AFRICA, like Australia, is the remnant of a much older continent, the greater part of which disappeared beneath the waves of the sea a great many million years ago. Until comparatively recent times it was still connected with Europe.Arabia, geographically speaking, is a continuation of the Sahara, and Madagascar, which has the fauna and flora of Africa, Asia and Australia, seems to indicate that there may have been a land connection between these three continents as recently ago as the era during which life first appeared upon our planet.

It is all very complicated and we shall have to discover a great many more data before we shall be able to say,“It was thus and thus and not otherwise”. In the meanwhile it is not a bad idea to mention these theories.They show us that the surface of our planet is constantly changing—that nothing is today quite as it was yesterday and that our ancestors a million years hence will look at our maps(if they are still interested in our funny little globe, having long since learned to fly to other and bigger planets)with ill-concealed surprise, just as we contemplate a hypothetical map of the Tertiary or Silurian age and ask ourselves,“Can such things ever have been?”

What finally remained of all this ancient territory and what has not changed since the beginning of our so-called“historical times”consists of two parts, a large square of land north of the equator and a smaller triangle south of the equator. But both the square and the triangle suffer from the same geographical disadvantage.Their outer rims are higher than the interior and as a result the interior resembles a gigantic saucer.Such a condition, as we have already seen in the case of Australia, is very bad for the country at large.The high edges of the saucer prevent the sea winds from penetrating into the interior, which is therefore apt to turn into a desert, and furthermore they deprive that interior of its natural outlets towards the sea.For when the African rivers finally reach the ocean, after having wandered all over the landscape, they must break their way through a series of mountainranges.That means that they suffer from water-falls and cataracts where they are least wanted.It means that ships cannot use these rivers to reach the interior of the country.It means that trade must wait until artificial harbors have been constructed and until railroads have been built that circumnavigate the water-falls.In short, it means isolation.

To most of us Africa is merely the“black continent”and we usually associate it with tropical forests and Negroes. As a matter of fact, one-third of the 11,300,000 square miles which the continent occupies(it is therefore three times as large as Europe)are desert and of absolutely no value.The population of 1,400,000,000 is divided into three groups of which one, that of the Negroes, is black, while the other two, the Hamites and the Semites, vary all the way from a dark chocolate to the whiteness of polished ivory.

It is natural, however, that the Negro should have forced himself more upon our attention than his lighter-colored neighbors. Not only does he impress us as something queer when we first see him, but the mistaken economic conceptions of our ancestors have dragged him all over the globe as a cheap and docile form of labor, and it is not always pleasant to be reminded of this disgraceful error of judgment.For Negro slavery has been one of the worst misfortunes that could possibly have overtaken both races, that of the white man as well as that of the black.We shall return to it a little later but we must first talk of Africa as it was before the invention of Negro slavery.

The Greeks were familiar with Egypt and with the Hamitic race which inhabited the valley of the Nile. The Hamitic races had occupied northern Africa at a very early date and had pushed the original, darker-skinned inhabitants southward in the general direction of the Sudan while keeping the northern border of the Mediterranean for their own exclusive use.The term Hamitic is a very vague one.There are no typical Hamites as there are typical Swedes or Chinamen.The Hamites are a mixture of Aryans and Semites with a heavy sprinkling of Negro and a number of older races that were already on the premises when these invaders from the east made their first entry.

When they reached Africa they were probably still in the nomadic stage of development, and as a result they spread all over the valley of the Nile and went further southward into Abyssinia and westward as far as the Atlantic seaboard. The Berbers of the Atlas Mountains are pure Hamites—or as pure as any Hamite can possibly be—and several of the wandering tribes of the Sahara are of Hamitic origin.The Abyssinians, on the other hand, are now so hopelessly mixed with Semites as to have lost a great many of their Hamitic traits.While the small-boned farmers of the Nile valley, are also of Hamitic stock although mixed beyond recognition by thousands of years of intermarriage with other races.

As a rule, when we try to classify different races, language comes to our rescue. But in northern Africa the spoken tongue is of very little help.There are Semitic tribes which speak only Hamitic and Hamitic tribes which speak only Arabic, while the Copts, the ancient Christians of Egypt, are the only people who have retained a knowledge of the ancient Hamitic tongue.The Greeks and Romans were apparently just as much puzzled as we are.They solved the difficulty by calling all the people who came from this neck of the woods“Ethiopians”or“black faces”.They wondered at their pyramids and at the negroid lips of their Sphynx(or are the lips Hamitic?Ask the professors!)and admired the patience of their long-suffering peasants and the wisdom of their mathematicians and the learning of their physicians, but they never seemed to have bothered to ask where these people might have come from.They spoke of them as Ethiopians.

One word of warning!If you should ever go to north Africa, be careful not to call all these people“Niggers”just because they are often rather dark-skinned. They might resent it and some of them are among the best fighters in the world.They have got the blood in them of those Egyptian warriors who conquered the whole of western Asia.They may even be the descendants of those Semitic Carthaginians who almost deprived Rome of the mastery of the Mediterranean.They may be the great-grandchildren of those Arab conquerors who not so very long ago overran the whole of southern Europe, or the children of those Algerian chieftains who put up such a terrific struggle when France tried to conquer Algeria and when Italy tried to get a foothold in Tunisia.Even if their hair be a little kinky, be careful and remember the fatal day in 1896 when the fuzzy-haired Ethiopians pushed the white-skinned Italians into the Red Sea.

So much for the Hamites, the first people the Europeans saw after they had sailed successfully across the Mediterranean. And little need be added about the Semites, with whom the Europeans came in very painful contact when Hannibal introduced the domesticated elephant to the plains of the Po.But once Carthage had been destroyed, the road to Africa lay open;and it is a curious fact that so few Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to find out what lay beyond that vast sandy region to which the Romans had given the name of Numidia.

Nero, of all emperors, was the first to take a serious interest in African exploration. His expeditions apparently got as far as that village of Fashoda which some thirty years ago was almost the cause of a war between France and England.But the Nero-Nile expedition does not seem to have been the white man's furthest-south even in those long ago days.It now seems likely that the Carthaginians several centuries before had already crossed the Sahara and had visited the Gulf of Guinea.But Carthage had been destroyed and all knowledge about that central part of Africa was definitely lost.For the Sahara was a barrier which frightened even the hardiest explorers.They might, of course, have followed the coast regions.But these were so completely lacking in harbors that the problem of getting a fresh water supply became an almost insurmountable obstacle.Africa has a coast line of only 16,000 miles, while Europe, one third its size, has a coast line of 20,000 miles.As a result, navigators who wanted to land anywhere on the African coast were obliged to drop anchor several miles away from land and must then cross the surf in an open row-boat, a procedure so uncomfortable and so dangerous that few of them ever tried it.

And so we had to wait until the beginning of the nineteenth century before we learned a few definite facts about the geography of Africa. Even then these sources of information were merely incidental, for the Portuguese, the first explorers of the African west coast, were on their way to the Indies and had very little interest in the land of the naked blackamoors.Since they could not reach India and China without circumnavigating that big barrier of the south, they felt their way along the African coast as carefully as a blind man trying to get out of a dark room.Without in any way looking for them they stumbled upon several islands, the Azores and the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands.Finally in 1471 they reached the equator.Then in 1488 Bartholomew Diaz spotted the Storm Cape, now the Cape of Good Hope.In 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded that cape and definitely located the shortest route from Europe to the Indies.

