THE SPIKED HELMET IN AFRICA
The other day two suave, frock-coated gentlemen, seated at a
green-covered table in the Foreign Office in Berlin, by putting their
names to the bottom of a piece of parchment, caused a territory
almost as large as the State of Texas to become French, and another
territory, larger than the State of Oregon, to become German. About as
many people were affected, though not consulted, by that international
dicker—which has passed into history as the Morocco-Equatoria
Convention—as there are in the county of London. The lot of about
four-fifths of these people will doubtless be materially improved, and
in a few years, if they have any gratitude in their Moorish souls,
they will be thanking Allah for having given them French instead of
Sherifian justice. As for those Congolese blacks who compose the other
fifth, they will soon find, unless I am very much mistaken, that the
red-white-and-black flag stands for something very different from the
red-white-and-blue one, and that the stiff-backed, guttural-tongued
German officers in their tight-fitting uniforms will prove sterner
masters than the easy-going French _administrateurs_ in their topées
and white linen.
Now the significance of that convention does not lie in its
ethics—which are very questionable; nor in the territory and
population and resources concerned—which are very great; but in the
fact that it brings within reasonable measure of fulfilment the
imperial dream which William II began dreaming some seven and twenty
years ago, and which he recently translated to the world in the
declaration “Germany's future lies oversea.” In those four words is
found the foreign policy of the Fatherland. The episode which began
with the sending of a war-ship to an obscure port of Morocco and ended
with Germany's acquirement of a material addition to her African
domain was not, as the world supposes, an example of the haphazard
land-grabbing so popular with European nations, but a single phase of
a vast and carefully laid scheme whose aim is the creation of a new
and greater Germany oversea—a _Deutschland über Meer_.
To solve the problems with which she has been confronted by
her amazing increase in population and production, Germany has
deliberately embarked on a systematic campaign of world expansion
and exploitation. Finding that she needs a colonial empire in her
business, she is setting out to build one just as she would build a
fleet of dreadnoughts or a ship canal. The fact that she has nothing
or next to nothing to start with, does not worry her at all. What she
cannot obtain by purchase or treaty site will obtain by threats, and
what she cannot obtain by threats she stands perfectly ready to obtain
by going to war. Having once made up her mind that the realisation of
her political, commercial, and economic ambitions requires her to have
a colonial dominion, she is not going to permit anything to stand in
the way of her getting it. In other words, wherever an excuse can be
provided for raising a flagstaff, whether on an ice-floe in the Arctic
or an atoll in the South Pacific, there the German flag shall flutter;
wherever trade is to be found, there Hamburg cargo boats shall drop
their anchors, there Stettin engines shall thunder over Essen rails,
there Solingen cutlery and Silesian cottons shall be sold by merchants
speaking the language of the Fatherland. It is a scheme astounding
by its very vastness, as methodically planned as a breakfast-food
manufacturer's advertising campaign and as systematically conducted;
and already, thanks to Teutonic audacity, aggressiveness, and
perseverance, backed up by German banks, fleets, and armies, much
nearer realisation than most people suppose.
In Morocco, East Africa, and the Congo; in Turkey, Persia, and
Malaysia; in Hayti, Brazil, and the Argentine; on the shores of all
the continents and the islands of all the seas, German merchants and
German money are working twenty-four hours a day building up that
oversea empire of which the Kaiser dreams. The activities of these
pioneers of commerce and finance are as varied as commerce and finance
themselves. Their guttural voices are heard in every market place;
their footsteps resound in every avenue of human endeavour. Their
holdings in Brazil are the size of European kingdoms, and so absolute
has their power become in at least two states—Santa Catharina and Rio
Grande do Sul—that the Brazilian Government has become seriously
alarmed. Their mines in Persia and China and the Rand rival the cave
of Aladdin. They are completing a trunk line across western Asia which
threatens to endanger England's commercial supremacy in India; in
Africa they are pushing forward another railway from the shores of the
Indian Ocean to the Great Lakes which will rival the Cape-to-Cairo
system in tapping the trade of the Dark Continent. They own the
light, power, and transportation monopolies of half the capitals of
Latin America. In China the coal mines and railways of the great
province of Shantung are in their hands. They work tea plantations in
Ceylon, tobacco plantations in Cuba and Sumatra, coffee plantations
in Guatemala, rubber plantations in the Congo, hemp plantations in
East Africa, and cotton plantations in the Delta of the Nile. Their
argosies, flying the house flags of the Hamburg American, the North
German Lloyd, the German East Africa, the Deutsche Levante, and a
score of other lines, carry German goods to German warehouses in the
world's remotest corners, while German war-ships are constantly aprowl
all up and down the Seven Seas, ready to protect the interests thus
created by the menace of their guns.
