitable for him to settle on the
soil of tropical Africa. On the other hand, remedies for all African
diseases may be found, and it may be no more dangerous to the white
man’s health to reside at Sierra Leone or on the Upper Congo than it
is for the indigenous black man. No doubt, as in Asia and South
America, the eventual outcome of the colonization of Africa by alien
peoples will be a compromise—a dark-skinned race with a white man’s
features and a white man’s brain.
APPENDIX I
NOTABLE EVENTS AND DATES IN THE MODERN HISTORY OF AFRICAN COLONIZATION
B.C.
Foundation of the colony of Utica (Atiqa) on the N.
African (Tunisian) coast by the Phœnicians about 1100
Foundation of the colony of Carthage by the Phœnicians about 822
Expedition of Dorians founds first Greek colony in
Cyrenaica (modern Barka) about 631
Pharaoh Niku II of Egypt (son of Psammetik) sends out
Phœnician Expedition from Red Sea which is said to
have circumnavigated Africa in three years about 600
Conquest of Egypt by the Persians under Cambyses about 525
Hanno the Carthaginian explores the West Coast of
Africa as far south as Sierra Leone and brings back
chimpanzees about 520
Alexander of Macedon conquers Egypt from the Persians;
and founds the city of Alexandria 332
The Romans take Egypt under their protection 168
The Romans definitely conquer and destroy Carthage and
found the Roman province of Africa (consisting
eventually of modern Tunis and part of Tripoli) 146-5
Numidia (Algeria) annexed to the Roman Empire 46
Egypt annexed to the Roman Empire 30
Romans invade Fezzan (Phazania) 19
A.C.
Mauretania (Morocco) annexed to the Roman Empire 42
Jewish massacre of Greek inhabitants of Cyrenaica 117
North Africa torn from the Roman Empire by the Vandals 429
Recovered partially by the Byzantines 531-4
Persian armies occupy Egypt 616
Herodius recovers Egypt from the Persians 626
The Muhammadan Invasion of Africa:
Amr-bin-al Asi conquers Egypt 640-2
The Arabs invade Tripoli and Tunis, defeat the
patrician Gregory and partially destroy
Byzantine rule 647-8
Oqba-bin-Nafa is appointed by the Khalif “governor
of Ifrikiyah” (669), overruns Fezzan and South
Tunis, and founds there the Muhammadan capital
of Kairwan 673
Oqba traverses N. Africa till he reaches the
Atlantic Ocean 681
Carthage taken by the Arabs (698); Tunisia finally
conquered from the Berbers (705); Morocco and
Algeria conquered about 708; Spain invaded by
Arabs and Berbers 711
First Islamic settlements founded on E. African
coast about 720; Kilwa Sultanate founded 960
Aghlabite (Berber) dynasty begins in Tunis in 800
(Morocco contemporaneously ruled by the
Idrisites) and comes to an end 909
Rise of the Fatimite dynasty over Tunis, Tripoli,
and Egypt (909), by whom Cairo (Al Kahira) is
founded 969
Great Arab invasion of North Africa (especially
Tunis) about 1045
About 1050 commences the invasion of N. Africa
from the Niger and the Moroccan Sahara by the
Berber sect of the Murabitin (Al-moravides), who
have conquered all N. Africa and Spain by 1087
Timbuktu founded by the Tawareq about 1100
The Third Great Berber dynasty of the Muahadim
(Al-Mohade) arises in W. Algeria about 1150,
conquers Morocco, Spain and Algeria, and finally
Tunis (from which the Normans are driven away) 1160
French and German Crusaders occupy eastern part of
Nile Delta and garrison Cairo before they are
driven out by “Saladin” 1163-70
Hafs dynasty founded in Tunis 1236
King Louis IX of France (“Saint Louis”) invades Egypt
in 1248; is disastrously repulsed, captured and
ransomed. Twenty-two years later he invades Tunis,
where he dies of fever 1270
Roman Carthage finally destroyed by the Moors, and
Tunis made the capital of “Ifriqiyah” about 1271
The Portuguese take Ceuta from the Moors 1415
The river Senegal reached by Portuguese exploring
vessels sent out by Prince Henry 1446
Diego Gomez reaches and names Sierra Leone 1460
The Canary Islands, discovered by a Norman adventurer
and ultimately sold to Portugal, are transferred by
that power to Spain 1479
Gold Coast, Niger Delta, Fernando Pô, Cameroons and
Gaboon discovered by the Portuguese 1471-80
River Congo discovered by the Portuguese 1482-5
Bartolomeu Diaz rounds the Cape of Good Hope 1488
Melilla (N. Morocco) captured by the Spaniards 1490
Christianity introduced into the kingdom of Congo by
the Portuguese 1491
Vasco da Gama passing round the Cape of Good Hope
discovers and names Natal (Christmas, 1497), reaches
Sofala and Malindi (East Africa) 1498
Sofala occupied and Portuguese East African Empire
begun 1505
Madagascar discovered by the Portuguese 1500-6
The Emperor Charles V grants a charter to a Flemish
merchant for the exclusive importation of negro
slaves into Spanish America; Slave Trade thus
definitely founded 1517
The Turks conquer Egypt 1517
Charles V intervenes in the affairs of Tunis (to
restore Arab Hafside Sultan and drive out the Turkish
corsair Khaïreddin Barbarossa) 1535
Charles V sustains disastrous repulse at Algiers (from
which dates gradual decay of Spanish power over North
Africa) 1541
Delagoa Bay first explored and temporarily settled by
the Portuguese 1544
First British trading ships leave London for the West
African coast 1553
Sir John Hawkins conveys the first cargo of negro
slaves to America under the British flag 1562
The Turks (having through corsairs founded the Regency
of Algiers in 1519, that of Tripoli in 1551) once
more take Tunis and make it a Turkish Pashalik 1573
Portugal founds the colony of Angola 1574
Dom Sebastião, King of Portugal, defeated and slain at
the battle of Kasr-al-Kabir; and the Portuguese
Empire over Morocco thenceforth crumbles 1578
Turkey attempts to wrest from Portugal the Zanzibar Coast,
but is utterly defeated by the Portuguese Admiral
Thomé de Sousa Coutinho 1584
Abu al Abbas al Mansur, the first “Sharifian” Emperor
of Morocco, who was the victor over Dom Sebastião,
sends an army across the Sahara and annexes Timbuktu
and the Upper Niger to the Moorish dominions 1590
The first Dutch trading ships appear on the West
African Coast 1595
The Dutch replace the Portuguese at Arguin (N. W. Coast
of Africa) and Goree (Dakar) in 1621; and at Elmina
(Gold Coast) 1637
French traders from Dieppe found the Fort of St Louis
at the mouth of the Senegal 1637
Foundation of the French Compagnie de L’Orient for the
purpose of colonizing Madagascar 1642
The British East India Company takes the Island of St
Helena from the Dutch 1651
The Dutch take possession of the Cape of Good Hope 1652
The dynasty of the Filali Sharifs acquires the
possession of the whole Empire of Morocco and Upper
Nigeria 1658
A British African Company chartered by Charles II
builds a fort at James Island, at the mouth of the
Gambia 1662
This same Company (afterwards the Royal African
Company), taking advantage of the war declared
against Holland, seizes and retains several Dutch
forts on the Gold Coast 1665-72
Denmark establishes forts on the Gold Coast about 1672
Brandenburg (Prussia) builds the Fort of
Grossfriedrichsburg on the Gold Coast 1683
England, to whom Tangier had been ceded by Portugal in
1662, abandons it to the Sharifian Empire of Morocco 1684
The rising Arab power of ’Oman had driven Portugal out
of all her possessions north of Moçambique by 1698
The present Husseinite dynasty of Beys (from 1706 to
1881 practically independent sovereigns) is founded
in Tunis by a Turkish Agha—Hussein bin Ali Bey 1706
Sieur André de Brüe, who went out to St Louis in 1697
as the Governor of the French Senegal Company, founds
during the next 18 years the French colony of Senegal
and returns to France 1715
The French occupy the Island of Mauritius (Bourbon or
“Réunion” not being occupied until 1764) 1721
The Portuguese (having finally lost Mombasa in 1730)
recognize the Maskat Imamate on the Zanzibar coast
and decree the Bay of Lourenço Marquez on the south
and Cape Delgado on the north to be the limits of
their East African possessions 1752
The Portuguese lose Mazagão, their last foothold in
Morocco 1769
Spain acquires Fernando Pô in the Gulf of Guinea 1778
Sierra Leone ceded to the British by the natives 1787
Spain loses Oran by a terrible earthquake, and with it
her last hold over Algeria 1791
Denmark forbids the Slave Trade to her subjects 1792
Britain first seizes the Cape of Good Hope 1795
Mungo Park discovers the river Niger at Segu 1796
The London Missionary Society’s Agents land in Cape
Colony and commence work amongst the Kafirs and
Bushmen 1799
Napoleon Buonaparte conquers Egypt, 1798; Nelson
destroys French fleet at Abukir Bay same year; French
evacuate Egypt 1801
Britain finally occupies the Cape of Good Hope 1806
Sierra Leone and Gambia organized as Crown Colonies 1807
An Act of Parliament is passed abolishing the Slave
Trade in the British dominions 1807
British capture from the French Seychelles (1794),
Mauritius and Réunion in 1810, and Tamatave and
Island of St Marie (Madagascar) in 1811
Muhammad Ali destroys the Mamluks in Egypt 1811
First Kafir war in South Africa 1811-12
Cape Colony definitely ceded by Holland to Great
Britain 1814
Island of Réunion (Bourbon) restored to France 1814
Holland abolishes the Slave Trade in her dominions 1814
France and Sweden abolish the Slave Trade 1815
France reoccupies Island of St Marie de Madagascar
(first taken in 1750) 1817
Invasion of the Egyptian Sudan by Muhammad Ali’s forces
(1820-22) and foundation of Khartum as its capital 1823
A British Government Expedition under Oudney,
Clapperton, and Denham discovers Lake Chad 1823
Vice-Admiral W. F. W. Owen completes his great coast
survey of Africa, in which for the first time in
history the outline of the African Continent was
correctly delineated 1822-9
Governor Sir Charles Macarthy defeated and killed by
the Ashanti in 1824; consequent first British war
with Ashanti terminates victoriously 1827
The Brothers Lander sent out by British Government
trace the Niger from Busa to the sea and establish
its outlet in the Gulf of Guinea 1830
A French Expedition conquers Algiers 1830
Portugal abolishes the Slave Trade 1830
First British steamers (Macgregor Laird’s Expedition)
navigate the Lower Niger (1832) and discover the
Benué River 1833
Slavery abolished in all British African possessions,
including Cape Colony, by 1834
Third Kafir War in South Africa 1834
Turkey sends expedition to Tripoli to restore her
direct authority 1835
First “trekking” of the Boers away from British rule 1836
Boer emigrants treacherously massacred by Dingane, King
of the Zulus 1837
The Sakalava of N.-West Madagascar place themselves
under French protection, and France occupies the
islands of Nossi Bé and Mayotta 1840
Second Niger Expedition despatched from England 1841
Muhammad Ali the Macedonian (once a Turkish officer of
Bashi-bazuks) confirmed in the hereditary sovereignty
of Egypt as Pasha and Wali 1841
The last of the quasi-independent Karamanli Pashas of
Tripoli seizes and garrisons the important Saharan
towns of Ghadames and Ghat in 1840-41; but is himself
removed by the Turks, who annex definitely to the
Turkish Empire Tripoli and Barka 1842
Natal becomes a British Colony 1843
Gold Coast finally organized as a Crown Colony 1843
French war with Morocco 1844
Waghorn’s Overland Route finally established across
Egypt 1845
Independence of the Freed-slave State of Liberia
recognized 1847
Abd-al-Kader surrenders; Constantine (East Algeria)
taken by the French 1847
Foundation of the French Freed-slave settlement of
Libreville in the Gaboon 1848
Krapf and Rebmann discover the snowy Mountains of Kenya
and Kilima-njaro 1848
Slavery had been abolished throughout all the French
possessions in Africa by 1849
Denmark cedes her Gold Coast forts to England 1850
Livingstone and Oswell discover the Central Zambezi 1851
Independence of the Transvaal Republic recognized by
Great Britain 1852
Representative Government established in Cape Colony 1853
General Faidherbe appointed Governor of Senegal in
1854; he breaks the Fula power in Senegal and greatly
extends the French possessions by 1856
A British Expedition is sent out in 1849 under
Richardson, Oberweg, Vogel and Barth to explore North
Central Africa: Oberweg navigates Lake Chad, ascends
the river Shari and is killed in Wadai; Barth visits
the Upper Benué, Timbuktu, etc., and returns to
England 1855
Livingstone makes his famous journey from Cape Colony
to Angola and from Angola to the Indian Ocean,
exploring the Zambezi from source to mouth, and
returns to England 1856
Burton and Speke discover Lake Tanganyika, and Speke
reaches south end of the Victoria Nyanza 1858
Livingstone and Kirk discover Lake Nyasa 1859
Spanish War with Morocco 1859-60
Zanzibar separated as an independent State from the
Imamate of ’Oman 1861
Lagos becomes a British Crown Colony 1863
Speke and Grant establish the Victoria Nyanza Lake as
the main source of the Nile, visit Uganda, and follow
the Nile down to Cairo 1860-4
(Sir) Samuel Baker discovers Lake Albert Nyanza 1864
Second Government Expedition under Dr Baikie sent out
to explore rivers Niger and Benué (1854); Dr Baikie
made Consul for the Niger, founds Lokoja at
Niger-Benué confluence and explores Benué (1857) and
greatly extends British influence; but dies in 1863;
Consulate abolished 1866
Discovery of a diamond near the Orange River in Cape
Colony 1867
Lakes Mweru and Bangweulu and the Upper Luapula (Congo)
R. discovered by Livingstone in 1867 and 1868
Basutoland placed under British protection 1868
British Army enters Abyssinia to release captives of
King Theodore and wins victory of Magdala 1868
Establishment of Triple Control over Tunisian finances 1869
Opening of Suez Canal 1869
Sir Samuel Baker appointed Governor of the Equatorial
province, Egyptian Sudan 1869
Dr Schweinfurth discovers the R. Wele-Mubangi, the
great northern affluent of the Congo 1870
Livingstone discovers the Lualaba or Upper Congo at
Nyangwe; is met at Ujiji and relieved by Stanley 1871
Insurrection against French in Eastern Algeria
suppressed 1871
Responsible Government introduced into Cape Colony 1872
Sultan of Zanzibar signs treaty forced on him by
England for abolition of the Slave Trade 1873
Second Ashanti War: Sir Garnet Wolseley takes and burns
Kumasi 1873-4
Dr Livingstone dies 1873
Cameron crosses Africa from Zanzibar to Benguela,
mapping Tanganyika correctly for the first time 1873-5
Stanley circumnavigates the Victoria Nyanza and traces
the river Congo from Nyangwe to the Atlantic
Ocean—the greatest journey in African Exploration 1874-7
Transvaal annexed by Great Britain 1877
The Dual Control of France and England imposed on
Egyptian Government (1876); Ismail Pasha deposed 1879
War between Great Britain and the Zulus 1879
The International Association founded by the King of
the Belgians, having developed a special branch, the
“Comité d’Études du Haut Congo,” sends out H. M.
Stanley to found what becomes six years later the
“Congo Independent State” 1879
De Brazza secures part of the Upper Congo for France 1880
The Transvaal revolts against Great Britain and obtains
recognition of its independence under British
suzerainty 1881
French force enters Tunis and imposes French protection
on that country 1881
French conquests reach the Upper Niger 1881-2
Arabi’s revolt in Egypt (1881), abolition of Dual
Control, bombardment of Alexandria and defeat of
Arabi at Tel-el-Kebir by Lord Wolseley; British
occupation of Egypt begins 1882
Italy occupies Assab Bay on Red Sea coast and commences
creation of colony of Eritrea 1882
Occupation of Obok by France 1883
The commencement of the African Scramble: Germany
establishes her protectorate over South-West Africa,
and over Togoland and the Cameroons in West Africa,
France occupies Grand Bassam and Porto Novo (Ivory
and Slave Coasts); Gordon is despatched to the Sudan
(which revolted from Egypt in 1883); and the Berlin
Conference on African questions is summoned 1884
Death of General Gordon at Khartum and temporary loss
of Egyptian Sudan 1885
Recognition by all the powers of Congo Independent
State 1885
Bechuanaland taken under British protection 1885
Germany founds her East African possessions in the
interior of the Zanzibar Sultanate 1885
Great Britain declares protectorate over Niger Coast
and river Niger and grants Charter to Royal Niger
Company: Joseph Thomson makes a Treaty for latter
Company with the Sultan of Sokoto 1885
Portugal extends her territory to the south bank of the
Congo and to Kabinda 1884-5
France concludes treaty with Madagascar which gives her
predominant influence over that island (declares
protectorate over Komoro Islands 1886) 1885
The Anglo-Egyptian forces sustain severe defeats near
Suakin at the hands of the Sudanese under Osman
Digna: Suakin is retained, but Egyptian rule in the
Nile valley is restricted to Wady Haifa. Italy
occupies Masawa 1885
Great discoveries of reef gold in the Transvaal;
founding of Johannesburg 1886
War breaks out in N. Nyasaland between British settlers
and Arab slave traders 1887
In Oil rivers (Niger Delta) Jaja, King of Opobo, is
arrested and banished; access to interior markets is
then obtained 1887
French Senegambian possessions definitely extended to
the Upper Niger 1887
Imperial British East Africa Company receives Charter 1888
Serious rebellion against the Germans breaks out in
East Africa (is not finally subdued by von Wissmann
till 1890) 1888
British protectorate over N. Somaliland first organized 1889
Italian protectorate established over East Somaliland:
and treaty concluded with Menelik of Ethiopia by
which Italy claimed to control foreign relations of
Abyssinia 1889
Charter given to British South African Company 1889
British Central Africa declared to be under British
protection: British flag hoisted on Lakes Tanganyika
and Nyasa 1889
In 1887 Stanley conducts an expedition by way of the
Congo to relieve Emin Pasha. He discovers the Edward
Lake and Ruwenzori Mountains and reaches Zanzibar 1889
Anglo-German Agreement concluded relative to East
Africa: Zanzibar taken under British protection;
Great Britain recognizes French protectorate over
Madagascar and French Sphere of Influence between
Algeria, the Niger, and Lake Chad; and France
recognizes the British Control over Sokoto and the
Lower Niger 1890
Cecil Rhodes, managing director of the British South
Africa Company, becomes premier of Cape Colony 1890
French expeditions reach the river Shari from the Congo
Basin and secure that river to French influence 1890-1
Captain (afterwards Colonel Sir Frederick) Lugard
establishes British predominance ever Uganda 1891
A German force annihilated by Wa-hehe in south central
part of German East Africa 1891
Paul Crampel, the first explorer crossing from the
Congo basin to, the Shari river, is killed by a
subordinate chief under Rabah Zobeir on the borders
of Dar Banda 1891
Belgians establish posts in Schweinfurth’s Wele 1892
Natal receives responsible government 1893
France conquers and annexes Dahomé 1893
Rabah Zobeir becomes Sultan of Bornu by conquest 1893
First Matebele war; death of Lobengula; Buluwayo
becomes the capital of Rhodesia 1893
French occupy Jenne and Timbuktu on the Upper Niger 1893-4
The Belgian forces under Baron Dhanis capture all the
Arab towns on the Lualaba (Upper Congo) and destroy
the Arab power in Congoland 1892-4
Witboo Hottentot outbreak against Germans in Southwest
Africa 1894
Uganda declared a British protectorate; Charter of
British East Africa Company withdrawn and British
East Africa henceforth administered under British
Commissioner 1894-5
Arabs finally defeated and expelled from Nyasaland
Protectorate 1895
Major Mouzinho de Albuquerque captures the Zulu king
Gungunyana and firmly establishes Portuguese dominion
in South-east Africa 1895
Captain Bottego establishes Italian post at Lugh on the
Jub river 1895
France conquers and annexes Madagascar 1894-6
Jameson raid into Transvaal; Matebele revolt and second
Matebele war 1896
Italy sustains terrible defeat in North Abyssinia. Her
protectorate over Abyssinia withdrawn and that
country’s independence recognized 1896
Anglo-Egyptian army reconquers Dongola 1896
Conquest of Nupe by the Royal Niger Company 1897
Zululand incorporated with Natal 1897
Railway completed to Buluwayo 1897
Emile Gentil reaches Shari river and Lake Chad from
Congo, and establishes French protectorate over
Bagirmi 1897
Benin city and kingdom conquered by a British Naval
Expedition (after a massacre of a pacific expedition
under J. R. Phillips) 1897
German East Africa declared a German colony 1897
Revolt of Sudanese soldiers temporarily imperils
British position in Uganda. Col. Sir J. R. L.