When that had been done, Africa once more dropped out of sight. It was a hindrance to navigation.It was too hot and too dry or too hot and too damp.The people were savages.The skippers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on their way to the Orient, called at the different islands, the Azores, Ascension, St.Helena, whenever scurvy and a high death rate among their sailors forced them to buy a few fresh vegetables.But African land to them was bad land.Give it a wide berth.And the poor heathen of that vast continent might have continued to dwell in peace if it had not been for the kindheartedness of the first man who was ever ordained a priest in the New World.

Bartolomé de las Casas was the son of a man who had accompanied Columbus on his original voyage to America.The son, appointed Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, received as compensation for his services a piece of land with the Indian occupants attached to it.In other words, he became a plain, ordinary slave-holder.Every Spaniard then living in the New World had a certain number of Indians who worked for him.It was a bad system but, like so many bad systems, it was tolerated because, being everybody’s business, it was nobody’s business.It just happened that las Casas one day clearly realized just how bad the system was and how unfair it happened to be to the original owners of the land, who were now forced to work in the mines and perform all sorts of menial tasks which they never would have touched while they were still free.

He went to Spain to do something about it. The all-powerful Cardinal Jimenes, confessor of Queen Isabella, thought that he was right, appointed him“Protector of the Indians”and sent him back to America to write a report.Las Casas returned to Mexico but found his superiors completely cold on the subject.The Indians had been given unto the Christians to do their bidding, just like the animals of the field and the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea.Why start something that would upset the entire economic fabric of the New World and furthermore would very seriously interfere with profits?

Then las Casas, who took his God-given task very seriously, had a bright idea. The Indian preferred death to captivity, as had been proved in Haiti where the number of natives had dropped from 1,000,000 to 60,000 in less than fifteen years.But the Negro of Africa did not seem to mind being a slave.In the year 1516(direful date in the history of the New World)las Casas published the details of his famous humanitarian scheme for the complete liberation of his Indian charges.Each Spaniard living in the New Spain was to be granted the right to import twelve African Negroes and the Indians were to be allowed to return to what remained of their own farms after the immigrants had deprived them of all the better parts.

Poor las Casas lived long enough to come to a true realization of what he had done. His shame(for he was an honest man)was such that he retired to a monastery in Haiti.Afterwards he returned to public life and tried once more to fight the battles of the unfortunate heathen.But nobody listened to him, and when he died in 1556 new plans were under way to bind the Indians even more fully to the soil, and the African slave trade too was in full swing.

What this trade meant to Africa during the 300 years of its existence we can only guess from the for reliable figures that have come down to us. The actual slave-hunting was not done by white men.The Arabs, who could wander at will over the entire northern part which had gradually been converted to Mohammedanism, held a monopoly of that racket.They had sold an occasional shipload of blackamoors to the Portuguese ever since the year 1434,but their business did not assume the gigantic proportions of the later days until the year 1517.There was big money in it.The Emperor Charles V(he of the famous Habsburg chin)bestowed upon one of his Flemish friends a grant which allowed him to carry 4000 African slaves each year to Haiti, Cuba and Porto Rico.The Fleming at once sold his imperial patent to a Genoese speculator who paid him 25,000 ducats for it.The Genoese in turn sold it to a combination of Portuguese and these Portuguese went to Africa and got in touch with the Arab dealers and the Arab dealers raided a number of Sudanese villages until they had about 10,000 slaves together(one must count on a heavy percentage of loss during the voyage)who were then packed into the hold of some evil-smelling carack and dispatched across the ocean.

Rumors of this new and easy way to get rich spread far and wide. The Papal Bull which had divided the whole world into two halves, one of which belonged to Spain and one to Portugal, made it impossible for the Spaniards to visit the“slave coast”themselves.The actual business of buying and transporting this black merchandise was therefore left to the Portuguese.But as soon as the power of the Portuguese had been broken by the English and the Dutch, slave-running became a monopoly of these two Christian nations.They continued to provide all the world with their“black ivory”(as the Bristol and London merchants playfully called it)until the year 1811 when Parliament finally passed a bill making the traffic in slaves a felony punishable with a fine and deportation.But it was a long time from 1517 until 1811 and until even afterwards, for slaves-muggling continued for fully another thirty years in spite of all the English warships.It did not fully come to an end until the early sixties of the nineteenth century when practically all European and American nations had abolished slavery definitely.(The Argentine abolished it in 1813,Mexico in 1829,U.S.A.in 1863,Brazil in 1888.)

How important the trade was in the eyes of Europe's rulers and statesmen is proved by the efforts they made to gain a monopoly of the slave traffic for the sole benefit of their own country. The refusal of Spain to continue a slave contract, thus far held by a few English merchants, even led to a war between England and Spain;and one of the stipulations of the famous peace treaty of Utrecht definitely transferred the West India slave monopoly from the Dutch to the English.Not to be outdone, the Dutch, who in 1620 had landed the first African slaves on Virginian soil, hastened to avail themselves of a law passed during the reign of William and Mary which had opened up the slave trade with the colonies to all the nations of the world.Indeed the Dutch West India Company, which through its scandalous neglect was responsible for the loss of Nieuw Amsterdam, only escaped bankruptcy because it made so much money out of its traffic in slaves.

We have very few statistics upon the subject, for the slavers were usually not the sort of men who took a scientific interest in their business;but those we have are appalling. The French Cardinal Lavigerie, archbishop of Carthage and founder of the famous Pères Blancs(the missionaries who have done so much good in northern Africa)and a man therefore thoroughly conversant with African affairs, estimated that at least 200,000 People per year had been lost to Africa on account of the slave trade, including those who were killed by the hardships of the march to the coast, the children who died because they were too young to be of any value and were therefore left to the mercies of the wild animals, and those who were actually shipped away to foreign shores.

Dr. Livingstone, another highly competent judge, put the actual number of slaves taken away from their homes every twelve months(regardless of those who died because they were left behind without any protection)at 350,000,of whom only 70,000 ever reached the other side of the ocean.

Between 1700 and 1786 not less than 600,000 slaves were brought to Jamaica alive, and during the same period more than 2,000,000 slaves were carried from Africa to the West Indies by two of the smaller English slave companies. By the end of the eighteenth century, Liverpool, London and Bristol maintained a fleet of 200 vessels with a total capacity of 47,000 Negroes, which plied regularly between the Gulf of Guinea and the New World.In 1791 when the Quakers and the enemies of slavery in general began their agitation against this outrage, a survey of the slave stations along the Bight of Benin showed 14 English,15 Dutch,4 Portuguese,4 Danish and 3 French.But the British were better equipped and handled one-half of the whole trade, the rest being divided among the other four nations.

Of the horrible things that happened on the mainland we learned very little until much later, when the British, in order to stamp this business out by the roots, went on shore in search of further violaters. It then appeared that native chieftains had been among the chief offenders, selling their own subjects as unceremoniously as those German rulers of the eighteenth century sold their regiments of recruits to the English for the purpose of squelching that little rebellion in Virginia and Massachusetts.But the general organization of the business had always been in the hands of the Arabs.This is rather curious.The Koran highly disapproves of such pursuits and Mohammedan law in general is much more lenient towards the slaves than the Christian edicts used to be.According to the laws of the white man, the child of a slave by her master was in turn held to be a slave, whereas according to the Koran, such a child must follow the status of the father and must therefore be considered as free.

The opening up of the Congo by the unspeakable Leopold of Belgium and the demand for cheap labor to work His Majesty's concessions started a temporary revival of the slave trade between the Portuguese colony of Angola and the interior of the Congo basin. But fortunately when that miserable old man(a medieval scoundrel on a constitutional throne in a modern democratic country—as strange a contradiction as had been seen for a long time)died, the Congo Free State had already been taken over by the Belgian state and that meant the end of the last attempts to make money out of buying and selling human beings.