Back of the German miners and traders and railway builders are the
great German banks, which, when all is said and done, are the real
exploiters of Germany's interests oversea. So completely are the
foreign interests of the nation in their hands that there is no reason
to doubt the story that the Emperor, when warned by the great bankers
whom he had summoned to a conference over the ominous Moroccan
situation that war with France would endanger, if not destroy,
Germany's oversea ambitions, turned to his ministers with the remark,
“Then, gentlemen, we must find a peaceable solution.” We of the West
have not yet awakened to a realisation of the magnitude of Germany's
foreign interests or to the almost sovereign powers which the banks
behind them exercise in certain quarters of the world—particularly in
that Latin America which we have complacently regarded as securely
within our own commercial sphere. In Asia Minor the Deutsche Bank not
only controls the great Anatolian Railway system but it is building
the Bagdad Railway—probably the most important of Germany's foreign
undertakings—these two German-owned systems providing a route by which
German goods can be carried over German rails to India more cheaply
than England can transport her own goods to her possessions in her own
bottoms. In one hand the Disconto Bank Gesellschaft holds the railway
and mining concessions of the Chinese province of Shantung, while with
the other it reaches out across the world to grasp the railway system
of Venezuela, it being to enforce certain claims of this bank that
the German gun-boat _Panther_—the same that occupied Agadir—bombarded
La Guayra in 1902 and as a consequence brought the relations of the
United States and Germany uncomfortably close to the breaking-point.
Seven German banks—the German-Asiatic Bank, the German-Brazilian
Bank, the German-Orient Bank, the German-Palestine Bank, the Bank
of Chile and Germany, the Bank of Central America, and the German
Overseas Bank—devote themselves exclusively to the exploitation of
foreign concessions, either owning or dominating enterprises of
every conceivable character in the regions denoted by their titles
or lending financial assistance to German subjects engaged in such
undertakings.
A few years ago, when Germany was starting in the race for naval
supremacy, the Imperial Admiralty issued a review of Germany's oversea
interests for the purpose of impressing the Reichstag with the
necessity for dreadnoughts and then more dreadnoughts. Here are some
of the figures, taken from the list at random, and the more impressive
because they are from official sources and because, since they were
published, they have materially increased:
North Africa $25,000,000
Egypt 22,500,000
Liberia 1,250,000
Zanzibar 1,500,000
Mozambique 2,750,000
Madagascar 1,500,000
British South Africa 337,500,000
Turkey and the Balkans 112,500,000
British India and Ceylon 27,500,000
Straits Settlements 8,750,000
China 87,500,000
Mexico 87,500,000
Venezuela and Colombia 312,500,000
Peru and Chile 127,500,000
Argentine 187,500,000
Brazil 400,000,000
And this endless caravan of figures represents but a fraction of
Germany's transmarine interests, remember, for it does not include
her colonies on both coasts of Africa, in North China, and in the
South Seas. Now, if you will again glance over the above list of
Germany's foreign interests, you can hardly fail to be struck by the
fact that by far the greater part of them are in countries notorious
for the weakness and instability of their governments, as, for
example, China, Morocco, Turkey, Liberia, Mexico, and Venezuela; or
in countries which, though possessing stable governments, would not
be strong enough successfully to resist German aggression or German
demands. In regions where German settlers abound and where German
banks are in financial control it is seldom difficult for Germany
to find an excuse for meddling. It may be that a German settler is
attacked, or a German consul insulted, or a German bank has difficulty
in collecting its debts. So the slim cables carry a dash-dotted
message to the Foreign Office in Berlin; instantly the cry goes up
that in Morocco or China or Venezuela or Hayti German “interests”
are imperilled; and before the government of the country in question
realises that anything out of the ordinary has happened a cruiser with
a German flag drooping from her taffrail is lying off one of its coast
towns. Before the silent menace of that war-ship is removed, Germany
generally manages to obtain a concession to build a railway, or a
ninety-nine-year lease of a coaling-station, or the cession of a strip
of more or less valuable territory, and so goes merrily and steadily
on the work of building up a German empire oversea.