Macdonald’s expedition reveals geography of region
between Lake Rudolf and Nile; Sir Harry Johnston
reorganizes the administration of Uganda protectorate
and concludes a new treaty with kingdom of Buganda 1897-98-1900
Anglo-French agreement signed with regard to Niger 1898
Anglo-German agreement relative to Delagoa Bay and
Other Portuguese possessions in Africa signed in 1898
Samori, the last great warrior chief of Senegal-Niger,
defeated and captured by the French 1898
Serious rising against the British Sierra Leone
protectorate 1898
Railway opened from Lower Congo to Stanley pool 1898
Khartum captured by Sir H. (since Viscount) Kitchener
and Anglo-Egyptian influence established over the
Sudan; Wadi Halfa-Dongola railway continued towards
Khartum 1898
Major Marchand, who is sent to Fashoda by French
Government, is withdrawn thence on British protests 1898
The British and French Governments conclude an appendix
to the Niger Convention of 1898 which determines
approximately the boundaries of British and French
influence in the Eastern Sudan 1899
Ashanti rising and final conquest of Ashanti 1900
Northern Nigeria taken over for administration by the
British Government 1900
The Khalifa and nearly all his remaining generals
perish in the battle of Omdubreikat (Kordofan) in
November, 1899, and Osman Digna is captured near
Suakin in January. Sir Reginald Wingate becomes
Governor-General of Sudan 1900
Rabah Zobeir, the Sudanese conqueror of Bornu, etc.,
dies in battle with the French 1900
The Sadd or obstructive water vegetation of Mountain
Nile is cut through by Major Malcolm Peake and
navigation opened up between Khartum and Gondokoro
(Uganda) 1900-1
Railway from Wadi Halfa reaches Khartum 1901
Sleeping sickness begins in Uganda in the autumn of 1901
War breaks out in South Africa between Boer Republics
and Great Britain (October 1899); Bloemfontein and
Pretoria taken, 1900; Orange Free State and Transvaal
annexed to British Empire, 1900; peace concluded 1902
Fadl-Allah, son and successor of Rabah, dies after his
defeat by the French on the frontiers of Bornu 1902
Right Hon. Cecil Rhodes dies at Muizenburg near Cape
Town, March 1902
German occupation of Lake Chad districts 1902
The final conquest of Northern Nigeria begins 1902.
(Yola, Bauchi, Bornu) and finishes (Kano and Sokoto) 1903
Uganda railway from Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza open for
through service in 1903
Mr E. D. Morel commences his public denunciations of
King Leopold’s misgovernment of the Congo State in
1902; (Sir) Roger Casement sent out to investigate
and report 1903-4
British-Somali War 1902-4
Anglo-French Agreement, allotting Morocco to a French
and Egypt to a British Sphere of Influence 1904
King Leopold sends an international commission to the
Congo basin to investigate truth of charges brought
against his administration (1904); the commission
reports 1905
Mauretania (land between Senegal and Moroccan Sahara)
taken under French administration 1904-5
Lagos and Niger coast united as “Southern Nigeria” 1904
Rhodesian “Cape to Cairo” railway reaches and bridges
Zambezi at Victoria Falls 1905
French conquest of Wadai, the great slave-raiding state
of the Central Sudan, begins 1904
Italian government takes on direct management of
Italian Somaliland 1905
German Emperor decides to pay state visit to Morocco at
Tangiers and thereby calls in question the allotment
of Morocco to France as a sphere of influence 1905
The Congress of Algeciras meets in southern Spain to
discuss the future of Morocco 1906
Railway from Khartum-Berber to Port Sudan (Red Sea)
opened 1906
Grant of responsible.government to the Transvaal 1906
In 1903 the Hottentots rebel against German authority
in South-west Africa. In 1904 the Ova-herero
(Damaras) join the rebellion, which is not finally
crushed until 1906-7
Responsible government granted to Orange River Colony
(Orange Free State) 1907
Diamonds found in German South-west Africa 1908
Belgium annexes the Congo Independent State 1908-9
In 1908 serious troubles break out in Western Morocco
(Shawia country) obliging France to land a large
force and occupy Casa Blanca and the neighbourhood;
Mulai Hafid defeats his brother (Abd-el-Aziz) and
becomes Sultan in his place; France and Germany come
to a temporary arrangement which recognizes France’s
“political interests” in Morocco 1909
Union of South Africa (Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal,
and Orange State) proclaimed 1909
Spaniards send an army of 50,000 men to conquer and
occupy Rif country (North-east Morocco) 1909-10
France conquers the Arab and Berber nomad tribes of
Adrar (Mauretania) 1909-10
France finally conquers Wadai 1910
Rhodesian “Cape to Cairo” railway opened as far as
Congolese frontier in Katanga 1910
Viscount Kitchener becomes British Agent in Egypt 1911
“Cape to Cairo” railway extended from Khartum to El
Obeid (Kordofan) 1911
The “Panther,” sent to Agadir on the south-west coast
of Morocco by Germany, reopens the Morocco question;
but the incident ends in a German recognition of a
French protectorate over Morocco 1911
Italy lands 80,000 men at Tripoli and eventually
annexes all Tripoli and Barka 1911-12
France cedes to Germany important territories which
connect the Kamerun colony with the Mubangi river and
the main Congo, making Germany a “Congo” power 1911-12
Railway from Lagos to Kano (Hausaland) finished 1912
Liberian Republic entrusts the management of its
finances and interior police to officials appointed
by United States President 1911-12
France and Spain definitely settle their partition of
Morocco; and France occupies all important Moroccan
towns except Tangier 1912
APPENDIX II
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE HISTORY OF COLONIZATION OF AFRICA. BOOKS SPECIALLY
USEFUL
ALL BLUE BOOKS published by Foreign Office and Colonial Office DEALING
WITH AFRICA and the SLAVE TRADE from 1830 to the present
day—especially for the years between 1876 and 1898, and 1903-11.
A HISTORY OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY; by (Sir) E. H. Bunbury. 2 vols. 2nd
edition. John Murray. 1883.̓
THE GOLD OF OPHIR; by Professor A. H. Keane. Edward Stanford. 1901.̓
LES CIVILISATIONS DE L'AFRIQUE DU NORD (Berbères, Arabes, Turcs); par
Victor Piquet. Paris: Armand Colin. 1909.̓
HISTOIRE DE L'AFRIQUE SEPTENTRIONALE (Berbérie); par Ernest Mercier. 3
vols. Paris: Ernest Leroux. 1891.̓
(An excellent and trustworthy compilation.)
HISTOIRE DE L'ÉTABLISSEMENT DES ARABES DANS L'AFRIQUE SEPTENTRIONALE
selon les auteurs Arabes. By the same author. 1 vol.
Paris: Challamel. 1875.
THE DAWN OF MODERN GEOGRAPHY. Vols. II. and III.; by C. Raymond Beazley.
Oxford. 1906.
PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR; by Professor C. Raymond Beazley.
Putnam. 1895.
Also by same author:
PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL, ETC. (Gives much interesting detail as to
early Portuguese colonizing work.) American Historical Review. Vol.
XVII. 1912.
THE CHRONICLE OF THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF GUINEA. G. de Azurara.
Translated from the Portuguese by C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage.
Hakluyt Society. 2 vols. 1899.
HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM OF CONGO; by Duarte Lopes—rendered into Italian
by Filippo Pigafetta. English translation: John Murray. 1881.̓
HISTORIA DA AFRICA ORIENTAL PORTUGUEZA; por José Joaquim Lopes de Lima.
Lisbon. 1862.
TRAVELS OF THE JESUITS IN ETHIOPIA; by B. Tellez. 8 London. 1710.̓
THE BARBARY CORSAIRS (Story of the Nations); by Stanley Lane Poole.
T. Fisher Unwin. 1890.
DOCUMENTS SUR L'HISTOIRE, ETC., DE L'AFRIQUE ORIENTALE; par le Capitaine
M. Guillain. 3 vols. Paris. 1856.̓
THE EARLY CHARTERED COMPANIES: by George Cawston and A. H. Keane.
Edward Arnold. 1896.
MUNGO PARK AND THE NIGER; by Joseph Thomson. George Phillips. 1890.̓
PIONEERS IN WEST AFRICA; by Sir Harry Johnston. 9 Blackie. 1911.̓
THE LANDS OF CAZEMBE (Lacerda’s journey to Cazembe in 1798); a
compilation by Captain R. F. Burton. Royal Geographical Society.
1873.̓
ZANZIBAR; by the same author. London. 1871.̓
THE MAPS OF AFRICA BY TREATY; by Sir Edward Hertslet, K.C.B. 2 vols.
Harrison & Sons. 1894-5.
EGYPT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY; by D. A. Cameron.
Smith, Elder & Co. 1898.
ENGLAND IN EGYPT; by Viscount Milner, G.C.B.
London: Arnold. 1892-1910.
UGANDA AND THE EGYPTIAN SUDAN; by Dr R. W. Felkin and C. T. Wilson. 2
vols. Sampson Low. 1882.̓
MARTYRDOM OF MAN; by Winwood Reade. Kegan Paul. (Ed. of 1910.)̓
SAVAGE AFRICA; same author. Smith, Elder & Co. 1864.̓
THE HEART OF AFRICA; by Dr Georg Schweinfurth. Sampson Low. 1873.̓
OUR SUDAN; its pyramids and progress; by John Ward. John Murray. 1905.̓
A HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN AFRICA; by Sir Harry
Johnston. National Society. 1911.̓
HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE BRITISH COLONIES. Vol. IV. Parts 1 & 2
(dealing with South and East Africa); by Sir C. P. Lucas, B.A.
Clarendon Press. 1897.
Do. Do. Vol. III. WEST AFRICA. Clarendon Press. 1894.̓
HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA; by G. M^cCall Theal. 5 vols.
Juta & Co., Cape Town. 1888-93.
ANGOLA AND THE RIVER CONGO; by J. J. Monteiro. 2 vols.
Macmillan & Co. 1875.
AFRICA. 2 vols. By Professor A. H. Keane. Edward Stanford. 1902.̓
TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AFRICA; by Dr Henry Barth.
5 vols. Longman, Brown, Green. 1857.̓
THE STORY OF AFRICA; by Dr Robert Brown. 4 vols.
Cassell and Company. 1894-5.
(A most valuable book of reference.)
THE PARTITION OF AFRICA; by (Dr) J. Scott Keltie. 2nd Edition.
Edward Stanford. 1895.
HOW I FOUND LIVINGSTONE. THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT. 2 vols. THE CONGO:
AND THE FOUNDING OF ITS FREE STATE. 2 vols. IN DARKEST AFRICA. 2
vols. By H. M. Stanley. Sampson Low.̓
DU NIGER AU GOLFE DE GUINÉE; par le Capitaine Binger. Paris 1892.̓
THE FALL OF THE CONGO ARABS; by Captain S. L. Hinde. Methuen. 1897.̓
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA; by Sir H. H. Johnston. 2nd Edition.
Methuen. 1899.
FIGHTING THE SLAVE HUNTERS IN CENTRAL AFRICA; by Alfred J. Swann.
Seeley & Co. 1910.
ADVENTURES IN NYASALAND; by Low Monteith Fotheringham.
Sampson Low. 1891.
TIMBUCTOO THE MYSTERIOUS; by Félix Dubois. William Heinemann. 1897.̓
THE RISE OF OUR EAST AFRICAN EMPIRE; by Captain F. D. Lugard, D.S.O. 2
vols. Blackwood, Edinburgh. 1893.̓
BRITISH EAST AFRICA; by P. M^cDermott. Chapman & Hall. 1895.̓
FIRE AND SWORD IN THE SUDAN; by Sir Rudolf Slatin Pasha.
Edward Arnold. 1896.
L'OMO: VIAGGIO DI ESPLORAZIONE NELL' AFRICA ORIENTALE; da Vannutelli e
Citerni. Milan. 1899.̓
(Deals with Italian Somaliland, Galaland, etc.)
À TRAVERS L'AFRIQUE CENTRALE: DU CONGO AU NIGER; by C. Maistre.
Paris. 1895.
THE UGANDA PROTECTORATE; by Sir H. H. Johnston. 2 vols. 2nd Edition.
Hutchinson. 1904.
MADAGASCAR; by Captain S. Pasfield Oliver. 2 vols. Macmillan. 1886.̓
THE RISE OF OUR WEST AFRICAN EMPIRE (Sierra Leone); by Captain C.
Braithwaite Wallis. London. 1903.̓
THE HISTORY OF SIERRA LEONE; by Major J. J. Crooks.
Simpkin Marshall. 1903.
_TIMES_ HISTORY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR. 5 vols.
_Times Office._ 1903-5.
CIVILIZATION IN CONGOLAND; by H. R. Fox-Bourne. London. 1903.̓
KING LEOPOLD’S RULE IN AFRICA; by E. D. Morel. Heinemann. 1904.̓
BRITISH NIGERIA; by Lieut.-Colonel A. F. Mockler-Ferryman.
London. 1902.
LIBERIA. 2 vols. By Sir H. H. Johnston. Hutchinson. 1906.̓
MADAGASCAR: Essai de Géographie Physique (gives much history, also); par
E. F. Gautier. Paris. 1902.̓
THE NEGRO IN THE NEW WORLD (gives history of Slave Trade); by Sir H. H.
Johnston. 44 Methuen. 1910.̓
NYASALAND UNDER THE FOREIGN OFFICE; by H. L. Duff. George Bell. 1903.̓
A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY; by Lady Lugard. London. 1904.̓
UGANDA AND ITS PEOPLES; by J. F. Cunningham. Hutchinson. 1904.̓
SEVENTEEN TRIPS THROUGH SOMALILAND, ETC.; by Colonel H. G. C. Swayne.
R.E. 3rd Edition. Rowland Ward. 1903.̓
THE NILE QUEST; by Sir H. H. Johnston. Lawrence & Butler. 1904.̓
GEORGE GRENFELL AND THE CONGO; by Sir H. H. Johnston. 2 vols.
Hutchinson. 1908.
THE GARDEN COLONY: the Story of Natal and its neighbours; by Robert
Russell. J. M. Dent. 1903.̓
THE GREAT PLATEAU OF NORTHERN RHODESIA; by C. Gouldsbury and H. Streane.
Edward Arnold. 1911.
A HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH
CENTURIES (treats of early history of South Africa); by Edward
Heawood, M.A. Cambridge University Press, 1912.̓
DAWN IN DARKEST AFRICA; by John H. Harris. Smith, Elder & Co., 1912.̓
MOROCCO IN DIPLOMACY; by E. D. Morel. Smith, Elder & Co., 1912.̓
THE STATESMAN’S YEAR-BOOK; by Dr J. Scott Keltie.
(Annual publication.) Macmillan.
COLONIAL OFFICE LIST; by W. H. Mercer and A. E. Collins.
Harrison & Sons. 1898-1912.
Also the works of LIVINGSTONE, W. FLINDERS PETRIE, SIR RICHARD BURTON,
CAPT. J. H. SPEKE, SIR SAMUEL BAKER; JOURNALS OF CHARLES GEORGE
GORDON, and 11th Edition, ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.