The beginning of the relation between the white man and the black one was therefore as unfortunate as it possibly could be. But what followed was just as bad.The reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs I must now describe in as few words as possible.

In Asia the white man came face to face with races that were either as civilized as he was himself or more so. Which meant that they were able to fight back and that the white man must mind his p's and q's or suffer the consequences.

The great Sepoy rebellion in India of the fifties of the last century, the terrible insurrection of Diepo Negoro, which twenty years before had almost deprived Holland of Java, the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan, the Boxer Rebellion of only a few years ago in China, the present unrest in India and the open defiance of Europe's and America's notes in regard to Manchuria by Japan are lessons which the white man could not afford to ignore.

In Australia the white man came in contact with the poor, savage remnants of the early Stone Age whom he could kill at will and with as few pangs of conscience as he destroyed the wild dingos that ate up his sheep.

The greater part of America was practically uninhabited when the white man arrived. The high and healthy plateaus of Central America and the north-western part of the Andes(Mexico and Peru)had a dense population, but the rest was almost empty.The few wandering nomads could be easily pushed aside and disease and degeneration then did the rest.

But in Africa conditions were different, for in Africa, regardless of slavery, regardless of sickness, regardless of bad gin, regardless of bad treatment, the population refused to die out. What the white man destroyed in the morning was replaced over night.Yet the white man insisted upon taking the black man's property.The result has been a holocaust of blood, the like of which the world has rarely seen;and the end is not yet.It is a struggle between the white man's gunpowder and the black man's tropical fertility.

Let us look at the map and give you a general outline of where things stand at the present moment.

Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided into seven parts and these I shall now take up, one by one. We begin in the left upper corner, in the north-west, the infamous coast of Barbary which made our ancestors tremble with fear whenever they had to sail past it on their way from northern Europe to the ports of Italy and the Levant.For it was the land of the terrible Barbary pirates and capture by them meant years of slavery until the family at home had borrowed enough money to set their poor cousin free.

This whole territory consists of mountains, and quite high mountains, too. And these mountains explain why that country had to develop as it did and why even today it has not yet actually been conquered by the white man.They are very treacherous mountains, full of ambushes and deep ravines, allowing a marauding party to make their attack and disappear without any one being the wiser.

Aeroplanes and long distance guns are of comparatively little value here. It was only a few years ago that the Spaniards met with a number of terrible defeats at the hands of the Riff people.Our ancestors knew this, and they preferred to pay an annual tribute to the different Sultans ruling this part of the African coast, rather than risk their navies and their reputations on dangerous expeditions against harbors which no white man had ever been allowed to visit.They maintained special consuls in Algiers and Tunis whose business it was to arrange for the ransom of their captured subjects and they supported religious organizations which had no other purpose than to look after the fate of the sailors who had been unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Moors.

Politically speaking, this north-western corner of the African continent is now divided into four separate parts, all of which however take their orders from Paris. The process of infiltration and occupation began in the year 1830.A common, ordinary fly-swatter was the immediate cause of the outbreak of hostilities but the real reason was that old public scandal of the northwestern Mediterranean, piracy.

At the Congress of Vienna the European powers had decided that“something must be done”to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. But of course the different powers could not decide who was to undertake the job, for the hero might keep some territory for himself and that would be unfair to the others—the usual story of all diplomatic conferences.

Now there were two Algerian Jews(all business in northern Africa had been in the hands of Jews for centuries)who had a claim against the French government for grain delivered to the French government in the days before Napoleon—one of those old claims that are forever cropping up in the chancellories of the Old and New World and that have been the cause of so many misunderstandings during the last two centuries. If nations, like individuals, would only pay their bills as they go along, we surely would all of us be much happier and certainly much safer.

In the course of the negotiations about this little grain bill, the Dey of Algiers one day lost his temper and hit the French consul with his fly-swatter. Then there was a blockade and a shot was fired(probably by accident, but such things are always happening where there are war-ships around)and an expeditionary force sailed across the Mediterranean and on the fifth of July of the year 1830 the French marched into Algiers and the Dey was taken prisoner and sent into exile and the war was on in all seriousness.

The mountain people found a leader, a certain Abd-el-Kader, a pious Mohammedan and a man of great intelligence and courage, who held out against the invaders for fifteen years and who did not surrender until the year 1847. He had previously received the promise that he would be allowed to remain in his own country, but this promise was broken and he was taken to France.Napoleon　Ⅲhowever set him free on condition that he would never again disturb the peace of his fatherland and Abd-el-Kader retired to Damascus, where he spent the rest of his days in philosophic meditations and pious deeds and where he died in 1883.

Long before his demise the last revolt in Algeria had been suppressed. Today Algeria is merely another department of France.Its people have the right to choose their own representatives and protect their interests in the French parliament in Paris.Its young men have the honor to serve as conscripts in the French army, but that is not entirely a matter of choice.But from an economic point of view, the French have done a great deal of excellent work to improve the living conditions of their new subjects.

The plain between the Atlas Mountains and the sea, called the Tell, raises grain. The Shat plateau, so called after many small salt lakes, is a grazing country, and the mountain slopes are more and more being used for wine-growing, while large irrigation works are under construction to allow the raising of tropical fruit for the European market.Iron and copper deposits have been located and railroad lines connect them with Algiers(the capital)and with Oran and Bizerta, the three main harbors on the Mediterranean.

Tunis, immediately to the east of the department of Algiers, is still nominally an independent state with a king of its own, but since 1881 it has been practically a French protectorate. But as France has no surplus population, most of the immigrants are Italians.The latter have a hard time competing with the Jews who moved to this part of the world centuries ago when it was still a Turkish possession, where they had a better chance to survive than under Christian rule.

Next to Tunis, the capital, the city of Sfax is the most important town. Two thousand years ago the land of Tunis was of more importance than it is today for then it formed part of the territory of Carthage.The harbor, which had room for 220 vessels, may still be seen.Otherwise very little remains, for when the Romans really wanted to do a job, they did it thoroughly and their hatred of Carthage(inspired of course by fear and jealousy)was such that they did not leave a single house standing when they finally took the city in 146 B.C.They burned it down to the ground.The charred ruins, lying sixteen feet below the level of the present soil, are all that remains of a city that once upon a time had almost a million inhabitants.

The north-western corner of Africa is officially known as the independent sultanate of Morocco. There still is a sultan but since 1912 he too is merely a puppet of France.Not that he ever amounted to much.The Kabyles, the mountain folk of the Anti-Atlas, were too strongly entrenched to bother much about this distant majesty who for safety's sake varied constantly between his two capitals, Morocco in the south and the holy city of Fez in the north.These handy mountains were such a menace that the valley people never even undertook to cultivate their fields.Their harvests would be stolen anyway.

One can say a great deal against French rule in these parts of Africa, but when it comes to the safety of the public highroads, they have performed wonders. They moved the center of government to Rabat, a city on the Atlantic, where the French navy can lend a helping hand in case of need.Rabat is several hundred miles north of Agadir, another Atlantic port which unexpectedly got into the limelight four years before the outbreak of the Great War when the Germans sent a gun-boat there to remind France that Morocco must not become another Algiers, an incident which helped a great deal to bring about the final disastrous conflict of the year 1914.

A small corner of Morocco just opposite Gibraltar is a Spanish colony. It was given to Spain as a peace-offering when France took possession of Morocco.The two cities of Ceuta and Melilla are best known from the newspaper stories of recent date mentioning the defeats which the unwilling Spanish troops suffered at the hands of the natives, the so-called Riff-Kabyles.

To the west of the Riff Mountains lies Tangier, the internationalist city where during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the European ambassadors accredited to the court of the Sultan of Morocco used to reside. The Sultan did not want them too near his own court and Tangier was therefore chosen as their place of residence.