But these interests, world-wide though they are, fail to satisfy
the German expansionist party whose prophet is the Kaiser. They
demand something more material than figures; they would see the
German flag floating over government houses instead of warehouses,
over fortifications instead of plantations. They would see more of
the map of the world painted in German colours. But Germany was late
in getting into the colonising game, so that wherever she has gone
she has found other nations already in possession. In North Africa
her prospectors and concession-hunters found the French too firmly
established to be ousted; the only territory left in South Africa over
which she could raise her flag was so arid and worthless that neither
England nor Portugal had troubled to include it in their dominions;
though she bullied China into leasing her the port of Kiauchau, the
further territorial expansion in the Celestial Empire of which she had
dreamed was halted by Russian jealousy and Japanese ambition; around
Latin America—the most enticing field of all—stretched the protecting
arm of the Monroe Doctrine.
Now, these “Keep Off the Grass” signs with which she was everywhere
confronted did not improve Germany's disposition. They made her feel
abused and peevish, and whenever she saw a foreign flag flying over
some God-forsaken islet in the Pacific or a stretch of snake-infested
African jungle, she resented it deeply and said that she was being
denied “a place in the sun.” So when France despatched an expedition
to Fez in the summer of 1911 to teach the Moorish tribesmen proper
respect for French property and French lives, Germany seized on that
action as an excuse for occupying a Moroccan harbour and a strip of
the adjacent coast, on the pretext that her interests there were being
jeopardised, and flatly refused to evacuate it unless France gave
her something in return. I might mention, in passing, that Germany's
interests in Morocco are considerably more important than is generally
supposed, the powerful Westphalian firm of Mannesmann Brothers having
obtained from Sultan Abdul Aziz extensive mining, ranching, and
plantation concessions in that portion of his empire which the German
newspapers proceeded to prematurely dub “_West Marokko Deutsch_.”
The rich iron deposits in this region, when taken in conjunction
with the alarming decrease of the ore supply in the German mines and
the consequent shortage which threatens the German iron and steel
industry, undoubtedly provided one of the reasons underlying the
Kaiser's interference with the French programme in Morocco.
France, knowing full well the enormous political and commercial value
of Morocco, and determined to complete her African empire by its
acquirement, after months of haggling, during which battle-ships and
army corps were moved about like chessmen, consented to compensate
Germany by ceding her a slice of the colony of French Equatorial
Africa, better known, perhaps, as the French Congo.[4] It was a good
bargain that France made, too, for she took an empire and gave a
jungle in exchange. But Germany made the better bargain, it seems
to me, for by agreeing to a French protectorate over Morocco she
obtained one hundred thousand square miles of African soil without
its costing her a foot of land or a dollar in exchange. From the
view-point of the world at large, Germany emerged from the Moroccan
imbroglio with a good-sized strip of equatorial territory, presumably
rich in undeveloped resources, certainly rich in savages, snakes,
and fevers, and, everything considered, of very doubtful value. But
to Germany this stretch of jungle land meant far more than that. It
was a territory which she had wanted, watched, and waited for ever
since she entered the game of colonial expansion. It is one of the
links—in many respects the most essential one—which she requires to
connect her scattered possessions in the Dark Continent and to bar the
advance of her great rival, England, to the northward by stretching an
unbroken chain of German colonies across Africa from coast to coast.
The acquisition of that piece of west-coast jungle marked the greatest
stride which Germany has yet taken in her march toward an empire
oversea.
[4] Germany has given her new colony the official designation “New
Kamerun.”
Heretofore Germany has been in much the same predicament as a boy who
tries to put a picture puzzle together when some of the pieces are
missing. In Germany's case the missing pieces were held by England,
France, Belgium, and Portugal, and they refused to give them up. If
you will open the family atlas to the map of Africa, you will see that
Germany's four colonies on that continent are so widely separated that
their consolidation is apparently out of the question. Northernmost
of all, and set squarely in the middle of that pestilential coast-line
variously named and noted for its slaves, its ivory, and its gold,
and aptly called “the rottenest coast in the world,” is the colony
of Togo. Approximately the size of Cuba and rich in native products,
it is so remote from the other German possessions that its only
value is in providing Germany with a _quid pro quo_ which she can
use in negotiating for some territory more desirable. In the right
angle formed by the Gulf of Guinea is the colony of Kamerun, a rich,
fertile, and exceedingly unhealthful possession about the size of
Spain. Though its hinterland reaches inland to Lake Tchad, it has
hitherto been destitute of good harbours or navigable rivers, being
barred from the Niger by British Nigeria and from the Congo, until
the recent territorial readjustment, by French Equatorial Africa.
