Central Africa

“ The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke and keep these unprotected children free. ”

“ It is a beautiful country, with many rivers and great lakes and mountains. Central and West Africa are also the very hottest part of this continent. Now when plants have a lot of water and a lot of sun they grow very quickly, and so Central Africa, with its hot sun and its great rivers and lakes, is a land of great forests. In these forests there are lions and leopards, elephants, and deer; and ivory and skins, as well as gold, have for many years been sold by the Central Africans to the traders from the desert. ”

“ I have not mentioned North and South Africa, because my eye was centered on the main mass of the Negro race. Yet it is clear that for the development of Central Africa, Egypt should be free and independent, there along the highway to a free and independent India; while Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli must become a part of Europe, with modern development and home rule. South Africa, stripped of its black serfs and their lands, must admit the resident natives and colored folk to its body politic as equals. ”

“ Without these splendid flowing highways of commerce, pulsing from the heart of the continent to the sea, the wonderful progress of the last quarter of a century would not have been possible. Following the lead of the Congo and its tributaries, Belgian pioneers have moved through the great wilderness, planting the plough and the cross, until to-day Central Africa, so long curtained from the eyes of civilised man, lies bare to the world. ”

“ This advice meeting the approbation of all the chiefs, Moto, accompanied by the kirangozi of Khamis bin Abdullah, who was learned in all the languages of Eastern Central Africa, sallied out of the camp in the direction of Kwikuru, while the Arabs sat in the tent of their leader, hospitably entertained with the beet that the larder could furnish. ”

“ For unknown centuries Central Africa had been peopled with many millions of savage, semi-savage, and barbarian black men, hidden from all civilising influence. Their social condition varied. Many were cannibals, some were living in a rude state of primitive tribal order, others were at incessant war with hostile tribes, all were living in the gloom of an interminable night of barbaric existence. Their only touch with the human family had been through the slave trade, of which they were the object and the victims. ”

“ This was the part of Africa which first drew European enterprise after Portugal and Spain became the world’s sailors, and began to feel their way toward the Cape of Good Hope. Three hundred years ago it was what Central Africa is to-day, a wonderland full of venturesome travelers, a source of national jealousy, a factor in European politics, a starting point for a thousand theories respecting colonization and of as many enterprises having for their object the introduction of commerce, the arts and Christianity among the natives, who were by no means as peaceably inclined as in the present day. ”

“ It is a long mass of one-story mud buildings, and the most miserable place of its size that I have seen in Central Africa. [404] There is no bazaar, but an open market-place, where the people sit on the ground and sell their produce, consisting of dourra, butter, dates, onions, tobacco and a few grass mats. There may be a mosque in the place, but in the course of my ramble through the streets, I saw nothing that looked like one. Half the houses appeared to be uninhabited, and the natives were a hideous mixture of the red tribes of Màhass and Shygheea and the negro races of Soudân. ”

“ Their banks are lined with a thick growth of sont, nebbuk, and other trees peculiar to Central Africa, in which many lions make their lairs and prey upon the flocks of the Arabs. One bold, fierce fellow had established himself on the island of Musakar Bey, just below the junction of the Nile, and carried off nightly a sheep or calf, defying the attempts of the natives to take him. Our view was confined to the thorns, on whose branches we left many shreds of clothing as mementoes of the journey, and to the barren range of Djebel Gerrari, stretching westward into the Desert. ”

“ If our victory is great enough, we can hope to unite under our hand the whole of Central Africa with our old colony South-west Africa; Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Dahomey, well-populated Nigeria with the port of Lagos, Kamerun, the rich islands of San Thomé and Principe with their splendid ports, the Katanga ore district, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Mozambique, and Delagoa Bay, Madagascar, German East Africa, Zanzibar, and Uganda ”

“ We here trace a historical thread which guides us through this labyrinth of tribes and overthrown kingdoms; and a lively interest is awakened by reflecting on their possible progress and restoration, through the intercourse with more civilized parts of the world. Finally, we find here commerce in every direction radiating from Kanó, the great emporium of Central Africa, and spreading the manufactures of that industrious region over the whole of Western Africa. ”

“ This task comprised the exploring of those mysterious territories of Central Africa, their effective occupation by means of advance posts which were to be created, the crushing of the slave traders who spread terror and misery through all this part of the continent—in a word, the organizing of a real State by the delimitation of a vast district and the exerting to its furthermost frontiers, of the beneficent action of the metropolis—a glorious but difficult mission coming to our officers as early as 1878. ”

“ Africa presents the same problem to the world. Whatever the white man may make out of African resource by following the usual formula of civilization, reduction, extirpation and so on, on the unchristian plea that the end justifies the means, that result can be safely increased a thousand times if only it is not forgotten that the native is the true, the natural, factor in any rational and permanent scheme of development.
The next section of Central Africa which comes under observation is that which is watered by the Lualaba, or in other words, the Congo, from Stanley Falls to Lake Bangweola. ”

“ He will find that the countries are laid down with a fidelity which generally belongs to standard geographical works, that no liberties are taken with the habits, the customs, or the true ethnology of the great country of Ututa, or with the geography of Central Africa, neither with the probabilities of a life in that far region. ”

