189. Civilization in Congoland.

190. The direct trading agents of King Leopold and his concessionaire companies, and the ofttimes worthy and gallant servants of the Congo State, were miserably underpaid.

191. Sir Henry Morton Stanley (John Rowlands) was born in 1842 at Denbigh in North Wales, the son of a farmer’s daughter who was very poor. He became eventually a work-house boy, but managed to acquire a passable education and to find his way twice to the United States, where he pursued many careers till at length he became a press reporter and a special correspondent. In this capacity he “found” and relieved Livingstone and prolonged Livingstone’s life by two years. In 1899 Stanley, who had been in Parliament since 1895, was made G.C.B. by the British Government.

192. The dynasty of Muhammad Ali may be said to have begun in 1841, in which year it was recognised and made hereditary by Turkey; but Muhammad Ali was the ruler of Egypt (as Pasha) from 1811, after the slaughter of the Mamluk Beys. His sons and son-in-law conquered for him Syria and Western Arabia and the northern part of the Sudan. The conquests west of Sinai were given up in 1841 but in that year he became the Vali or Viceroy over Egypt and the Sudan, the succession to that post to fall to his male descendants. His immediate successor was his grandson Abbas bin Tusūn; then followed the rule of his favourite son, Said bin Muhammad. Said was succeeded in 1863 by his nephew Ismail, son of Ibrahim, the reputed eldest son of Muhammad Ali. But according to some accounts Ibrahim, the great conqueror, was only the adopted son of Muhammad Ali. The present Khedive of Egypt is the great-grandson of Ibrahim, but he is also descended from Muhammad Ali through his mother, Princess Amina, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Muhammad Ali through Tusūn. The title of Khedive (a Persian word meaning prince) was conferred on the Pasha or Viceroy of Egypt in 1867.

193. This was a revolt against Egyptian rule, taxation, and interference with the slave trade, started by an Arab fanatic born in the Dongola district who was named Muhammad Ahmad, but called himself the Mahdi or Messiah. His first successes were amongst the ignorant Muhammadans of Kordofan who had grown to loathe the exactions of Turkish (i.e. Egyptian) rule. Muhammad Ahmad died in 1885 and was succeeded by his Lieutenant, the Khalifa Abdallah-al-Taaisha. His fanatical followers were usually called the “Dervishes.” Muhammad Ahmad’s forces captured Al-Obeid the capital of Kordofan in January 1883, and overwhelmed nine months later a force of 10,000 men under Hicks Pasha sent by the Egyptian Government to recover the Western Sudan from anarchy. Hicks Pasha (Colonel William Hicks) was an officer of the Indian Army who had served with distinction in the Mutiny and had fought in the Abyssinian campaign of 1867-8. In 1882 he entered the Khedive’s service as Chief of the Staff in the Sudan, recaptured the Sennar country from the Mahdists, and might have suppressed the whole rebellion and obviated Gordon’s mission and all subsequent disasters if he had been allowed a free hand by the Egyptian ministry at Khartum. Out of his force of 8000 fighting men and 2000 camp followers, all but 300 were slain at Kashgil on the fatal day of November 5, 1883.

194. This phrase first made its appearance in a pamphlet issued by the late Sir Edwin Arnold in 1876 and was revived by the author of this book in an article in the Times of August 10, 1888.

195. Taken by the Italians from the Dervishes in 1894 and restored to Anglo-Egyptian control in 1897.

196. Placed under British protection in 1884.

197. The first British Agent (for the East India Company) and Consul General at Zanzibar was appointed in 1841.

198. Uganda will probably continue to be the general name for this protectorate; but the correct form of the word is Buganda. This rendering is now reserved for the native kingdom or province of Buganda, while the Swahili version of the term—Uganda—is applied to the whole protectorate of five provinces.

199. Kabarega was the son and successor of the Kamasi who had so persecuted the Bakers, Emin, Casati and other travellers.

200. The work of this Special Commission was additional to and confirmatory of the efforts of Sir Henry Colvile, Mr Ernest Berkeley, Mr F. G. Jackson (since Governor of Uganda), Mr George Wilson and Colonel Trevor Ternan (Commissioners or Acting Commissioners) to found a stable confederation of warlike and peaceful negro peoples, to combat famine and disease caused by intertribal wars, and to extend the boundaries of this protectorate northwards to the navigable Nile.

201. The Kabaka of Buganda has been, down to 1912, a minor under a native regency. He is descended from a dynasty which has apparently ruled in Buganda since a period contemporary with the reign of Henry IV in England. This dynasty, like most others in Equatorial East Africa, appears to have been founded by a man of Gala descent.

202. The Protectorate now contains seven provinces and a northern tract of territory not yet organized. The narrow coast-belt from Lamu to the Umba River is leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar for a payment of £17,000 per annum.