The future of this entire mountainous triangle is no longer a matter of doubt. In another fifty years, that whole region will be French, together with the second natural division of Africa which we shall discuss now—that of the great brown desert, the As-Sahra of the Arabs, the Sahara of our modern maps.

The Sahara, which is almost as large as the continent of Europe, runs all the way from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and on the other side of the Red Sea it continues under the guise of the Arabian peninsula. In the north, except for the Atlas triangle of Morocco, Algiers and Tunis, the Sahara is bordered by the Mediterranean and in the south by the Sudan.The Sahara is a plateau, but not a very high one, for most of it lies at an altitude of only 1200 feet.Here and there are the remnants of old mountain ridges, worn away by wind and sand.There are a fair number of oases where the subterranean water allows a few thrifty Arabs to lead a not over-abundant existence.The density of population is 0.04 per square mile which means that the Sahara is practically uninhabited.The best known among the wandering desert tribes are the Tuaregs, excellent fighters.The other Saharians are a mixture of Semite(or Arab)and Hamite(or Egyptian)and Sudanese Negro.

The French Foreign Legion looks after the safety of travellers and does this exceedingly well. These French Legionnaires(who, by the way, are never allowed on French soil)may be a bit rough at times, but they have a tough problem on their hands.To police a region as large as Europe with a mere handful of men is no job for saints.Therefore, if we can believe common rumor, very few saints have been encouraged to enlist.The old caravan roads are beginning to lose their importance.The tractor-wheeled automobile has taken the place of the smelly camel.It is much less costly and infinitely more dependable for very long distance.The days when tens of thousands of camels would forgather in Timbuktu to bring salt to the people of the western Sahara are gone forever.

Until the year 1911 that part of the Sahara which borders on the Mediterranean was ruled by a Pasha of its own who recognized the Sultan of Turkey as his over-lord. In that year the Italians, knowing that the French were going to take Morocco as soon as they could do so without provoking a war with Germany, suddenly remembered that Libya(the Latin name for Tripoli)had once upon a time been a very prosperous Roman colony.They crossed the Mediterranean and took 400,000 square miles of African territory and hoisted the Italian flag over it and asked the world politely what it was going to do about it.As nobody was particularly interested in Tripoli(sand without iron or oil)the descendants of Caesar were allowed to keep their new colony and they are now busy building roads and trying to raise a little cotton for the textile factories of Lombardy.

On the east, this Italian experiment in the difficult art of colonizing is bordered by Egypt. This country owed most of its prosperity to the fact that it was really a sort of island cut off from the west by the Libyan desert and protected against the south by the Nubian desert, while the Red Sea and the Mediterranean took care of the boundaries in the north and in the east.The actual Egypt, the Egypt of history, the ancient land of the Pharaohs, which was the great store-house of art and learning and science of the ancient world, consisted of a very narrow strip situated along the shore of a river almost as long as the Mississippi.The real Egypt, not counting the desert, is smaller than the kingdom of the Netherlands.But whereas Holland can feed only 7,000,000 people, the Nile valley is so fertile that it is able to support double that number.When the great irrigation works, begun by the English, shall have been finished, there will be room for many more.But the Fellahs(the tillers of the soil who are almost without exception Mohammedans)will have to stick to their farms, for industry is not easy in a country which has neither coal nor water-power.

Ever since the great Mohammedan conquest of the eighth century, Egypt had belonged to Turkey, under a khedive or king of its own. In 1882 England occupied the country under the pretext that its financial conditions were so hopelessly bed as to warrant interference on the part of a competent European power.But the demand of Egypt for the Egyptians became so strong after the Great War that the English were forced to renounce their claims and Egypt was once more recognized as an independent kingdom which had a right to conclude all sorts of treaties with other foreign powers except commercial treaties, which must first of all be submitted to England.The British troops were to be withdrawn from all Egyptian cities except Port Saïd.Finally Alexandria, which had become the main commercial port on the Mediterranean since Damietta and Rosetta on the delta had lost their importance, must be allowed to remain an English naval base.

It was a generous agreement and a perfectly safe one, for meanwhile England had definitely occupied that eastern part of the Sudan through which the Nile happens to flow. By getting control over the water of this river upon which 12,000,000 little brown Egyptians depend for their living, England is certain that it can always make its wants more or less understood in distant Cairo.

Any one however at all familiar with political conditions in the Near East will hardly blame England for trying to maintain a strong hold upon this part of the world. The Suez Canal, the short cut to India, runs entirely through Egyptian territory and it would be suicidal for England to let some one else get hold of that salty artery of trade.

The canal, of course, is not of England's making. As a matter of fact, the British government tried as hard as it could to prevent de Lesseps from beginning to dig any canal at all.There were two reasons why England should have opposed this plan.In the first place, England did not have the slightest confidence in the oft-repeated assertions of Napoleon　Ⅲthat the canal, built by French engineers and with French money, was merely a commercial venture.Queen Victoria might love her dear brother in the Tuileries, who once upon a time had done service as a special London constable when her beloved subjects were on the verge of rioting for bread, but the average Englishman did not care to hear that name which reminded him too much of a certain nightmare of half a century before.And in the second place, England feared that this short cut to the Indies and China and Japan would seriously interfere with the prosperity of her own good city on the Cape of Good Hope.

Nevertheless, the canal was built and Signor Verdi composed his noble opera,“Aïda”,in honor of the occasion and the Khedive ruined himself providing free board and lodging and free tickets to“Aïda”to all his foreign visitors, who filled not less than sixty-nine vessels when they went a-picnicking from Port Saïd to Suez, which was the terminus of the canal on the Red Sea.

Then England changed her tactics and her prime-minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who belonged to a race that has never yet been accused of lacking in business ability, managed to get hold of a majority of the canal stock which until then had belonged to the Khedive. And as Napoleon no longer counted and the route proved to be a god-send for the trade between Asia and Europe and produced almost$40,000,000 a year in revenue alone(28,000,000 tons passed through it in 1930),there have been no further complaints from the side of the British government.

By the way, the famous antiquities of Egypt are situated all over the land. The pyramids you will find in the neighborhood of Cairo where Memphis was once upon a time located.But Thebes, the old capital of upper Egypt, was situated several hundred miles further up the river.Unfortunately the tremendous irrigation works of Assuan have turned the temple of Philae into little islands which are now entirely surrounded by the muddy waters of the Nile and which are therefore doomed to ultimate destruction.The grave of King Tut-ank-Amen, who died fourteen centuries before the beginning of our era, is also to be found in that part of Egypt, as are the graves of many other kings whose former household possessions and whose mummies are gathered together, in the museum of Cairo which is fast becoming a cemetery as well as one of the world's most interesting collections of antiquities.

The third part of Africa, geographically different from all other sections, is the Sudan. The Sudan runs almost parallel with the Sahara but it does not continue quite so far eastward because it is brought to a sudden halt by the high plateaus of Abyssinia which separate it from the Red Sea.

Now in the great international bridge game played with Africa as a stake, when one nation announces“three spades”the others at once answer“four diamonds”. England had taken the Cape from the Dutch during the beginning of the nineteenth century.The original settlers, being Dutch and therefore obstinate, had packed their belongings in their covered wagons, had inspanned their oxen and had trekked northward.(these are now perfectly good English words.Since the late Boer War you will find them in any good dictionary.)The English were playing the game the Russians had played in the sixteenth century during the conquest of Siberia.You will remember how it was played.As soon as enough Russian fugitives had settled a new region of Siberia, the Czar's troops went after them and informed them that since they were originally Russian subjects, the land they had just occupied was therefore of course Russian property and the government in Moscow would let them know when to expect the tax-collector.