“ To me, it almost appears such a community of man is shadowed out in the mystical language of the sacred historian; and though I do not expect to find a paradise, still there is that in Central Africa that will well reward those adventurous spirits who will press on to explore its unknown portions. ”

“ Central Africa had now become in all essential respects a State. It had been recognised as such by the United States on April 22, 1884, seven months before the opening, and ten months before the close, of the Berlin Conference, but now its geographical limits were defined, its political status fixed, its neutrality assured. ”

“ The civilisation of Central Africa was, and forsooth, still is, an immense task, and the State’s early attitude of welcoming quasi private enterprise to co-operate with it in the development of lands which indolent native races had ravaged—first for their own immediate wants, later at the behest of adventurers and despoiling traders, whose coin was alcohol and shoddy tinsel—was not only justified in a Government seeking rational progress, but it followed the soundest principles of what the higher socialism terms community of interest. ”

“ The temptation of richer lands in Central Africa has always proved irresistible when local political or economic conditions altered in consequence of growing ethnic pressure to the extent of providing just that impetus necessary to overcome the human disinclination to leave homes which have been occupied for generations. ”

“ Within a decade the population of Central Africa reached the grand total of 25,000,000 industrious, loyal citizens, forming a flourishing dependency, enjoying home rule and liberty, under the protection of British laws and arms. ”

“ We go also into the interior through our Colonies; the money spent for the great enterprise to open Central Africa benefits your brethren; gentlemen, not so in your trial from the East. Only the chiefs living on the East coast get the benefit (and also along the West coast) , and natives who never have been and never will be so friendly to you like the Bechuanas in Central South Africa. These chiefs on the East coast are at first willing when ivory is plentiful in their lands, and as long as they can buy lots of our goods ”

“ Central Africa, including all that portion of the continent lying between, say, the Albert Nyanza and the river Zambesi, and Zanzibar and the Congo mouth, and which, although no part now remains of it that is not nominally the territory either of the Congo Free state or some European power, is still almost entirely in the possession and occupation of its lawful owners, the native uncivilized tribes. ”

“ The labours of men like Livingstone, Stanley, and others have given us a knowledge of the physical character of Central Africa, and of the populations which inhabit it, showing that there are great capabilities for the development of trade, and of the civilising effects which are the result of commerce. ”

“ Who says that the next 25 years will surely determine what Central Africa is to be. Considering what has been done in Uganda and Congo land, we ought fully to expect that the gospel tree will have so grown that its branches with healing leaves will overshadow the whole land. ”

“ The best road towards the great central lakes, and that which gives us the best hope of ultimate success in gaining access to the land and the people, for the purposes of commerce and civilisation together throughout the whole of Central Africa, is a problem of great interest and importance. ”

“ I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. ”

“ Between the two latter and German West Africa and Angola, the territories of British South Africa and British Central Africa in the interior extend northward to the Congo State and to German East Africa, which occupies the east coast north of Lake Nyassa and the Ruvuma River. The Orange River and Vaal River colonies adjoin Natal and British South Africa. North of German East Africa lies British East Africa, which touches on the north the British sphere of influence in the Sudan, Abyssinia, and on the coast, Italian Somaliland. ”

“ They gradually founded strong slave-trading settlements on the east and west coasts of Lake Nyasa, and thence westwards to Tanganyika and the Luapula. They never came in great numbers, however, and, except here and there on the coast of Lake Nyasa, have left no mixed descendants in the population. The total native population of all British Central Africa is about 2,000,000, that of the Nyasaland Protectorate being officially estimated in 1907 at 927,355. Of Europeans the protectorate possesses about 600 to 700 settlers, including some 100 officials. ”

“ The idea of the people of Central Africa of the whites is that they are few in number, that they live at the bottom of the sea, and are possessed of great wealth, but that they have no palm oil or logwood, and are, therefore, compelled to come to land to trade for these articles. ”

“ The work commenced by our own Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Universities’ Mission and the Presbyterian Missions was due directly or indirectly to the influence of that great Missionary explorer—David Livingstone.
Central Africa exercises a singular fascination on those who visit it. Its great lakes, its mighty rivers, its boundless forests, its glorious sunshine, the black races which inhabit it, all combine to make travel in that region a unique and delightful experience. ”

“ In this connection we come upon an order of events, not to say an era, which favors an affirmative answer to the above questions, which plainly point, not to white encroachment, but to white existence and possibilities in the very midst of a continent apparently destined for other purposes. The very fact that new discoveries in Central Africa have revealed vast populations untouched by civilization has opened the eyes of the world to the usual processes of nation-making afresh. Have any people ever risen out of barbarism without external help? ”

“ Central Africa alone would, it is true, give us a great extent of territory, but the value of the colonial products which it contains does not correspond to its size. We must therefore look to other quarters of the globe also, if we are to secure adequate acquisitions. ”

“ The main direction however, is upwards, and as the country opens out below, one gets a first impression of the enormity and grandeur of Central Africa. As far as the eye reaches, are ranges of hills, the Palabala Mountains crowned by a great cone which appears first on one side then the other, as we cork-screw our way up. The line indeed is a marvel of engineering construction, for a most difficult piece of country is traversed without a single tunnel and with very few cuttings and embankments. ”