We have now seen the result of these race movements during three or four thousand years, which have caused nations superior in physical or mental development to the Negro, the Negroid, and the Hamite to move down on Africa as a field for their colonization, cultivation, and commerce. The great rush, however, has only been made since 1881, and may be said to have begun with the French invasion of Tunis. Now there remain but two small portions of the map of Africa which are uncoloured, that is, attributed to the independent possession of a native state. These tracts, theoretically independent, or the overlordship of which is international, are the Negro Republic of Liberia on the West coast and the Ethiopian Empire in North-east Africa. The whole remainder of the continent is now allotted to the dominion, overlordship or exclusive political direction of some one European, Christian power: Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, or Spain. Morocco, on the extreme north-west of the continent, the bulk of whose trade was formerly with England, and whose principal seaport was once in English hands, has now France for a protector, educator and disciplinarian, and Spain for recolonizer. There is Egypt, in the occupation and under the control of Britain, though still nominally a tributary state of the Turkish Empire. Since this book was first published in 1898, the truculent Muhammadan state of Wadai has been annexed and conquered by France, together with Baghirmi and Kanem, Aïr and the Saharan oases. Darfur is under Anglo-Egyptian suzerainty; Tripoli, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan are annexed to Italy as the future “Colony” of Libya; and British rule has been made very real over the eastern Fula States of Nigeria and Bornu. The South African Republic and Orange Free State are part of the Union of South Africa. Even Liberia has recently entrusted its finances to the indirect control of its original parent, the United States. Only Abyssinia—now the Empire of Ethiopia in very fact, since 1900—remains theoretically independent; and even Abyssinia is aware that three European powers—Britain, France, and Italy—while guaranteeing her independence, have in a sense agreed to take joint action if she should abuse that independence to the commercial or political injury of their interests. Abyssinia, for many reasons connected with her history, her religion, and her sturdy assertion of independence deserves more than any other state of Africa to preserve her national self-respect and her sovereign status, provided she will abstain from offence, and recognize her geographical and racial limitations. But if through ambition she should attempt to arm and to lead the peoples of the Sudan against the new order of things which is being patiently introduced by Great Britain, she will find herself restricted once more to the African Switzerland which has been the nucleus and the last refuge of this Semitico-Hamitic people. Liberia by studiously following American advice and educating herself on the right lines to be an African Negro State and not an African parody on a tiny scale of the vast United States of North America, may play an important part some day in the political development of West Africa.
What is Europe going to do with Africa? It seems as though there were three courses to be pursued, corresponding with the three classes of territory into which Africa falls when considered geographically. There is, to begin with, that much restricted healthy area lying outside the tropics (or in rare instances, at great altitudes inside the tropics), where the climate is salubrious and Europeans can support existence under much the same conditions as in their native lands. Here they can freely rear children to form in time a native European race; and in these regions (except in parts of South Africa) there is no dense native population to dispute by force or by an appeal to common fairness the possession of the soil. These lands of the first category are of relatively small extent compared to the mass of Africa. They are confined to the districts south of the Zambezi and the Kunene (with the exception of the neighbourhood of the Zambezi and the eastern coast-belt); to the fifty thousand square miles on the mountain plateaus of Northern Rhodesia, and about a hundred and thirty thousand on the highlands of Nyasaland, Katanga, South and Central Angola, Uganda and British East Africa; to the northern half of Tunisia, a few districts of north-east and north-west Algeria and the Cyrenaica (northern projection of Barka); and to parts of the northern projection of Morocco. The second category consists of countries like much of Morocco, Algeria, southern Tunis, and Tripoli; Barka, Egypt, Abyssinia and parts of Somaliland; where climatic conditions and soil are not wholly opposed[227] to the healthful settlement of Europeans, but where the competition or numerical strength or martial spirit of the natives already in possession are factors opposed to the substitution of a large European population for the present owners of the soil. The third category consists of the remainder of Africa, mainly tropical, where the climatic conditions make it impossible for Europeans to cultivate the soil with their own hands, to settle for many years, or to bring up healthy families. Countries lying under the first category I should characterize as being suitable for European colonies, a conclusion somewhat belated, since they have nearly all become such. The second description of territory I should qualify as “tributary states,” countries where good and settled government cannot be maintained by the natives without the control of a European power, the European power retaining in return for the expense and trouble of such control the gratification of performing a good and interesting work, and a field of employment and profitable enterprise for a few of her choicer sons and daughters. The third category consists of “plantation colonies”—vast territories to be governed as India is governed, autocratically but wisely and as far as possible through native chiefs and councils, with the first aim of securing good government and a reasonable degree of civilization to a large population of races at present inferior in culture and mentality to the European. Here, however, the European may come, in small numbers, with his capital, his energy, and his knowledge to develop a most lucrative commerce, and obtain products necessary to the use of his advanced civilization.