The English were forever following the Boers further northward, trying to annex their territory. It had come to several very disagreeable conflicts, for the Boer farmers, having spent most of their lives out in the open, were better shots than the Cockney regiments turned loose against them.After the battle of Majuba in 1881(Gladstone, who was eminently fair in this matter, on that occasion gave a lesson in forbearance which all statesmen might well copy:“Just because we were defeated last night and our pride is hurt is no reason why we should insist on the shedding of more blood!”),the Boers gained a temporary respite and regained their independence.

But all the world knew what the end would be of this struggle between the British Empire and a handful of farmers. English land companies, acquiring enormous tracts of land from native chiefs, were creeping up further and further northward.Meanwhile British troops, in order to establish order all over Egypt, were slowly but steadily working their way southward along both banks of the Nile.A famous English missionary was exploring the central region of Africa with the most brilliant results.Plainly the English were digging themselves a tunnel right through the heart of the Dark Continent.They had started building operations simultaneously in Cairo and in the Cape(the usual way for tunnels to be constructed).Sooner or later the two ends would meet in the region of the great lakes where both the Nile and the Congo came from, and then England could run her trains from Alexandria to Table Bay(so-called after the Table Mountain, that curiously shaped mesa that forms a natural background for Capetown)without a change of ears.

What England was so evidently trying to do along a line running from north to south, France now planned to do along a line running from west to east, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, let us say from Dakar in the Senegal to Djibouti in French Somaliland which was also the port of entry for the whole of Abyssinia and which even then was connected by railroad with the Abyssinian capital of Addis Ababa.

Such gigantic projects take time but not quite as much time as we sometimes feel inclined to believe when we look at the map and contemplate the terrific difficulties that were to be overcome ere that line should ever have reached such a hard-to-get-at spot as Lake Chad, just north of Nigeria—and from there the hardest part of the route would begin, for the eastern Sudan(now the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan)was as inhospitable a region as the Sahara.

Capital, however, in the hands of an energetic modern power, especially if it sees a chance of making one hundred cents on the dollar, will dynamite its way through time and space as lightly and easily and usually as ruthlessly as a war tank going through a flock of geese. The Third French Republic, trying to regain the prestige the Second Empire had lost, was energetic enough, and the stockings and the hidden old cigar boxes of the French peasants produced the necessary capital.The struggle for the right of way from west to east in competition with the right of way from north to south was on in all seriousness and the French, whoever since the beginning of the seventeenth century had been fighting with the English and the Dutch for the possession of the land situated between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, now used that territory as a political can opener with which to get at the contents of the unlimited area of the whole of the Sudan.

I can't go into the details of all the operations and machinations and the diplomatic steps and the commercial steps and the lying and cheating and horse-dealing and cajoling that had to take place before France could claim the greater part of the western Sudan as part of their African Empire. Even today they keep up the pretense of being merely the temporary administrators of a number of protectorates and mandates, but everybody has gradually learned what that means.The gangsters who have acquired exclusive control over the New York milk racket will probably call their band of cutthroats“The Milk Dealers'Protective Association”.European nations, quick to learn even from our humble highwaymen, have coined the word“mandates”.But the results are about the same.

Geographically speaking, the French have made a wise choice. Most of the Sudan is very fertile, which of course explains the fact that the natives are by far the most intelligent and industrious of all the different Negro tribes that inhabit Africa.Part of the soil is the same sort of loess as that found in northern China, and as Senegambia(merely another name for Senegal)is not cut off from the sea by a mountain ridge, the interior has sufficient rainfall to allow the people to raise cattle and corn.The African Negro, by the way, is no rice-eater, but a mealie-eater,“mealie”being a sort of secondcousin to our own corn-mush but a little less delicately prepared.They are also very remarkable artists whose curious bits of sculpture and pottery when exposed in our museums never fail to attract the attention of the multitudes because they look for all the world exactly like the most recent masterpieces of our own futurist painters.

The Sudanese, however, have one great disadvantage from the white man's point of view. They are ardent followers of the Prophet whose missionaries overran and converted the whole of northern Africa.In the Sudan, one race especially, the Fula or Fellatah, a mixture of Negroes and Berbers, who are to be found everywhere south and east of the Senegal River as the dominating class of society, have long been a menace to French authority.But railroads and roads and airplanes and tanks and caterpillar tractors are more powerful than all the Sudras or verses of the Koran.The Fellatahs are learning to drive flivvers.Romance is rapidly making its exit by way of the gas station.

Before the French and the English and the Germans settled down in the Sudan, the greater part of this territory belonged to those charming native princes who had grown rich stealing each other's subjects and selling them into slavery. Some of these potentates have gained a certain sad fame as among the most picturesque but also the most brutal of by-gone despots.The King of Dahomey with his highly efficient army of Amazons is still fresh in the memory of those who as children saw the last of his troops perform at our country fairs;and that may have been one of the reasons why the natives put up so little resistance when the European war ships appeared.No matter how greedy the new white master might be, he was always a great improvement on the black tyrant who had just been deposed.

The greater part of the southern Sudan is cut off from the ocean by a high mountain ridge which follows the coast line of the Gulf of Guinea. This prevents such rivers as the Niger from playing a really important part in the development of the interior, for like the Congo, the Niger is obliged to take a very roundabout way to avoid the main mass of these hills.Then just before it reaches the coast, it must dig a channel through these rocks with the result that there are a number of cataracts where they are least wanted(that is, near the sea)while the upper part of the river is apt to be navigable enough but there is nobody there to navigate it.

In the case of the Niger even this does not hold true. It is really more of a succession of long lakes and small pools than a regular river, as Mungo Park discovered in 1805 when he gave his life to find the river of which he had dreamed since he was a small boy in Scotland.This may have been responsible for the fact that the Sudanese, deprived of all water-ways, were able to make such a success of their overland trade-routes, and that Timbuktu, on the left bank of the upper Niger, could become such a very important center of trade, the Nizhni-Novgorod of Africa, where the north and the south and the east and the west came together to do business.

Timbuktu owes a great deal of its popularity to its queer name which sounds like the magic formula of some mysterious African witch-doctor. In the year 1353 it had been visited by the Ibn Batuta, the Marco Polo of the Arab world.Twenty years later it made its first appearance on Spanish maps as a great market for gold and salt, substances which were of almost equal value in medieval days.When the English Major Gordon Laing reached it in the year 1826,after having crossed the Sahara from Tripoli, it was merely the ruins of its former self, having been repeatedly attacked and destroyed by Tuareg and Fellatah marauders.On his way to the coast Major Laing was murdered by the Fellatah of Senegambia, but from that time on, Timbuktu was no longer another mysterious Mecca or Khiva or Tibet, but became a plain, ordinary“objective”of the French forces operating in the western Sudan.

In the year 1893 it was taken by a French“army”,consisting of one French naval ensign and six white men, accompanied by twelve Senegalese. The power of the desert tribes had not yet been broken, for soon afterwards they killed off most of the white invaders and almost completely destroyed a relief corps of two hundred men which was coming up from the coast to avenge the defeat of the naval contingent.

But of course it was then merely a matter of time before all of the western Sudan should be in French hands. The same held true of the region around Lake Chad in the central part of the Sudan, which was easier of access because the Benue River, a tributary of the Niger which runs due east and west, is much more navigable than the Niger itself.

Lake Chad, which lies about 700 feet high, is very shallow and rarely deeper than about 20 feet. In contrast to most other inland seas, the water is fresh and not salt.But it is growing smaller and smaller all the time and in another century it will be merely a marsh.One river loses itself in this lake.It is called the Shari, and the fact that it is merely an inland river which starts a thousand miles from the sea and ends a thousand miles from the sea, yet is as long as the Rhine, will give you a better idea of the proportions of central Africa than almost anything else I can think of.