INDEX
Abatetwa clan, 281
Abbadie, Antoine and Arnaud, 226, 317
Abbas bin Tusūn, 360
Abbas Hilmi, 367
Abbasid Khalifs, 67, 69, 71, 72
Abd-al-aziz, 223
Abd-al-Hamid, 366
Abd-al-Kader, 214, 218
Abd-al-Mumin, 64
Abd-al-Wadite kings of Tlemsan, 64
Abdallah-al-Taaisha, 363
Abdallah-bin-Abu-Sarh, 56
Abdallah-bin-Zubeir, 56
Abd-ar-rahman bin Mūawiya, 59
Abo, 192
Abraham of Beja, 81, 82
Abreu, Gomez d', 424
Abruzzi, Duke of the, 340
Abu Muhammad Hafsi, 64
Abu-AbdAllah, 60
Abukir Bay, 212
Abu’l Abbas Ahmad-al-Mansur, 66 _et seq._
Abyssinia, 7, 10, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 43, 51, 52, 62, 82 _et seq._,
152, 212, 226, 227, 241, 242, 245, 253, 300, 301, 303, 308, 316,
317, 319, 320, 326, 363, 393 _et seq._, 443
Abyssinian explorers, 45, 317
Accra, 124, 177, 178, 196
Aχdar mountains, 42
Acila, 66
Açores Islands, 92, 116, 390
Acre, 212
Acunha, Tristan d' (Conquistador), 83
— — Island, 268
Adamawa, 194
Aden, 18, 19, 73, 83, 226, 227, 235, 335, 337, 372
Adis Ababa, 227, 396
Adonis, 39
Adrar, 12, 121, 321
Adrar Temmur, 209
Adua, 396
Adulis, 43
Aelius Gallus, 298
_Aepyornis_, 424
Afar-Danakil-Somali language group, 21
Afarik, 37
Affonso (of Kongo), 86
Africa, prehistoric race movements in, 1 _et seq._;
negroes of modern Africa, 5, 6;
indebted to Egypt for domestic animals and cultivated plants, 19,
20;
Mediterranean colonization of, 32 _et seq._;
derivation of name, 37;
Arab conquest of, 52 _et seq._
“Africa” (the Roman province of), 47, 49 _et seq._, 59, 219
African Association, 304, 305, 318
— Lakes Company, 248, 277, 284
“Afrikander Bond,” 276
Afrikanders, 129, 140, 276
Agades, 13, 19, 49, 209
Agadir, 224, 225, 399
Agau-Bilin, 21
Aghlab, Aghlabite dynasty, 59, 60
Agisymba, 48
Agulhas, Cape, 81
Ahaggar, 337
Ahmad bin Tulūn,70
Ahmadu Abdulei, 203
Ahmadu Ahmadu, 202
Ahmadu bin Tidiani, 202, 204
Ahmadu Lobo, 202
Ahmadu, the Fula King, 309
Air, country of, 327, 337, 443
Air and Asben, oasis, 209
Akaba, Gulf of, 366
Akko, 32
Al-Araish, 77
Al-'Askar, 60
Albanians, 19, 70
Albany, 256, 258
Albargoa, 423
Albert Nyanza, _see_ Nyanza
Albreda, 171
Albu, Sir G., 146, 274
Albuquerque, Major Mouzinho de, 114
Aldabra, 29, 295
Aleppo, 71
Alexander, Lieut. Boyd, 338, 339
Alexander, Sir J. E., 307
Alexander the Great, 43
Alexandria, 44, 45, 52, 71, 212, 214, 238, 298, 359, 360, 362, 366,
393
Al-Fasi, 391
Alfonso I, 76
Alfonso III, 77
Alfonso V, 76
Alfonso VI, 76
Al Fostat, 60
Alfred, county of, 270
Algarve, 77
Algeciras Conference, 223, 225
Algeria, 5, 8, 12, 22, 35, 38, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56, 59 _et seq._,
116, 119, 120, 160, 207, 213 _et seq._, 245, 252, 253, 301, 321,
337, 444, 445
Algiers, 117, 118, 195, 213, 214, 230, 235, 400
Algoa Bay, 81, 126, 259
Alhucemas, Is., 119
Ali, 56, 59, 60, 66, 69
Ali bin Hamūd, 382
Al Jof, 237
Al Kahirah, 60
Al-Kaïm bi Amr Allah, 60
Al Kasr-al-Kabīr, 77
Al-Katai, 60
Allah, 55
Allat, 55
Al-Mahdi Senussi II, 236
Al-Mansur, 67, 69
Al-Masr, 60
Almeida, Francisco de, 424
Almirante Islands, 28, 29, 295
Almoravide, Almohade, _see_ Marabut and Muāhadim
Al Mu’izz, 60
Al-Obeid, 363
Alsace-Lorraine settlers in Algeria, 216
Alula, Ras, 394
Alvares, Dom, 86 _et seq._
Alvarez, 83
Al Wardani, 367
Amalfi, 390
Amamfengu, 267
Amaro José, 307
Amatola Mountains, 263
Amatongaland, 281, 283
Ama-zulu, 281
Ambas Bay, 184, 244, 415
Ambriz, 94
America, 88, 92, 124, 154
American Colonization Society, 158, 164
American Missionaries, 36, 96, 175, 228, 252, 261
American slave-trade, 153, 154, 156
American War of Independence, 173
Amerindian type, 4
Amhara, 395
Amiens, Peace of, 254
Amina, Princess, 360
Amir-al-Mumenin, 63
Amorites, 22
Amr-bin-al-As, 55
Amsterdam, 127
Anamabu, 176
Andalucia, 50, 120, 202
Andaman Islands, 3
Anderson, Benjamin, 166
Andersson, C. J., 317, 327
Angas, G. F., 308
Angles, 50
Anglo-French Conventions, 210, 225, 230, 366, 368
Anglo-German Convention of 1890, 364, 411
Angola, 87, 89 _et seq._, 96, 97, 104, 106, 108, 124, 128, 154, 184,
245, 250, 251, 258, 291, 301, 316 _et seq._, 325, 338, 444
Angoni-Zulus, 24, 103, 160, 279
Angora goats, 265, 274, 419
Angoshe, 103, 109, 110
Angra Pequena, 99, 406, 420
Anhaya, Pedro de, 83
Ankobra, 124
Ankole, 381
Annesley Bay, 43
Anno Bom Island, 121
Anti-Atlas Mountains, 120, 224
Antilles, 117
Antonelli, 329
Anuaks, 370
Apollonia, 42, 124
Arābi, Ahmed, 360, 362
Arabia, 1, 4, 17, 21, 22, 24, 26, 29, 33, 39, 43, 51, 52, 54 _et
seq._, 62, 84, 103, 152, 156, 159, 160, 326
Arabic language, 40, 61, 70, 75, 217, 253, 448, 449
Arabs, 13, 14, 19, 22 _et seq._, 29, 30, 42, 44, 45, 52 _et seq._,
70 _et seq._, 134, 146, 152, 160, 161, 213, 215, 217, 241, 279,
285, 291, 294, 344 _et seq._, 446 _etc._
Aragon, 116
Aramaic, 21, 40
Archinard, Col., 204, 206
Argonauts, 41
Arguin, 79, 123, 198, 403
Arizona, 153
Armenia, 20
Armenians, 19, 21, 22
Arnaud (explorer), 338
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 364
Arnot, F. S., 330
Arõ tribe, 187
Aruwimi, R., 329, 332
Arvad, 32
Aryan tongues, 21
Aryan type, 22
Arzila, 66
Ascension Island, 99, 268
Ashanti, 10, 12, 14, 48, 124, 146, 154, 161, 176 _et seq._, 204, 309
Ashmun, 39
Ashmun, Rev. Jehudi, 164
Asia, probable birth-place of the negro, 4;
modern negroes of, 5 _etc._
Asia Minor, 69
Asiatics in S. Africa, 291, 294
Asil, 237
Asiut, 303
Asjer, 37
Asmara, 393
Ass, the, 75
Assab Bay, 393
As-Sanusi, 236
Assini, 205
Assuan, 368
Assyria, Assyrians, 19, 21, 33, 37
Astarte, 39
Atbara, 46, 365
Atiqa, 32, 33
Atlantic Ocean reached by Arabs, 57
Atlas Mountains, 2, 47, 49, 64, 223, 224, 324, 331, 336
“Atrocities,” 349
Augustus Caesar, 298
Aures Mountains, 445
Aurigha, 53
Austen, Capt. H. H., 339
Australia, 264, 293
Australoids, 2
Austria, 59, 245
Austrian attempt on Delagoa Bay, 111
Austrian Catholic Mission on Nile, 319
Austrian missionaries, 245
Author.
His experience of slave traffic, 155, 156;
administers Ambas Bay, 184;
removes Jaja, 185;
explores the Benin river, 186;
administers British Central Africa, 278, 284;
with Dr Cross discovers south end of Lake Rukwa, 328;
other African explorations, 330, 331;
and Kili-ma-njaro, 376, 409;
appointed Special Commissioner, 380, 381;
on the East African Protectorate, 387
Avis, House of, 66, 88
Awarigha, 37
Awuraghen, 37
Axim, 124
Axum, 43, 300
Ayeaye, the, 427
Ayubite kings of Egypt, 71
Baal-hammana, 38
Baal Milkkart, 39
Bab-al-Mandib, Straits of, 4, 393, 397
Babel or Babylon, 60
Baboons, 43
Badagri, 311, 312
Baert, Capt., 330
Baetica, 50
Baganda, 380
Baghdad, 58, 59, 67, 69 _et seq._
Bagirmi, 13, 14, 194, 230, 235 _et seq._, 324, 443
Bagradas, 38
Bahr-al-Ghazal, 12, 16, 19, 43, 46, 319, 321, 326, 327, 336, 363,
369
Baikie, Dr W. B., 188
Bailundo, 96
Baines, Thomas, 283
— William, 327
Ba-jok, 87, 301
Baker, Sir Samuel and Lady, 315, 318, 326, 362
Bakhunu, 204
Ba-kioko, 87
Bakka, 54
Ba-kongo, 240
Balboa, 153
Baldissera, General, 396
Baldwin, 327
Ball, Mr John, 324
Bamaku, 202, 203, 305
Bambotus, 49
Bambuk, 199, 304
Banana (tree), 27, 75, 92, 93
Bandiagara, 202
Bangweulu, Lake, 322, 330, 334
Bani, 14
Banks, Sir Joseph, 304
Bantu Africa, 26, 308, 335
Bantu border-line, 230, 332
— language, 10, 11, 16, 134
— negroes, 26, 30, 45, 51, 97, 122, 126, 134, 232, 415, 418
— — migrations of, 134, 135, 255
Baptist Mission (Cameroons and Congo), 184, 244, 325, 329, 415
Baptista (explorer), 307
Baratieri, General, 396
Barbarossas, the, 118
Barbary, 54, 59, 61, 62, 66, 298, 302
Barbary States, 118, 169, 195, 303;
_see also_ Algeria, Tunis, Tripoli
Barclay, Hon. Arthur, 167
Bardera, 398
Bardo Museum, 35
Barghash, Sultan, 375
Bari people, 245, 326
Baring, Sir E., _see_ Cromer
Baringo, Lake, 331, 335
Barka, 41, 57, 61, 69, 314, 444
Barke, 42
Barotse, 249, 278, 325, 339
Barrakonda Rapids, 302
Barreto, Francisco, 101, 102, 300
Barth, Dr Heinrich, 195, 314, 315
Bary, Dr E. von, 327
Basel Mission, 248
“Bastards,” the, 139, 142, 418
Bastian, Dr, 322
“Bastion de France,” 211
Basuto, Basutoland, 134, 140 _et seq._, 249, 250, 263, 264, 270,
273, 275, 281, 291 _et seq._
Batavia, 126, 127, 135, 136
Bateke country, 90
Batenstein, Fort, 124
Bates, G. L., 339
Batetela, 346
Bathurst, 170, 171
Batoka country, 240, 247
Battel, Andrew, 301
Bauchi, 194
Bauer, F., 338
Baumann, Dr, 333, 336
Baya country, 234
Ba-yaka, 87
Bayoñ, 415
Beaconsfield, Lord, 406
Beaufort, de, 200, 319
Bechuana, Bechuanaland, 134, 140, 143, 145, 249, 255, 269 _et seq._,
291, 292, 307, 308, 317
Beechey, Admiral, 314
Beecroft, Capt. John, 183, 188, 313
Behanzin, 206
Beira, 82, 100, 113 _et seq._, 279, 285, 286
Beirūt, 32
Beit, Alfred, 146, 274
Beja, 21, 81
Beke, Dr C. T., 317
Belgian Africa, 342 _et seq._
Belgian Congo, 87, 96, 233, 235, 272, 291
Belgians, King of the, 229 _et seq._, 328, 329, 342 _et seq._
Belgium, Belgians, 161, 328, 329, 342 _et seq._
Bell, King, 408
Beltrame, Giovanni, 319
Belzoni, Giovanni, 186
Bembatoka Bay, 429, 438
Bena-mutapa, 23
Benadir, 397, 398
Bengal, Bay of, 28
Benghazi, 42
Benguela, 90, 94, 96, 159, 251, 301, 316, 323
Beni-Hilal, 61
Beni-Merīn, 54, 64
Beni-Midrār, 59
Benin, 154, 169, 181 _et seq._
Beni-Rustam, 59
Beni-Soleim, 61
Bentley, Reverend Dr H., 244, 329
Benue, R., 12, 13, 48, 185, 188, 190 _et seq._, 313, 332, 333, 338
Benyowski, 427
Benzert, 38
Berber states and dynasties, 194
Berbers, 12 _et seq._, 18, 21, 36 _et seq._, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57 _et
seq._, 117, 214, 215, 217, 253, 446
Berenike, 18
Berg River, 131
Berg-Damara negroes, 7
Berkeley, E., 380
Berlin Conference, 189, 192, 219, 229, 231, 343
Berlin Convention of 1884, 112
Bermuda, 264
Bermudez, 84
Bernard, A., 334
Beshar, 222
Best, Rev. Mr, 251
Betancourt (Béthencourt), Jean de, 85, 116
Bethany, 406
Betsi-misáraka, 428
Beurmann, M. v., 324
Bey of Constantine, 214, 218
Bey of Tunis, 219, 220, 323
Bezuidenhout brothers, 258
Biafra, 183
Bianco, Andrea, 424
Bibars, 71
Bights of Biafra and Benin, 183, 205, 312, 313
Bihé, 251
Bilma, 209, 339
Binger, Colonel Louis G., 203, 205, 315, 333
Bird, Mrs Isabella, 433
Biruna, 32
Biruta, 32
Bisandugu, 204
Bisharin, 17, 18, 21, 52
Bishops (Christian), _see_ Christian;
Negro do., 86, 243
Biskra, 57
Bismarck, Prince, 405, 406
Bismarck archipelago, 3
Bitter Lakes, 33
Bizerta (Hippo-Zaryt), 38
“Black Africa,” 449, 450
“Black, White, and Yellow,” 272
Blanchet, Paul, 338
Blanco, Cape, 78, 79, 121, 171, 198, 403
Blantyre, 108, 251
Blemmyes, 52
Bloemfontein, 149, 288;
Convention, 142
Blyden, Dr E. W., 167
Bocarro, Jasper, 300
Boer victories, 149
Boers, the, 7, 95, 129, 136, 138 _et seq._, 257, 258, 260 _et seq._,
281 _et seq._, 292, 293, 388
Böhm, 327, 334
Boiteux, Lieut., 206, 207
Bojador, Cape, 78, 121
Bolts (adventurer), 111
Boma, 80, 87, 347
Bombay Presidency, 152
Bona, Bône, 38, 66, 117, 216, 390
Bondelzwarts, 417
Bondu, 201, 202
Bonnat, Mons. M. J., 325
Bonnier, Col., 204, 207
Bonny, R., 185, 189
Boomerang, 15
Bôr, 319
Borān Gala country, 386
Borckenhager, Mr, 276
Borelli, H., 226, 334
Borghese, Prince Giovanni, 323
Borgnis-Desbordes, General, 202
Borgu, 12, 51, 182, 192 _et seq._
Bornu, 12, 15, 19, 48, 51, 68, 70, 160, 191, 193, 204, 235, 236,
304, 310, 314, 315, 323, 443
Boroma, 247
Botha, General Louis, 150
Bottego, 334
Bourbon, Island of, 127, 296, 426, 429
Boutros Pasha, 367
Bowdich, Thomas Edward, 176, 309
Bragança, House of, 67, 93
Brandenburg in Africa, 403
— Great Elector of, 403
Brass, R., 189, 312
Brass settlement, 312, 313
Brass work, 187
Bratières, Serg., 205
Brava (Barawa), 100
Brawa, 398
Brazil, Brazilians, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 104, 158, 159, 226, 301
Brazza, Savorgnan de, 228, 229, 234, 329, 343
Brest, 201
Bricchetti-Robecchi, 334
Bristol, 157, 205
Britain, British, 72, 77, 104, 110, 126, 132, 133, 154, 161, 163,
165 _et seq._, 171, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 189, 191 _et seq._,
198, 219, 227, 239, 254 _et seq._, 359 _et seq._
Britain and the Slave Trade, 239
— Missionary efforts, 239
British Element in Cape Colony, 257
— Empire in India, 133
— Empire of the Future, 446
— Central Africa, 107, 108, 179, 278, 279, 284, 331, 334
— East Africa, 10, 156, 250, 444
— — Company, 376, 378, 383
— Government, the, 73, 107, 112, 113, 124, 135, 141, 157, 164, 173,
176, 178, 183, 187, 188, 192, 194, 206, 257, _etc._
— Nigeria, 188, 190 _et seq._
— occupation of Egypt, 19, 159
— South Africa, 95, 115, 144, 149, 254 _et seq._, 291
— South Africa Chartered Co., 113, 114, 147, 160, 231, 278, 284,
285, 287, 339, 346
Bronze work, 186, 187
Brown, Dr Robert, 154, 199
Browne, William G., 303
Bruce, James, 303
— Sir David and Lady, 340
Brüe, André de, 198, 199, 302, 309
Bu Amama, 217
Bube, the, 122
Buchanan, John, 278
Buëa, 415
Buffalo, Indian, 75, 390
— River, 255
Buganda, 377, 379, 381
Bugeaud, Marshal, 214
Bugia, 66, 117
