An African Adventure Part 7

He said all this with such a solemn and sober face that you would have thought the whole destiny of the British Empire depended upon the elaborateness of his utterance.

To return to the matter of unrest, all the concrete happenings that I have related show that the authority of the white man in Africa is still resented by the natives. It serves to emphasize what Mr. Lothrop Stoddard, an eminent authority on this subject, so aptly calls "the rising tide of colour." We white people seldom stop to realize how overwhelmingly we are outnumbered. Out of the world population of approximately 1,700,000,000 persons (I am using Mr. Stoddard's figures), only 550,000,000 are white.

A colour conflict is improbable but by no means impossible. We have only to look at our own troubles with the j.a.panese to get an intimate glimpse of what might lurk in a yellow tidal wave. The yellow man humbled Russia in the Russo-j.a.panese War and he smashed the Germans at Kiao Chow in the Great War. The fact that he was permitted to fight shoulder to shoulder with the white man has only added to his c.o.c.kiness as we have discovered in California.

Remember too that the Germans stirred up all Islam in their mad attempt to conquer the world. The Mohammedan has not forgotten what the Teutonic propagandists told him when they laid the cunning train of bad feeling that precipitated Turkey into the Great War. These seeds of discord are bearing fruit in many Near Eastern quarters. One result is that a British army is fighting in Mesopotamia now. A Holy War is merely the full brother of the possible War of Colour. In East Africa the Germans used thousands of native troops against the British and Belgians. The blacks got a taste, figuratively, of the white man's blood and it did his system no good.

Throughout the globe there are 150,000,000 blacks and all but 30,000,000 of them are south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. They lack the high mental development of the yellow man as expressed in the j.a.panese, but even brute force is not to be despised, especially where it outnumbers the whites to the extent that they do in South Africa. I am no alarmist and I do not presume to say that there will be serious trouble. I merely present these facts to show that certainly so far as affecting production and economic security in general is concerned, the native still provides a vexing and irritating problem, not without danger.

The Union of South Africa is keenly alive to this perplexing native situation. Its policy is what might be called the Direct Rule, in which the whole administration of the country is in the hands of the Europeans and which is the opposite of the Indirect Rule of India, for example, which recognizes Rajahs and other potentates and which permits the brown man to hold a variety of public posts.

The Government of the Cape Colony is becoming convinced that Booker Washington's idea is the sole salvation of the race. That great leader maintained that the hope for the Negro in the United States and elsewhere lay in the training of his hands. Once those hands were skilled they could be kept out of mischief. I recall having discussed this theory one night with General s.m.u.ts at Capetown and he expressed his hearty approval of it.

The lamented Botha died before he could put into operation a plan which held out the promise of still another kind of solution. It lay in the soil. He contended that an area of forty million acres should be set aside for the natives, where many could work out their destinies themselves. While this plan offered the opportunity for the establishment of a compact and perhaps dangerous black ent.i.ty, his feeling was that by the avoidance of friction with the whites the possibility of trouble would be minimized. This scheme is likely to be carried out by s.m.u.ts.

Since the Union of South Africa profited by the whirligig of war to the extent of acquiring German South-West Africa it only remains to speak of the new map of Africa, made possible by the Great Conflict. Despite the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France one fails to see concrete evidence of Germany's defeat in Europe. Her people are still c.o.c.ky and defiant.

There is no mistake about her altered condition in Africa. Her flag there has gone into the discard along with the wreck of militarism. The immense territory that she acquired princ.i.p.ally by browbeating is lost, down to the last square mile.

Up to 1884 Germany did not own an inch of African soil. Within two years she was mistress of more than a million square miles. a.n.a.lyze her whole performance on the continent and a definite cause of the World War is discovered. It is part of an international conspiracy studded with astonishing details.

Africa was a definite means to world conquest. Germany knew of her vast undeveloped wealth. It is now no secret that her plan was to annex the greater part of French, Belgian, Italian and Portuguese Africa in the event that she won. The Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway would have hitched up the late Teutonic Empire with the Near East and made it easy to link the African domain with this intermediary through the Turkish dominions.

Here was an imposing program with many advantages. For one thing it would have given Germany an untold store of raw materials and it would also have put her into a position to dictate to Southern Asia and even South America.

The methods that Germany adopted to acquire her African possessions were peculiarly typical. Like the madness that plunged her into a struggle with civilization they were her own undoing. Into a continent whose middle name, so far as colonization goes, is intrigue she fitted perfectly. Practically every German colony in Africa represented the triumph of "b.u.t.ting in" or intimidation. The Kaiser That Was regarded himself as the mentor, and sought to recast continents in the same grand way that he lectured his minions.

The first German colony in Africa was German South-West, as it was called for short, and grew out of a deal made between a Bremen merchant and a native chief. On the strength of this Bismarck pinched out an area almost as big as British East Africa. Before twelve months had pa.s.sed the German flag flew over what came to be known as German East Africa, and also over Togoland and the The Cameroons on the West Coast.

Germany really had no right to invade any of this country but she was developing into a strong military power and rather than have trouble, the other nations acquiesced. Once intrenched, she started her usual interference. The prize mischief-maker of the universe, she began to stir up trouble in every quarter. She embroiled the French at Agadir and got into a snarl with Portugal over Angola.