The mountainous Wadai region east of Lake Chad acts as the great divide between the Nile, the Congo and the Chad region. Politically it belongs to the French and is supposed to be an administrative part of the French Congo.It also marks the end of the French sphere of influence, for on the east of it begins the eastern Sudan, now known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, a country which the ancients knew as the land of the White Nile.

When the English began to survey their road from the Cape to Cairo and decided that they must occupy this most valuable strategic point or run the risk of losing it to some other nation, the eastern Sudan was a desert, plain, simple and fancy. The Nile was absolutely unnavigable, and there were no roads.The people, at the mercy of all the scum from the nearby deserts, were poor and wretched beyond belief.Geographically it was without any value, but politically its possibilities were enormous.In 1876 therefore, England induced the Khedive of Egypt to entrust the administration of these hundreds of thousands of square miles of“nominal Egyptian territory”to that same General Gordon whom we have already met in the chapter on China, assisting the Peking government to repress the Tai-Ping rebellion.Gordon remained in the Sudan for two years and with the help of a very clever Italian assistant, one Romolo Gessi, he accomplished the one thing most needed:he broke up the last of the slave rings, shot the leaders and set more than 10,000 men and women free and allowed them to return to their homes.

As soon, however, as this stern Puritan had turned his back upon the Sudan, the old terrible conditions of misgovernment and oppression returned. Theresult was the outbreak of a movement for complete independence, a sort of“Sudan for the Sudanese and all the slave-trading we want”.The leader of this rebellion was a certain Mahommed Ahmed, who called himself a Mahdi or leader to show the faithful the road of the true Moslem faith.The Mahdi was successful.In 1883 he conquered El Obeid in Kordofan, which is now connected with Cairo by rail, and later in the same year he destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under Hicks Pasha, an English colonel in the service of the Khedive.Meanwhile, in 1882,England had assumed a protectorate over Egypt and the Mahdi now had to contend with a more dangerous enemy.

But England was too experienced in colonial affairs and knew the difficulties too well to rush into any rash expeditions. For the moment she counselled the Egyptian government to withdraw its troops from the Sudan.General Gordon was once more sent to Khartum to arrange for the withdrawal of the remaining Egyptian garrisons.But no sooner had he reached Khartum than the forces of the Mahdi swept northward and left Gordon and his companions marooned in Khartum.He sent urgent messages for relief.But Gordon was a Puritan mystic.Gladstone, who was then the head of the British government, was an Episcopal mystic.These two mystics, the one in London on the Thames and the other in Khartum on the Nile, did not like each other.And because they did not like each other, it was impossible for them to cooperate intelligently.

Gladstone sent a relief expedition, but much too late, for when it was still several days away from Khartum the town was taken by the forces of the Mahdi, and Gordon was murdered. That happened in January of 1885.In June of the same year the Mahdi died.His successor maintained himself as ruler of the Sudan until the year 1898 when an Anglo-Egyptian army under Kitchener wiped his followers from the face of the desert and recaptured the entire territory as far south as Uganda, which is on the equator.

The English have done an enormous amount of good in improving the condition of the natives by giving them roads, railroads, safety, by stamping out all sorts of hideous and unnecessary forms of disease, the usual things which the white man does for the black man and for which the white man expects the black man to say thank you, if he is that foolish, but for which the black man will shoot the white man in the back just as soon as he can, as the white man will well enough know if he has had a couple of centuries of colonial experience.

The railroad southward from Alexandria and Cairo now runs as far as El Obeid in the west and Port Sudan on the Red Sea in the east. If in the years to come an enemy should suddenly destroy the Suez Canal, England can still transport her troops from east to west via this railroad that runs through the valley of Egypt and then recrosses the Nubian Desert.

But now we have got to go back a few years and see how the Mahdi revolt was to have the most far-reaching influence upon the development of Africa in a way which had nothing at all to do with the Mahdi himself or his ambitions to become the independent ruler of the land of his fathers.

When the Mahdi uprising began, the Egyptian forces furthest towards the south were forced to find a refuge in a part of central Africa which was then practically unknown. Speke had crossed it in 1858 when he discovered Lake Victoria, the mother lake, so to speak, of the river Nile.But most of the land between Lake Albert and Lake Vitoria was still terra incognita.This Egyptian force, under command of a German physician, a certain Dr.Eduard Schnitzer, better known by his Turkish title of Emin Pasha, had disappeared from sight after the fall of Khartum, and the world was curious to know what had become of its leader.

The job of finding him was entrusted to an American newspaper man by the name of Stanley. His name was really Rowlands, but he had adopted that of a New Orleans merchant who had been very good to him when he had first landed in America, a poor English boy who had run away from the workhouse.Stanley wa already famous as an African explorer for the voyage which he had undertaken in 1871 to find Dr.Livingstone.Since then England had begun to realize the importance of keeping at least a few fingers in the African pie and the London Daily Telegraph cooperated with the New York Herald in defraying the cost of the voyage.This expedition, which lasted three years and which was undertaken from east to west, proved that the Lualaba which Livingstone had suspected of being part of the Congo was in reality the beginning of that river.It also showed the vastness of the territory traversed by the Congo River on its circuitous route to the sea and it brought home tales of strange native tribes, the presence of which no one so far had suspected.

It was this second voyage of Stanley's which drew the attention of the world to the commercial possibilities of the Congo and which made it possible for Leopold of Belgium to found his Congo Free State.

When at last the fate of Emin Pasha became a subject of world-wide concern, it was only natural that Stanley should be selected as the man best fitted to find him. He began his search in 1887 and the next year he found Emin in Wadelai just north of Lake Albert.Stanley tried to persuade this German, who seems to have exercised a tremendous power over the natives, to enter the service of the King of the Belgians, which would probably have meant that the great lake region of Africa would also have been added to the territory of the Congo colony.But Emin seems to have had plans of his own.As soon as he reached Zanzibar(he really was not anxious at all to be“saved”)he got in touch with the German authorities and it was finally decided to send him back, well provided with men and money, to try to establish a German protectorate over the high plateau between the three great lakes of Victoria, Albert and Tanganyika.Along the coast of Zanzibar the German East Africa Company had acquired large interests as early as 1885.If the lake region were added, Germany would be able to frustrate the English plans for dividing all of Africa into two parts by a broad strip of English territory running from Egypt to the Cape.But in 1892 Emin was murdered near Stanley Falls on the Congo by Arab slave-dealers who wanted to avenge some of their colleagues deservedly hung by the stern German in his younger days.Nothing therefore came of the Emin's dream of the new Germany on the high plateau of Tanganyika.As a result, however, of his disappearance, the greater part of central Africa had now been definitely put upon the map.And that brings us to the fifth natural division of Africa, the high mountainous regions of the east.

These stretch all the way from Abyssinia in the north to the Zambesi River in the south where the territory known as South Africa begins. The northern part of this region is inhabited by Hamites, for the Abyssinians and the Somalis, although they have kinky hair, are not Negroes.The southern part consists of Negroes and a great many Europeans.

The Abyssinians are Christians of a very old vintage, having been converted as early as the fourth century, almost 400 years before we had a single Christian community in central Europe. Their Christian sentiments, however, did not prevent them from making perpetual war upon their neighbors.In the year 525 they even crossed the Red Sea and conquered the southern part of Arabia, the Arabia Felix of the Romans(in contrast to the Arabia Deserta of the interior).It was this expedition which had made the young Mahommed realize the necessity for a strong and united Arab fatherland and which had started him upon his career as the founder of a religion and a world-empire.