“Bula Matadi,” 87, 343, 356
Bullom, 174
Buluwayo, 272, 285
Bunbury, Sir E. H., 41, 298
Bunnon, L. von, 336
Bunyoro, 320, 380, 381
Burchell, Dr William, 307
Burmese, 3
Burton, Sir Richard F., 183, 186, 315, 318, 324, 334
Buru, 3
Busa, 188, 190, 191, 208, 306, 311, 312
Bushiri, 411
Bushmen, 2, 5 _et seq._, 18, 26, 29, 126, 134, 232, 255
Bushongo, 16, 26, 339
Busira, R., 329
Busoga, 376, 378, 387
Büttikofer, Prof. J., 328
Büttner, Dr R., 336
Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell, 313
Byzacene, 58
Byzantium, Byzantine Greeks, 19, 39, 41, 43, 50, 52, 53, 55 _et
seq._, 74, 152
Cabo Tormentoso, 81
Cacao tree, 92, 96, 97, 122, 180
Ca' da Mosto, 79
Cadiz, 32
Caillaud, F., 319
Caillié, René, 200, 309
Cairo, 60, 67, 69, 71, 72, 82, 212, 245, 279, 303, 362, 366
Caius Plinius Secundus, 45, 298
Calabar, _see_ Old
California, 293
Cam, Diogo, 80, 85
Cambier, Capitaine, 342
Cambon, M. Jules, 220
Cambyses, 43, 298
Camel, the, 48, 54, 75, 419
Cameron, Capt. V. L., 322, 325, 328, 342
Cameroons (Kamerun), 5, 6, 12, 13, 20, 36, 49, 79, 99, 122, 182 _et
seq._, 228, 229, 234, 244, 251, 324, 325, 331, 332, 338, 407,
408, 414, 415
Campagnon, Sieur, 199, 302, 309
Campbell, Capt., 306
— (Scotch missionary explorer), 307
Canaanite settlements in Berberland, 37
Canada, 143, 173, 216
Canary Islands, 32, 85, 116, 117, 120, 196, 225, 226, 390
Candido de Costa Cardoso, 307
Cannibalism, 349
Cantin, Cape, 35
Cape Bon peninsula, 41
— Coast, 99, 124, 176, 177
— of Good Hope, 81 _et seq._, 99, 100, 104, 125 _et seq._, 242, 254
— Colony, 130 _et seq._, 176, 240, 254 _et seq._, 404
— Dutch, 147, 149
— Town, 106, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135 _et seq._, 254, 255, 269,
272, 273, 279
— Verde, 36, 79, 99, 197, 201
— — Islands, 79, 92, 98, 133
“Cape Boys,” 267
“Cape to Cairo,” 279, 340, 364
Cape-Jubi-Bojador region, 225
Capello, Brito, 325
Capuchins, 94, 228
Carnarvon, Lord, 143, 269, 280
Caron, Lieut., 203
Carthage, 24, 32, 35, 37, 38, 46, 47, 57, 65, 152, 235
Carthaginians, 33, 35 _et seq._, 79, 121
Casablanca, 223
Casamanse, River, 201
Casati, 380
Casement, Sir R., 355
Cassel, Sir E., 368
Castile, 85, 116
Castile-Aragon, 66
Cat, the domestic, 92
Catalans, 78
Cathcart, General, 263
Cattle, 39, 180, 255, 274, 419
Caucasia, 20
Caucasian race, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 21, 75
Cavendish, Capt., 267
Cavendish, Mr H. S., 335
Cerne, _see_ Kerne
Cetewayo (C̓echwayo), 282
Ceuta, 57, 58, 65, 67, 77, 78, 119
Ceylon, 4, 28, 29, 129, 133, 428
Chad, Lake, 8, 14, 15, 20, 46, 48, 54, 62, 159, 190 _et seq._, 230,
235, 300, 310, 315, 324, 337, 338
Chafarinas Islands, 119
Chaga, 376
Chagos group, 28
Chaillé-Long, Col., 326
Chaillu, Paul du, 228, 324
Chaka, 140, 141, 261, 267, 281
Chaldaea, 37
Chali, 259
Chama, 124
Chamberlain, Mr Joseph, 287
Chanler, W. Astor, 335
Chanoine, Capt., 221, 222, 236
Charlemagne, 59
Charles of Anjou, 65
Charles II of England, 176, 302
— V of Spain, 118, 153
— X of France, 213, 431
Chartered companies, 109, 114, 124, 192, 278
Chatelain, Rev. Héli, 251
Chekhs, 72
Chelmsford, Lord, 282
Cherim, 106
Chevalier, A., 338, 340
Chillies, 91, 92
Chimpanzee, the, 17, 36
China, Chinese, 29, 83, 91, 290, 291, 294
Chinde, R., 114, 115, 318
_Chiromys_, 427
Chobe, R., 416
Christian Bishops in Tunisia, 65;
in Central Africa, 86, 327, 378;
Madagascar, 248
Christian Missions in Africa, list of:
American Presbyterian Mission, 250, 251
Austrian Catholic Mission (Sudan), 245
Baptist (American) Gaboon Mission, 251
— (British) Cameroons and Congo Mission, 184, 244
— (Scotch) Nyasaland Mission, 252
Basel Mission, 248
Bavarian (Roman Catholic) Mission, 249
Berlin Missionary Society, 249
British Roman Catholic Mission, 246
Church Missionary Society, 159, 242, 243, 248, 251, 316, 328, 378
Dutch Reformed Church Mission, 250
Edinburgh Missionary Society, 242, 250
Episcopal Methodist (American) Mission, 251
Established Church of Scotland Mission, 250
Free Church Mission (Scotch), 250
French Evangelical Missionary Society, 249
French Roman Catholic Missionary Society, 245
Glasgow Missionary Society, 242, 250
Jesuit missions (Zambezi), 246;
(Madagascar), 247
London Missionary Society, 242, 247, 248, 284, 334, 430, 433
Moravian Protestant Mission, 242, 248, 249
North African Mission, 252
North German (Bremen) Mission, 249
Norwegian Mission, 251
Plymouth Brethren, 252
Primitive Methodist Society, 243
Rhenish Missionary Society, 249
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 243
Society of Friends’ (Quaker) Mission, 247
Swedish Protestant Mission, 249
Swiss Calvinist Mission, 249
Swiss Protestant Mission, 248
United Presbyterian Mission, 250
Universities’ Mission, 251, 277, 327
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 242, 243
White Fathers of the Sudan Mission, 245;
(in Uganda), 377, 379
Zambezi Industrial Mission, 252
Christianity, establishment of, 50
Christianity (in Kongo Kingdom), 86, 87, 239, 240;
among negro races in general, 240, 449
Christians in North Africa, 62;
Madagascar, Uganda, 378, 379
Chudeau, R. (explorer), 339
Chumi River, 256
Cinchona tree (Quinine), 96
Circassians, 19, 70, 71
Cis-Saharan Africa, 1
Clapperton, Hugh, 193, 194, 310, 311
Clarke, General, 136
Clarke, John (missionary), 244
Clarke, Sir Marshall, 282
Clarkson, 155
Claudius Ptolemaeus, 45, 299
Clozel, F. J., 334
Coco-nut palm, 92, 93, 110
Coelo-Syria, 55
Coffee and coffee cultivation, 75, 96, 110, 270, 279
Coillard, Rev. Mr, 249, 325
Colonial Office, 187, 261
Colonies, three classes of, in Africa, 443 _et seq._
“Colony of the West African Settlements,” 175
“Colony of Upper Senegal and Niger,” 209
Colorado, 293
Colston, Col., 326
Colvile, Sir H., 380
Comber, Rev. Thos., 244, 329
“Comité d'Etudes du Haut Congo,” 343
Commerson, Philibert, 427
Comoro Islands, _see_ Komoro
Compiègne, Marquis de, 324
Conference, Berlin, 189, 192, 219, 229, 231, 232
— Brussels, 232
Congo Christianity, 85 _et seq._, 239, 240
— Free State, 161, 192, 231, 278, 329, 343 _et seq._
— river and basin, 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 20, 25, 74, 78, 80, 85, 87
_et seq._, 160, 193, 228 _et seq._, 244, 245, 251, 301, 308, 322,
324, 325, 329, 330, 332, 336, 342 _et seq._
Congo Treaty of 1884, 277, 278
— French, _see_ French Congo
Congoland, 5, 10, 12, 15, 16, 26, 85, 88, 94, 124, 161, 191, 227,
238 _et seq._, 316, 338 _et seq._
“Conquistadores,” Portuguese, 77, 90, 91
Constantine, 214, 216, 218
Constantinople, 51, 69, 72, 212, 360
Constitution granted to Cape Colony, 258
Conventions, _see_ under title of nationality or place
Convicts sent to Cape, 264
Cook, Captain, 304
Coomassie, _see_ Kumasi
Copper, 96, 110, 273, 419
Coppolani, French Commissioner, 209
Copra, 110
Coptic Church, 253
— language, 70
Copts, 52, 53, 70, 367
Corisco Bay, 99, 121, 234
Cornet, Dr, 330
Coromanti, 124
Corsairs, _see_ Pirates
Cortes, 153
Cortier, 338
Cosmoledo, 295
Cossack “Monks,” 395
Costa Cardoso, Candido de, 307
Cotton, 270, 279, 419
Cotton, Lieut. P. H. G. Powell, 340
Covilhão, Pero de, 82 _et seq._, 300, 424
Craig, General, 135, 136
Crampel, Paul, 230, 235, 333
Crimean War, 159, 219, 265, 266
Croats, 72
Cro-Magnon race, 4
Cromer, Lord, 361, 364, 368
Cromwell, 140
Cross, Dr, 328, 331
— River, 183, 184, 187, 250, 313, 338
Crowther, Samuel (Bishop), 188, 243
Cuanhama, _see_ Kuanyama
Cuba, 117, 120, 158, 159
Cunnington, Dr W. A., 340
Cybele, 39
Cyclades, 41
Cydames, 49
Cyprus, 33
Cyrene, Cyrenaïca, 16, 33, 40 _et seq._, 47, 53, 61, 161, 236 _et
seq._, 298, 314, 317, 398, 443, 444
Cyrus, 43
Dagomba-Moshi, 180
Dahia-al-Kahina, Queen, 57, 58
Dahomé, 11, 12, 96 _et seq._, 154, 161, 176, 181, 182, 190, 205,
206, 208 _et seq._, 324
_Daily Telegraph_, the, 325
Dakar, 123, 198, 209, 210, 230, 234
Damara, 97, 417
Damaraland, 9, 249, 255, 274, 275, 317, 405, 418
Damascus, 60, 214
Dameirah, Cape, 397
Damerghu, 337
Damietta, 392
Danákil Coast, 17, 18, 84, 300, 393
Danes, _see_ Denmark
Dar-al-Baida, 223
Dar-es-Salaam, 44, 414
Darfur, 19, 54, 62, 70, 194, 303, 323, 324, 327, 339, 363, 369, 402,
443
Dar Runga, 237, 324
Dar Sila, 237
Date-palms, 38, 41
Dauphin, Fort, 425 _et seq._
Davidson, John, 314
De Beaufort, 200, 309
De Beers Diamond-mining Company, 284
Debono, Andrea, 319
Decken, Baron von der, 331, 404
Décle, Lionel, 340
Delafosse, Maurice, 338
Delagoa Bay, 93, 105, 110 _et seq._, 132, 134, 149, 274, 281, 308
Delcommune, Alexandre, 330
Delgado, Cape, 104, 110, 113, 409
Demerara, 137
De Mist, Commissioner-General, 137, 254, 255
Denham, Major D., 193, 195, 310
Denhardt brothers, 409
“Denis,” King, 228
Denmark abolishes slave-trade, 154, 157;
withdraws from Gold Coast, 177
De Pass family, the, 146, 273
Dernah, 42
Dernburg, Herr, 413
Dervishes, 227, 337, 363, 395
De Séchelles, 295
Destenave, Col., 338
Dē tribe, 164
Devonshire merchants, 169
Dey of Algiers, 213
Dhanis, Baron, 330, 345, 346
Diamonds, Diamond Fields, 142, 146, 166, 268, 269, 272 _et seq._,
341, 419
Diaz de Novaes, Bartolomeu, 80, 81, 89, 125
— Diniz, 79
— Diogo, 85
— Paulo, 89, 90
Dickens and “Mrs Jellyby,” 313
Diego, Dom, 86
— Garcia, 295
— Suarez Bay, 429, 431, 437
Dieppe adventurers, 78, 80, 196 _et seq._
Dikjeschop, 124
Dinar Bu’l-Muhajr, 57
Dingane, 281, 282
Dingiswayo, 140, 141, 281
Dinizulu, 282
Dinka people, 370
Diogenes, 44, 45
Dixcove, 124
Djur, R., 227
Dochard, Dr, 306
Dodds, General, 206
Dodo, the, 123
Dog, the, 39, 92
Domestic animals and plants of Africa, 92
Donaldson Smith, Dr, 335
Dongola, 5, 15, 70, 72, 83, 365
Doornkop, 147
Doria, 119
Dorians, 41
Doutté, Edmond, 338
“Downing Street” doubts, drifts, and dallies, 141, 275
Draa, River, 32, 36, 37, 66, 299, 304
Dragut, 118
Dravidian races, 271
“Drifts” question, 287
Drury, Lieut., 371
Dual Control, the, 361, 362
Duala, 184, 244, 415
Dubreka, R., 408
Duck, the domestic, 92
Duckworth, W. L. H., 5, 7
Dufton, H., 317
Durban, 141, 261, 262, 272
D'Urban, Sir Benjamin, 259 _et seq._
Dutch, the, 28, 77, 85, 93 _et seq._, 123 _et seq._, 157, 158, 177,
178, 197, 254, 257 _et seq._, 267 _etc._
— half-castes, 124
— language, 139, 258, 276, 448
Duveyrier, 321, 322
Dwarf races, 43
Dybowski, M., 230, 333
Eannes, Gil, 78
Eannes, Gonçalvez, 300
East Africa, _see_ British, German, _etc._
East Africa, State of, 115
East India Company, British, 85, 111, 268, 374
— Austrian, 111
— Dutch, 125 _et seq._, 254, 306
— French, 426, 441
East Indies, 91, 111
Eastern Province of Cape Colony, 265, 267, 273
Ediya, 122
Edward VI, 169
Edward VII, 292
Egypt, 1, 5, 7, 13 _et seq._, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 33, 37, 42, 43,
45, 47, 49, 51 _et seq._, 84, 102, 152, 187, 212, 235, 252, 326,
442
Egyptian Government, 320
Egyptians, Ancient, 13, 16 _et seq._, 22, 32, 33, 52, 53
— Modern, 446
Ekoi country, 338
Elamites, 3
El Arwan, 309
Elephant, African, 35, 39, 110, 270
Elgon, Mt, 19, 331, 335, 385
Elise Carthage, Fort, 124
Elizabeth, Queen, 169, 170
Elliott, Mr Scott, 334
Ellis, Mr (of Madagascar), 433, 434
Elmina, 80, 123, 124, 178, 196
Elphinstone, Admiral, 136
Elton, Captain Fred., 327
Embo, 270
Emden, 403
Emin Pasha, 315, 330, 332, 336, 344, 363
England, English, _see_ Britain, British
— and Portugal, 98, 108, 113, 115, 168
English language, 122, 165, 167, 244, 258, 448, 449
Eratosthenes, 45, 298
Erhardt, 316
Eriksson, 327
Eritrea (Italy’s Red Sea Colony), 227, 396, 397
Errik, 76
Ethiopia, Ethiopians, 21, 43, 46, 52, 82 _et seq._, 226, 298, 372,
442
Euan-Smith, Sir Charles, 410
Euesperides, 42
Eunuchs, Negro, 152, 156, 159
Euphrates, 32, 60
Eurasians, 294
European population of Cape Colony in 1770, 132;
in 1791, 135;
in 1806, 255;
in 1850, 264;
in 1891, 291;
in 1904, 291
Eusebius, 41
Evatt, Col. J., 380
Evora, Pero d', 300
Exeter Hall, 140
Explorers, Great, 297 _et seq._
— fourteen greatest, list of, 315
Fadl-Allah, 193
Faidherbe, General, 200, 201, 221
Faleme, R., 209
Falkenstein, 322
False Bay, 126, 135
Fang negroes, 122, 415
Fanti, 124, 176, 178
Farewell and King, Lieuts., 261
Farquhar, Sir Robert, 294, 429
Fas (Fez), 65
Fashoda, 204, 227, 336, 337, 365
Fatima, 60, 66, 69
Fatimites, 56, 60, 61, 71
Fazogl, 319
Federation of South Africa, 142, 143, 147, 280
Felkin, Dr R. W., 328
Ferdinand I, 76
Ferdinand and Isabella, 116
Ferguson, G. E., 333
Fernandez, João, 79, 300
Fernando Pô, Island, 121, 122, 183, 184, 243, 244, 324, 333
Fez, 59, 65, 67, 224
Fezzan (Phazania), 12, 15, 47, 56, 69, 70, 304, 310, 323, 398, 401,
443
Figig, 47, 222
Fiji, 3
Filali dynasty, 66 _et seq._
Fingo Kafirs, 267
Finland, 293
Fischer (explorer), 331
Flacourt, Governor of Madagascar, 425
Flamand, G. B. M., 337
Flanders in Africa, 111
Flatters, Col., 221
Flegel, Herr, 190, 333
Flemish Colonists, 90
— missionaries, 88, 240
Flinders, Matthew, 295
Florida, 153
Fodi Kabba, 172
Fodio, Othman Dan, 194, 201
Fodi Silah, 172
