Africa

West Africa Britain devoted much attention. The slave trade abolitionists

had already, in 1788, formed a settlement at Sierra Leone, on the Guinea

coast, for freed slaves, and from this establishment grew the colony of

Sierra Leone, long notorious, by reason of its deadly climate, as ``The

White Man's Grave.''6 Farther east the establishments on the Gold Coast

began to take a part in the politics of the interior, and the first British

mission to Kumasi, despatched in 1817, led to the assumption of a

protectorate over the maritime tribes heretofore governed by the Ashanti.

An expedition sent in 1816 to explore the Congo from its mouth did not

succeed in getting beyond the rapids which bar the way to the interior, but

in the central Sudan much better results were obtained. In 1823 three

English travellers, Walter Oudney, Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton,

reached Lake Chad from Tripoli—the first white men to reach that lake. The

partial exploration of Bornu and the Hausa states by Clapperton, which

followed, revealed the existence of large and flourishing cities and a semi-

civilized people in a region hitherto unknown. The discovery in 1830 of the

mouth of the Niger by Clapperton's servant Lander, already mentioned, had

been preceded by the journeys of Major A.G. Laing (1826) and Rene Caillie

(1827) to Timbuktu, and was followed (1832-1833) by the partial ascent of

the Benue affluent of the Niger by Macgregor Laird. In 1841 a disastrous

attempt was made to plant a white colony on the lower Niger, an expedition

(largely philanthropic and antislavery in its inception) which ended in

utter failure. Nevertheless from that time British traders remained on the

lower Niger, their continued presence leading ultimately to the acquisition

of political rights over the delta and the Hausa states by Great Britain.7

Another endeavour by the British government to open up commercial relations

with the Niger countries resulted in the addition of a vast amount of

information concerning the countries between Timbuktu and Lake Chad, owing

to the labours of Heinrich Barth (1850-1855), originally a subordinate, but

the only surviving member of the expedition sent out.

Meantime considerable changes had been made in other parts of the

continent, the most notable being—the occupation of Algiers by France in

1830, an end being thereby put to the piratical proceedings of the Barbary

states; the continued expansion southward of Egyptian authority with the

consequent additions to the knowledge of the Nile; and the establishment of

independent states ((Orange Free State and the Transvaal) by Dutch farmers

(Boers) dissatisfied with British rule in Cape Colony. Natal, so named by

Vasco da Gama, had been made a British colony (1843), the attempt of the

Boers to acquire it being frustrated. The city of Zanzibar, on the island

of that name, founded in 1832 by Seyyid Said of Muscat, rapidly attained

importance, and Arabs began to penetrate to the great lakes of East

Africa,8 concerning which little more was known (and less believed) than in

the time of Ptolemy. Accounts of a vast inland sea, and the discovery in

1848-1840, by the missionaries Ludwig Krapf and J.Rebmann, of the snow-clad

mountains of Kilimanjaro and Kenya, stimulated in Europe the desire for

further knowledge.

At this period, the middle of the 19th century, Protestant missions were

carrying on active propaganda on the Guinea

The era of great explorers.

coast, in South Africa and in the Zanzibar dominions. Their work, largely

beneficent, was being conducted in regions and among peoples little known,

and in many instances missionaries turned explorers and became pioneers of

trade and empire. One of the first to attempt to fill up the remaining

blank spaces in the map was David Livings tone, who had been engaged since

1840 in missionary work north of the Orange. In 1849 Livingstone crossed

the Kalahari Desert from south to north and reached Lake Ngami, and between

1851 and 1856 he traversed the continent from west to east, making known

the great waterways of the upper Zambezi. During these journeyings

Livingstone discovered, November 1855, the famous Victoria Falls, so named

after the queen of England. In 1858-1864 the lower Zambezi, the Shire and

Lake Nyasa were explored by Livingstone, Nyasa having been first reached by

the confidential slave of Antonio da Silva Porto, a Portuguese trader

established at Bihe in Angola, who crossed Africa during 1853-1856 from

Benguella to the mouth of the Rovuma. While Livingstone circumnavigated

Nyasa, the more northerly lake, Tanganyika, had been visited (1858) by

Richard Burton and J. H. Speke, and the last named had sighted Victoria

Nyanza. Returning to East Africa with J. A. Grant, Speke reached, in 1862,

the river which flowed from Victoria Nyanza, and following it (in the main)

down to Egypt, had the distinction of being the first man to read the

riddle of the Nile. In 1864 another Nile explorer, Samuel Baker, discovered

the Albert Nyanza, the chief western reservoir of the river. In 1866

Livingstone began his last great journey, in which he made known Lakes

Mweru and Bangweulu and discovered the Lualaba (the upper part of the

Congo), but died (1873) before he had been able to demonstrate its ultimate

course, believing indeed that the Lualaba belonged to the Nile system.