203. Leo Africanus, who wrote the most important work on Africa in the 16th century, was born at Granada in southern Spain in 1494, just after the capture of that place by the Spaniards. His family migrated to Morocco, and “Hassan ibn Muhammad al Wizaz,” surnamed “Al-Fasi,” was educated mainly at Fas or Fez: whence his nickname. He travelled throughout North Africa and crossed the Desert to the Niger; visited Guinea, Mandingoland, the Niger Bend, Agades, Hausaland and Lake Chad, Egypt, and the Nile. Captured by Italian pirates he was sold as a slave and presented to Pope Leo X, who converted him, christened him, pensioned him, and encouraged him to give to the world his valuable geographical and historical information.

204. East Friesland.

205. Perfunctory regret for such concessions may be spared when it is borne in mind that the United States of Europe (as they would have become in an Anti-British League) would hardly have allowed even Free-trade England to acquire all the coast-line of the Dark Continent.

206. The concession of Witu, or Vitu, had been obtained by the Denhardt brothers on the 8th of April, 1885, and a German protectorate was declared on the 27th of May. For subsequent history see page 384.

207. Dar-es-Salaam is the capital of German East Africa.

208. Kamerun is the official spelling of the old Portuguese name for this region (Camarões) which we render “Cameroons.”

209. In the early days of the colony, when Germany rather despaired about the unprofitable region she had annexed on the map, she brought into existence the German South-west Africa Company in order to introduce capital into the country. To this company were given extensive land and mineral concessions without any regard whatever for native rights or sentiment. Hence, when these rights were exercised, arose much trouble with the settled negro population.

210. There are said to be only about 20,000 Herero people now living in Damaraland. It would be a great pity if this intelligent, strong race of Bantu negroes disappeared. They must have an interesting history behind them, which is being slowly pieced out by tradition and by the etymology of their remarkable language, by some regarded as the “Sanskrit of the Bantu.” They seem to have emigrated almost direct to South-West Africa from East Equatorial Africa some fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago, bringing their long-horned cattle with them.

211. There is stronger evidence to show that Menouthias was a little island—Zanzibar, probably—close to the African coast. Menouthias is repeated in the Arab name Manutia, and Al-phil means “ivory”—the ivory island or market.

212. Almost certainly this was an egg of the gigantic Æpyornis. The Æpyornis, a ratite bird as large as, or larger than, an ostrich and distantly allied to both ostriches and cassowaries, lived on in Madagascar to the human period—say two thousand years ago or even later. It was quite possibly seen alive by the earliest Arab visitors to the island.

213. But by the natives as Andrian Potsy, i.e. “White King.”

214. Already famous for his discoveries in India; a beautiful jungle fowl is named after him.

215. The Malay immigration into the Komoro Islands was relatively slight. The bulk of the population here is composed of East Coast negroes, speaking a Bantu dialect allied to the tongues spoken on the Zanzibar coast. There was a large influx of Arabs, however; and this mingling with the negroes produced the present race of the Komoro Islanders, a very fine type of the successful results that attend the mixture of the Semite and the negro.

216. The Hovas, or Merina, as they are properly called, of Central Madagascar bear a strong physical resemblance to the Javanese. They seem to have reached east Madagascar much later than the ancestors of the Sakalava and Betsi-misáraka, and subsequently to the Arabs. The Merina ruling caste is very “Malay” or Mongoloid in appearance.

217. A post a little to the north of Tamatave on the east coast.

218. Further confirmed by the treaty of the 13th of November, 1815.

219. The tribes of the western half of Madagascar, a finer race physically than the Hovas owing to their greater intermixture with negroes. They now number about 156,000.

220. In 1840 Jesuit priests had again endeavoured to establish themselves in Madagascar, on the north-west coast, but they all died from fever.

221. This law was completely abrogated by the French in 1896, and foreigners can now acquire land as easily as natives.

222. Who had made themselves ill by appropriating and drinking his claret—that was all.

223. Whether the Hovas had overlooked the Mojanga route and had decided to concentrate all their resistance on the approach from Tamatave is not known; but after their repeated boasts as to the determined resistance they would make to an invader, the collapse of their defence and the feebleness of the resistance they offered to the French are matters of considerable astonishment. It must have been mainly due to the fact that the Hova rule over the bulk of the island was hated, and that the other tribes were not inclined to fight for its maintenance.

224. Since the annexation to France, and the consequent dominating influence of the Roman Catholic missionaries, many natives have been constrained to exchange their Protestant faith for Roman Catholic Christianity.

225. Particulars as to General Galliéni’s reforms and the resulting condition of Madagascar are given in an article “French Policy in Madagascar,” in the October Journal of the African Society, London, 1904.

226. The French occupation of Madagascar has resulted in great gains to science. Noteworthy are the investigations in palæontology of the two Grandidiers and of M. A. Jully, which have revealed a marvellous extinct fauna of lemurs, hippopotami, carnivores, birds, and giant reptiles.

227. Although in the Sahara desert and the coast region of German S.-W. Africa the great summer heat and the waterless nature of the soil are obstacles sufficient, at any rate at the present time, to render these countries uncolonizable, such difficulties are being fast overcome by the resources of science.

229. It is interesting to observe how under the British ægis Maltese are prospering in Egypt and on the northern and eastern coasts of Africa.