Foreign Office, 405, 409
Forfeitt, Rev. W., 329
Fort Dauphin, 425 _et seq._
Fort James, 170
Fort Salisbury, 285
Foucauld, Charles de, 336
Foule Point, 429, 431
Foureau, Mons. F., 221, 222, 236, 337
Fox-Bourne, Mr, 351
France, 4, 8, 50, 97, 106, 121, 132, 161, 166, 167, 171, 188, 191
_et seq._
— and Abyssinia, 395
Francis I, 211
Franco-German war, 202, 215
François, Major von, 329
Frederic William I, 403
Freetown, 176
Fremantle, Admiral Sir E., 384
Fremona, 300
French, 28, 71, 72, 104, 105, 109, 118, 126, 133, 157, 158, 196 _et
seq._, 294, 423 _et seq._
— Congo, 172, 192, 221, 227, 228, 231, 233 _et seq._, 329, 336
— East India Company, 426
— Guinea, 10, 209
— language, 448, 449
— missionaries, 88, 94, 207, 228, 240, 278, 377 _et seq._
— Nigeria, 201
— Revolution and its effects on Dutch settlers in Cape Colony, 135
— — and Egypt, 212
— rule of Egypt, 19
— settlers in Dutch South Africa, 129
— settlers in Algeria, 216
— Somaliland, 227
— West Africa, total area of, 211
— West India Company, 198
Frere, Sir Bartle, 143, 280 _et seq._, 375, 405
Frey, Col., 203
Frio, Cape, 99
Froude, Mr J. A., 280
Fūl people, 12
Fula race and Empire, 13, 16, 49, 53, 68, 151, 161, 170, 172, 190
_et seq._
— speech, 11, 12
Fulde speech, 12
Funj Empire, 62, 72
Further India, 3
Futa Toro, Futa Jallon, 201 _et seq._
“Fuzzie-wuzzies,” 17, 52
Gaboon, 36, 99, 172, 184, 205, 228 _et seq._, 251, 324
Gades, 32
Gafsa, 50, 53
Gaghu, Gao, 68
Gaika clan, 266, 267
Galas, Galaland, 13, 16 _et seq._, 19, 21, 22, 45, 51, 151, 161,
245, 249, 334, 335, 338, 339, 386
Galeka clan, 260, 266, 267
Galiber, Admiral, 437
Galicia, 76
Galley-Hill man, 2 _et seq._, 17
Galliéni, Col., 202, 439
Gallwey, Sir H. L., 186
Galton, Mr Francis, 317
Gama, Christoforo da, 84
Gambetta, 189, 362
Gambia, R., 12, 36, 79, 98, 154, 169 _et seq._, 200, 201, 206, 229,
302, 304, 305, 309
Gamitto, Capt., 307
Gamtoos River, 131
Gao, 202
Garama, 47, 48
Garamantes, 47, 54
Gardiner, Capt. Allen, 261
Garstin, Sir W., 371
Gautier, E. F., 35, 337 _et seq._
Gaza, 114
Gedge, Ernest, 335
Genoa, Genoese, 62, 78, 85, 153, 211, 390
Gentil, M. Emil., 230, 235, 334
Ger, R., 47
German Colonial Society, 405, 406, 410
— East Africa, 9, 10, 21, 44, 245, 249, 252, 291, 335, 336
— East African Association, 410
— South Africa, 95
— South-West Africa, 7, 273, 276, 336
— South-West Africa Company, 417
— missionaries, 242, 275, 404, 405
Germany, Germans, 59, 71, 72, 77, 109, 113, 145, 146, 161, 166, 184,
190 _et seq._, 216, 223 _et seq._, 265, 266, 275, 276, 278, 399,
403 _et seq._
Gessi Pasha, 302, 326, 362
Getulians, 53
Ghadames, 49, 308, 323, 398
Ghana, 14
Ghat, 37, 310, 321, 327, 398
Gibbons, Major A. St H., 339
Gibraltar, 2, 32, 33, 58, 146, 195
Ginger, 92
Gir, R., 47, 49
Giraffe, the, 130, 306
Giraud, Lieut., 330
Gladstone, Mr, 282, 286, 393, 406, 437
Glenelg, Lord, 260, 261, 263
Glover, Sir John, 178
Goa, 103, 104, 109, 271;
Goanese, 307
Goats, 75
Goetzen, Count, 334
Gold, 14, 24, 26, 79, 96, 100, 101, 103, 132, 145, 166, 180, 199,
283, 341
— Coast, 11, 14, 79, 80, 98, 124, 125, 128, 154, 169, 175 _et seq._,
196, 205, 248, 325, 333, 403
Goldie, Sir George Taubman, 189, 192, 208
Goldsmid, Sir Frederick, 344
Golea, 221
Goletta, 66, 118, 119, 219
Gomba, 208
Gomez, Diego, 79
Gonçalo de Silveira, 101, 241
Gondar, 303
Gondokoro, 319, 320, 371
Gongo Lutete, 345
Gonsalvez, Antonio, 78
Gordon College, 370
— General, 326, 362, 363
— Capt. R. J., 131, 306
Goree, 123, 198, 200, 305
Gorilla, the, 5, 6, 17, 36, 121, 228, 324
Goro, 385
Gorst, Sir J., 367
Gouraud, Col., 209
Gova, Francisco de, 87
Graaf Reinet, 131
— Van de, 131
Graça, 316
Grahamstown, 256
Grain Coast, 164, 165, 169
Granada, 65, 66, 116
Grand Basa, 164
— Bassam, 172, 205
— Canary, 117
Grandidier, Dr A., 337, 440
Grandy, Lieut., 322
Grant, Col. J. A., 315, 318 _et seq._
— Sir C., 260
Granville, Lord, 277, 405, 406, 436
“Granvilles,” 174
Gray, Major, 306
Great Britain, _see_ Britain, England
— Fish River, 81, 131, 132, 134, 135, 255 _et seq._
— Lakes region, 12
Greece, 41
Greek Church, 253
— language, 70
Greeks, 19, 41, 42, 44, 46, 53, 57, 70 _et seq._
Green (explorer), 317
Greenville, 164
Gregory, Dr J. W., 335
— the Patrician, 56
Grenfell, Lord, 365
Grenfell, Rev. George, 229, 244, 315, 325, 329, 333
Grenna, 42
Gretsyl, 403
Grey, Sir George, 141, 142, 265, 267, 280, 293
Grikwaland East, 263
— West, 269
Grikwas, Grikwaland, 142, 146, 269
Grogan, E., 340
Groot Fontein, 420
Grossfriedrichsburg, 403
Ground-nuts (_Arachis_), 109, 110, 171
Guadalquivir, R., 32
Guanches, 117
Guano, 146, 273, 275, 420
Guardafui, Cape, 397
Guavas, 92
Guiana, 124
Guinea, 79, 80, 86, 92, 94, 123, 124, 153, 197, 199
— Gulf of, 78, 81, 194 _et seq._, 323, 391
Gungunyama, 114
Gurara, 222
Gurley, Rev. Robert, 164
Habesh, 84
Hadhramaut, 73
Hafs dynasty of Tunis, 64, 118
Haiderān, 61
Hajji 'Omaru, Al, 200 _et seq._
Halawi tribe, 370
Halikarnassos, 42
Hall (Acting-Commissioner), 430
Hamadi dynasty of Tunis, 64
Hamed bin Muhammad bin Juma, 344
Hamid bin Thwain, 382
Hamilton, Mr James, 317
Hamite race, 7 _et seq._, 18, 19, 21, 22, 48, 52, 72, 194, 230, 386,
447
Hamitic languages, 10, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 46, 70
Hampden, Mt, 23
Hanlon, Bishop, 379
Hannibal, 38
Hannington, Bishop, 378
Hanno’s voyage, 35, 36, 173, 298
Hanse towns (Hamburg), 314, 404
Haqsu, 22
Hardinge, Sir A., 383, 385
Haricot beans, 92
Harrar, 22, 227, 334, 372
Harris, Sir D., 146, 274
— Sir W. C., 307, 317, 336
Harrison (explorer), 302
Hartzell, Bishop, 252
Harun-al-Rashid, 59
Hassan-bin-Kassim, 67
Hassan-bin-Numan, 57, 58
Hastie, Mr, 430
Hausa, the, 10, 13 _et seq._, 178, 179, 191 _et seq._, 421;
land, 48, 70, 160, 193 _et seq._, 222, 306, 315;
language, 448, 449
Hawai, 3, 428
Hawkins, Sir John, 153, 169, 173
Haywood, Capt. A. H., 338
Hebrew language, 40
Hedjaz, the, 318
Hekataios, 43
Helena, St, Id. of, 85, 92, 99, 125 _et seq._, 267, 268, 282
Heliopolis, 60
Henderson, Lieut., 204
Henric of Besançon, 76, 77
Henrique, Cardinal, 88, 93
— Dom, 86
Henry the Navigator, Prince, 65, 78, 79, 168
Heraclius, 53
Hercules, 39
— Straits of, 35
Herero, Ova-, the, 97, 134, 255, 274, 416 _et seq._
Hernandez, 153
Herodotos, 33, 34, 42, 49, 297, 298
Heuglin, Theodor von, 320
Hewett, Mr E. H., 184, 408
Hicks Pasha, 363, 365
Hides, 146
High Commissioner of South Africa, 148, 269, 280, 284, 288
Hikushahu (Hyksos), 22
Hima, 12, 16
Himyarites, 22, 73
Hinde, Capt. S. L., 330, 345, 349
Hintsa, Chief, 260
Hippo, 38
Hippo-Diarrhytos, 38
Hippon-Zaryt, 38
Hippopotamus, 30, 49, 101, 166, 392, 440
Hispaniola, 153
Hlubi, 273
Hobley, C. W., 335
Hodgson, Sir F. and Lady, 179
Hodister, 344
Hodister, A., 330
Hofmeyr, Mr J. H., 276
Höhnel, Lieut., 331, 387
Holland, _see_ Dutch;
also 262
Holub, Dr, 330
_Homo primigenius_, 2
— _sapiens_, 2
Hooker, Sir Joseph, 324
Hop, Capt., 306
Hore, Capt, 334
Hornemann, Friedrich, 304
Horse, the, 39, 48, 75, 92
“Horseshoe arch,” 74
Hostains, M., 337
Hottentots, 7 _et seq._, 95, 126, 128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 139, 142,
232, 241, 242, 249, 255, 257 _et seq._, 291, 416 _et seq._
Houghton, Major, 304
Hourst, Lieut., 208
Hovas, the, 27, 31, 247, 248, 428 _et seq._
Huara, 53
Huguenots, 129, 241
Humt Suk, 119
Hunein, 66, 117
Hussein bin ’Ali, 218
Husseinite Beys of Tunis, 218
Hutter, F., 338
Hutton, Mr James, 409
Ibadite sect, 73
Iberia, 37, 65
Iberian race, 76
Ibn Batuta, 299
Ibn Errik, 76
Ibn Haukal, 299
Ibn Tumert, 64
Ibn Yaṣin, 63
Ibo, 109, 110, 185, 187
Ibos, the, 312
Ibrahim, 360
Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab, 59
Ibrahim, Lake, 326
Idda, 187
Idris, 58
Idris II, 59
Idris or Edrisi (geographer), 299
Ifni, 120
Ifriqiah, 56, 59
Ijō, 312
Ikopa, R. (Madagascar), 438
Ikshids, 71
Île de France, 294, 440
Ilhas dos Idolos, 210
Illórin, 193
Ilo, 208
Imam of Maskat, 73, 104, 374, 383, 384
Imbangola, 87
Imérina, 31, 428, 429
Impoina, 429
India, 3, 4, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 44, 75, 82, 91 _et seq._, 100, 101,
103, 152, 156, 158, 300
Indian architecture, 74
— fig, 93
— Ocean, 12, 19, 28, 31, 102, 126
Indians in Africa, 29, 105, 109, 447;
in Natal, 271, 272;
Mauritius, 294
India-rubber, 110, 166, 279, 348, 350
Indo-China, 28
Indonesians, 28
Inhambane, 34, 114, 115
Innocent X, Pope, 392
Insalah, 222
Insuma, 124
International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of
Central Africa, 342, 343, 404
Inverarity, Mr, 429
Ionian Islands, 41
Ireland, 4, 25
Irish, 72
Irish settlers, 257
Isandhlwana, 282
Isangila, 308
Ishak-bin-Sokya, 67, 68
Islam (Muhammadanism), 4, 14, 25, 30, 39, 56, 58, 63, 70 _et seq._,
117, 152, 202, 237, 238, 240, 241
Islands in Indian Ocean belonging to British, 295
Isle of Man, 293
Isleños, 117
Isles de Los, 408
Ismail, 219, 360, 361, 401
Italian language, 216, 393, 448
— missionaries, 88, 94, 240, 241, 392, 393
Italians, Italy, 4, 38, 42, 49, 50, 62, 71, 72, 74, 78, 116, 161,
196, 216, 219, 238, 245, 390 _et seq._
Ivens, Roberto, 325
Ivory, 79, 110, 187, 270, 274, 279, 348, 350
— Coast, 203 _et seq._, 337
Jackfruit, 92
Jackson, Col. I., 338
— F. G., 380, 387
— F. J. (Sir), 335
Jacobite Church, 52
Jacobs, Hon. Simeon, 146, 274
Jacquin, Capt., 205
Jafarabad, 153
Jaga, Jagga, the, 87, 88, 301
Jaghbub, 236
Jaja, King, 185
Jamaica, 154, 158, 174
James bros. (explorers), 334
Jameson, Dr (Sir Starr), 147, 148, 285, 286, 289
Janjira, 153
Jannequin de Rochefort, 197, 198, 302
Janssen, Camille, 344
Janssens, Governor, 137, 254, 255
Japanese, 291
Jauhar-al-Kaid, 60, 71
Java, 27, 28, 31, 126, 427
Jazirat-al-Komr, 423
Jean René, 430
Jenné, 14, 202, 204, 206, 300
Jentinck’s duiker, 166
Jerba, Is. of, 39, 41, 56, 66, 119
Jerma, 47
Jesuits, 84, 88, 101, 105, 106, 239, 240, 246, 247, 300, 301, 434,
435
Jewish Territorial Organization Committee, 388
Jews, the, 32, 40, 42, 50, 53, 58, 59, 72, 81, 145, 146, 215, 217,
218, 273, 274
Jibl-al-Tarik, 58
Jibuti, 227, 337
Jilolo, 3
Jinga, 87
Jinga Bandi, 93
Joal, 198
João I, Dom, 78
João II, 81, 82
João, King of Portugal, 86
Jobson, Capt. Richard, 170, 302
Johannesburg, 145, 147, 148, 294
John of Abyssinia, King, 394, 395
John of Gaunt, 78, 168
Johnson, Elijah, 164
Johnston, H. H., _see_ Author
— Keith, 328
Johnstone, Commodore, 133
— Commander, 436, 437
Jok, 87
Jolofs, 12
Jorāwa, 57
José, Amaro, 307
Joseph of Lamego, 81, 82
Jouffre, Col., 207
Jub, or Juba, River, 21, 383, 385, 386, 397, 398
Jubi, Cape, 120, 121
Judaism amongst Berbers, 58
Juder Basha, 68
Jühlke, Dr, 408
Julian, Count, 57, 58
Julius Maternus, 48
Jully, M. A., 440
Junker, Dr William, 332
Kaarta, 200, 203, 204, 304, 309
Kabail, 215
Kabaka, the, of Buganda, 379, 381
Kabara, 203, 206, 207
Kabarega, 380
Kabinda, 89, 97
Kafa, 21
Kaffa, 226
Kaffraria, 243, 260, 266, 267
Kafir Wars, 135, 136, 256, 259, 260, 263, 267
Kafirs, 10, 130, 134, 135, 140, 141, 255 _et seq._, 281, 294
Kafue, R., 106, 330
Kagera, R., 336, 340
Kahina, Queen Dahia-al-, 57, 58
Kairwan, 57, 60, 61, 65
Kalahari desert, 276, 325, 419
Kamasi, 380
Kambujiya, 43
Kamerun, _see_ Cameroons
Kandt, Dr R., 340
Kanem, 48, 54, 194, 237, 238, 402, 443
Kanemi Sheikhs, 193, 194
Kankan, 210
Kano, 187, 193, 194, 310, 311, 323
Kanuri people and language (Bornu), 15, 191
Karamania, 118
Karamanli dynasty, 310, 400
Karanga, 134
Kareli, 260
Karema, 342
Karoo, 272
Kart-hadshat, 32
Kasai, R., 95, 97, 301, 329, 339
Kasalá, 365, 395
Kashgil, 363
Kasongo, 344, 345
Kasr-al-Kabīr (Morocco), 66 _et seq._, 77, 78, 120
Kasr-es-Said, treaty of, 220
Kasson, 302
Katanga, 96, 97, 272, 330, 332, 339, 346, 357, 444
Kathiawar, 153
Kavala, 248
Kavirondo, 19, 387
Kayès, 210
Kazembe, 105, 307
Keetmanshoop, 420
Kei, R., 134, 135, 259, 260, 263, 267
Keiskamma, R., 256, 257, 259
Keith, Dr A., 5
— Lord, 429
Kenya, Mt, 316, 331, 335
Kerckhoven, L. van, 330
Keren, 394
Kerne, 36, 37, 79
Kersten, Otto, 404
Ketama, 60
Khaireddin Barbarossa, 118
Khalifs of Baghdad, 58, 59, 67, 69 _et seq._
Khariji, sect of Islam, 56, 59, 73
Khartum, 46, 319, 363, 364
Khedives of Egypt, 72, 360
Khmirs, 220
Khojas (Indians), 271
Kiezelbach, 320
Kikuyu, 383, 385
Kilima-njaro, 44, 316, 330, 331, 335, 376, 404, 409, 410, 414
Kilimatinde, 414
Kilindini, 387
Kilwa (East Africa), 73, 83, 100, 103, 413
Kimberley, 146, 268, 272, 273, 283
Kimberley, Lord, 275
Kimo, 29
King, W. Harding, 339
Kiokwe, Ba-, 87
Kipling, Rudyard, 17
Kir, 46
Kirby, Capt. Brandon, 333
Kirk, Sir John, 321, 374 _et seq._, 410
Kisches, the, 274
Kisi, 175
Kismayu, 386
Kitchener, Lord, 227, 288, 289, 337, 365, 367, 369
Kivu, Lake, 334, 340
Kleber, 212
Klobb, Lieut.-Col., 222
Knoblecher, Dr, 319
Koelle, Rev. Dr S. W., 159, 243
Kollmann, Capt. Paul, 336
Komadugu, R., 315
Komatipoort, 149
Komoro Islands, 22, 27, 29, 30, 73, 423, 427, 428, 437, 441
Konakri, 209, 210
Kong, 204
