POLITICAL DIVISIONS OF AFRICA
Scarcely any portion of Africa at the present day can be described as independent of European rule. The Empire of Abyssinia maintains a tottering independence which cannot last much longer, owing to the utter inability of the ruling race, the Abyssinians, to impose law and order throughout their ill-governed dominions. The little Republic of Liberia on the west coast of Africa was founded by white Americans as a refuge for American slaves who had gained their freedom a hundred years ago. It has not so far been much of a success as a governing power over the wild negroes of the territory proclaimed as “Liberian,” and the government of the country is a good deal controlled and influenced nowadays by the American organizers lent by the United States. Not only is the whole of Africa controlled by Europe, but by Christian Europe; Muhammadan Turkey being excluded from any further interference in African affairs, since the Italian annexation of the Tripolitaine and the establishment of a British control in Egypt.
MARVELOUS OPENING UP IN RECENT YEARS
In the truly marvelous opening-up of Africa which has been taking place during the last twenty years, and more especially since the commencement of the present century, the great schemes and public works which most deserve mention in a brief record (beginning on the north and proceeding southwards) are the following:
The damming of the Nile at Assuan, at what is called the first (though it is really the last) of its cataracts. This operation, though it is leading to the submergence of the temples of Philae, will more than double its native population. For Egypt (compared to the rest of Africa) is a healthy land for Black, White, and Yellow. Give it a sufficient water supply in the way of irrigation and it will become one of the wealthiest regions, for its area, on the world’s surface and one of the most habitable. What the ultimate consequences of this regeneration of Egypt under the British aegis will be, it is interesting to speculate. Certainly the prosperity of this land will far exceed the greatest altitude ever reached in population and civilization at the best period of the rule of the dynastic Egyptians—let us say, Egypt 1,500 years before the time of Christ; and if ever Egypt again is one of the great nations of the world the thanks of her people will be due entirely to the British nation which undertook its regeneration.
The Italians are commencing a similar work in the Tripolitaine, and once Italy has got effective control we may look with confidence to the restoration of the sparsely inhabited region between Egypt and Tunis to a state of prosperity such as it has not enjoyed since it ceased to form part of the Roman Empire. Wells will be dug and will tap the immense reserves of water underlying the surface of the Sahara. The French have really transformed Tunis from a semi-desert country to one of the most fertile and beautiful in the Mediterranean Basin. Algeria has more than twice the native population at the present day which it possessed at the time the French abolished the rule of the Turkish pirates in 1830–40.
A VAST SYTSEM OF RAILWAYS
The French are entirely revolutionizing conditions of life in Morocco, chiefly by means of railways. They have carried their eventual Trans-Saharan Railway from Oran on the coast to a distance of 700 miles south, into the desert, beyond the range of the great Atlas. In fact, what with the work of the Italians in Tripoli, the British in Egypt, and the French in the rest of North Africa, there will, before very long, be a continuous line of rail between Tangier through North Africa to Alexandria and Cairo.
The French also, once they are free from any reasonable dread of German invasion, will complete their Trans-Saharan Railway right across the Desert of Timbuktu, arid joining with other railways already constructed or under construction, will eventually link up Tangier with Kano in Northern Nigeria, as well as the British, French and German colonies on the West African coast.
Tangier, which will certainly be the point of departure for these tremendous overland railway journeys through the once Dark Continent, constitutes at the present time a tiny internationalized state of Morocco, under the joint guardianship of Britain, France and Spain. It is, of course, only a few hours’ steam from Gibraltar and the Spanish and Portuguese coasts. It is the Calais of Africa, and perhaps some day may be its most important city.
RECENT DISCOVERIES OF MINERAL WEALTH
The extraordinary rate at which railway building is now proceeding in Africa is justified commercially by recent discoveries of great mineral wealth. The tin and the coal of Nigeria; the phosphate deposits of Tunis; mineral oil in Somaliland, Egypt, and the Northern Sudan; gold, tin, copper, coal, petroleum, in North and Central Africa; haematite iron, lead, silver, in Morocco; phosphates, soda, copper, iron and gold in the Sahara Desert and the Egyptian Sudan; are, or will be, inducements for railway adventure in those regions, while in much of Central Africa, Angola, Nyasaland, Uganda, Kamerun, the Congo Basin and the forest regions of West Africa, the inducement for railway and road construction is often not mineral but vegetable; for these regions are producing ever-increasing quantities of rubber, coffee, cotton, tobacco, maize, peanuts, bananas, cocoa, palm-oil and palm-nuts; besides timber, cattle, hides and wax. One of the most interesting phases in the opening-up of Africa is the greatly increased application of the negro races to agriculture and horticulture on their own account. The cocoa of British West Africa is produced not by hired laborers or slaves for white planters, but by free natives working