Livingstone's lonely death in the heart of Africa evoked a keener desire

than ever to complete the work he left undone. H. M. Stanley, who had in

1871 succeeded in finding and succouring Livingstone, started again for

Zanzibar in 1874, and in the most memorable of all exploring expeditions in

Africa circumnavigated Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and, striking

farther inland to the Lualaba, followed that river down to the Atlantic

Ocean—reached in August 1877—and proved it to be the Congo. Stanley had

been preceded, in 1874, at Nyangwe, Livingstone's farthest point on the

Lualaba, by Lovett Cameron, who was, however, unable farther to explore its

course, making his way to the west coast by a route south of the Congo.

While the great mystery of Central Africa was being solved explorers were

also active in other parts of the continent. Southern Morocco, the Sahara

and the Sudan were traversed in many directions between 1860 and 1875 by

Gerhard Rohlfs, Georg Schweinfurth and Gustav Nachtigal. These travellers

not only added considerably to geographical knowledge, but obtained

invaluable information concerning the people, languages and natural history

of the countries in which they sojourned.9 Among the discoveries of

Schweinfurth was one that confirmed the Greek legends of the existence

beyond Egypt of a pygmy race. But the first discoverer of the dwarf races

of Central Africa was Paul du Chaillu, who found them in the Ogowe district

of the west coast in 1865, five years before Schweinfurth's first meeting

with the Pygmies; du Chaillu having previously, as the result of journeys

in the Gabun country between 1855 and 1859, made popular in Europe the

knowledge of the existence of the gorilla, perhaps the gigantic ape seen by

Hanno the Carthaginian, and whose existence, up to the middle of the 19th

century, was thought to be as legendary as that of the Pygmies of

Aristotle.

In South Africa the filling up of the map also proceeded apace. The

finding, in 1869, of rich diamond fields in the valley of the Vaal river,

near its confluence with the Orange, caused a rush of emigrants to that

district, and led to conflicts between the Dutch and British authorities

and the extension of British authority northward. In 1871 the ruins of the

great Zimbabwe in Mashonaland, the chief fortress and distributing centre

of the race which in medieval times worked the goldfields of South-East

Africa, were explored by Karl Mauch. In the following year F. C. Selous

began his journeys over South Central Africa, which continued for more than

twenty years and extended over every part of Mashonaland and Matabeleland.

(F. R. C.)

V. PARTITION AMONG EUROPEAN POWERS

In the last quarter of the 19th century the map of Africa was

transformed. After the discovery of the Congo the story of exploration

takes second place; the continent becomes the theatre of European

expansion. Lines of partition, drawn often through trackless wildernesses,

marked out the possessions of Germany, France, Great Britain and other

powers. Railways penetrated the interior, vast areas were opened up to

civilized occupation, and from ancient Egypt to the Zambezi the continent

was startled into new life.

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. 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. The low-water mark of British interest in South

Africa was reached in 1854 when independence was forced on the Orange River

Boers, while in 1865 the mind of the nation was fairly reflected by the

unanimous resolution of a representative House of Commons committee:10

``that all further extension of territory or assumption of government, or

new treaty offering any protection to native tribes, would be

inexpedient.'' For nearly twenty years the spirit of that resolution

paralysed British action in Africa, although many circumstances—the absence

of any serious European rival, the inevitable border disputes with

uncivilized races, and the activity of missionary and trader—conspired to

make British influence dominant in large areas of the continent over which

the government exercised no definite authority. The freedom with which

blood and treasure were spent to enforce respect for the British flag or to

succour British subjects in distress, as in the Abyssinian campaign of 1867-

68 and the Ashanti war of 1873, tended further to enhance the reputation of

Great Britain among African races, while, as an inevitable result of the

possession of India, British officials exercised considerable power at the

court of Zanzibar, which indeed owed its separate existence to a decision

of Lord Canning, the governor-general of India, in 1861 recognizing the

division of the Arabian and African dominions of the imam of Muscat.

It has been said that Great Britain was without serious rival. On the

Gold Coast she had bought the Danish forts in 1850 and acquired the Dutch,

1871-1872, in exchange for establishments in Sumatra. But Portugal still

held, both in the east and west of Africa, considerable stretches of the

tropical coast-lands, and it was in 1875 that she obtained, as a result of

the arbitration of Marshal MacMahon, possession of the whole of Delagoa

Bay, to the southern part of which England also laid claim by virtue of a

treaty of cession concluded with native chiefs in 1823. The only other

European power which at the period under consideration had considerable

possessions in Africa was France. Besides Algeria, France had settlements

on the Senegal, where in 1854 the appointment of General Faidherbe as

governor marked the beginning of a policy of expansion; she had also

various posts on the upper Guinea coast, had taken the estuary of the Gabun

as a station for her navy, and had acquired (1862) Obok at the southern

entrance to the Red Sea.

