Christmas and New Year’s Eve were passed at sea, with the usual festivities; the latter, on which the dancing was kept up with equal enthusiasm and energy by German and English passengers, was also the eve of our arrival at Suez.
About noon on the first day of January, 1907, I set foot on the soil of Egypt, which I have only just left, after a stay of nearly three weeks. I had a great desire to study the relics of ancient Egyptian culture on the spot, and therefore left Cairo and its neighbourhood as speedily as possible for Upper Egypt—Luxor, Karnak and Deir el Bahri. From a climatic point of view, also, Cairo was not well adapted for an intermediate station between the tropics and the winter of Northern Europe. One after another of our passengers remaining behind for a tour in Egypt became indisposed. Some, therefore, took the next boat for Germany, arguing that their colds “would cost less at home,” while others made off up the Nile by train de luxe, in order to accustom themselves slowly and carefully in the glorious desert air of Assuan to the sub-arctic climate of Ulaya.
The Assuan dam is historically a piece of Vandalism, technically a meritorious piece of engineering, economically a truly great achievement. The narrow-gauge railway winds up the Nile in sharp curves between Luxor and Assuan. Sometimes the Nile flows in immediate proximity to the track—sometimes there is a narrow strip of alluvial level between the sacred stream and the new unholy iron road. All this time one is oppressed by the narrowness of the country; it seems as if the first high wind must blow the sand right across it and bury it altogether. Suddenly the bare hills on the left retreat: a wide plain opens out before us, only bounded in the far distance by the sharp contours of the hills in the Arabian Desert. The plain itself, too, is a desert—but how long will it remain so? Turn to the right and consider the great block of buildings which meets your eye. It is neither Egyptian nor Arabian, there is none of the dirt of Fellah barbarism about it; on the contrary, it represents the purest Anglo-American factory style. The tall chimney crowning the whole, and emitting a dense cloud of smoke, forms an incongruous contrast with its surroundings—the silver Nile with its border of green fields, running like a ribbon across the boundless sands of the desert to east and west. Look before you at the straight canal crossing the plain and lost to sight in the distance and the ditches and channels by which it distributes the Nile water in all directions, with perfect regularity. The building is a pumping-station, established to restore the desert plain by irrigation to its former fertility. Now it is still perfectly bare: in a few months’ time, it will be a sea of waving corn with stalks bearing fruit a hundredfold.
The economic exploitation of the Upper Nile Valley is an example which ought to be followed by our own colonial administration. Without a resolute purpose, without capital, and without accurate knowledge of the country and its resources, even that English or American company could do nothing. We need all three factors, if we want to make any progress, whether in Eastern or in South-Western Africa, in Kamerun or in Togo. There is only one small point of difference—the alluvial soil of the Nile Valley, accumulated through many myriads of years needs nothing but irrigation to once more make it into arable soil of the first quality. The Nile, wisely regulated, is the magic wand which will, almost instantaneously, change the desert into a fruitful field. This transforming agency is absent in the bush and steppes of German East Africa. It is true that that country possesses numerous streams, but at present their volume of water is subject to no regulation, and none of them is navigable on the same imposing scale as the Nile. In the course of years, no doubt, the Pangani will become an artery of traffic, as also the Rufiji, and perhaps our frontier stream, the Rovuma; but it will not be within the lifetime of the present generation.
The soil of German East Africa, too, cannot be compared with that of Egypt; it is no alluvial deposit, rich in humus, but in general a tolerably poor one, produced by the weathering of the outcropping rocks and not to be rendered fertile by moisture alone. Nevertheless, so far as I am able to judge, the water question remains the cardinal one in our colonial agriculture. At Saadani they have begun at once to do things on the grand scale, breaking up large areas with steam-ploughs, in the hope that wholesale cotton cultivation may put an end to the American monopoly. So far this is very good; the temperature is favourable, and the soil quite suitable for such a crop. One factor only is uncertain: German East Africa, like India, is never able to reckon on a normal amount of atmospheric moisture—and, if the rains fail, what then?
The Dark Continent has often been compared to an inverted plate. The land slopes gently upwards from the sea-shore, the angle of inclination gradually becoming greater, till we have a bordering range of mountains of considerable height. But it is only as seen from the coast that this range can be said to have a mountainous character; once he has crossed it, the traveller finds that, as on the heights of the Harz or the Rhenish slate mountains, he is on a plain almost level with its summit. To carry out the comparison with the plate, we may say that he has now crossed the narrow ledge at the bottom, and is now walking over the horizontal surface within that ledge.
