Chapter XIX: Section I: Africa

I have taken the above heading for this chapter because it indicates truly the manner in which the dominion of the white man over many of the coloured races has been thrust upon him. There is a good deal of misunderstanding on the subject. Really the world-wide dominion of the British Empire, to take the most conspicuous example, has been forced upon the mother country. There is an idea, and some of our rival nations have specially encouraged it, that those overseas dominions have been won by our aggressive spirit, land-grabbing and desirous of ever acquiring new possessions. Even we ourselves are rather apt to attribute it to the adventurousness of our ancestors; as if they had gone out seeking adventures like the knights-errant of old.

If we regard the events as they actually did happen we must confess the process much more prosaic. No doubt very adventurous and heroic deeds were done during its course. We have every right to be proud of our Anglo-Saxon race on their account. But our principal reason for pride is to be found in what the race has done, less in aggression, than in defence. It was Britain that was very largely concerned in humbling the overweening ambition of Spain, in baulking {218} the arrogance of Louis XIV., in thwarting the projects for world empire of Napoleon.

But what happened in the spread of the white man's power all over the world was that he went here and there, in the first place, and settled, for purposes of trade. We have seen the Portuguese going down the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold and ivory; Spain crossing the Atlantic for the treasures of El Dorado, the supposed city of gold; Portuguese, Dutch, and English going easterly to India, and farther, all to see what they could bring back.

They settled. Then they found that, in order to trade peaceably, and with tolerable security, they had to take control of the city or territory in which they settled.

That is, in few words, the story of the whole process. The settlements were at first along the coasts, and then gradually extended inland, as the boundaries of the districts already settled were everywhere threatened by the unsettled peoples outside the boundaries. We saw the process in action in the British Empire in India.

That is the common story. It is a little varied by the special circumstances of such countries as Australia and parts of South America which favoured the raising of sheep and cattle. There the settlers extended their boundaries not so much for security as to gain more pasture lands.

Somewhat thus, then, is the manner in which the white man has been forced, if he would develop the earth so as to afford support for its increasing population, to take this burden on his shoulders.

Africa, being so accessible to Europe, was the first of the new countries to which Europeans went trading in their ships. In a very early chapter of the story we have seen that many of the ports along the north coast of Africa, which is the Southern Mediterranean {219} shore, were nests of pirates preying upon the trading shipping. That was a condition of affairs which became more and more intolerable to Europe as the trade increased. It was with the approval of all Europe that the French in 1830 captured and took Algiers, which was the headquarters of the Moorish pirates. They extended that possession over the whole of Algeria till they reached the Turkish possession of Tripoli, which, again, extended to Egypt easterly.

[Sidenote: Egypt]

Egypt had freed herself from the suzerainty of Turkey about the date, 1830, of France's annexation of Algiers. Under an able ruler she developed her resources and was well governed, but from about 1870 onward, under a far less able successor, both government and finance fell into confusion.

In 1876 the British Government acquired by purchase the larger number of the shares in the Suez Canal. As a short cut to India, the Suez Canal was of vital interest to Great Britain. It was of vital interest, too, that the traffic through it should be safe and well conducted. This led to an inquiry into the condition of the Egyptian government, which showed that unless these conditions were bettered it was most unlikely that the Canal would be properly controlled and made safe.

The outcome was that the English and French established themselves in a joint control--it was called a Dual Control--over Egypt, in 1879.

Three years later, again, Egypt revolted against this control. England asked France to join her in forcibly putting down the revolt. France declined. England then invited the aid of Italy, for Italy had an interest both in Egyptian affairs generally, and in the Suez Canal especially, because she had established a coaling station, where her ships might replenish their coal supplies, in Eritrea, a district far down on the {220} west shore of the Red Sea. But Italy also declined. Therefore Great Britain went in alone to restore order.

The revolt was effectually quelled; but Great Britain dared not leave the country to the mercies of a native or of a Turkish ruler. She had to stay, in the very interests of Egypt herself. At the moment of writing, Egypt has been given a large share of self-government, of which she still has to prove herself altogether worthy.

And this burden of Egypt, thus undertaken, led on to the shouldering of yet another, of the country southward, the Sudan. Really it is a burden inseparable from the burden of Egypt, because the Nile, which is Egypt's very life-blood, passes through it, and because it is, or it was, the home of wandering slave-making Arab tribes always liable to inflict raids on Egypt itself.

Hence arose expeditions and again expeditions, in some of which Great Britain's arms suffered heavy reverse, against one or other of the fanatical Arab leaders who arose and assumed the title of Mahdi. The loss which stands out most tragically in England's memory is that of General Gordon, at Khartoum, in 1885. It was not until 1898, and the decisive defeat of the Mahdi by Lord Kitchener, that the problem of the Sudan could be regarded as tolerably solved. We may note that the manner of fighting of the Arabs was to charge in cavalry masses. It is mode of attack which gives a target terribly exposed to the fire of modern machine guns; and that gun has greatly diminished the danger of civilised troops charged by those desert warriors.