Follow the same coast-line twelve hundred miles to the southward and
you will come to German Southwest Africa, a barren, inhospitable,
sparsely populated land, stretching from a harbourless coast as far
inland as the Desert of Kalahari. On the other side of the continent,
just south of the Equator, lies German East Africa, almost twice the
size of the mother country and the largest and richest of the Kaiser's
transmarine possessions. The combined area of these four colonies is
equal to that of all the States east of the Mississippi put together;
certainly a substantial foundation on which to begin the erection of
an empire, especially when it is remembered that French Africa, which
now comprises forty-five per cent of the continent, is for the most
part the work of but a single generation.
When Monsieur Cambon and Herr von Kiderlein-Waechter put their pens to
the piece of parchment of which I have already spoken, the boundary of
the Kamerun was automatically extended southward almost to the Equator
and eastward some hundreds of miles to the Logone River, the apex of
the angle formed by the meeting of these new frontiers touching the
Congo River and thereby bringing the Kamerun into contact with the
Belgian Congo. In other words, Germany's great colonies on either
coast are no longer separated by French and Belgian territory, but
by Belgian alone—and Belgium, remember, is both weak and neutral.
Now, it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Belgium
might consent to sell Germany either the whole or a portion of the
Congo, for the financial difficulties of that colony have been very
great, and it has never been able to pay its way, its wants having
been supplied at first by large gifts of money from King Leopold,
and more recently by loans raised and guaranteed by Belgium. This
unsatisfactory financial condition not having helped to popularise
the Congo with the thrifty Belgians, there is considerable reason to
believe that the Brussels Government would lend an attentive ear to
any proposals which Germany might make toward its purchase. England
might be expected, of course, to oppose the sale of the Congo to
Germany tooth and nail, it being the fear of just such an eventuality
which caused her to seize on the rubber atrocities as an excuse for
her vigorous and persistent advocacy of the internationalisation
of the Congo. Though France holds the reversionary rights to the
Congo, there are no grounds for believing that she would place any
serious obstacles in the way of its acquisition by Germany, for she
has given it to be understood that she intends devoting her energies
henceforward to the exploitation of her enormous possessions in North
Africa. Assuming, then—and these assumptions, believe me, are not
nearly so chimerical as they may sound—that the Belgian Government
should sell Germany all or a part of the Congo, Germany's possessions
would then stretch across the continent from coast to coast,
comprising all that is most worth having in Equatorial Africa.
While we are about it, let us carry our assumptions one step farther
and take it for granted that Portugal could be induced to dispose
of her great west-coast colony of Angola, to which Germany already
possesses the reversionary rights. It is not only possible, but
probable, that a good round offer of money, or perhaps another Agadir
performance, based on some easily found pretext and backed up by
German war-ships in the Tagus, would induce the Lisbon Government
to hand over Angola, along with its fevers and its slavery, to the
Germans. Portugal is bitterly poor, its government is weak and
vacillating, and a long list of failures has left the people with
little stomach for colonisation. The Portuguese Republic has few
friends among the monarchical nations of Europe and could count on
scant aid from them in resisting Teutonic coercion. It is asserted
in diplomatic circles, indeed, that the ink on the Morocco-Equatoria
Convention was scarcely dry before the German minister in Lisbon had
opened secret _pourparlers_ with the Portuguese Foreign Office with
a view to the purchase of both Angola and the east-coast colony of
Mozambique.[5] The acquisition of Angola would supply Germany with the
final link needed to unite her colonies in East, West, and Southwest
Africa, thus giving her an African empire second in size only to that
of France. Far-fetched and far-distant as all this may sound, I have
but roughly sketched for you that imperial dream for whose fulfilment
the Kaiser and his people are indefatigably working and confidently
waiting.
[5] Though commonly applied to the colony of Portuguese East
Africa, the name Mozambique belongs, strictly speaking, only to the
northernmost province of that possession.