It is possible that these distinctions may be rudely set aside by the pressure of natural laws one hundred, two hundred years hence, if the other healthy quarters of the globe become over-populated, and science is able to annul the unhealthy effects of a tropical climate. A rush may then be made by Europeans for settlement on the lands of tropical Africa, which in its violence may sweep away contemptuously the pre-existing rights of inferior races. But until such a contingency comes about, and whilst there is so much healthy land still unoccupied in America and temperate Africa, it is safer to direct our efforts along the lines laid down in these three categories I have quoted. Until Frenchmen have peopled the north of Tunis and the Aures Mountains of Algeria, it would be foolish for their Government to lure French emigrants to make their homes in Senegambia or on the Congo; until Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, the Transvaal, and Rhodesia south and north of the Zambezi are as thickly populated with whites as the resources of the country permit, it would be most unwise to force on the peopling by Europeans of Sokoto or the coast lands of British East Africa. On the other hand, however healthy the climate of Egypt may be, it is a country for the Egyptians, and not for Englishmen, except as administrators, instructors, capitalists, or winter tourists. Since we have begun to control the political affairs of parts of West Africa and the Niger basin our annual trade with those countries, rendered secure, has risen from a few hundred thousand pounds a year to about £10,000,000. This is sufficient justification for our continued government of these regions and their occasional cost to us in men and money.
In the north of Africa the white Berber race will tend in course of time to weaken in its Muhammadan fanaticism, and to mingle with the European immigrants as it mingled with them in ancient times and in the middle ages, when it invaded Spain and southern Europe. The Arab will gradually draw aloof, and side with those darker Berbers, who will long range the Sahara wastes unenvied; or else he will betake himself to the Sudan, and lead a life there freer from European restrictions, even though it be under a loose form of European rule. The Egyptians will probably continue to remain the Egyptians they have been for untold centuries, no matter what waves of Syrian, Libyan, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Turkish, French or English invaders swept over the land; but they will probably come within that circle of confederated nations which will form the future British Empire—nations of every origin, colour, race, religion, united only by one supreme ruler, and the one supreme bond of peace, mutual defence, and unfettered interchanging commerce. The Negro or Negroid races of all Africa between the Sahara Desert, the Red Sea, and the Zambezi will remain negro or negroid, even though here and there they are slightly lightened with European blood, and on the east are raised to a finer human type by the immigration of the Hamites, the interbreeding of Arabs, and the settlement of Indians. It is possible that there may be a considerable overflow of India into those insufficiently inhabited, uncultivated parts of East Africa now ruled by Britain and Germany. Indians will make their way as traders into British Central Africa, but these territories north of the Zambezi will be governed also in the interests of an abundant and powerful negro population, which before many years have elapsed will be as civilized and educated as are at least a million of the negro inhabitants south of the Zambezi at the present day. South of the Zambezi great changes will take place. The black man may continue to increase and multiply and live at peace with the white man, content to perform for the latter many services which his bodily strength and indifference to health permit him to render advantageously. But as the white population increases from one to twenty millions it will tend to reserve to itself all the healthy country in the south of Africa, and inland on that great central plateau which stretches up to and beyond the Zambezi; and the black man will be pushed by degrees into the low-lying, tropical coast regions of the south-east and of the Zambezi valley—regions which with much of Bechuanaland and Nyasaland must for an indefinite period be regarded as a Black Man’s Reserve.
The European nations or national types which will predominate in the New Africa are the British (with whom perhaps Dutch will fuse), the French and the French-speaking Belgian, the German, the Italian, the Greek, and the Portuguese. The Spaniard may be met with on the North-west coast and in Morocco and Western Algeria; the Portuguese may have in Angola a second Brazil, but this dream will dissolve disenchantingly unless this nation can soon recover national energy and divert her thousands of emigrants annually to Portuguese Africa rather than to Portuguese- or English-speaking America. Portugal itself requires colonists and ought to be able to support not a discontented six but a prosperous fifteen millions of people. Italy’s share of colonizable territory may be comparatively small under her own flag, and Greece may have none at all, but the north, the north-east, and north-central parts of Africa will teem with busy, thrifty, enterprising Italian and Greek settlers, colonists, merchants and employés[229].