This peculiar conformation has to be taken into account by those engaged in developing our colonies, i.e., in the first place, it is responsible for the fact that the rivers are navigable only to a very slight degree, if at all. In the second place, the greater part of the rainfall is precipitated on the seaward slope of the range, while its other side is almost rainless, which accounts for the arid character of Ugogo and the neighbouring districts. Yet the greater part even of this interior has a soil on which any crops which can be cultivated at all in Equatorial Africa are well able to thrive. The planter there is fortunate in being able to count on the vivifying influence of the tropical sun, which, throughout the year, conjures flourishing fields out of the merest sand. In the south I was able, day after day, to convince myself of the truth of this assertion.
The South has hitherto been the Cinderella of our colonial districts, and I fear it is likely to remain so. The prejudice as to its barrenness has deterred both official and private enterprise. It is true that neither the Mwera Plateau nor the Makonde highlands, nor the wide plains extending behind these two upland areas, between the Rovuma in the south and the Mbemkuru or the Rufiji in the north, can be called fertile. Sand and loam, loam and sand, in the one case, and quartz detritus in the other, are the dominant note of the whole. Yet we have absolutely no reason to despair of this country, for if the native can make a living out of the soil, without manuring and with none of the appliances of our highly-developed intensive farming—if this same native is in a position to export an appreciable fraction of his produce in the shape of sesamum, ground-nuts, rubber, wax, cereals and pulse—it would surely be strange if the white man could not make much more out of the same ground.
One thing, indeed, must never be forgotten: neither this district nor Africa in general is a pays de Cocagne where roast pigeons will fly of their own accord into people’s mouths; work, unceasing, strenuous work, is just as much an indispensable condition of progress as in less happy climates. We have had sufficient opportunity to observe and appreciate this persevering industry in the case of the Makonde, the Yaos, and the Makua. And we may be sure of one thing, that the European planter, whether in the north or the south, on the coast or in the interior, will not have a much easier time than these people. That, however, will do him no harm; on the contrary, the harder the struggle for existence, the more vigorous has been the development of a colony throughout the whole course of human history. The United States of to-day are the standing proof of this assertion; the South African colonies, now developing in a most satisfactory manner, speak no less clearly, and other cases in point might easily be adduced.
The waves are running higher, the König having more breadth of beam than depth, does not roll, but cannot help shipping more seas than she would like. Ought I, in face of this grand spectacle, to let myself be absorbed in useless forecasts of the future? My friend Hiram Rhodes’s taunt about “political childhood” was cruel—yet there was some truth in it, and not as regards the Zanzibar treaty only. We Germans have begun colonizing three hundred years later than other nations, and yet Dick, Tom and Harry are raising an outcry because our colonies, acquired fully twenty years ago, do not yet produce a surplus. The honest fellows think that “South-West” alone ought to be in a position to relieve them from the necessity of paying any taxes whatever. One could tear one’s hair at such folly and such utter lack of the historic sense. Most books are printed in Germany—none are bought, and but few read there. Among these few we can scarcely include any works on colonial history, otherwise it would be impossible that even colonial experts should know so little of those thousand conflicts, difficulties and reverses experienced to their cost by the English in India, in the South Seas, in Africa, and in America, and which over and over again might well have disgusted the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese with their extensive colonial possessions. Unconsciously influenced by the wealth of England and the affluence of Holland, both in great part arising from their foreign possessions, we are apt to forget that three centuries are a period fifteen times as long as our own colonial era, and that at least ten generations of English and Dutch have won by hard, unceasing work what we expect to receive without effort on our part. I am firmly convinced that we shall never learn to appreciate our really splendid possessions till a more thorough system of instruction has supplied the want above referred to—doubly inexcusable in a nation whose intellectual pre-eminence is everywhere acknowledged.
Such historic sense is to be gained by putting two kinds of capital into the colonies—the blood shed for their preservation and development, and the hard cash spent on the utilization of their resources.
