Africa

“ My brother Parisians, when I think that, at the most moderate computation, nine-tenths of you picture Africa to yourselves as a vast desert, destitute of water and shade—wretched creatures that you are—there is not a country, perhaps, in the wide world that is watered by so many, and such great torrents and rivers, that is shaded by such gigantic trees, that is beautified by nature to such a luxuriant extent, as certain parts of central Africa. ”

“ Between the two sterile tracts of Africa lies the real Continent. All the coast lands are a shell. Egypt is but a strip on either side the Nile. Central Africa—the Lake regions which feed the Nile, Congo and Zambesi—is a great and grand section, where nature has been prodigal in all her gifts, and which invites a civilization as unique and strong as its physical features. ”

“ Let us therefore call our skilful and energetic brethren to come to us and share the suffering and the glory of saving Africa. Let us stand on the beach and on the hill-side, and beckon to them in all lands to come and participate in lofty duty, in painful but saving labor, and to aid in the restoration and enlightenment of a vast continent! ”

“ One of the charms of Africa is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing. ”

“ As yet we only know a kind of toy Africa, harmless and without churlishness, spring-like and temperate, with its oases, its wells, its mountains, its miniature storms, all that makes life agreeable, variety, accident, everything to inspire a love of travel and incite to great discoveries. ”

“ This vast and wild Africa, to indefinite depths, seems now yearning to throw off the forest, the jungle, and the bush, and to open a pathway for the spade, the hoe, the plough, and the scythe; so that all the world, ere the coming of its last days, may delight itself with its prolific fulness and its vast and inexhaustible riches. ”

“ If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race,—and come it must, some time, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement,—life will awake there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived. ”

“ Let us begin by studying the scientific works of the African explorers and stop reading and believing the silly slush which ignorant missionaries put into our heads about the alleged degradation of our people in Africa. Let us learn to know Africa and Africans so well that every educated Negro will be able at a glance to put his hand on the map of Africa and tell where to find the Jolofs, Ekois, Mandingoes, Yorubas, Bechuanas or Basutos and can tell something of their marriage customs, their property laws, their agriculture and systems of worship. ”

“ To those who associate the name of the great African continent only with visions of the steaming mangrove swamps of the west coast, the luxuriant flower-carpets and grasses of the south, the trackless sand-wastes of the north, and the undulating thirsty plains of ‘the Bush,’ whose idea of Africa, indeed, may be summed up in three words—sun, savages, and fever—to such, we say, it may be difficult to accept the knowledge that snow-capped mountains exist in the very heart of this dry and heat-engirdled land. ”

“ Africa is not only now well known, but the exploration of its interior has been followed by political changes of the most revolutionary character. It presented a virgin field for colonization, of which the land-hungry nations of Europe hastened to avail themselves, dividing up the continent between them until, by the end of the century, the partition of Africa was practically complete. It is one of the most remarkable circumstances in history that a well-known continent remained thus so long unexplored to serve in our own days as a new field for the outpouring of the nations. ”

“ Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting ancient Egypt to the mother continent of Asia was Africa vitalized by the pulse of another life. European influences penetrated little beyond the northern coast. ”

“ Africa rises from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the general physical geography of these has been already sketched—first, a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. ”

“ There are green and sheltered valleys in Africa,—broad and beautiful rivers,—and vegetation in its loveliest and most magnificent forms.—But no comfortable houses, no thriving farms, no cultivated gardens;—for it is not safe to possess permanent property, where each little state is surrounded by warlike neighbors, continually sending out their armed bands in search of slaves. ”

“ Africa is still a home of the incalculable, not wholly explored or explorable, still a hinterland to which the youth of the south can push forward in search of fortune, and from which that breath of romance, which is the life of the English race, can inspire thinkers and song-makers. ”

“ Still, Africa to-day is an unknown land. That Africa was a rich country, was proven by the treasures brought from the interior by the rivers Nile, Niger and Congo. That it was populous, was demonstrated by the millions of slaves furnished by the native tribes to the outside world. For curiosity alone, explorations were made in the early part of the century; but it remained with Livingstone to first open up the Dark Continent, and with Stanley, to pierce its very heart. Africa is to-day, however, a mystery which, it seems, will never be penetrated. ”

“ The nobler-spirited of them feel deeply their state of humiliation, and the more intelligent of them to perceive the only remedy for it. Africa, the home of their fathers, calls to them across the sea, and spreads her arms to welcome them. ”

“ But Africa, though the primary, is not the sole asylum within contemplation; an auxiliary one presents itself in the islands adjoining this continent, where the coloured population is already dominant, and where the wheel of revolution may from time to time produce the like result. ”

“ All the world now turns to Africa as the scene of those adventures which possess such a weird and startling interest for readers of every class, and which invite to heroic exertion on the part of pioneers. ”

“ We have been taught to regard Africa as a dark, stolid continent, unawakened, unvisited by the agencies and influences that have transformed the world from age to age. Yet it was in northern and northeastern Africa that within historic periods three of the most powerful and brilliant civilizations were developed,—the Egyptian, the Carthaginian, the Saracenic. ”