One of the first things his followers did was to drive the Ethiopians away from the coast towns of the Red Sea and to destroy their business relations with Ceylon and India and far-away Constantinople. After that defeat, Ethiopia became a sort of Japan which took no further interest in outside affairs until the middle of the last century when the different European powers began to cast longing glances in the general direction of the peninsula of Somaliland, not because Somaliland was of any possible value, but because it was situated on the Red Sea which soon would be merely an extension of the Suez Canal.France was the first to arrive upon the scene and to occupy the harbor of Djibouti.The English, after a punitive expedition against the Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia, during which that extraordinary monarch killed himself rather than fall into the hands of his enemies, took British Somaliland which, situated just opposite Aden, gave them command of the gulf of that name.The Italians took a slice north of the French and British possessions with the intention of using the coastal region as a base of supplies from where to conduct a glorious expedition against Abyssinia.

This glorious expedition took place in the year 1896,and on that occasion the Italians lost 4500 white and 2000 native troops, with a slightly smaller amount of prisoners. Since then the Italians have left their Abyssinian neighbors alone although they are now the owners of another part of Somaliland, south of the British settlement.

In the end, of course, Abyssinia will go the way of Uganda and Zanzibar. But the difficulties of transportation, not overcome by the single railroad line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, and the broken up nature of the entire Abyssinian plateau which makes it a natural fortress, together with the realization that those black men will under circumstances fight back with great bitterness, have so far saved that ancient kingdom from the usual annexation by one of her European neighbors.

South of Abyssinia and east of the Congo lie the three great African lakes. Of those the Nyasa sends tributaries to the Zambesi River, while Lake Victoria is responsible for the River Nile and the Tanganyika Lake connects with the Congo, suggesting that this region must be the highest part of Africa.The investigations of the last fifty years completely bear this out.Kilimanjaro, southeast of Lake Victoria, is 19,000 feet high and Mount Ruwenzori(the Mountain of the Moon of Ptolemy, which Stanley rediscovered some twenty centuries later)is 16,700 feet, with Kenya(17,000)and E1gon(14,000)close seconds.

This whole region was originally volcanic but the African volcanoes have not been working at their trade for a good many centuries. Politically the entire territory is divided into a number of subdivisions, all of them however under British rule.

Uganda, a cotton-raising country, became a protectorate in 1899.

The former possessions of the British East Africa Company, now Kenya Colony, were made part of the empire in 1920,while the erstwhile holdings of the German East Africa colony became a British mandate in 1918 and are now part of the Tanganyika territory.

The most important town on the coast is Zanzibar, the capital of an old slave-trading sultanate over which the English established a protectorate in 1890. The town was a great center for Arab merchants from all over the Indian Ocean.They were probably responsible for the spread of the Swahili language, the jargon of Zanzibar, which is now spoken all over the east coast of Africa just as Malayan has become the“lingua franca”of the islands of the Dutch East Indies.At the present time a slight knowledge of Swahili is the most valuable asset for anyone wishing to do business along the three thousand miles of the Indian Ocean front and their millions of square miles of hinterland.If he will also bother to learn a little Bantu, the language of all the South African Negroes, he can, with a few words of Portuguese and a smattering of pidgin-Arabic and a sentence or two in Cape Dutch be sure of all of his meals while travelling from one end of the continent to the other.

That closes the chapter on northern Africa, except for the narrow coastal region that lies between the Atlantic and the mountains of the Sudan and the Cameroon Mountains. This strip of land has been known these last four hundred years as Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea.I have already mentioned the Guineas when I spoke of slavery, for it was there that the“black ivory”was gathered ere it was made ready for shipment to the rest of the world.Today that coast belongs to a number of nations, but none of these settlements is of any interest to anybody except a few stamp-collectors.

Sierra Leone is an old English settlement which, like Liberia just to the west of it, was intended to be a homeland for former slaves. Neither Sierra Leone nor Liberia, with its capital city of Monrovia(so-called after our President Monroe)amounts to anything except sad disappointments in the hearts of a good many perfectly honest men and women who had hoped for better things when they generously offered their money to return the black man to the country of his great-grandfather's birth.

The Ivory Coast is French, and Accra will eventually be a harbor of the French Sudanese Empire. Nigeria is English.The capital is Lagos.Dahomey was an independent native state until the French took it in 1893.

Cameroon was German until the war. It is now a French protectorate.So was and is Togo.The rest is part of the French Congo, making the whole of that part of the world a large French equatorial empire with little foreign enclosures which eventually will be acquired by the French in exchange for either cash or for something some other power may want in another part of the world.

The Dutch East Indian Company, in order to shorten the voyage from Batavia to Amsterdam, had maintained an overland route of its own by way of Persia and Syria and Alexandria. But every time there was a quarrel between two Mesopotamian potentates the mails and the caravans were so hopelessly delayed that the bulk of the merchandise continued to be sent by way of the Cape.

In order that nothing might interfere with the steady flow of its Indian products, the Dutch thereupon occupied a few harbors along the coast of Guinea which they could also use as slave ports, took St. Helena and fortified the Cape.

In 1671 the Dutch, who like all good merchants liked to have things in writing(think of the absurd comedy of“buying”Manhattan in exchange for$24. 00 worth of gadgets!)bought the land around the fort of Capetown from the Hottentots.That meant the end of the Hottentots for, deprived of their land, they were forced to move northward into the region of the Orange River and the Vaal which was occupied by their hereditary enemies, the Bushmen.It seemed a punishment from Heaven that those same Dutch farmers, who had been terribly cruel in their dealings with both Hottentots and Bushmen, should afterwards have suffered a similar fate.For Capetown was occupied by the English in 1795 and then it was the turn of the Boers to move northward.They repeated this maneuver a number of times until the year 1902,when the last of their two independent republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State were definitely annexed by the English.

Capetown, however, has remained the most important harbor of the whole triangle. But the coastal region counts for nothing compared to the tremendously rich interior.This interior consists of a high plateau dotted with low hills, a sort of mesa here called kopjes.On the west this plateau is cut off from the Atlantic by the Komas highlands.On the east it is separated from the Indian Ocean by the Matoppo Mountains and in the south it is cut off from the Capetown region by the Drakensberg Ridge.

None of these mountains has any glaciers. All the rivers therefore of this entire region depend upon rainfall for their water supply.As a result they are wild torrents in the winter and dry, hollow roads in the summer, and as they have got to break their way through a mountain ridge ere they reach the sea(with the exception of the rivers in Natal, which therefore is the richest of the different countries that now make up the U.S.A.or Union of South Africa)they are of no possible use as roads of commerce to the interior.

In order therefore that the hinterland might have access to the sea, a number of railways have been constructed. Before the war the most important of these roads was the one between Pretoria and Lourenco Marques on the Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa.Since the war the roads to Swakopmund and Lüderitzland in the former territory of German South-west Africa(now a mandate of the Union)have been finished;and northward one can now go by rail as far as Lake Tanganyika and then, after having crossed the lake by boat, one can take another train from there for Zanzibar.

In order to get that far north, one is obliged to spend an uncomfortable day crossing the Kalahari desert but once this has been left behind, one enters into the hilly territory of Rhodesia, so-called after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the old British South African chartered company and one of the earliest prophets of a united South Africa under British domination. That dream has partially come true.The different chartered companies and the former Boer republics and the Kaffir and Zulu nations are now all of them part of the Union of South Africa which was proclaimed in 1910.But as the Boer element which lives in the country districts seems to be gaining on the English element which had been chiefly attached to the cities by the discovery of gold around Johannesburg and diamonds near Kimberley, there is a violent struggle going on to decide which of the two rival elements shall be the deciding factor.By way of compromise, Capetown has been made the place where the parliament of the Union meets, but Praetoria, the old capital of the Transvaal Republic, has been promoted to act as the seat of the government.