Kongo, Kingdom of, 85 _et seq._, 228, 392
Konkan, 153
Koran, the, 74
Kordofan, 10, 11, 19, 54, 70, 237, 245, 323, 324
Kormantyn, 124, 176, 196
Kosoko, 181
Kosseir, 18
Kotonu, 210
Krapf, Dr Ludwig, 242, 243, 316, 331
Krause, G. A., 333
Kroumirs, the, 220
Kru, 165
Kruboys, 151, 174, 205
Kruger, President, 149, 286 _et seq._
Kuanyama, 97
Kubango, R., 420
Kufra, 237, 323
Kukawa, 315
Kulikoro, 210
Kulis, 271, 294
Kumasi, 176, 178, 179
Kund, Lieut., 332
Kunene, R., 95, 97, 330, 420, 444
Kurds, 71, 72
Kurene, 41, 42, 46, 298
Kuros, 53
Kuseila, the Berber prince, 57
Kushite type, 20, 21
Kwa, 348
Kwando, R., 420
Kwango, R., 87, 95, 301, 307, 325, 329, 339
Kwanza, R., 89 _et seq._
Kwilu, 339
Kwo-ibo, 182
Laborde, M., 431 _et seq._
La Calle, 211
“La Case,” 425
Lacerda e Almeida, Dr F. J. M. de, 105, 106, 307
Lado, 346, 370
Ladysmith, 288
Lagos, 99, 175, 180 _et seq._, 205, 242, 311, 323, 407
Laing, Major, 308, 310
Laird, MacGregor, 188
Laka country, 234
La Mar Chica, 224
Lambert, Capt., 197
— M., 433, 434
Lamego, 81
La Mine d'Or, 80, 196
Lamta, Lemtuna, 63, 68
Lamu, 26, 73, 83, 100, 101, 384
Lamy, Commandant, 221, 222, 236
Lander, Richard and John, 188, 311 _et seq._
Landor, A. Savage, 340
Langalibalele, 273
Lang’s Nek, 143
La Perrone, 338
Last, J. T., 243
Latin, 50, 76
Lavigerie, Cardinal, 245, 246, 377
Lebanon, 33
Lebda, 37
Le Fébvre, Théophile, 317
Leibnitz, 212
Lemon, the, 91
Lemur, the, 427, 440
Lemuria, 4, footnote
Lenfant, Capt. E., 338, 339
Lentils, 92
Lenz, Dr Oskar, 324, 330
Leo Africanus, 299, 391
Leo X, Pope, 391
Leo XIII, Pope, 245
Leon, 76
Leon, Pedro, 84
Leonora, Queen of Portugal, 86
Leopold II, King, 192, 231, 233, 342, 346 _et seq._
Leopold, Lake, 329
Léopoldville, 347
Leptis, 37, 53
Lescallier, Mons., 429
Lesseps, F. de, 361
Le Vaillant, 309
Levant, 65
Levantine Italians, 392, 393
Libenge, 234
Liberia, 10, 36, 79, 93, 99, 122, 158, 163 _et seq._, 196, 203 _et
seq._, 250, 251, 262, 298, 328, 337, 338, 442, 443
Libreville, 228
Libyan Desert, 48, 54, 70, 75, 237, 303, 323, 338, 339, 402
Libyan tongue, 21, 53, 54
Libyans, 12, 13, 16, 18, 21, 22, 42, 48, 49, 53, 54
Likoma, Bishop of, 252
Lilienfelds, 146, 274
Lime, the, 75, 91
Limpopo, R., 7, 283, 307, 308
Linant, Adolphe, 319
Linant de Bellefonds, 326
Lingam, the, 24
Lipperts, 146
Lisbon, 77, 83, 84, 86, 90, 101, 109, 168
Lithgow, William, 301
Little Dieppe, 196
Little Paris, 196
Liverpool, 157, 231
“Liverpool of West Africa,” 181
Livingstone, Dr, 95, 106 _et seq._, 160, 246, 250, 251, 276 _et
seq._, 315, 317, 321, 322, 325
Lixus, R. (the R. Draa), 32, 36
Loanda, São Paulo de, 90, 93
Loango, 94, 228, 230 _et seq._, 301, 322, 336
Lobengula, 283 _et seq._
Lobito Bay, 96, 97, 339
Lobo, Jeronimo, 84, 300, 301
Loesche, Pechuel, 322
Loge, R., 89
Logone, 14
Logwek, Mount, 319
Lokoja, 188
Lom, R., 332
Lomami, R., 97, 329, 345
Lome, 421, 422
London Convention, 144, 145
— Company of Adventurers, 169, 301, 302
“Long juju,” 187
Lonsdale, Capt. R. L., 333
Lopes, Duarte, 88, 92, 93
Lorraine frontier, 235
Los, Isles de, 210
Lothaire, Major, 347, 378
Lotos, Lotos Eaters, 38, 41, 56
Louis Napoleon, _see_ Napoleon
— IX (Saint) of France, 65
— XIV of France, 129, 211, 226, 359, 425
— Philippe, 205, 228
Louisiana, 216
Lourenço Marquez, 105, 110 _et seq._, 149
Lovedale, 250
“Lower Guinea,” 228
Luabo, 102
Lualaba, 322, 325, 330, 345
Luangwa, R., 108, 334
Luapula, R., 105, 322, 334
Luata, 53
Lucas, Sir Charles, 125
Ludamar, 304
Luderitz Bay, 419
Luderitzhafen, 420
Lüderitz, Herr, 406
Lugard, General Sir Frederick, 193, 208, 285, 378
Lugh, 398
Lukkus, R., 77
Lukolela, 234
Luluabourg, 346
Lulongo, R., 329
Lunda, 87, 94, 105
Lupton Bey, 326
Lurio, R., 109, 110
Lusambo, 345
Lusitania, 77
Lydzaamheid, 132
Lyon, Capt. G., 310
Lyons Missionaries, 244, 245
Maba, 161, 237
Macarthy, Sir Charles, 177
Macdonald, Col. Sir J. R. L., 335, 381
Macdonald, Sir Claude, 186
Macedonia, Macedonians, 19, 37, 43
Macgregor Laird, James, 313
Macguire, Corporal, 315
Mackenzie, Bishop, 251
— Sir G., 377
Mackinder, H., 335
Mackinnon, Sir Wm., 375
Maclean, Charles, 177
Macmahon, Marshal: his Delagoa Bay award, 111, 112, 274
Madagascar, 4, 22, 24, 26 _et seq._, 44, 51, 73, 74, 82, 84, 85, 93,
100, 104, 109, 126, 128, 225, 235, 247, 248, 251, 294 _et seq._,
308, 337, 423 _et seq._
Madan, Mr, 252
Madeira, 85, 91, 116
Mad Mullah, the, 372, 373
Mafeking, 286
Magdishu, 83, 100, 398
Mage, Lieut. E., 201
Magwangwara, 413
Magyar, Ladislas, 316
Mahdi (Sudan), 237, 245, 327, 363 _et seq._;
Mahdis frequently arising in Islam, 60, 63, 64
Mahdia, 60
Mahé, 295
Maherero, Samuel, 417, 418
Mahmud Basha, 68
Mahrab (Sacred Shrine), 39, 55, 74
Maistre, Lieut. C., 230, 334
Maize, 91, 92, 279
Majerda, R., 32, 33, 38
Majorca, Majorcans, 62, 78
Majuba Hill, 143
Makana, 256
Makhzen, 224
Makka, 54
Makololo, the, 108
Makoma, 259
Makua, the, 103, 105, 114, 132
Malacca, 91
Malachite, 110
Malagasy people, 27, 29, 30, 294, 295, 425, 428 _et seq._
Malata, 426
Malay Peninsula, 3
— races, 27 _et seq._, 255, 258, 259, 291, 427, 428
Malaysia, 3, 28, 128, 428
Maldiv archipelago, 28, 29, 428
“Malik,” 71
Malindi, 26, 82, 83, 100, 300, 383, 384
Malta, 40, 62
— Knights of, 66, 69
Maltese, 40, 119, 216, 319, 448
Mamluks, 59, 71, 72, 212, 360
Mañanja, 106
Mañbettu, 12, 16, 326
Mandara, 194, 195, 376
Mandingoes, 10, 13, 14, 51, 151, 161, 170, 172, 203 _et seq._
Manenguba, 415
Manika, 100, 101, 105
Manioc, 91, 92
Mannesmann, firm of, 224
Manoel, King, 424
Manputo, 92
Mantumba, Lake, 329
Manutia-Alphil, 423
Manyema, 160, 322, 345, 346
Maples (Archdeacon, then Bishop), Chauncey, 252, 327
Marabut, Marabitin (Almoravides), 62, 63, 68
Maravi, Lake, 276, 307
Marchand, Capt. J. B., 204, 227, 336, 337, 365
Mare, Uso di, 79
Maria Theresa, 111
Marie of Madagascar, St, 426, 430, 431
Marinel, Georges le, 330
— Paul le, 330
Marinus of Tyre, 45, 47, 299
Marka, 398
Marks, Senator S., 146
Marno, 326
Maroons, 174
Marrakesh, 67
Marseilles, 41, 110, 172
Martin V, Pope, 79
Martyn, Lieut., 306
Maryland, 164, 165
Mary, Queen, 169
Masai, 21, 331, 381, 385
Masawa, 83, 84, 226, 301, 303, 394
Mascarene archipelago, 28, 84, 123, 271, 296, 440
Mascarenhas, 84, 123
Mashonaland, 26, 113, 247, 285, 327
Masina, 202, 203, 309
Maskara, 214
Maskat, 73, 83, 104, 160, 374, 383, 384
— Arabs, 73
Masmuda, 64
Mason Bey, 320, 326
Massaia, Monsignor, 245
Massalit Arabs, 237
Massari, Lieut. A. M., 323
Massowah, _see_ Masawa
Masudi, 299
Matadi, 347
Matebele, -land, 26, 113, 160, 267, 276, 285
Matmata country, 38
Matopo hills, 285
Matteucci, Dr, 323
Matthews, Major G. E., 371
Mauch, Karl, 283, 327
Maud, Capt. P., 339
Mauretania, 5, 16, 32, 35, 39, 43, 46, 57, 61, 72, 209
Mauritius, 28, 31, 85, 123, 126, 127, 132, 271, 294 _et seq._, 318,
429, 440, 441
Mauro, Fra, 423
Mayo, Earl of, 330
Mayotta, 432, 437
Mazagan, 78
Mazrui Arabs, 383, 384
Mbam, R., 332
Mbomu, 230, 235, 327, 346
McClear, Sir Thomas, 317
McMurdo, Col. E., 149
McQueen, James, and the Niger, 312
Mecca, 54, 55, 63, 67, 82, 202, 236
Mechow, Major von, 329
Medina, 54, 67, 82, 172, 201, 202
Medina-Cœli, Duke de, 119
Mediterranean colonization of Africa, 32 _et seq._
— man, 22
— Sea, 79, 91, 118, 146, 195, 299
Mehdia, 60, 390
Mehedia, 118
Meilleraye, Duc de la, 425
Melanesians, 31
Melilla, 66, 67, 117, 119, 120, 224
Melland, Frank, 339, 340
Mello, Duarte de, 83, 100
Memphis, 60
Mendelssohns, 146, 274
Mendi, 174, 175
Menelik, Emperor, 395, 396
Meninx (Jerba), 38, 56
Menoutheseas, 423
Menouthias, 44, 423
Merina, 428
Meroe (Merawi), 46, 51
Mesopotamia, 17, 69, 70, 74
Mesurado, Cape, 164
Mexico, 139, 153
Meyer, Dr Hans, 335
Mfumbiro, 334
Miani, Giovanni, 319
Middle men of W. African trade, 185
Mikindani, 300
Milk (Moloch), 38
Millet, M. René, 220
Milner, Sir Alfred (Viscount), 288, 289
Minaean kingdom, 22
Missionaries, Christian, 51, 88, 108;
(attitude towards Cape Dutch), 139, 140, 257;
summing-up of their characteristics, 253
Missions, Christian, 239 _et seq._;
_see_ Christian
Mizon, Lieut., 190, 191
Mnyamwezi, 346
Moςambique, 8, 26, 29, 73, 82, 83, 94, 99, 100, 102 _et seq._, 123,
128, 132, 258, 327, 338
— Co., 114
Moffat, Rev. R., 307
Mogods, 2
Mohade, A1-, _see_ Muāḥadim
Mohair, 146
“Mohocks,” the, 198
Mohr, Edward, 327
Moir, John and Frederick, 284
Mojanga, 429, 436, 438
Mokha, 44
Mollien, Gaspard, 200, 309
Mombasa, 24, 26, 73, 83, 100, 102, 104, 242, 300, 316, 331, 335,
363, 374, 384, 387
Monastir, 117, 119
Monclaros (the Jesuit priest), 101, 102
Mongalla, 330
Mongase, 102
Mongoloids, 4, 17
Mongols, 71
Monomotapa, 23, 100 _et seq._, 241
Monophysite Church, 52
Monouthis, 423
Monrovia, 164, 404
Monteil, Col. P. L., 204, 333
Monteiro, Joachim Monteiro, Major, 307
Moore, J. E., 334
Moorish conquests in Nigeria, 14
Moors, geographical enterprise of the, 300
Moravians, 242
Moravide, _see_ Marabut
Mordokhai Abi-Serūr, 35, 316
Morel, E. D., 234, 355, 356
Morenga, 418
Moret, 338
Morgen (explorer), Lieut., 332
Morland, Colonel T. L. N., 193
Morocco (Mauretania), 5, 12, 16, 32 _et seq._, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56
_et seq._, 77, 116, 119 _et seq._, 152, 159, 169, 176, 195, 197,
200, 208, 214, 216, 217, 223 _et seq._, 252, 253, 299, 323, 336,
442, 444
— Spanish possessions in, 121, 122, 442
Moselekatse, _see_ Umsilikazi
Mosely, Prof. A., 146
Moselys, 274
Mosenthals, the, 146, 274
Mosi, 10, 325
Mosi-Gurunsi speech, 12
Moslems, 59, 202
Mossamedes, 9, 94, 95
Mossel Bay, 81
Mostaganem, 236
Mosto, Ca' da, 79
Motawakkil, 69
Mount, Cape, 164
Mountains of the Moon, 45
Mouzinho de Albuquerque, 114
Mpongwe, 228
Mpozo, R., 80
Msambiji, 100
Msidi, 346
Msilikazi, 143
Mtesa, King, 377
Muāḥadim (Almohade), 64
Mubangi, 6, 10, 15, 229, 230, 234 _et seq._, 244, 326, 329, 336,
338, 415
Mubarak, 384, 385
Mubuku, 334
Mueller, Dr Hans, 329
Muhammad Ahmad, 363
Muhammad-al-Amin-al-Kanemi, 193, 194
Muhammad Ali, 72, 195, 245, 319, 359, 360, 392, 400
Muhammad-al-Mahdi, 66
Muhammadan colonization, 74
Muhammadanism, _see_ Islam
Muhammadans, 55, 56, 63, 65, 67, 240, 252
Muhammad bin Abdallah, 372, 373
Muhammad-bin-Ali, 236
Muhammad Granye, 84
Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, 73
Muhammad Sharif, 236
Muhammad (the Praiser), 54 _et seq._, 59, 60, 66
Muhibidi, 100
Mu’izz-li-din-Allah, 60, 71
Mulai Abd-al-Malek, 66
Mulai Hafid, 223, 224
Mulai Ismail of Morocco, 68
Mulattoes, 163 _et seq._
Muluba, 10
Muluya, R., 119, 120, 223
Muni, R., 121
Munyamwezi, 10
Munzinger, 320
Murie, Dr, 320
Murray, Mungo, 317
Murzuk, 49, 323
Musa, 93
Musa-bin-Nusseir, 58
Musambiki, 100
Musgu speech, 14
Musha Island, 372
Musk duck, 92
Muza, 44
Mwanga, King, 378 _et seq._
Mwata Yanvo, 94, 316, 322, 327
Mwene-mutapa, 101
Mweru, Lake, 105, 278, 307, 322, 327, 334
Mzab Berbers, 53, 56
Nabataean kingdom, 52
Naber, Capt., 338
Nachtigal, Dr, 184, 315, 323, 324, 407, 408
Naivasha, Lake, 331
Namakwaland, 128, 243, 255, 275, 276, 306, 404, 405
Namuli, 110
Nana, 186
Nantes, Edict of, 129
Napata, 46
Napier, General, 262
Naples, Neapolitans, 62, 65, 213, 214, 390
Napoleon the Great, 99, 157, 212, 268, 349
— III, 205, 214, 215, 217, 218, 361, 433
Napoleonic wars, 137, 163, 171, 200, 228, 314, 441
Nassau, Fort, 124
Natal, 82, 140 _et seq._, 261, 262, 269, 270, 273, 281 _et seq._,
404
— Bay of, 128
National African Company, 189
“Native Question,” the, 293
Nature, her pranks, 256
Naukratis, 42
Navarre, 116
Neanderthal species, 2
Necho, Pharaoh, 33
Nefusa, 53, 56
Negrito tribes, 3
Negro, the, characteristics of, 151, 152, 271;
warning to, 162;
Christian, 239, 240;
Muhammadan, 240;
future of, 446 _et seq._
Negroes, 2 _et seq._, 18, 29, 45, 48, 51, 68, 74, 80, 122, 124, 151
_et seq._, 230, 255, 258, 259, 291
Negroid races (Nubians, Fulas, Mandingoes, etc.), 13 _et seq._, 22,
48, 51, 54, 230, 446
Nejd, 73
Nelson, 117, 212
Nepoko, R., 332
Nero, 46, 298
Netherlands Railway, 287
Neumann, O., 339
Neumann, Sir S., 146
Neumanns, 274
New, Mr Chas., 331
New Caledonia, 3, 205
— Guinea, 3, 75
— Mexico, 153
— Zealand, 3, 205, 293
_New York Herald_, 322, 325
Ngami, Lake, 274, 307, 317
Ngaundéré, 333
Nguru, 409
Nicholas I, Tsar, 360
Niéger, 338
Niger, Convention with France, 182, 190
— Coast Protectorate, 186, 187, 189
— Company, Royal, 187, 189 _et seq._, 208, 231, 232
— R., 8, 11 _et seq._, 19, 20, 43, 47 _et seq._, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70,
74, 79, 159, 172, 182, 184, 187 _et seq._, 299, 304, 305, 308,
311 _et seq._
Niger Delta, 79, 99, 154, 182, 183, 185, 187, 242, 331
Nigeria, 10, 12 _et seq._, 43, 63, 67, 75, 152, 161, 171, 179, 184,
185, 194, 227, 250, 339, 443
Nikki, 208
Niku II, Pharaoh, 33, 34, 42, 297
Nile, the, 5, 11, 17 _et seq._, 21, 22, 33, 42 _et seq._, 60 _et
seq._, 84, 227, 230, 245, 298 _et seq._, 318 _et seq._
Nilotic speech-group, 10, 21
Nogal, 398
Normans, 62, 78, 80, 85, 196 _et seq._
