Edward Heawood, Frank R. Cana, T. Athol Joyce & John Scott Keltie

“ But if ease of communication is favourable to the rise of large states and the cultural progress that usually accompanies it, it is, nevertheless, often fatal to the very culture which, at first, it fostered, in so far as the absence of natural boundaries renders invasion easy. A good example of this is furnished by the history of the western Sudan and particularly of East and South-East Africa. From its geographical position Africa looks naturally to the east, and it is on this side that it has been most affected by external culture both by land (across the Sinaitic peninsula) and by sea. ”

“ Climate and Health.—Lying almost entirely within the tropics, and equally to north and south of the equator, Africa does not show excessive variations of temperature. Great heat is experienced in the lower plains and desert regions of North Africa, removed by the great width of the continent from the influence of the ocean, and here, too, the contrast between day and night, and between summer and winter, is greatest. (The rarity of the air and the great radiation during the night cause the temperature in the Sahara to fall occasionally to freezing point.) ”

“ The Berlin conference likewise enacted that over a wide area of Central Africa—the conventional basin of the Congo—there should be complete freedom of trade, a freedom which later on was held to be infringed in the Congo State and French Congo by the granting to various companies proprietary rights in the disposal of the product of the soil. More important in their effect on the economic condition of the continent than the steps taken to ensure freedom of trade were the measures concerted by the powers for the suppression of the slave trade. ”

“ In addition to slaves, furnished by the continent from the earliest times, a certain amount of gold and ivory was exported from the tropical regions, but no other product supplied the material for a flourishing trade with those parts. To their Asiatic and European invaders the Africans indeed owed many creature comforts—the introduction of maize, rice, the sugar cane, the orange, the lemon and the lime, cloves, tobacco and many other vegetable products, the camel, the horse and other animals—but invaluable to Africa as were these gifts they led to little development of commerce. ”

“ The real struggle in West Africa was between France and Great Britain, and France played the dominant part, the exhaustion of Portugal, the apathy of the British government and the late appearance of Germany in the field being all elements that favoured the success of French policy. Before tracing the steps in the historic contest between France and Great Britain it is necessary, however, to deal briefly with the part played by Germany. She naturally could not be disposed of by the chief rivals as easily as were Portugal and Liberia. ”

“ In Tunisia the work of strengthening the protectorate established in 1881 had gone steadily forward; but it was in Algeria that the extension of French influence had been most marked. The movement of expansion southwards was inevitable. With the progress of exploration it became increasingly evident that the Sahara constituted no insurmountable barrier between the French possessions in North and West Central Africa. But France had not only the hope of placing Algeria in touch with the Sudan to spur her forward. ”

“ Other important factors in the economic as well as the social conditions of Africa are the advance in civilization made by the natives in several regions and the increase of the areas found suitable for white colonization. The advance in civilization among the natives, exemplified by the granting to them of political rights in such countries as Algeria and Cape Colony, leads directly to increased commercial activity; and commerce increases in a much greater degree when new countries—e.g. Rhodesia and British East Africa—become the homes of Europeans. ”

“ By the agreement of July 1890 with Germany, Great Britain had been reluctantly compelled to abandon her hopes of through communication between the British spheres in the northern and southern parts of the continent, and to Consent to the boundary of German East Africa marching with the eastern frontier of the Congo Free State. Germany frankly avowed that she did not wish to have a powerful neighbour interposed between herself and the Congo Free State. ”

“ A line of greater economic importance than the last named is the railway (completed in 1905) from Port Sudan on the Red Sea to the Nile a little south of Berber, thus placing the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan within easy reach of the markets of the world. A west to east connexion across the continent by rail and steamer, from the mouth of the Congo to Port Sudan, was arranged in 1906 when an agreement was entered into by the Congo and Sudan governments for the building of a railway from Lado, on the Nile, to the Congo frontier, there to meet a railway starting from the river Congo near Stanley Falls. ”

“ The Horn of Africa appears to have been the centre from which the Hamites spread, and the pressure they seem to have applied to the Negro tribes, themselves also in process of expansion, sent forth larger waves of emigrants from the latter. These emigrants, already affected by the Hamitic pastoral culture, and with a strain of Hamitic blood in their veins, passed rapidly down the open tract in the east, doubtless exterminating their predecessors, except such few as took refuge in the mountains and swamps. ”

“ Experiments have been made in the introduction of South American rubber plants, but opinions differ as to the prospects of success, as the plants in question seem to demand very definite conditions of soil and climate. The second product, palm-oil, is derived from a much more limited area than rubber, for although the oil palm is found throughout the greater part of West Africa, from 10° N. to 10° S., the great bulk of the export comes from the coast districts at the head of the Gulf of Guinea. A larger supply, equal to any market demand, could easily be obtained. ”

“ The interior limits of the Portuguese possessions in Africa south of the equator gave rise, however, to much more serious discussions than were involved in the dispute as to the Muato Yanvo’s kingdom. Portugal, as has been stated, claimed all the territories between Angola and Mozambique, and she succeeded in inducing both France and Germany, in 1886, to recognize the king of Portugal’s “right to exercise his sovereign and civilizing influence in the territories which separate the Portuguese possessions of Angola and Mozambique.” ”

“ An examination of the map of West Africa will show what possibilities of trouble were left open at the end of 1890 by the various agreements concluded up to that date. From Say on the Niger to where the Lagos frontier came to an abrupt stop in 9° N. there was no boundary line between the French and British spheres of influence. To the north of the Gold Coast and of the French Ivory Coast colony the way was equally open to Great Britain and to France, while the vagueness of the Say-Barrua line left an opening of which France was quick to avail herself. ”

