Sub-Saharan Africa

“ 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. ”

“ Four territories are, so to speak, in the melting pot of political speculation—British Gambia, French Congo, Belgian Congo, and the Portuguese colonies of East and West Africa. None of the Powers in control of these territories desire to add another foot of tropical Africa to the burden they carry already. Great Britain has a full share of responsibilities in the African continent. France, Belgium and Portugal, even if they desired to enlarge their tropical dependencies, have not yet established a case for expansion. ”

“ Science, commerce, and philanthropy have enlisted by the side of religion in the task of opening up Africa. The chief outlets of the slave-trade have at length, it is hoped, been closed, thanks mainly to the efforts of England, and the hearty co-operation of the government of Portugal, Egypt and Zanzibar. ”

“ Not only has geographical acquaintance with the Congo Basin revealed the wealth of the vast regions it comprises, but European commerce, which was blocked at a short distance from the coast, has penetrated the heart of Africa, in countries hitherto utterly unknown. Civilisation, in divers forms, has made no less progress, and has been permanently established in the very centre of Africa. ”

“ 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 ”

“ These beginnings of education are not much for so vast a land and there is no general standard or set plan of development, but, after all, the children of Africa are beginning to learn.
In black Africa today only one-seventeenth of the land and a ninth of the people in Liberia and Abyssinia are approximately independent, although menaced and policed by European capitalism. Half the land and the people are in domains under Portugal, France, and Belgium, held with the avowed idea of exploitation for the benefit of Europe under a system of caste and color serfdom. ”

“ For it seems to be the fact that tropical and sub-tropical Africa has another function in the world than to be the home of the great family of negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other products of no great value to the native population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But to the world these countries are barely disclosed, because their population is indolent, too few in numbers and on too low a level of civilization to master the grandeur of nature. The discoveries of recent decades have enlightened us in regard to matters in Africa. ”

“ If the soil of Africa is turned up today by the colonist's plough share, no ancient weapon will lie in the furrow; if the virgin soil be cut by a canal, its excavation will reveal no ancient tomb; and if the ax effects a clearing in the primeval forest, it will nowhere ring upon the foundations of an old world palace. Africa is poorer in record history than can be imagined. 'Black Africa' is a continent which has no mystery, nor history! ”

“ It is recognized that a spark may cause a conflagration through negro Africa. On the other hand, the colonial burden of the European governments grows heavy; the trade advantages of holding Africa might be equally gained without the expense and trouble of administration; it is mutual jealousy, not great success, [vi] which holds the European powers in Africa. ”

“ The greatest disadvantage to Africa, by thus draining it of the inhabitants is, that it prevents them from cultivating and peopling that great fertile country, of introducing European arts and sciences amongst them, and of carrying on a friendly, civil, and christian Commerce with them into the heart of their region. ”

“ In regard to the population, as well as its geographical character, Africa naturally divides itself into two great portions, north and south of the mountains of Kong and the Jebel el Komar, which give rise to the waters of the Senegal, the Niger and the Nile. To the north of this line, Africa is ruled, and partially occupied by foreign races, who have taken possession of all the fertile districts, and driven the aboriginal population into the mountains and deserts of the interior. ”

“ Europe has no population available. Entering on the West Coast, the people and Government of the United States may stretch a chain of settlements of her own citizens through the whole length of Soudan, from the Niger to the Nile—from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
Colonies.—A protracted experience convinces us that it may be laid down as a principle demonstrated by numerous examples, that if Western and Central Africa is ever to advance in civilization; if its inhabitants are ever to become not Europeanized, but intelligent, competent and productive Africans ”

“ West Sudanese: Wolof; Mandingan; Felup; Timni; Kru; Sierra Leonese; Liberian; Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba; Ibo; Efik; Borgu; Mossi.
Central Sudanese: Songhai; Hausa; Mosgu; Kanembu; Kanuri; Baghirmi; Yedina.
East Sudanese: Maba; Fúr; Nuba; Shilluk; Dinka; Bari; Abaka; Bongo; Mangbattu; Zandeh; Momfu; Basé; Barea.
The Negro-Caucasic "Great Divide."
From the anthropological standpoint Africa falls into two distinct sections, where the highest (Caucasic) and the lowest (Negro) divisions of mankind have been conterminous throughout all known time. ”

“ 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? ”

“ This problem is but typical of the larger political questions that press for settlement in the new Africa. Whatever the solution may be, one or two facts stand out clearly. One is that Africa can no longer rest in undisturbed slumber. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness. ”

