Even with the loss of her Gaboon-West Congo territory, France would still possess a magnificent and compact African Empire exceeding in extent that of any other European Power, or at any rate superior in continuous area—an empire of something like 3,100,000 square miles, stretching from Senegal and Morocco to the frontiers of Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan, from Algiers and Carthage to the Belgian Congo and the vicinity of Uganda; besides her valuable foothold on the Gulf of Aden, and the possession of Madagascar (presently to be described), which compensates her for the want of colonies in South and East Africa. In the regions north of the Mubangi-Wele—a river which Germans, Englishmen and Belgians were the first to discover, but the whole of the north bank of which from the Mbomu confluence to the Congo confluence is now owned by France—Frenchmen have reason to be proud of their country’s record. As already related, it was French explorers who first solved the mystery of the passage from the Congo watershed to that of the Shari-Chad; and several French explorers paid with their lives for their temerity. To enquire into and avenge the death of Paul Crampel, a French commissioner, Emile Gentil (subsequently, until 1908, Governor of French Congo) had penetrated down the Shari River, from the Congo basin, till he had reached the far-famed country of Bagirmi. Here he induced the much-harried native sultan to accept French protection, and placed a French resident at his court. Bagirmi was then invaded by Rabah Zobeir, who had made himself Sultan of Bornu. The Bagirmi sultan and the French resident had to flee before the army of Rabah; but after two years’ fighting, in which at first the French met with several reverses, Rabah was defeated and slain in a great battle in which the Foureau-Lamy^[132] expedition, which had come from Algiers, were joined by the remnant of the Voulet-Chanoine column from Senegal, and a river flotilla from the Mubangi-Congo. For two years more, however, the French forces in Bagirmi had to fight Rabah’s sons and successors; but the last of these was defeated and slain (on the borders of Bornu) in the early part of 1902.

The next enemy to be grappled with and overcome—the last, so far as one can foresee, of the strong Mussulman states of Central Africa—was the country of Wadai, situated to the north-east of Bagirmi and a region which had been for a century or more the chief focus of slave-raiding and trading in Central Africa, besides being singular in that region for its secular hatred and distrust of the white man, in whom the Arabized ruling classes of Wadai saw not only the hated Christian infidel but the eventual opponent of the slave trade, out of which Wadai had amassed wealth since the seventeenth century. The French entered into relations with Wadai in 1900, and interfered in its civil wars. But incited by the agents of the Senussi sheikh^[133], the Wadai ruler attacked the French outposts on the Shari in 1904 and carried off many negro prisoners. Another motive for their hostility was that France had given refuge to a claimant for the Wadai throne—Asil, subsequently Sultan of Wadai. Between 1904 and 1911 fighting between the French and a section of the Wadaian peoples—mostly the Maba negroids and the Massalit Arabs—continued until the French had conquered the whole country and installed Asil on the throne of Wadai under the guidance of a French resident who has since (1912) deposed him for cruelty. They themselves took over the direct government of the southern provinces, the negro countries of Dar Runga and Dar Sila, so long the hunting-grounds for the slave-raiders; so much so, that their once abundant negro population was reduced to a few thousand miserable savages. In this long warfare against the strongest and most fanatical of Muhammadan negro states, the French lost numerous officers of note and displayed qualities of resource and heroism that promise well for a nation which can produce at the present day such officers and non-commissioned officers. As in the case of the British, the rank and file of their armies on these campaigns were Africans, mainly Senegalese.

The conquest of Bagirmi and Wadai naturally secured to the French the more sparsely populated country of Kanem, inhabited mainly by those Tibu negroids whose race extends right across the Sahara to the hinterland of Tripoli. Now that Italy is in occupation of Cyrenaica, and Turkey can no longer supply arms and ammunition to Wadai for the campaign against the interfering white man, it is unlikely that French rule will be seriously contested any more in the heart of the Central Sudan; so long, that is, as Britain rules to the eastward. Quite possibly a great strategic future may lie before Kanem and Wadai, and the lands of the French Mubangi province; for through these regions may pass the trunk line of Trans-African railways, the route which will connect South Africa with Tangier and with Alexandria. The conquest of Wadai by the French has been the final and the most crushing blow directed at the African slave trade of Islam, and it has been carried out with a lavish expenditure of money and bravery at a distance of something like 1,500 miles from the nearest civilized base, a feat almost without parallel in African history. It may well serve as a pendant and an effacement to that brief lapse from the policy of a civilized Power during which something like a new form of slavery was established by France in Western Congoland.