North African Mission, 252
Northcott, Col. H. P., 333
“Northern Nigeria,” 192, 193
Northern Rhodesia, 278, 279, 291, 292, 331
Norway, 293
Nosi Komba, 432
— Mitsiu, 432
Nosi-bé, 432, 436
Nova Scotia, 174
Nubia, Nubians, 5, 15, 17 _et seq._, 52, 70, 72, 74, 298, 303, 326
Numidia, 46, 47
Nun, Cape, 120
Nunez, R., 200
Nupe, 10, 12, 161, 191 _et seq._, 304, 311, 323
Nyam-nyam, 12, 16, 319, 326, 370
Nyangwe, 322, 345
Nyanza, Albert, 45, 318, 320, 326, 332
— Edward, 332, 334
— Victoria, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 44, 45, 281, 318, 325, 326, 331, 335,
336, 340, 377
Nyasa, Lake, 9, 109, 160, 161, 248, 249, 251, 252, 276 _et seq._,
300, 307, 321, 322, 327, 328, 334, 338
Nyasaland, 8, 26, 89, 107, 110, 114, 115, 159, 247, 250 _et seq._,
279, 291, 292, 327, 331, 444
— German, 249
“Nyassa,” Chartered Company of, 109, 110
Nyoro, 320
Nzadi, 86
Oak tree in Cape Colony, 129
Obbia, 398
Obeid-Allah, 60
Obok, 226, 372, 394
Oceania, 3, 27
Ochiali, 119
Oea, 53
Ogadein Somaliland, 372, 386
Ogowé, R., 79, 80, 228, 233, 324, 330
Ohrwalder, Father, 245
Oil Islands, 295
“Oil Rivers,” 182 _et seq._, 312
Okabango-Teoge, R., 317
Okapi, the, 341
Old Calabar, 99, 182 _et seq._, 250, 313
Oldfield, Dr, 313
Olifants River, 131
Olive oil, 110
Ollone, Capt. d', 337
Omaiyad dynasties, 56, 59
'Oman, 73, 74, 83, 160, 374, 384
Omar, 59
'Omaru bin Saidi, 202
Om Dubreikat, 369
Omdurman, 193, 337;
victory of, 227, 365
Omo, R., 334
Omuramba, 317
On, 60
Ondonga, 97
O'Neill, Lieut. H. E., 327
Onions, 92
Opobo, R., 185, 189
Oqba-bin-Nafa (the Prophet’s barber), 56, 57
Oran, 66, 117 _et seq._, 214, 216 _et seq._, 230
Orange Free State, 140 _et seq._, 258, 264, 268, 269, 271, 280, 281,
286, 288, 291, 292, 443
— Prince of, 135, 137, 254
— River, 9, 131, 132, 140, 142, 145, 206, 256, 261 _et seq._, 268,
274, 306, 307
Orange tree, 75, 85, 91, 92, 390
Orangia, 146
Ormuz, Is., 83
Osheba country, 234
Osman Digna, 369
Ostrich, Ostrich farming, 43, 255, 265, 268, 274
Oswell, Mr W., 317
Otavi, 419, 420
Oudjda, 223
Oudney, Dr, 310
“Outlanders” (Uitlanders), 147, 148, 288
Ovambo, Ovamboland, 97, 274, 317, 418
Overweg, Dr, 314, 315
Owen, Admiral W. F. W., 106, 111, 112, 308, 374
— Major Roddy, 380
Ozi, R., 384
Paarl, 272
Pacific Ocean, 153
Padrone, Cape, 81
Paez, Pedro, 84, 300, 301
Paiva, Alfonso de, 82
Pakenham, Mr, 436
Palestine, 71
Palgrave, Mr W. C., 275
Pallier, Lieut., 222
Palm, _see_ Coco-nut, Date-palms
— oil, 182, 183
Palmas, Cape, 79, 99, 164
Palmerston, Lord, 165
Panama, 153
Panda, 282
Panet, M., 321
Pangani, 44
Papaws, 91, 92
“Paradise, grains of,” 169
Park, Mungo, 172, 188, 203, 304 _et seq._
Parkinson, J., 338
Parkyns, Mansfield, 317
Passarge, Herr, 332, 336
Pateχ, 39
Paterson, Lieut. W., 306
Paul V, Pope, 94, 391
Peacock, the, in N. Africa, 39
Peake, Major M., 371
Peddie, Major, 306
Peebles and Mungo Park, 305
Pemba, Is., 44, 100, 377, 382, 383, 423
Peñon, 117, 118
Pepper, 169
Pereira, 307
Perim, Is., 226, 372
Péringuey, Dr, 7
Periplus of the Red Sea, 44, 45
Persia, -n Empire, 1, 3, 4, 22, 29, 37, 41, 43, 45, 52, 53, 55, 72,
152, 159
Persian influence on Zanzibar coast, 73, 74
— Gulf, 32, 73, 81, 83, 100, 103, 104, 158
Persians, 19, 22, 35
Peru, 153
Peters, Dr, 378, 408, 409
Petherick, John, 319, 362
Petrie, Prof. W. Flinders, 17, 34, 296, 297
Pfeiffer, Mme Ida, 433
Pfeil, Count, 408
Phallic worship, 24, 39, 74
Phazania, 49, 54
Phenbalon, 423
Philae, 298
Philip, Dr, 260
— II of Spain and Portugal, 88, 93
Philippa, 78
Philippine archipelago, 3
Phillips, J. R., massacre of, 186
— Sir L., 146, 274
Phoenicia, Phoenicians, 22, 24, 25, 30, 32 _et seq._, 55, 83, 146,
297
Pierre, Admiral, 436, 437
Pietermaritzburg, 272
Pig (domestic), 39, 92
Pigafetta, Filippo, 88, 391
Pine-apple, 91, 92
Piquet, Victor, 37
Pirates (Dutch), 103
— (Madagascar), 426
— (Moorish), 77, 119, 211
— (Turkish), 69, 118, 119
Pisa, Pisans, 62, 390
Pisania, 304, 305
Pitt, organises second expedition to take Cape Colony, 137
Pius IX, Pope, 245
Plantain, the, 93
Plettenberg’s Beacon, 255
Pliny, 45, 298, 299, 303
Pococke, Dr Richard, 303
Pogge, Dr, 327
Poivre, Mons., 427
Pokquesoe, 124
Poles, 72
Polignac, Prince de, 431
Polo, Marco, 424
Polybius, 49, 298
Polynesians, 28, 31
Pombal, Marquez de, 247
Pomel, Prof. A., 35
Pompeii, 48
Pondoland, 263, 267
Port Elizabeth, 273
— Herald, 115
— Natal, 261
— Nolloth, 273
Portal, Sir Gerald, 378, 394
Portendik, 171, 198, 200
Porto Novo, 172, 182, 205, 206
— Praya, 133
— Rico, 117, 158
— Silva, 316
Portudal, 198
Portugal, 65, 67, 76 _et seq._, 106, 115, 157, 158, 169 _et seq._
— and Dahomé, 96
— and England, 168
— and Germany, 410
Portuguese, 23, 26, 28, 65 _et seq._, 73, 75 _et seq._, 116, 168 _et
seq._, 181, 182, 196 _et seq._, 239 _et seq._, 274, 277, 278, 300
_et seq._
— East Africa, 100, 105 _et seq._, 241, 277, 327
— Guinea, 98, 201, 209, 309, 330
— language, 76, 448, 449
— missionaries, 90, 94, 240, 241, 300, 301
— West Africa, 95, 108
Portulano, the Laurentian, 391
Potagos, P., 327
Potato, the, 91, 92
Potsy, Andrian, 425
Poultry, 75
Praça de São Sebastião, 100
Prehistoric race movements, 1 _et seq._
Presbyterian missionaries, 242
Prester John, 83, 241
Preston, Rev. Mr, 251
Pretoria, 148, 149, 288, 292
Prime Minister of Madagascar, 438, 439
Primitive Methodist missionaries, 122, 243
Prince Henry of Portugal, _see_ Henry
Prince Imperial of France, 282
Prince’s Fort, 124
— Is. (Principe), 86, 91, 92, 96
Pringle, Capt., 335
Pronis, first French Governor of Madagascar, 425
Prostitutes sent to Sierra Leone, 174
Protectionist policy in French Colonies, 231, 439
Protestant Missions in Africa, 241, 247, 248, 252, 253
Proto-Semitic speech, 17
Prussian Company of Emden, 403
Psammetik I, Pharaoh, 42, 297
Ptolemaios Soter, 43
Ptolemies, 19, 42, 43, 298
Ptolemy the Geographer, 45, 47, 299, 423
Pungwe, R., 113
Punic, 50, _see_ Phoenicians
Purdy-Bey (Col.), 326
Putumayo, 351
Pygmies of the Congo, 7, 9, 232
Quambalon, 423
Queens of Madagascar, 431 _et seq._
Quelimane, 73, 82, 83, 100, 101, 106 _et seq._, 318
Quraish tribe, 54
Rabah Zobeir, 193, 235, 236
Rabai, 242
Rabba, 313
Rabbat Amma, 39
Rabinowitz family, 146, 274
Rabodo (Rasohérina), Queen, 434
Radama I, King, 429 _et seq._
— II, King, 433, 434
Railways, 96, 97, 112, 114, 115, 149, 175, 179, 180, 187, 194, 203,
210, 217, 219, 221, 227, 238, 272, 279, 286, 387, 414, 415, 420,
422
— in Cape Colony, 272
— in Congo Free State, 347, 358
— Cape to Cairo, 340
Rainilaiarivóny, Prime Minister, 435
Rakoto, Prince, 432, 433
Ranavalona, Queen, 247, 431, 434
— II, Queen, 435
— III, Queen, 437
Rand, the, 290
Rapaports, the, 146, 274
Ras Alula, 394
Ras Benās, 18
Ras Kasar, 394
Rashūf, 39
Ravenala, the, 427
Ravenstein, Mr E. G., 80
Rawson, Admiral Sir H., 186
Reade, Winwood, _see_ Winwood Reade
Rebmann, Rev. Johann, 242, 243, 316, 331
Recollets friars, 94
Red Sea, the, 4, 16 _et seq._, 21, 22, 43, 44, 52, 70, 82 _et seq._,
100, 102, 226, 227, 299, 394
Reichardt, Dr (explorer), 311, 317
— (missionary), 243
Reichenbach, Dr S. von, 336
Reitz, Lieut., 374
Reitz, Mr, 276
René, Jean, 430
Rennell Rodd agreement, 372
Réunion (Bourbon), 28, 31, 84, 123, 127, 295, 296, 430, 440, 441
Révoil, M., 334
Rhapta, 44
Rhaptum, 44
Rhinoceroses, 48
Rhodes, Right Hon. Cecil J., 147, 148, 279, 283 _et seq._
Rhodesia, 23 _et seq._, 100, 107, 114, 146, 231, 270, 271, 278, 279,
285, 291, 330, 339
Ribat (on the Niger), 63
Rice, 75, 92
Richardson, James, 195, 314, 315
Richelieu, Cardinal, 425
Riebeek, Jan van, 125
Riff country (N. Morocco), 120, 223, 224, 226
Rio de Janeiro, 301
Rio d'Ouro (Rio de Oro), 36, 78, 79, 121, 196, 209, 300, 321
Rio del Rey, 184, 191
Rio Muni, 234
Rio Pedro, 205
Ripon Falls, 318
Ritchie, Mr, 310
“Rivières du Sud,” 201
Robert of Sicily, Count, 299
Roberts, Joseph Jenkins, 165
— Lord, 288
Robertsport, 164
Robinson, Sir H., 284, 288
Rochefort, Claude Jannequin de, 197, 198, 302
Rochelle, Vacher de, 425, 426
Rodriguez, 28, 123, 295
Rohlfs, Gerhard, 315, 323
Rokel, R., 173, 308
Roman Catholic Missions, 94, 228, 240, 241, 244, 247, 253, 319, 377,
378, 434, 439
Roman Empire, 40, 43, 45, 47, 62, 299
Romans, the, 19, 37, 40, 45 _et seq._, 57, 298, 391
Rome, 42, 43, 50, 152, 391
Ronga, 134
Roosevelt, Theodore, 340
Rosetta, 42, 360
Rosmead, Lord, 288
Roumas, the, 202
Rowlands, John, _see_ Stanley
Royal African Company, 176
— Geographical Society, 244, 318, 322, 328, 331, 376
— Senegal Company, 198
— Umbrella, 60
Ruad, 32
Rubault, M., 309
Rudolf, Lake, 10, 21, 51, 331, 335, 338, 339, 385
Rufiji, R., 412
Rufisque, 198
Rufu, R., 44, 383
Ruki, R., 329
Rukwa, Lake, 328, 331
Rūm, 72
Ruma, Rumi, 68
Rupert, Prince of Madagascar, 425
Rüppell, Dr E., 317
Ruspoli (Explorer), 334
Russia, 132, 364
— German, 326
Russia’s action in Abyssinia, 253, 395, 396
Ruvuma, R., 100, 109, 113, 300, 316, 322, 327, 375, 410, 411, 413
Ruwenzori, Mt, 45, 320, 331, 332, 334, 340
Saadian dynasty, 66, 67
Sabaeans, 22, 83, 134, 146
Sabi, R., 23, 114, 115
Sacred Shrine, 39, 55
Saffi, 78
Sagres, 78
Sahara desert, 8, 13 _et seq._, 20, 25, 33, 36, 37, 47 _et seq._,
62, 63, 68, 70, 74, 75, 78, 121, 160, 192, 194, 217, 221, 222,
238, 299, 300, 314, 320 _et seq._
Sahati, 394
Saho, 21
Said bin Muhammad, 360
Saida, 32, 37
Saint Augustine (Florida), 153
Saint George’s Bay Company, 173
Saint Helena, Is., _see_ Helena, St
Saint Laurence, Is., 85
Saint Louis, 196 _et seq._, 321
Saint Mary, Is., 170
Sakalava, the, 31, 428, 432, 435
Saker, Rev. Edward, 244
Salagá, 325, 421
Salah-ad-din Yusaf bin Ayub (Saladin), 71
Saldanha Bay, 126, 136
Salisbury, 23
Salisbury, Lord, 394
Salt, 14
Salt, Henry, 308
Samori, 161, 203 _et seq._
Sanagá, R., 332
Sand River Convention, 141, 142, 263
Sandawi, 9, 336
Sandile war, 263
Sanga, R., 191, 234, 338, 415
Sanhaga (Sanhaja), 53, 54, 60
Sankuru, R., 329, 339, 345
San Pedro, R., 165
Sansanding, 305
Sansanne Mangu, 421
Santo Domingo, 167
Santorin, 41
São João d'Ajudá, 97
São Jorge da Mina, 80
São Lourenço, 424
São Miguel, 90, 94
São Paulo de Loanda, 90, 93 _et seq._, 123, 325
São Salvador, 86, 89, 94, 322
São Thomé, 81, 86, 91, 92, 96, 97
São Vicente, 99
Saracenic architecture, 74
Saracens, 390
Sardinia, 25, 50, 62, 390
Sarepta, 32
Sarras, 365
Savage, Dr, 228
Saxons, 50
Say (on the Niger), 190, 208, 315
Sayyid Sa’id, 242
Schaudt, G., 324
Schenk, Dr A., 336
Schnitz, H., 336
Schnitzer, E., 363
Schön, Rev. J. F., 243
Schweinfürth, Dr, 230, 315, 326
Scotch, Scotsmen, 138, 139, 257;
similarity with Dutch, 138;
in Nyasaland, 279
Scott (draughtsman), 305
Scott-Elliott, Mr, 334
Sealskin industry, 146
Sebastião, Dom (King of Portugal), 66, 68, 77, 87 _et seq._
— São, Fort of, at Moçambique, 100
Sebu, 35
Secondee, 124
Sego (Niger), 201 _et seq._, 305, 306
Seidel, N., 336
Sekondi, 179, 180
Selim, Sultan, 118
Selous, Mr F. C., 330
Semitic colonization, 16, 19, 20
— languages, 20 _et seq._
— race, 22, 134, 230
Semliki, R., 320, 332
Sena (Zambezi), 73, 83, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 115, 308
Senegal, R., 10, 12, 36, 49, 54, 62, 75, 79, 99, 159, 171, 196 _et
seq._, 304
— Colony, 12, 170, 188, 198, 206, 209, 210, 221, 227, 235, 302
Senegalese, 10, 207, 227, 237
Senegambia, 10 _et seq._, 63, 68, 70, 83, 98, 169, 170, 172, 190,
194, 200, 201, 245, 300, 321, 445
Sennār, 62, 70, 72, 212, 245, 303
Senussi or Sanusi, 236, 401
— II, 236, 237
— III, 237
Septa, 57, 77
Septimus Flaccus, 47, 48
Serandab, 423
Serbs, 72
Serpa Pinto, Colonel, 108, 325
Sesamum, 110
Sesheke, 317
Seychelles Islands, 28, 29, 295, 428, 429
Sfax, 118, 119
Sharifian dynasty of Morocco, 66 _et seq._, 77
Shari, R., 11 _et seq._, 191, 230, 234, 235, 237, 310, 324, 338
Sharp, Granville, 154, 174
Sharpe, Sir Alfred, 278, 285, 334
“Shatts,” the, 38
Shaw, Dr, 303
— Mr (Madagascar), 436, 437
Shawia, the, 223, 224
Shea-butter, 180
Sheep, 39, 75, 255, 274, 419
Shela Mountains, 95
Shepherd kings, 22
Shepstone, Sir T., 143, 281
Sherboro, R., 36
Sherbro, 165
Shia faith, 56, 59, 60, 71
Shiré Highlands, 108, 114, 251, 277 _et seq._, 327
— River, 106, 108, 110, 114, 277 _et seq._, 300, 321
Shirwa, Lake, 334
Shoa, 242, 245, 307, 317, 329, 337, 395
Sibree, Rev. J., 337
Sicily, Sicilians, 38, 41, 60, 62, 65, 74, 299, 390
Sidi Ferruj, 213, 230
Sidi Mubarak, 384
Sidon, 32, 33, 37
Sierra Leone, 11, 36, 79, 93, 98, 99, 122, 154, 158, 159, 163, 164,
167, 172 _et seq._, 200, 201, 203, 242, 304, 308
Sierra Leone Company, 173
Sigilmessa, Sijilmassa, 59, 67
Sikhs, 161, 279, 380
Silva Americano, 96
Silveira, Gonçalo de, 101, 241
Simon’s Bay, 263, 264
— Town, 136
Sims, Dr, 251
Sinai Peninsula, 366
Sinô, 164
Sintra, Pedro de, 79
Siwah, 18, 53, 70, 236, 317
Sixtus V, Pope, 391
Slagter’s Nek, 258, 261
Slatin Pasha, 327
Slave Trade, 4, 80, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 107, 121, 122, 124, 151
_et seq._