In the south of Africa the burden of the white man had at first lain chiefly on the shoulders of the Dutch, and the story of South Africa in the nineteenth century is mainly the story of the shifting of that burden to the {221} British. It was in the year of the battle of Waterloo that the Dutch possessions, from the Cape of Good Hope northward, were ceded to Great Britain by the King of the Netherlands.

[Sidenote: The Boers]

But the Boers, as the colonial Dutch were called--the name is akin to German _bauer_, a peasant--were, and are, a people who valued their nationality and their independence. It was not for more than thirty years that they formally acknowledged the British rule, which in the meantime had been extended to include the district of Natal. After a few years of experience of that rule, the Boers made a great "trek," or exodus, and established themselves farther north, beyond the British domination, in what was then called the Orange Free State.

And there it is possible they might have dwelt for many generations as a free republic of farmers had it not been for the discovery, some twenty years later, of the diamond mines in the Transvaal district, farther north again, whither the Boers had by that time extended their occupation.

The effect of that discovery was to attract to the region of the diamond mines a rush, chiefly of British, but of variously mixed, nationality. Ten years later the Transvaal was proclaimed a British possession, and almost immediately the Boers went to war to maintain its independence.

The war was inglorious for Great Britain and involved a serious disaster to a considerable British force. It ended in a compromise which did not promise much security for the future. The Boers acknowledged the suzerainty of Great Britain and, subject to that not very clearly defined control, were conceded the right of managing affairs in the Transvaal. That was in 1881.

And from that time until the end of the century trouble grew and grew between the increasing {222} population of the diamond fields and the increasing numbers and strength of the Transvaal Boers. Britain's position was difficult. These Boers had been the first to shoulder the white man's burden--if we like to put it in that way. They had been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land before them--if we prefer to put it so. Whichever way we prefer, they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over diamond-producing strata.

From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers' side. But there is another point of view. These diamond searchers had come in in a perfectly peaceful way. They brought much wealth to the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did not give them fair and decent treatment. The result was the breaking out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might be forced right back to the sea. Not only the Transvaal Boers but those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together. Fortunately for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was largest, stood firmly for the Empire. At length the fortune of war turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea. By 1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion.

And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe had been fighting was voluntarily given to him. It was a tremendous experiment--tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; {223} that is to say, an experiment to be feared. It seemed an immense risk to take--thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe. But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the experiment as Great Britain in making it. He proved his gratitude by devoted service for the Empire in the Great War. It was a tremendous experiment, wonderfully justified.

[Sidenote: The division of Africa]

It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white nations in Africa. The French have a huge area in the north-west, reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River. The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia, which joins the other British colonies farther south. Great Britain has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east. Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it. Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a coloured race. Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is under Spain.

These many and very different countries have not been won for the white man without heavy fighting with the natives whom the white intruders found there. Great Britain has had its severe campaigns against the Kaffirs and the Zulus in the south. The Italians have received very rough handling from the Abyssinians. Spain and France still have their troubles in the north. But the white man has prevailed, and must prevail increasingly as his better science puts better instruments of war into his hands.

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There remains one great nation not yet named in this chapter which also had extensive possessions in Africa until the Great War--Germany. It was not until rather a late date in the story that Germany, under the strong hand of Bismarck, had been welded into a nation at all. The year 1884, when the German Colonisation Society was founded, may be taken as the date when she set to work with the deliberate and avowed purpose of taking her place among the colonising nations. It was less a matter, with her, of shouldering a burden thrust upon her, than of going out of her way to seek the burden, in her fear lest the other nations should possess themselves of all the unclaimed spaces before she could stretch out a hand for them.

Acting from this motive, she obtained, on the west coast of Africa, the large territory of the Cameroons--now, since the Great War, under the French mandate--of German South-West Africa--now under the mandate of the Union of South Africa--and of German East Africa--now under the mandate of Great Britain.

Of all these, the last was perhaps of chief importance from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxon dominance, because there was a small portion of its north-eastern boundary where it joined with the Belgian Congo, and it was just this, and only this, junction which intervened between the Anglo-Saxon protectorate of Uganda on the north and the long lake of which the southern shore was part of Rhodesia. That is to say, that this junction of Germany with Belgium alone prevented an all-British route, by river, lake, or land, from the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope.

With the mandate to Great Britain of German East Africa, which was one of the results of the Great War, that intervention has been removed.

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This then, in bare outline, is the way in which the burden of Africa has been distributed on the shoulders of the white men.