“ The zones of minimum rainfall have a very scanty flora, consisting of plants adapted to resist the great dryness. Characteristic of the Sahara is the date-palm, which flourishes where other vegetation can scarcely maintain existence, while in the semi-desert regions the acacia (whence is obtained gum-arabic) is abundant. The more humid regions have a richer vegetation—dense forest where the rainfall is greatest and variations of temperature least, conditions found chiefly on the tropical coasts, and in the west African equatorial basin with its extension towards the upper Nile ”

“ The more extensive Zang (Zenj) empire, of which the name Zanzibar (Zanguebar) is a lasting memorial, extending along the sea-board from Somaliland to the Zambezi, was also extinct. The Arabs had established themselves firmly on the coast, and thence made continual slave-raids into the interior, penetrating later to the Congo. The Swahili, inhabiting the coast-line from the equator to about 16° S., are a somewhat heterogeneous mixture of Bantu with a tinge of Arab blood. ”

“ The origin of the Bushman is lost in obscurity, but he may be conceived as the original inhabitant of the southern portion of the continent. The original home of the Negro, at first an agriculturist, is most probably to be found in the neighbourhood of the great lakes, whence he penetrated along the fringe of the Sahara to the west and across the eastern highlands southward. Northerly expansion was prevented by the early occupation of the Nile valley, the only easy route to the Mediterranean, but there seems no doubt that the population of ancient Egypt contained a distinct Negroid element. ”

“ The rainfall zones are, however, somewhat deflected from a due west-to-east direction, the drier northern conditions extending southwards along the east coast, and those of the south northwards along the west. Within the equatorial zone certain areas, especially on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea and in the upper Nile basin, have an intensified rainfall, but this rarely approaches that of the rainiest regions of the world. The rainiest district in all Africa is a strip of coastland west of Mount Cameroon, where there is a mean annual rainfall of about 390 in. ”

“ The third division of the higher region of Africa is formed by the Abyssinian highlands, a rugged mass of mountains forming the largest continuous area of its altitude in the whole continent, little of its surface falling below 5000 ft., while the summits reach heights of 15,000 to 16,000 ft. This block of country lies just west of the line of the great East African trough, the northern continuation of which passes along its eastern escarpment as it runs up to join the Red Sea. ”

“ There are carved out of the territories comprised in what is officially known as French West Africa five colonies—Senegal, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Dahomey and the Upper Senegal and Niger, this last being entirely cut off from the sea—and the civil territory of Mauritania. To the colony of the Upper Senegal and Niger is attached the military territory of the Niger, embracing the French Sahara up to the limit of the Algerian sphere of influence. ”

“ Happily Lord Salisbury was able to announce, on the 4th of November, that France was willing to recognize the British claims, and the incident was finally closed on the 21st of March 1899, when an Anglo-French declaration was signed, by the terms of which France withdrew from the Nile valley and accepted a boundary line which satisfied her earlier ambition by uniting the whole of her territories in North, West and Central Africa into a homogeneous whole, while effectually preventing the realization of her dream of a transcontinental empire from west to east. ”

“ Before 1875 the only powers with any considerable interest in Africa were Britain, Portugal and France. Between 1815 and 1850, as has been shown above, the British government devoted much energy, not always informed by knowledge, to western and southern Africa. In both directions Great Britain had met with much discouragement; on the west coast, disease, death, decaying trade and useless conflicts with savage foes had been the normal experience; in the south recalcitrant Boers and hostile Kaffirs caused almost endless trouble. ”

“ Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan, Tunisia and Tripoli were subject in differing ways to the overlordship of the sultan of Turkey, and with these may be ranked, in the scale of organized governments, the three principal independent states, Morocco, Abyssinia and Zanzibar, as also the negro republic of Liberia. There remained, apart from the Sahara, roughly one half of Africa, lying mostly within the tropics, inhabited by a multitude of tribes and peoples living under various forms of government and subject to frequent changes in respect of political organization. ”

“ The visions once entertained of vigorous negro communities at once civilized and Christian faded away; to the hot fit of philanthropy succeeded the cold fit of indifference and a disinclination to bear the burden of empire. ”

“ Having secured an opening on Lake Chad for her Cameroon colony, Germany was anxious to obtain a footing on the middle Niger for Togoland. German expeditions reached Gando, one of the tributary states of the Sokoto empire on the middle Niger, and, notwithstanding the existence of prior treaties with Great Britain, sought to conclude agreements with the sultan of that country. But this German ambition conflicted both with the British and the French designs in West Africa, and eventually Germany had to be content with the 11th parallel as her northern frontier. ”

“ In the swamp regions of north-east Africa the papyrus and associated plants, including the soft-wooded ambach, flourish in immense quantities—and little else is found in the way of vegetation. South Africa is largely destitute of forest save in the lower valleys and coast regions. Tropical flora disappears, and in the semi-desert plains the fleshy, leafless, contorted species of kapsias, mesembryanthemums, aloes and other succulent plants make their appearance. ”

“ The ornithology of northern Africa presents a close resemblance to that of southern Europe, scarcely a species being found which does not also occur in the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Among the birds most characteristic of Africa are the ostrich and the secretary-bird. The ostrich is widely dispersed, but is found chiefly in the desert and steppe regions. The secretary-bird is common in the south. The weaver birds and their allies, including the long-tailed whydahs, are abundant, as are, among game-birds, the francolin and guinea-fowl. ”