“ Africa, he added, that continent ever explored and ever mysterious, where at a moment's warning countries of thousands of square miles are discovered — Africa so painfully won to civilization, does not seem called to play an eminent part, notwithstanding her immense reservoir of men. ”

“ Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world—North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators—War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret. ”

“ It seems to me that Africa is the fitting continent in whose mysterious solitudes the greatest explorer of this generation should die in service and on his knees. He symbolized the possibilities of the Negritto race for the expression of the life of the Son of God, and mutely prophesied of the ages to come. ”

“ The attempt to explore the interior of Africa, dictated by the same generous views, is in no respect less interesting, nor does it promise less important results, even than those great undertakings; and it will be peculiarly worthy of an age and nation, rendered for ever memorable in the annals of mankind by the Abolition of the African slave trade. ”

“ The oldest civilisation, the oldest state grew up on that quarter of the globe which seems least favourable to the development of mankind. On either side of the equator, Africa stretches out in huge land-locked masses. A vast table-land occupies the whole south of the continent, and in the north sinks down to a plain more impassable even than the broad seas which wash the coasts of Africa on the west, south, and east. This plain—the bed of a dry sea—lies in the burning sun without vegetation. ”

“ Africa, the true South of the earth, is distinguished from all the other great divisions of the earth by its almost insular form and its unbroken outline. It is separated from Asia merely by the Isthmus of Suez, scarcely 70 miles wide. But it is of altogether more virgin a nature than Asia, and has been encroached upon by scarcely any foreign influence. Africa is a unit in itself; the most exclusive of continents, its periphery is almost a perfect ellipse. ”

“ We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley of the Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. ”

“ Not until slavery received its death blow among civilized nations did they begin to set permanent feet, in a spirit of scientific and christian inquiry, on the interior soil of Africa, and to map out its blank spaces with magnificent lakes and rivers. ”

“ AFRICA is less known than any of the other divisions. The greater part of the inhabitants are in a state of barbarism. Nearly three-quarters of Africa lie in the torrid zone, and the dark complexion and savage character of the inhabitants, and the ferocity of its wild beasts, seem in unison with the excessive heat of the sun, and the frightful aspect of the deserts.
The West India Islands lie in the Atlantic Ocean, between North and South America, in the torrid zone. They belong principally to European nations. ”

“ In fifty years the map of Africa will bear little resemblance to that of to-day, but what of the natives? Are they to have no voice in their destiny? One listens with impatience to the cool and calculating discussions for a re-arrangement of the map of Africa, which are being carried on without any reference to the native tribes, without any reference to treaty obligations, and with little respect for the fundamental obligations of Christianity, the teaching of which the European Powers claim as their special monopoly. ”

“ Africa is an independent continent in even less degree than is either of the two Americas, for it forms the southwesterly extension of the Old World land-mass, and it lies in close proximity to Asia and Europe, with both of which continents it has, during long periods of past geological time, been intimately united by broad isthmuses. ”

“ Africa, like Europe and America, evidences a commingling of different stocks: the blacks are not all black, nor all woolly-haired; the Africans pass through all shades, from that of the light Berber, no darker than the Spaniard, to the deep black of the Iolofs, between Senegal and Gambia. ”

“ Reflecting on these and other relations made by unenlightened men, it appears, that as the great continent of Africa, amidst its seas of sand, occasionally shews its Oasis, or fertile [iii] isle, rising in each desert; so, in analogy to the face of the country, does the blank and torpid mind of its people, display occasionally notes of intelligence and philanthropy; rich spots of genius, and partial scenes of improved social establishment. ”

“ While we grow infatuated with descriptions of African wealth and possibility, we almost skip the mightiest problem Africa can reveal, the relationship its own people are to bear to its material development, their status as factors in unfolding the inner continent to the outer world. ”

“ So that in this great land of Africa we have people living very different kinds of life, in the deserts, in the forests of the Congo, in Uganda and on the Nile, in the mines of South Africa, and on the great farms on the veld and in the great towns. The country itself is different in different parts: the sand in the north; Central Africa, with its hot sun and its lakes and rivers and mountains and forests; South Africa, with its great grassy plains, and the mines and towns joined by the railways which make it easy to get quickly to places far away. ”

“ It is a land where the sky is without cloud, and the earth without shade. These deserts, which are not lacking in grandeur and attraction, mark, north and south, the true boundaries of Africa. Beyond them, north and south—to the north, Mauretania, Algeria, Egypt; to the south, the region of Cape Colony—the soil, the climate, the fauna and flora, the inhabitants are no longer characteristically African, but European.
II. The Inhabitants.—The most recent statistics give the population of Africa as from 160,000,000 to 200,000,000 souls. ”

“ If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa the human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such has actually been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities arising from the physiography of the land—its climate, its rainfall, its deserts, and the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast. ”