Very few people are aware that, as long ago as 1898, England and
Germany concluded a secret agreement which definitely provides for
the eventual disposition of Portugal's African possessions. Of its
true history and scope, however, little has ever leaked out. It grew
out of Joseph Chamberlain's restless and ambitious schemes for the
consolidation of British dominion in Africa. Appreciating, early in
the Boer War, that England's success in that struggle would largely
depend upon Germany remaining strictly neutral, that master statesman
proposed to the Berlin Government a plan the effect of which was to
divide the reversion of Angola and Mozambique between Great Britain
and Germany, inferentially leaving the former a free hand south of
the Zambezi. This was the famous Secret Treaty, the final text of
which was afterward signed by Lord Salisbury, and it was largely
in virtue of this agreement that England was free from German
interference during the Boer War. It is an interesting comment on the
ethics of international politics that this remarkable agreement was
concluded without any consultation of Portugal, the country the most
vitally concerned. Delagoa Bay is no longer as imperative a necessity
to England as it was in 1898, at which time it was the quickest way
to reach the Transvaal, and, on the other hand, the West Coast is
daily becoming more important for strategical and commercial reasons,
for the “Afro” railway, of which I have made mention in the chapter
on Morocco, will become in the near future the great highway between
Europe and South America, while the railway now being built between
Benguela (Lobito Bay) and the Katanga region will provide the easiest
and quickest means of communicating with Rhodesia and the Transvaal.
The terms of the Anglo-German Secret Treaty are of interest, however,
as indicating how that portion of the African continent lying south
of the Congo will be eventually parcelled out, and as showing the
framework on which is being slowly but surely constructed Germany's
African empire.
The erection of such a German state across the middle of Africa would
have far-reaching results in more directions than one. In the first
place, it would end forever England's long-cherished ambition of
eventually linking up her Sudanese and South African possessions
and thus completing an “All Red” route from Cairo to the Cape. In
the second place, Germany is now in a position to build her own
transcontinental railway—from east to west instead of from north
to south—on German or neutral soil all the way, thus removing the
completion of the Cape-to-Cairo system, even under international
auspices, to a very distant day, and making Dar-es-Salam and Duala,
instead of Cape Town and Alexandria, the starting-points for those
highways of steel which are destined to open up inner Africa.
It is surprising how little even the well-informed know of these
far places which Germany has taken for her own. Fertile spots as
any upon earth, covered with hard-wood forests and watered by many
rivers, when seen from the shade of an awning over a ship's deck
they are as alluring as the stage of a theatre set for a sylvan
opera. Go a thousand yards back from that smiling coast, however,
and the illusion disappears, for you find a country whose hostile
natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers combine to make it deserving
of its title—“the white man's graveyard.” The statesmen of the
Wilhelmstrasse must have taken a long look into the future when they
raised the German flag over such lands as these. The returns they
have yielded thus far would have discouraged a man less sanguine
than William Hohenzollern. Though subsidised German steam-ships ply
along their coasts, though their forests resound to the clank and
clang of German railway-builders' tools, though the plantations of
government-assisted settlers dot the back country, though she has
spent on them thousands of lives and millions of marks, Germany's
only returns thus far have been a few annual tons of ivory, copra,
and rubber, some excellent but unprofitable harbours, and many lonely
stations where her sons contract fevers and pessimism. But I would
stake my life that this out-of-the-way, back-of-beyond, sun-blistered,
fever-stricken German Africa will be a great colony some day.
From the care with which they are laid out, from the perfection of
their sanitary arrangements, from the substantiality of their public
buildings and official residences and their suitability to the
climatic conditions, the travellers who confine their investigations
to the coast are readily deceived into thinking that Tanga and
Bagamoyo and Dar-es-Salam and Swakopmund and Duala are the gateways
to rich and prosperous colonies. From the very outset, however,
the imperial government based its claim for popular support in its
colonial ventures upon the erroneous assumption that German colonies
would attract Germans, and that in this way the language of the
Fatherland would be spread abroad and eventually supplant that of
Shakespeare. The Germans, however, have stubbornly refused to go to
their own colonies, preferring those where English is the speech and
where there are fewer officials and more freedom. To-day, therefore,
you find the model German towns, so perfectly built that you feel as
though you were walking through a municipal exhibition, almost wholly
peopled by brass-bound, hide-bound officials, while the German traders
are carrying on thriving businesses under the English flag at Mombasa
and Zanzibar and Sierra Leone.