“ And all this is directly attributable to the revolted Askaris of the Congo: they led the attack with thirty guns, took all the cattle, and then departed, leaving this horde of hyænas in their wake; and a similar fate has, I suppose, befallen all those tribes between Tanganyika and Albert Edward through whose country they passed.
The partition or occupation of Africa with a view to sound colonization--that is, to fit the country as a future home for surplus population--is the obvious duty of the nations which form the vanguard of civilization. ”

“ There is no place in the world where the ordinary forces of colonization are so nonplussed as in Africa. If we are to go ahead with our humanitarian and commercial and political problems in Africa, in the old fashioned, uncompromising, brutal way; if Africa is to be civilized by the rejection of Africans, by their extinction or degradation; then will civilization commit a graver mistake and more heinous crime than when it forced the Indian into the lava-bed, the Aztec into the Pacific or the Inca into bondage, and death in476 the mine. ”

“ To hold Algeria is to cripple France.
What, then, is the cause of the fatality which has thus ever attended African colonization by Europeans? In tropical Africa, the heat and insalubrity, and consequently the total unfitness for European life, are causes quite sufficient to account for the failure; and the failure has been eminent with French, Dutch, English, and Danes. But this will not account for want of success in temperate Africa, whether beyond the northern or southern tropic. ”

“ The second is that nowhere else in tropical or sub-tropical Africa is the British administrator faced, at least on a large scale, with a Mohammedan population, already to be counted in millions and increasing year by year with significant rapidity. ”

“ But a European colonisation of Abyssinia, possible as it might be climatically, is out of the question in view of the relatively abundant and warlike population indigenous to the Ethiopian Empire. ... {4} "Then comes Central Africa, which may be taken to range from the northern limits of the Congo basin and the Great Lakes on the north to the Cunenc River and the Zambesi on the south. British East Africa and Uganda offer probably the largest continuous area of white man’s country in the central section of the continent. ”

“ Therefore the descent from the equatorial plateau of Africa down to the Atlantic littoral means a drop in culture also, because the various elements of civilization which for ages have uninterruptedly filtered into Sudan from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have rarely penetrated to the western rim of the highland, and hence never reached the coast. Moreover, this steaming lowland, from the Senegal River to the Kamerun Mountains, has been a last asylum for dislodged tribes who have been driven out by expanding peoples of the plateau. ”

“ The system in force in parts of East Africa is a variant of the Angola system. Then we have the comprehensive projects of the Empire Resources Development Committee, with which certain members of the present Government are coquetting. In the view of the spokesmen of the Empire Resources Development Committee, the population of British tropical Africa is an "undeveloped national asset," and the problem of Empire there consists in converting the African into a "useful human being." The land is not, it seems, the property of the people living upon it and using it ”

“ On the whole consideration of the subject, we feel convinced, that Eastern Africa is the safe and the natural point for British enterprise; that it is the most direct and effective point for the extinction of the cruel traffic in human flesh; and that it is the most promising and productive point for the establishment of that substantial connexion with the governments of the interior, which alone can be regarded as worth the attention of the statesman. ”

“ They found partially disrupted Negro states on the west coast and falling empires in the Sudan, together with the old unrest of over-population and migration in the valley of the Congo. They not only offered a demand for the usual slave trade, but they increased it to an enormous degree, until their demand, added to the demand of the Mohammedan in Africa and Asia, made human beings the highest priced article of commerce in Africa. ”

“ Indeed, if one had been going to pick out a body of men for the express purpose of testing the question whether it is possible for the white races to exist and thrive in tropical Africa, establish civilized governments, cultivate the soil, carry on manufactures and commerce, redeem the natives, and introduce institutions such as are found at home, these would have been the men. ”

“ The character of its inherent wealth is also different. Other countries have their frozen regions, inland seas and marshes, stupendous mountains and deep jungles, but Africa alone has its Sahara. Commerce has scattered the germs of civilization here and there upon the coasts of Africa, but its central portions are to all intents as undeveloped as when Semiramis went into Ethiopia, and Sesostris levied his tributes of gold, silver, precious stones and woods. What Africa is held in reserve for by the general economy of the universe it is impossible to determine ”

“ The parts of Africa unoccupied or unclaimed by Europeans are a portion of the Desert of Sahara, which no one wants; Abyssinia, still independent though in danger of absorption; and Liberia, a state over which rests the shadow of protection of the United States.
British Colonies in Africa
Of the British colonial possessions in Africa we have already sufficiently described that in the south, extending now from Cape Town to Lake Tanganyika, and forming an immense area, replete with natural resources, and capable of sustaining a very large future population. ”