As for the two unusually large remnants of the ancient Portuguese Empire which continue to separate the U. S.A.from the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Angola in the west and Mozambique in the east, they are so badly administered that sooner or later they will be taken over by one of their more powerful neighbors.Just now, with agricultural products at a lower price than ever before and cattle-raising at a complete standstill, the South Africans are not in search of fresh pastures and grain fields.When times return to normal, these Portuguese colonies will be annexed without the firing of a single gun.For South Africa is developing a new race, neither Dutch nor English but purely South African.And it is so rich in mineral wealth, in copper and coal and iron, and the soil is so fertile that it may well develop into a sort of United States on a slightly smaller scale.

At the other side of the Strait of Mozambique lies the island of Madagascar which measures 230,000 square miles and is slightly larger than the Republic of France to which it belongs. The population is about 4,000,000.It is a mountainous island and the eastern part exposed to the tradewinds, has excellent timber which is exported from the harbor of Tamatave, connected by rail with the capital, Tananarivo.

The people look more like Malays than like Negroes. But Madagascar must have been separated from Africa at a very early period in our geological history for none of the usual African animals are to be found on the island.

East of Madagascar lie two little islands which were of great importance when the India trade still followed the route of the Cape. They are Mauritius and Reunion.Mauritius, an old fresh water vegetable station of the Dutch East India Company, is now English, and Reunion is French.

As for the other islands which, geographically speaking, belong to Africa, I have already mentioned St. Helena, while Ascension, further to the north in the Atlantic, is also a coaling and a cable station.The Cape Verde Islands are Portuguese.They lie a few hundred miles west of the coast of Mauretania, now occupied by a insignificant Spanish colony.The Canary Islands are Spanish, and Madeira and the Azores are Portuguese, and Teneriffe, with its well known volcano, is Spanish.As for the island of St.Brandon, in which all honest skippers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed as firmly as we ourselves believe in the tables of multiplication, that was situated here too.But no one could ever quite find out where because it went to the bottom of the ocean as soon as any vessel came near it and only reappeared when the visitor was gone.That seems to me to have been a very sensible thing to do on the part of an African island.It was the only way in which it could escape being occupied by a foreign power.

Most continents can be reduced to few simple images. We say“Europe”and we see the dome of St.Peter's and ruined castles on the Rhine and the silent fjords of Norway and we hear the troika bells of Russia.Asia calls forth pictures of pagodas and masses of little brown men bathing in a wide river and strange temples, ten thousand feet up in the air, and the placid symmetry of old Fuji.America means sky-scrapers, factory chimneys, an old Indian on a pony going nowhere in particular.Even far off Australia has its symbols, the amiable kangaroo with his inquisitive and intelligent eyes.

But Africa, how shall we reduce that land of contrasts and extremes to a single symbol?

It is a land of torrid heat without any rivers!Yet the Nile is almost as long as the Mississippi and the Congo is only a little shorter than the Amazon River and the Niger just as long as the Hwang-Ho. It is a land of torrential rains and insufferable moisture!Yet the Sahara alone, the dryest of all deserts, is larger than all of Australia and the Kalahari is as big as the British Isles.

The people are weak and helpless, the black man does not know how to defend himself!Yet the most perfectly organized military machine the world has ever seen was developed among the Zulus, and the desert Bedouins and other northern tribes have been known to charge successfully against European troops armed with machine guns.

Africa has no convenient inland seas like the Baltic or our own Great Lakes!Granted, but Lake Victoria is as large as Lake Superior, Tanganyika is as big as the Baikal Sea, Nyasa twice as big as Lake Ontario.

Africa has no mountains!But Kilimanjaro is 5000 feet higher than Mount Whitney, the highest peak of the United States, and Ruwenzori, just north of the equator, is higher than Mont Blanc.

Then what is wrong with this continent?I don't know. Everything is there but nothing seems to be where it could possibly be of any use to anyone.The whole arrangement is wrong.With the exception of the Nile, all these rivers and mountains and lakes and deserts serve no purpose.Even the Nile, which at least flows into a sea of great commercial importance, is hampered by too many cataracts.As for the Congo and the Niger, they have no comfortable access to the sea, while the Zambesi starts where the Orange River should end and the Orange River ends where the Zambesi should start.

Modern science may eventually make the desert bear fruit and drain the marshes. Modern science may find ways to cure the dysentery and the sleeping sickness, which have wiped out entire countrysides in the Sudan and the Congo region, as modern science has set us free from yellow fever and malaria Modern science may turn the high central and southern plateaus into a replica of the French Provence or the Italian Riviera.But the jungle is strong and persistent and the jungle has a handicap of millions of years.Let modern science relax but for a moment and the jungle and all its atrocities will be back at the white man's throat and will throttle him and it will breathe its poisonous breath into his nostrils until he dies and is eaten by the hyenas and the ants.

Perhaps it is the lightless tropical forest which has put its dreadful stamp upon the whole African civilization. The desert may be frightening but the shimmering dark forest is terrifying.It is so full of life that it has become lifeless.The struggle for existence must proceed quietly lest the hunter himself become the hunted.And so day and night and night and day creation devours itself beneath the high roof of the listless leaves.The most harmless-looking insect has the most deadly sting.The most beautiful flower carries its secret burden of poison.Every horn and hoof and beak and tooth is against every other horn and hoof and beak and tooth.The pulse-beat of existence is accompanied by the crunching of bones and the tearing asunder of soft brown skins.

I have tried to talk of these things with Africans. They laughed at me.Such was life.Life was either stark poverty or overwhelming abundance.There was no golden mean.One either froze or one roasted.One either drank coffee from golden cups with an Arab merchant or one took a pot-shot at an old Hottentot woman.She was no good anyway.For this land of contrast seems to do dreadful things to people.It warps their vision.It kills their susceptibilities to the finer sides of life.The ceaseless carnage of the veldt and forest gets into their blood.And a quiet little mousy official, fresh from the stiff respectability of a slumbering Belgian village, turns into a monster who has women flogged to death because they fail to bring an extra pound of rubber;and then quietly smokes his afterdinner cigar while the insects devour some poor black devil, mutilated because he was in arrears with his ivory.

I am trying very hard not to be unfair. Other continents, too, have greatly contributed to the sum total of human cruelty and malevolence.But gentler forms walk across the countryside.Jesus preaches, Confucius teaches, Buddha implores, Mahommed sternly points to his harsh virtues.Africa, alone, has borne us no prophet.Other continents have been greedy and selfish but at times the spirit has conquered the flesh and they have gone forth upon some mighty pilgrimage, the purpose of which lay hidden far beyond the gates of Heaven.

The only sound of marching feet across the African desert and through the shrubs is that of flint-eyed Arabs in search of their human prey, of Dahomeyan Amazons, ready to pounce upon a sleeping village and steal the children of their neighbors to sell them into foreign slavery. In other parts of the world women ever since the beginning of time have tried to make themselves desirable in the eyes of their men that they might attract them and gain their favor.In Africa alone women have deliberately made themselves hideous that they might repel all those who should meet them unaware.

I might continue this bit of special pleading ad infinitum. But this book is getting much too long and so you had better try to find an answer for yourself.

People have been faced by the same perplexing question ever since they first gazed upon the useless grandeur of the Pyramids and looked suspiciously at the tracks that lost themselves in the sands of the distant desert. But none of them returned any the wiser.