In North Africa the Turks had (in 1835) assumed direct control of

Tripoli, while Morocco had fallen into a state of decay though retaining

its independence. The most remarkable change was in Egypt, where the

Khedive Ismail had introduced a somewhat fantastic imitation of European

civilization. In addition Ismail had conquered Darfur, annexed Harrar and

the Somali ports on the Gulf of Aden, was extending his power southward to

the equatorial lakes, and even contemplated reaching the Indian Ocean. The

Suez Canal, opened in 1869, had a great influence on the future of Africa,

as it again made Egypt the highway to the East, to the detriment of the

Cape route.

Any estimate of the area of African territory held by European nations in

1875 is necessarily but approximate, and varies chiefly

The division of the continent in 1875.

as the compiler of statistics rejects or accepts the vague claims of

Portugal to sovereignty over the hinterland of her coast possessions. At

that period other European nations—with the occasional exception of Great

Britain—were indifferent to Portugal's pretensions, and her estimate of her

African empire as covering over 700,000 sq. m. was not challenged.11 But

the area under effective control of Portugal at that time did not exceed

40,000 sq. m. Great Britain then held some 250,000 sq. m., France about

170,000 sq. m. and Spain 1000 sq.m. The area of the independent Dutch

republics (the Transvaal and Orange Free State) was some 150,000 sq. m., so

that the total area of Africa ruled by Europeans did not exceed 1,271,000

sq. m.; roughly one-tenth of the continent. This estimate, as it admits the

full extent of Portuguese claims and does not include Madagascar, in

reality considerably overstates the case.

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. In this region

were the negro states of Ashanti, Dahomey and Benin on the west coast, the

Mahommedan sultanates of the central Sudan, and a number of negro kingdoms

in the east central and south central regions. Of these Uganda on the north-

west shores of Victoria Nyanza, Cazembe and Muata Hianvo (or Yanvo) may be

mentioned. The two last-named kingdoms occupied respectively the south-

eastern and south-western parts of the Congo basin. In all this vast region

the Negro and Negro-Bantu races predominated, for the most part untouched

by Mahommedanism or Christian influences. They lacked political cohesion,

and possessed neither the means nor the inclination to extend their

influence beyond their own borders. The exploitation of Africa continued to

be entirely the work of alien races.

The causes which led to the partition of Africa may now be considered.

They are to be found in the economic and political

Causes which led to partition.

state of western Europe at the time. Germany, strong and united as the

result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, was seeking new outlets for her

energies —new markets for her growing industries, and with the markets,

colonies. Yet the idea of colonial expansion was of slow growth in Germany,

and when Prince Bismarck at length acted Africa was the only field left to

exploit, South America being protected from interference by the known

determination of the United States to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, while

Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain already held

most of the other regions of the world where colonization was possible. For

different reasons the war of 1870 was also the starting-point for France in

the building up of a new colonial empire. In her endeavour to regain the

position lost in that war France had to look beyond Europe. To the two

causes mentioned must be added others. Great Britain and Portugal, when

they found their interests threatened, bestirred themselves, while Italy

also conceived it necessary to become an African power. Great Britain awoke

to the need for action too late to secure predominance in all the regions

where formerly hers was the only European influence. She had to contend not

only with the economic forces which urged her rivals to action, but had

also to combat the jealous opposition of almost every European nation to

the further growth of British power. Italy alone acted throughout in

cordial co-operation with Great Britain.

It was not, however, the action of any of the great powers of Europe

which precipitated the struggle. This was brought about by the ambitious

projects of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. The discoveries of

Livingstone, Stanley and others had aroused especial interest among two

classes of men in western Europe, one the manufacturing and trading class,

which saw in Central Africa possibilities of commercial development, the

other the philanthropic and missionary class, which beheld in the newly

discovered lands millions of savages to Christianize and civilize. The

possibility of utilizing both these classes in the creation of a vast

state, of which he should be the chief, formed itself in the mind of

Leopold II. even before Stanley had navigated the Congo. The king's action

was immediate; it proved successful; but no sooner was the nature of his

project understood in Europe than it provoked the rivalry of France and

Germany, and thus the international struggle was begun.

Conflicting ambitions of the European powers.

At this point it is expedient, in the light of subsequent events, to set

forth the designs then entertained by the European powers that participated

in the struggle for Africa. Portugal was striving to retain as large a

share as possible of her shadowy empire, and particularly to establish her

claims to the Zambezi region, so as to secure a belt of territory across

Africa from Mozambique to Angola. Great Britain, once aroused to the

imminence of danger, put forth vigorous efforts in East Africa and on the

Niger, but her most ambitious dream was the establishment of an unbroken

line of British possessions and spheres of influence from south to north of

the continent, from Cape Colony to Egypt. Germany's ambition can be easily

described. It was to secure as much as possible, so as to make up for lost

opportunities. Italy coveted Tripoli, but that province could not be seized

without risking war. For the rest Italy's territorial ambitions were

confined to North-East Africa, where she hoped to acquire a dominating,

influence over Abyssinia. French ambitions, apart from Madagascar, were

confined to the northern and central portions of the continent. To extend

her possessions on the Mediterranean littoral, and to connect them with her

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