The Kaiser's experience with Kruger is typical. When the Jameson Raid petered out William Hohenzollern sent the dictator of the Transvaal a telegram of congratulation. The old Boer immediately regarded him as an ally and counted on his aid when the Boer War started. Instead, he got the double-cross after he had sent his ultimatum to England. At that time the Kaiser warily side-stepped an entanglement with Britain for the reason that she was too useful.

It is now evident that a large part of the Congo atrocity was a German scheme. The head and front of the expose movement was Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt of London. He sought to foment a German-financed revolution in Ireland and was hanged as a traitor in the Tower.

Behind this atrocity crusade was just another evidence of the German desire to control Africa. By rousing the world against Belgium, Germany expected to bring another Berlin Congress, which would be expected to give her the stewardship of the Belgian Congo. The result would have been a German belt across Africa from the Indian to the Atlantic Oceans.

She could thus have had England and France at a disadvantage on the north, and England and Portugal where she wanted them, to the south.

Hence the Great War was not so much a matter of German meddling in the Balkans as it was her persistent manipulation of other nations' affairs in Africa. She was playing "freeze-out" on a stupendous scale. You can see why Germany was so much opposed to the Cape-to-Cairo Route. It interfered with her ambitions and provided a constant irritant to her "benevolent" plans.

So much for the war end. Turn to the peace aspect. With Germany eliminated from the African scheme the whole region can enter upon a harmonious development. More than this, the fact that she is now deprived of colonies prevents her from recovering the world-wide economic authority she commanded before the war. A congested population allows her no more elbow room at home. Before she went mad her whole hope of the future lay in a colonization where her flag could fly in public, and in a penetration which cunningly masked the German hand. The world is now wise to the latter procedure.

The new colour scheme of the African map may now be disclosed. The Union of South Africa, as you have seen, has taken over German South-West Africa; Great Britain has a.s.sumed the control of all German East Africa with the exception of Ruanda and Urundu, which have become part of the Belgian Congo. Togoland is divided between France and Britain, while the greater part of The Cameroons is merged into the Lower French West African possessions of which the French Congo is the princ.i.p.al one.

Britain gets the Cameroon Mountains.

The one-time Dark Continent remains dark only for Germany.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph Copyright British South Africa Co._

VICTORIA FALLS]

CHAPTER III--RHODES AND RHODESIA

I

For fifty-eight hours the train from Johannesburg had travelled steadily northward, past Mafeking and on through the apparently endless stretches of Bechua.n.a.land. Alternately frozen and baked, I had swallowed enough dust to stock a small-sized desert. Dawn of the third day broke and with it came a sharp rap on my compartment door. I had been dreaming of a warm bath and a joltless life when I was rudely restored to reality. The car was stationary and a blanketed Matabele, his teeth chattering with the cold, peered in at the window.

"What is it?" I asked.

"You are in Rhodesia and I want to know who you are," boomed a voice out in the corridor.

I opened the door and a tall, rangy, bronzed man--the immigration inspector--stepped inside. He looked like a cross between an Arizona cowboy and an Australian overseas soldier. When I proved to his satisfaction that I was neither Bolshevik nor Boche he departed with the remark: "We've got to keep a watch on the people who come into this country."

Such was my introduction to Rhodesia, where the limousine and the ox-team compete for right of way on the veldt and the 'rickshaw yields to the motor-cycle in the town streets. Nowhere in the world can you find a region that combines to such vivid and picturesque extent the romance and hardship of the pioneer age with the push and practicality of today. Here existed the "King Solomon's Mines" of Rider Haggard's fancy: here the modern gold-seekers of fact sought the treasures of Ophir; here Nature gives an awesome manifestation of her power in the Victoria Falls.

It is the only country where a great business corporation rules, not by might of money but by chartered authority. Linked with that rule is the story of a conflict between share-holder and settler that is unique in the history of colonization. It is the now-familiar and well-nigh universal struggle for self-determination waged in this instance between all-British elements and without violence.

All the way from Capetown I had followed the trail of Cecil Rhodes, which like the man himself, is distinct. It is not the succession of useless and conventional monuments reared by a grateful posterity.

Rather it is expressed in terms of cities and a permanent industrial and agricultural advance. "Living he was the land," and dead, his imperious and constructive spirit goes marching on. The Rhodes impress is everywhere. Now I had arrived at the cap-stone of it all, the domain that bears his name and which he added to the British Empire.

Less than two hours after the immigration inspector had given me the once-over on the frontier I was in Bulawayo, metropolis of Rhodesia, which sprawls over the veldt just like a bustling Kansas community spreads out over the prairie. It is definitely American in energy and atmosphere. Save for the near-naked blacks you could almost imagine yourself in Idaho or Montana back in the days when our West was young.

Before that first day ended I had lunched and dined in a club that would do credit to Capetown or Johannesburg; had met women who wore French frocks, and had heard the possibilities of the section acclaimed by a dozen enthusiasts. Everyone in Rhodesia is a born booster. Again you get the parallel with our own kind.