The great languages of New Africa will be English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hausa, Swahili, and Zulu. It is doubtful whether German will ever become implanted as an African language any more than Dutch has taken root in the Malay Archipelago. It is true that Dutch in a corrupted jargon has become a second language to the Hottentots and a few Bantu tribes. But Dutch is simpler in construction, and easier of pronunciation to a negro than German. I have observed that in the Cameroons the Germans make use of the “pigeon” English of the coast as a means of communication with the people when they do not speak in the easily acquired Duala tongue. In East Africa, on the other hand, they use Swahili universally, just as the Dutch use Malay throughout their Asiatic possessions. English may not become the dominant language in all countries under British influence in Africa. It will certainly become the universal tongue of Africa south of the Zambezi, and possibly, but not so certainly, in British Central Africa, where, however, it will have the influence of Swahili to contend with. In British East Africa, in Zanzibar, and in Uganda the prevailing speech will be the easy, simple, expressive, harmonious Swahili language, a happy compromise between Arabic and Bantu. In Somaliland, Egypt, the Sahara, and the Sudan Arabic will be the dominating language; but Italian, French, and English will be much used in Lower Egypt. Italian, Arabic, and French will remain coequal in use in Barka, Tripoli, Tunis, and Eastern Algeria; French and Arabic (French perhaps prevailing) in Algeria; and French will make its influence felt in Morocco (though it will contend there with Arabic and Spanish), and right across the Western Sahara to Senegambia and the upper Niger. English will be, as it is now—either in jargon or correctly spoken—the language of intercommunication on the West coast of Africa from the Gambia to the Gaboon. French, Swahili and Portuguese will prevail in the Congo basin; Portuguese in Angola; and Hausa in Nigeria and around Lake Chad. In Madagascar French will predominate, mingling in the Komoro Islands with Swahili.
Paganism will disappear. The continent will soon be divided between nominal Christians and nominal Muhammadans, with a strong tendency on the part of the Muhammadans towards an easy-going rationalism, such as is fast making way in Algeria, where the townspeople and the cultivators in the more settled districts, constantly coming into contact with Europeans, are becoming indifferent to the more inconvenient among their Muhammadan observances, and are content to live with little more religion than an observance of the laws, and a desire to get on well with their neighbours. Yet before Muhammadanism loses its savour, there will probably be many uprisings against Christian rule among Muhammadan peoples who have been newly subjected to control. The Arab and the Hamite for religious reasons may strive again and again to shake off the Christian yoke, but I strongly doubt whether there will be any universal mutiny of the black man against the white. The negro has no idea of racial affinity. He will equally ally himself to the white or to the yellow races in order to subdue his fellow black, or to regain his freedom from the domination of another negro tribe. There may be, here and there, a revolt against the white rule in such and such a state; but the diverse civilizations under which the African will be trained, and the different languages he will be taught to talk, will be sufficient to make him as dissimilar in each national development as the white man has become in Europe. And just as it would need some amazing and stupendous event to cause all Asia to rise as one man against the invasion of Europe, so it is difficult to conceive that the black man will eventually form one united negro people demanding autonomy, and putting an end to the control of the white man, and to the immigration, settlement, and intercourse of superior races from Europe and Asia. Difficult, this conception may be, in the light of past history, and because language counts for so much, but not impossible. Any repetition of Leopoldian tactics on a large scale, any gross oppression of the negro in South, East, West or Central Africa might fuse all culture differences, blend black and yellow men of diverse religious beliefs and superstitions in one blazing rebellion against the white race which might avail to wreck the new and the growing European civilization now spreading so fast over Africa. But otherwise the indigenous races of Africa will grow up into being black or brown British subjects (unless we deny them all suffrage), Frenchmen, Portuguese or Germans. Great white nations will populate in course of time South Africa, North Africa, and Egypt; and rills of Caucasian blood will continue, as in the recent and the remote past, to circulate through Negro Africa, leavening the many millions of black men with that element of the white-skinned sub-species which alone has evolved beauty of facial features and originality of invention in thought and deed. But the black—or, as it will be in the future, the brown—race will, through bowing to many an influence and submerged by many an invasion, in the long run hold its own within limits, and secure for itself a large proportion of the soil of Africa. All predictions as to the future of the Dark Continent seem futile in face of the unexpected, the strange, the unlooked-for which arises in Africa itself. A new disease may break out which destroys the negro and leaves the white man standing; or unconquerable maladies may be evolved which sweep the white man away or make it too dangerous and unprofitable for him to settle on the soil of tropical Africa. On the other hand, remedies for all African diseases may be found, and it may be no more dangerous to the white man’s health to reside at Sierra Leone or on the Upper Congo than it is for the indigenous black man. No doubt, as in Asia and South America, the eventual outcome of the colonization of Africa by alien peoples will be a compromise—a dark-skinned race with a white man’s features and a white man’s brain.