— Abolition of, 107, 155, 157 _et seq._, 238, 258, 259, 432
Slavery, 80, 95, 161
Slaves (Christian), 241
— (Negro), 128, 153, 173, 228, 259
Slavs, 59, 70 _et seq._
Sleeping sickness, 382
Smeathman, Dr Henry, 173
Smith, Sir Harry, 259, 263
Smythies, Bishop, 327
Sneeubergen, 132
Sobat, R., 227, 298, 337 _et seq._
Sofala, 23, 26, 34, 73, 82, 83, 99 _et seq._, 134, 299, 300, 424
“Sofas,” 204
Sokoto, 190 _et seq._, 222, 306, 310, 311, 315
Sokotra, Is., 44, 83, 372, 393
Sokya (Askia) dynasty in Sudan, 67, 68
Soleillet, Paul, 321
Solomon Islands, 3
Solomons, 274
Solum, 400
Somalía Italiana, 398
Somaliland, Somalis, 4, 7, 15, 17, 18, 22, 44, 70, 72, 73, 75, 82,
84, 99, 151, 226, 227, 300, 318, 334, 335, 337 _et seq._
Somerset, Lord Charles, 256, 258, 261
— East, 259
Sommervill (Dutch Commissioner), 307
Somrai, 324
Songhai, 13, 14, 49, 51, 79, 191, 209
Sonnerat, 427
Sonnini, 303
Sonyo, 85
Ṣor, 32
Sousa Coutinho, Thomé de, 103
“South African Republic,” 144, 148, 149, 283, 288, 443
South African War (1899-1902), 286, 288, 291, 388
South American states abolish slave-trade, 157
Southern Nigeria, Protectorate of, 185 _et seq._
Southern Rhodesia, 285, 286, 292
Spain, Spaniards, 4, 8, 32, 34, 38, 39, 41, 57 _et seq._, 65, 72,
74, 76, 93, 116 _et seq._, 146, 152, 153, 169, 183, 216, 225
— in Africa, 116 _et seq._, 241
Spanish, 122, 216, 449
— Guinea, 121
— missionaries, 122, 241
Speke, Capt. J. H., 315, 318 _et seq._, 334
Spice Islands, 75
Spices, West African, 168
St Augustine’s Bay, 425, 431
St Marie de Madagascar, 426, 430, 431
St Vincent, Bory de, 429
Stadhouder (_also see_ Prince of Orange), 130, 136, 306
Stairs, Capt., 332, 346
Stanley, H. M., 87, 91, 229, 248, 315, 319, 322, 325, 326, 328, 329,
332, 342 _et seq._
Stanley Pool, 85, 91, 229, 231, 347
Stapleton, Rev. W. H., 244, 329
Steere, Bishop, 251, 252, 327
Stephanie, Lake, 331
Stettin, von, 332
Steudner, Dr, 320
Stevenson, Mr Jas., 284
Stewart, Rev. Dr James, 250
Stibbs, Capt. Bartholomew, 171, 302
Stockenstrom, Sir Andries, 260
Stokes, Chas., 347, 378
Storms, Capt. E., 342, 344, 352
Stover, Rev. W. M., 251
Strabo, 298
“Strandlooper” skulls, 3, 7
Stuhlmann, Dr Franz, 336
Suakin, 21, 82, 323, 328, 364, 365
Sudan, 20, 37, 48, 51, 54, 67, 68, 74, 152, 161, 187, 190, 193, 194,
226, 230, 235, 237, 238, 245, 320, 326, 362 _et seq._
Sudanese language-families, 10
Sudd, 46, 298, 320, 371
Suē, R., 336
Suetonius Paulinus, 47, 49
Suevi, 76
Suez, 16
— Canal, 268, 361, 362
— Gulf of, 18, 33
Suffetula (Sbeitla), 56
Suffren, Admiral, 133
Sufis, 204
Sugar, Sugar-cane, the, 75, 91, 92, 110, 146, 270, 271
Sū'id bin Ali, 382
Sumatra, 3, 27, 28, 31, 124, 178, 295, 304
Sunda Islands, 427
Sunday River, 256
Sunni faith, 56, 59, 71
Sūs country (South of Morocco), 35, 57, 224, 225
Susa (Tunis), 117, 119
Susu, 174, 242
Swahili (people and language), 10, 30, 101, 410, 411, 448, 449
Swakopmund, 420
Swann, Alfred, 161
Swayne, Col., 335
Swazi dialect, 134
Swazis, Swaziland, 143, 145, 149, 270, 292
Sweden, Swedes, 157, 177
Sweet potato, the, 91, 92
Swiss missionaries, 96
— settlers in Algeria, 216
Syria, Syrians, 1, 4, 22, 24, 32, 37, 39, 40, 52, 55, 69 _et seq._,
212, 291
Syrian Desert, 32
Tabarka, 390
Table Bay, 125, 126, 137
Tafilalt, 59, 67, 336
Tagus, R., 76
Tahiti, 205
Tajurra, 227
Takorari, 124
Takrana, 403
Takrur, 202
Talbot, P. A., 338
Tamatave, 296, 429 _et seq._
Tammuz, 39
Tamul race, 271
Tana, R., 21, 335, 384, 386, 409, 410
Tanánarivo, 433, 434, 438, 439
Tanga, 414
Tanganyika, Lake, 9, 134, 160, 245, 248, 278, 279, 281, 284, 291,
318, 322, 324, 325, 327, 328, 330, 334, 336, 340, 344, 404, 411
Tangier, 51, 53, 66, 67, 71, 75, 78, 120, 195, 223, 226, 238
Tangiers, 58
Tangis, 53
Tanit, 38
Tapioca, 92
Tappenbeck, Lieut., 332
Tarifa, 58
Tarik, 58
Tasmania, 3
Tasmanian aborigines, 2 _et seq._
Taufik, Khedive, 361
Taveita, 156, 376
Tawareq (Tamasheq), 15, 54, 63, 67, 68, 205, 207, 221, 222, 232,
309, 321, 322
Tea, 270
Tebessa, 50, 53, 216
Teda, 13, 15, 54
Teleki, Count Samuel, 331, 387
Tel-el-Kebir, 362
Tembe, 111
Tenda, 170, 302
Tenduf, 314
Tenerife, 117
Teniahir, Lagoon of, 36
Ternan, Col. T., 380
Ternate, 75
Tete, 101, 103, 115, 241, 247, 307
Tetwan, 66, 119
Teutonic type, 22, 76, 77
Teuχeira, 42
Thala, 53
Thames, R., 48
Theion Oχema, 173
Thera, 41
Thibaut, 319
Thira, 41
Thomé, São (Thomas, St), (Is.), _see_ São Thomé
Thompson, Capt. George, 170, 302
Thomson, Joseph, 190, 315, 328, 331, 336, 375, 376, 387
Thonner, Franz, 339
Three-points, Cape, 124
Thurston, Major A. B., 380
Thys, Col., 347
Tiaret, 59
Tibesti, 15, 19, 323, 338
Tibu country, Tibus, 13, 15, 47, 54, 209, 222, 232, 237
Tidiani, 201
Tidikelt, 222
Tieba, 204
Tigré, 245, 395, 396
Tilho, Capt., 338
Timbo, 203
Timbuktu, 13, 67, 68, 78, 79, 116, 186, 200, 202 _et seq._, 300,
303, 304, 308, 309, 315
Timgad, 53
Timne, 11, 174, 175
Timor, 3
Tingis, 51
Tinne, Alexandrine, 320, 321, 324
“Tippoo-Tib,” Tipu-Tipu, 344
Tlemsan, 57, 64, 65, 118, 236
Tobacco, 27, 91, 92, 154, 279
Togoland, 12, 248, 333, 336, 408, 421, 422
Tokar hills, 369
Tomato, the, 92
Tonga, 134
Toole, Mr, 310
Torday, Emil, 339
Toro, 381
Torobe, 202
Toski, 365
Totem, 101
Toucouleurs, 202
Toutée, Commandant Georges, 333
Tozer, Bishop, 251
Transcontinental Telegraph, 279
Transkei, 267
Transsaharan Railway, 194, 221
Transvaal, 95, 112, 140, 142 _et seq._, 263, 269, 271, 274, 276, 280
_et seq._, 307
Trinkomali, 133
Tripoli, 5, 12, 33, 37 _et seq._, 47, 49 _et seq._, 61, 62, 64, 66,
69, 160, 161, 187, 194, 195, 204, 216, 218, 238, 252, 308, 310,
314, 322, 393, 443
Tripolis, 53
Tripolitaine, 15, 53, 54, 398 _et seq._
Tristam, Nuno, 78
Tristan d'Acunha Is., 99, 268;
_see_ Acunha, Tristan d’
Troglodytes, 36
Trotha, General von, 417, 418
Truster (Dutch Commissioner), 306
Tsetse fly, 26, 102, 382
Tsumeb, 419, 420
Tsur, 32
Tuaregs, 13, 14, 37, 54
Tuāt, 222, 337
Tuburi, 338
Tuckey, Capt., 308
Tugela, R., 263
Tulbagh, Governor, 130, 306
Tulunid dynasty, 71
Tungi Bay, 113
Tunis, Tunisia, 2, 24, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 46, 47, 49 _et seq._, 61,
62, 64 _et seq._, 118, 119, 160, 216 _et seq._, 245, 252, 301,
390, 392, 393, 444
Turkana, 10
Turkey, Turks, 19, 65, 69 _et seq._, 84, 102, 103, 118, 119, 152,
159, 160, 195, 212, 218, 238, 300, 301, 366, 398 _et seq._
Tusūn, 360
Twat, 41, 68, 308, 323
Tyre, Tyrians, 32, 33
Ubbo, 38
Uda, 44
Uechtritz, Herr, 332
Uganda, 20, 235, 245, 246, 248, 326, 328, 331, 334, 335, 363, 377,
387, 444
Ujda, 223
Ujiji, 322
Ukami, 409
Ulysses, 41
Umba, 383, 386, 410, 411
Umhlakazi, 266
Umsilikazi, 283
Union of S. Africa, 292, 293, 443
United States of America, 96, 124, 154, 157 _et seq._, 163, 167,
240, 262, 443
Unknown River, the, 325
Unyamwezi, 9
Unyoro, 335
Urban VIII, Pope, 392
Uruj, 118
Usagara, 409
Usambara, 333, 414
Uso di Mare, 79
Utica, 32, 33
Uzeguha, 409
Vaal River, 141, 142, 261, 306
Vacher de Rochelle, 425, 426
Vai language, 93
Va-kioko, 301
Vandals, 50, 51, 401
Vandalusia, 50
Vandeleur, Col., 335
Van der Stel, Commander, 306
Van Diemen’s Land, 264
Vangèle, Capt., 329, 330
Vardon, Major, 308
Vasco da Gama, 82, 99, 100
Velez de la Gomera, 119
Venice, Venetians, 62, 102, 168, 319, 390, 391
Verde, Cape, 36, 79, 99, 197, 201
— Islands, 79, 92
Vereeniging, 149, 291
Vermuyden, 302
Verneaux, Dr, 4
Verner, S. P., 329
Victoria (Ambas Bay), 415
— Falls, 247, 279
— Nyanza, _see_ Nyanza
— Queen, 165, 280
— (territory), 262
Vienna, Congress of, 157
Vincent, M., the explorer, 321
Vine, the, 39, 127
Virginia, 154
Virunga, Mt (Volcano), 334
Vischer, Hanns, 339
Vitu, 384, 409, 410
Vogel, Dr, 315, 324
Volta, R., 70, 177, 179, 204, 325, 333
Volubilis, 59
Von Lindequist, 418
Voulet, Capt., 221, 222, 236
Vredenburg, 124
“Vryheid” (New Republic), 282, 283
Wadai, 62, 70, 159, 161, 236 _et seq._, 315, 323, 324, 338, 339,
420, 443
Wad-al-Makhazen, 66
Wad-an-Nejumi, 365
Wadelai, 380
Wadi Halfa boundary, 364, 369, 371
Wahehe, 412, 413
Wahhabis, 73
Waima, 203
Wales, 4
Walfish Bay, 275, 291, 292, 307, 317, 405
Wanga, 410
Wa-ngoni, 412, 413
Wa-nyamwezi, 160, 357, 412
Wargla, 221
Wargli, the, 54
Warren, Sir Charles, 145, 283
Warsheikh, 398
Waswahili, 412
Waterberg mountains, 417, 418
Waterboer, 269
Wax, 110
Wa-yao, 160
Weatherley, Mr Poulett, 334
Webi Shebeili River, 334, 397
Wele, R., 230, 235, 244, 326, 327, 329, 346
Wele-Mubangi, 12
Wellby, Capt. M. S., 339
Welsh, 257, 319
Wends, 72
Werne, Ferdinand, 319
Werner, J. R., 330
West African Settlements, 175, 180
— India Company, Dutch, 124, 125
— Indies, 124, 153, 154, 158, 169, 173, 227, 240
Whale oil industry, 146
Wheat, 75, 92, 127, 132
“White Fathers,” the, 207, 245, 246, 342, 377, 379
Whitehouse, Commander B., 340
White peoples, 162
White, Sir Geo., 288
Whyda (Dahomé), 176
Whyte, A., 340
Wibsen, Fort, 124
Wilberforce, Wm., 155, 174
Wilhelm II, Emperor, 225
Willcocks, Col. (Sir) James, 179
— Sir W., 368
William IV of England, 432
Willoughby, Digby, 437
“Willyfoss Niggers,” 174
Wilson, G., 380
— Rev. C. T., 328
— Rev. J. L., 251
Windhoek, 420
Wingate, Sir R., 369
Winton, Sir Francis de, 175, 344
Winwood Reade, 324
Wissmann, Major H. von, 161, 329, 333, 404, 411
Witbooi, Hendrik, 416, 418
Witu, _see_ Vitu
Witwatersrand, 145
Woelfel, Lieutenant, 205
Woermann, House of, 404
Wolf, Dr Ludwig, 329
Wolofs, 12, 13, 151
Wolseley (Sir Garnet, afterwards Viscount), 178, 273, 362, 364
Wood, Sir Richard, 219
Wool, 146, 255, 265, 268
Wuli, 172, 201
Wyoming, 293
Xengibar, 424
Ximenez, Cardinal, 118
X̓osa-Kafirs, 134, 257, 259, 260, 263, 266, 267
Yakub bin Killis, 71
Yaman, 43, 44, 73, 74
Yanbu, 67
Yao, Wa-, the, 247, 252
Yathrib, 54
Yellala Falls, 80, 308
Yellow peoples, 162
Yendi, 421
Yolofs, 431
Yonnis, the, 175
Yoruba, Yoruba-land, 13, 179, 311
Young, Lieut. Edward, 277
Yussuf-bin-Tashfin, 63
Zaire, 86
Zambezi, R., 5, 8, 23, 73, 74, 82, 83, 91, 100 _et seq._, 132, 134,
143 _et seq._, 154, 159, 240, 241, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 272,
274, 276, 278, 279, 300, 307, 308, 317, 318, 325, 444
Zambezia, 9, 12, 17, 26, 92, 101, 105, 109, 241, 276, 279, 300, 321,
331
Zanzibar, 22, 29, 30, 44, 73, 83, 100, 103, 104, 113, 152, 159, 160,
242, 251, 252, 279, 299, 308, 322, 327, 328, 374 _et seq._, 404,
410 _et seq._, 423
Zebra antelope, 166
Zeila, 82, 300, 372
Zenaga, 54
Zeneta, 53, 54
Zeringhi, Federigo, 392
Zeyanite kings of Tlemsan, 64
Zimba, Ba- or Va-, 23, 24, 29, 103
Zimbabwe, 23 _et seq._, 29, 39, 51, 134, 146, 327
Zimmermann, O., 338, 339
Zinder, 222, 337
Zintgraft, Dr, 332
Ziri dynasty (N. Africa), 64
Zizyphus, 41
Zobeir Pasha, 193
Zoroastrian faiths, 55
Zulu dialect, 134, 448
Zulus, Zululand, Zulu-Kafir race, 10, 24, 97, 103, 114, 128, 134,
140, 141, 143, 145, 149, 151, 251, 256, 261, 263, 270, 279, 281
_et seq._, 308
Zumbo, 105, 108, 115, 240, 247
Zuurveld, 256
Zwartebergen Mountains, 131
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
----------------------------------------------------------------
COLONIZABLE AFRICA
Plate VII.
[Illustration]
Sir H.H. Johnston del^t. W. & A.K. Johnston Limited Edinburgh &
London
EXPLANATORY NOTE
[pink] _Healthy colonizable Africa, where European races may be expected
to become in time the prevailing type, where essentially
European states may be formed_
[yellow] _Fairly healthy Africa; but where unfavourable conditions of
soil or water supply, or the prior establishment of warlike or
enlightened native races or other causes, may effectually
prevent European Colonization_
[tan] _Unhealthy but exploitable Africa; impossible for European
colonization, but for the most part of great commercial value
and inhabited by fairly docile, governable races; the Africa of
the trader and planter and of European control and supervision_
[brown] _Very unhealthy Africa_
----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------
POLITICAL AFRICA—1912
Plate VIII.
[Illustration]
Sir H.H. Johnston del^{t.} W. & A.K. Johnston Limited Edinburgh &
London
EXPLANATORY NOTE
Possessions, Protectorates, Spheres of Influence or occupation of
countries
[british] _British_ [portuguese] _Portuguese_
[french] _French_ [turkish] _Turkish_
[italian] _Italian_ [belgian] _Belgian Congo_
[german] _German_ [spanish] _Spanish_
_Independent or unoccupied States are uncoloured_
_Pink bars on blue imply uncertainty of possession_
----------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected,
and are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the
original.
28.27 when re[ ]discovered by the Portuguese Removed.
169.32 of [(]_Xylopia æthiopica_). Added.
246.9 French-protected subjects[.] Added.
290.10 under proper guarantees[.] Added.
319.31 (French consul at Khartum[)] Added.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF THE COLONIZATION OF AFRICA BY ALIEN RACES ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