To illustrate the extent of the British Colonial Empire and its distribution throughout the world, it is often pointed out that the mother country is seldom without a colonial war of some kind. This is true in the present, and it has also been true in the past: England has in fact always had to fight for her dominions beyond sea. Undoubtedly, this three hundred years’ struggle for possession, which, under her special circumstances has often been for England a struggle for existence, is the principal ground for the peculiarly close and intimate relation between the mother country and the daughter states. Hardly a family but has dear ones buried in Indian or African soil. This fact at first attaches to the country a painful interest, which very soon gives rise to an interest of another sort. The truth of this doctrine has been illustrated in the saddest way for us by the sanguinary war in South Western Africa.
The other kind of capital—the monetary—cannot be discussed in the case of our colonies without touching on the railway question. What complaints have been made of the invincible reluctance of German capitalists to engage in colonial undertakings! I am not myself a wealthy man, but, if I had a million to lose, I should nevertheless hesitate before investing it in a country without means of communication, being entirely devoid of natural ones, while artificial ones are as yet only in the elementary stage. At home, every one is now expecting great things from the new driver of our colonial chariot. Herr Dernburg is a trained financier, and he, perhaps, can succeed where others have failed—in the completion of the great railway system projected long ago, and in procuring the no less necessary financial resources.
Lastly, the native is not without an important bearing on the future of our East African colony. As an ethnographer, I am in a better position to form an opinion about him than with respect to other questions, in which the outsider like myself has only common sense to guide him. The black man is pronounced by some, “an untrained child;” by others, “utterly depraved and incurably lazy.” There is yet a third party who are inclined to leave him at least one or two small virtues, but these are steadily shouted down. It is true that the native population of the Coast towns have a horror of any serious work, and look down on it as a lowering of themselves; but I think we may be permitted to entertain a better opinion as to the great mass of the people in German East Africa. The most numerous tribe in the whole colony are the Wanyamwezi, who are estimated at about four million souls, and occupy the whole central area east of the Great Rift Valley. No one has yet ventured to doubt their industry or their capacity for progress; they are excellent agriculturists, and at the same time they were, for a whole century, the mainstay of the caravan trade between the coast and the heart of the continent. Before long this traffic must in the nature of things cease, but we have no right to suppose that the Wanyamwezi will therefore become superfluous. A glance over the reports of the Uganda Railway will show us how fortunate we are in possessing such an element in the social structure as this vigorous tribe. Let us then be wise enough to encourage and develop this economic force for the native’s own benefit, and above all to get the full advantage of it ourselves. What is true of the Wanyamwezi is also true of many other tribes. Even now, I cannot forget the impression made on me by the high average of the farming which I saw among my friends in the Rovuma Valley. People who, however often they have been displaced, still cling so firmly to the soil, must certainly have great potentialities for good, or all the teachings of racial psychology and history are falsified. This unexpectedly high stage of culture can only be explained by an evolution extending over a period of incalculable length. There is nothing to disprove the great antiquity of agriculture among the Bantu; they are conservative, as their continent is conservative; the few alien elements still in the economic stage of the collector and hunter—the Bushmen in the most arid parts of the south, and the Pygmies in the most inaccessible forests of Central and West Africa—must have been crowded out by them many centuries ago.
The farming of our natives is done entirely with the hoe—that implement-of-all-work, with the heavy transverse blade which serves alike for breaking up and cleaning the ground, for sowing the crops, and, to a certain extent, for reaping them. We are too much inclined to think of this mode of cultivation as something primitive and inferior, and, in fact, in so far as it dispenses with domestic animals, whether for work or for the supply of manure, it is really very far behindhand. But we must also take into account that some parts of our colonies are infested with the tsetse-fly, and that the system of cultivating narrow strips of ground entirely with the hoe really marks a very high stage of farming. The best proof of this is the retention of the narrow bed in our gardens, where the cultivation can scarcely be said to be of a more elementary description than that of our fields. It is significant, too, that for the more intensive forms of culture when carried on in the open fields, e.g., flower-growing, as near Erfurt, Quedlinburg, Haarlem, etc., and market-gardening as in the neighbourhood of Brunswick, Hanover, Mainz, and other large towns, the long, narrow bed is most in favour. Moreover, it is difficult to see how the native could cope with the weeds—the principal danger to his crops—were it not that his narrow beds are easily reached from all sides.
The native mode of agriculture, therefore, need not be interfered with: it has been tested and found excellent.