To the average American reader Rhodesia is merely a name, a.s.sociated with the midnight raid of stealthy savage and all the terror and tragedy of the white man's burden amid the wild confines. All this happened, to be sure, but it is part of the past. While South Africa still wrestles with a serious native problem, Rhodesia has settled it once and for all.

It would be impossible to find a milder lot than the survivors and sons of the cruel and war-like Lobengula who once ruled here like a despot of old. His tribesmen--the Matabeles--were put in their place by a strong hand and they remain put.

Bulawayo was the capital of Lobengula's kingdom. The word means "Place of Slaughter," and it did not belie the name. You can still see the tree under which the portly potentate sat and daily dispensed sanguinary judgment. His method was quite simple. If anyone irritated or displeased him he was haled up "under the greenwood" and sentenced to death. If gout or rheumatism racked the royal frame the chief executed the first pa.s.serby and then considered the source of the trouble removed. The only thing that really departed was the head of the innocent victim.

Lobengula had sixty-eight wives, which may account for some of his eccentricities. Chaka, the famous king of the Zulus, whose favourite sport was murdering his sons (he feared a rival to the throne), was an amateur in crime alongside the dusky monarch whom the British suppressed, and thereby gained what is now the most prosperous part of Southern Rhodesia.

The occupation and development of Rhodesia are so comparatively recent--(Rhodes and Dr. Jameson were fighting the Matabeles at Bulawayo in 1896)--that any account of the country must at the outset include a brief historical approach to the time of my visit last May. Probe into the beginnings of any African colony and you immediately uncover intrigue and militant imperialism. Rhodesia is no exception.

For ages the huge continent of which it is part was veiled behind mystery and darkness. The northern and southern extremes early came into the ken of the explorer and after him the builder. So too with most of the coast. But the vast central belt, skirted by the arid reaches of Sahara on one side and unknown territory on the other, defied civilization until Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, and Grant blazed the way. Then began the scramble for colonies.

Early in the eighties more than one European power cast covetous glances at what might be called the South Central area. Thanks to the economic foresight of King Leopold, Belgium had secured the Congo. Between this region which was then a Free State, and the Transvaal, was an immense and unappropriated country,--a sort of no man's land, rich with minerals, teeming with forests and peopled by savages. Two territories, Matabeleland, ruled by Lobengula, and Mashonaland, inhabited by the Mashonas, who were to all intents and purposes va.s.sals to Lobengula, were the prize portions. Another immense area--the present British protectorate of Bechua.n.a.land--was immediately south and touched the Cape Colony and the Transvaal. Portuguese East Africa lay to the east but the backbone of Africa south of the Congo line lay ready to be plucked by venturesome hands.

Nor were the hands lacking for the enterprise. Germany started to strengthen the network of conspiracy that had already yielded her a million square miles of African soil and she was reaching out for more.

Control of Africa meant for her a big step toward world conquest. Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, which touched the southern edge of this unclaimed domain, saw in it the logical extension of his dominions.

Down at Capetown was Rhodes, dreaming of a Greater Britain and determined to block the Kaiser and Kruger. It was largely due to his efforts while a member of the Cape Parliament that Britain was persuaded to annex Bechua.n.a.land as a Crown Colony. Forestalled here, Kruger was determined to get the rest of the country beyond Bechua.n.a.land and reaching to the southern border of the Congo. His emissaries began to d.i.c.ker with chiefs and he organized an expedition to invade the territory. Once more Rhodes beat him to it, this time in history-making fashion.

Following his theory that it is better to deal with a man than fight him, he sent C. D. Rudd, Rochfort Maguire, and F. R. ("Matabele") Thompson up to deal directly with Lobengula. They were ideal envoys for Thompson in particular knew every inch of the country and spoke the native languages. From the crafty chieftain they obtained a blanket concession for all the mineral and trading rights in Matabeleland for 1,200 a year and one thousand rifles. Rhodes now converted this concession into a commercial and colonizing achievement without precedent or parallel. It became the Magna Charta of the great British South Africa Company, which did for Africa what the East India Company did for India. Counting in Bechua.n.a.land, it added more than 700,000 square miles to the British Empire.

Like the historic doc.u.ment so inseparably a.s.sociated with the glories of Clive and Hastings, its Charter shaped the destiny of the empire and is a.s.sociated with battle, blood, and the eventual triumph of the Anglo-Saxon over the man of colour. Other chartered companies have wielded autocratic power over millions of natives but the royal right to exist and operate, bestowed by Queen Victoria upon the British South Africa Company--the Chartered Company as it is commonly known--was the first that ever gave a corporation the administrative authority over a politically active country with a white population. The record of its rule is therefore distinct in the annals of Big Business.

It was in 1899 that Rhodes got the Charter. In his conception of the Rhodesia that was to be--(it was first called Zambesia)--he had two distinct purposes in view. One was the larger political motive which was to widen the Empire and keep the Germans and Boers from annexing territory that he believed should be British. This was Rhodes the imperialist at work. The other aspect was the purely commercial side and revealed the same shrewdness that had registered so successfully in the creation of the Diamond Trust at Kimberley. This was Rhodes the business man on the job.