Another question is, how shall we, on this basis, make our black fellow-subjects useful to ourselves? In my opinion, there are two ways, as to both of which the pros and cons are about equal. Both have been in operation for some time, so that we have a standard to guide us in forecasting the ultimate development of the whole colony. In the one, the native is not encouraged to advance in his own home and on his own holding, but is trained as a labourer on the plantation of a European master—plantations being laid out wherever suitable soil and tolerable climate promise a good return for outlay. The other method has the progress of the native himself in view, and aims at increasing his economic productivity by multiplying and improving the crops grown by him on his own account, teaching him new wants and at the same time increasing his purchasing power. In this way it is hoped that he will exchange his exports for ours.
The future must show whether the German people will decide for one of these ways to the exclusion of the other, or whether, as heretofore, both will be retained. For the mother country their value is about equal and depends on the degree of activity shown in colonial affairs as a whole. But the second is decidedly to the advantage of the native himself. As a plantation labourer he is and remains a mshenzi; as a peasant proprietor he is able to advance. At the same time we must not forget that our colonies were founded in the expectation of providing homes for our surplus population, and that if the native is to claim the most fertile parts of his own country for himself, nothing can come of that ver sacrum. It also depends on the general direction of our policy whether the numerical increase and physical improvement of the native are to our interest or not. Some primitive peoples have almost or entirely disappeared under the influence of civilization; the Tasmanians belong to history; the Maoris of New Zealand and the Kanakas of Hawaii are rapidly diminishing, and we have lately heard of the last Vedda in Ceylon. The negro race does not belong to these candidates for extinction; on the contrary, wherever it has come in contact with the white, it has grown stronger in every respect; there is therefore no fear of its dying out. But shall we go further and, by artificial selection, deliberately raise their coefficient of multiplication? Certainly we ought to do so, for a numerous resident population is under all circumstances a benefit to us. It solves the labour problem for the planter, and, on the other hand, the European manufacturer and merchant will, of course, prefer a large number of customers to a small one. How is this improvement to be initiated? I have nothing further to add to the remarks which, à propos of the various diseases and other scourges of this continent, occur in the preceding pages.
In Europe some people are stupid, others of moderate capacity, and yet others decidedly clever. The huge lip-ornaments of the Makonde and Makua women sometimes produce the impression of a simian type of face, and small boys occasionally suggest by their features a not remote kinship with the missing link, but this exhausts the list of excuses I could have alleged for looking down from a superior height on the people in question. In all the months spent among the natives of the Rovuma Valley, I never discovered any reason why we should, as we are so fond of doing, associate the idea of absurdity with the African. On the contrary, the behaviour, not only of the elders, but of the liveliest of the young people in their intercourse with Knudsen and myself, was characterized by a quiet dignity which might well have served as an example to many a European of similar social position. My personal experiences will not allow me to believe in the dogma of the negro’s incapacity for development. It cannot be denied that he has achieved a certain intellectual progress, even in North America, though the obstacles there are greater than the facilities. Why, therefore, should he not rise, as soon as the opportunity is offered to him in such a way that he can take advantage of it? Only we must not expect this advance to take place overnight, any more than we can expect a rapidity of economic progress at variance with every law of historical probability.
It is now quite dark; the boat must have changed her course, for the gale no longer meets us in front, but comes from the port side, so that no doubt we are approaching Crete. To-morrow, or the day after, we shall pass the coast of Greece. I must confess that I am looking forward to a sight of this country, though I do not regard its classic age with the same unbounded and uncritical enthusiasm as many of our countrymen, to whom the ancient Greek is the embodiment of all historical and cultural virtues. One thing only even the blackest envy cannot deny to the Hellenes of old—a courage in colonial enterprise which we should do well to imitate both now and in the future.
This future is still shrouded in mystery. Will our East African colony become a second India? I do not doubt for a moment that it will, and my mind’s eye sees the whole country traversed by railway lines. One of these follows the old caravan road from the coast to Tanganyika. The iron horse has superseded the old carrier-transport, and the clattering train now bears the carriers themselves, as well as bulky goods which could never have been put on the market under the old system. One line runs to the Victoria Nyanza and another to distant Nyasa; we are able to link up with the British network of railways in South Africa, with the communications of the Congo State, with the Nile Valley. Thirty years ago Stanley’s march to the Lake Region and his boat-voyage down the Congo were epoch-making achievements. We of to-day may perhaps live to make the trip by train de luxe from the Cape to Cairo, and from Dar es Salam to Kamerun.