Now, Germany has no one but herself to blame for this condition of
affairs, having brought it about by the short-sightedness of her
colonial policy and the harshness and incapacity of her officials.
Intending to found industrial colonies, she created military
settlements instead, administering and exploiting them, not as if they
were German lands, but as if they were an enemy's country. Nothing
emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's
African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or
officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of
the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a
malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus
driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up
their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. The
soldiers, for want of something better to do, are forever seeking
advancement by making unnecessary expeditions into the hinterland for
the purpose of “punishing” the natives, thus causing them to migrate
by wholesale into British, Belgian, and even Portuguese territory, so
that the German colonies are left without labour and the plantations
are consequently being ruined.
The needless severity of Germany's colonial rule is graphically
illustrated by the fact that during 1911 there were 14,849 criminal
convictions in German East Africa alone, or one conviction to every
637 natives; while in the adjoining protectorate of Uganda, among the
same type of natives but under a British administration, the ratio
of convictions was only one in 2,047. There is not a town in German
East Africa where you cannot see boys of from eight to fourteen
years, shackled together by chains running from iron collar to iron
collar and guarded by soldiers with loaded rifles, doing the work of
men under a deadly sun. Natives with bleeding backs are constantly
making their way into British and Belgian territory with tales of
maltreatment by German planters, while stories of German tyranny,
brutality, and corruption—of some instances of which I was myself a
witness—form staple topics of conversation on every club veranda and
steamer's deck along these coasts. In German Southwest Africa the
dearth of labour, owing to the practical extermination of the Herero
nation in Germany's last “little war” in that colony, has become a
serious and pressing problem. In a single campaign—which cost Germany
five hundred million marks and the lives of two thousand soldiers,
and which could have been avoided altogether by a little tact and
kindness—half the total population of the colony was killed in
battle or driven into the desert to perish. That is why the builders
of the Swakopmund-Otavi Railway in German Southwest Africa—the
longest two-foot-gauge line in the world—have to send to Europe for
their labour. Until Germany makes a radical change in her methods
of colonial administration, and until she learns that traders and
labourers are more essential to a colony's prosperity than pompous
and domineering officials, her colonial accounts will continue to
stand heaviest on the debit side of the ledger.
Successful colonial administration in Africa, as in all tropical
countries, is largely a matter of temperament, and the stolid sons of
the Fatherland seem, strangely enough, to be more quickly affected by
the demoralising climate and to be irritated more easily than either
the English or the French. The Englishman's sense of justice and the
Frenchman's sense of humour are their chief assets as successful
colonisers and rulers of alien peoples, but the German colonial
official, who is generally serious by nature and almost always
domineering as the result of his training, possesses neither of these
invaluable attributes and is heavily handicapped in consequence. It
is no easy task with which he is confronted, remember. The loneliness
and the privations of the white man's life, and the debility that
comes from the heat and the rains and the fevers, when combined with
the strain of governing and educating an inconceivably lazy, stubborn,
stupid, and intractable people, make the job of an African official
one of the most trying in the world. The loneliness and the climate
seem to grip a German as they never do an Englishman, and he becomes
irritable and ugly and unreasonably annoyed by trifles, so that when
a native fails to get out of his way quickly enough, or to salute him
with the punctiliousness which he considers his due, he flies into a
rage and orders the man to be flogged. The native goes back to his
village with a bleeding back and hatred in his heart, and, as likely
as not, a bloody, costly, and troublesome native uprising ensues.
The African native is, after all, nothing but an overgrown and very
aggravating child, and his upbringing is a job for school-teachers
instead of drill sergeants, and the sooner the imperial government
appreciates that fact the better.
I went to German East Africa, which is the Kaiser's star colony,
expecting to be deeply impressed; I came away deeply disappointed. It
is only about fifty miles from Zanzibar across to Dar-es-Salam, the
capital of the colony, but the local steamer, which is the size of a
Hudson River tugboat and rolls horribly on the slightest provocation,
manages to use up the better part of a day in making the trip. Seen
from the steamer's deck, Dar-es-Salam presents one of the most
enchanting pictures that I know, and every one who goes ashore there
does so with high expectations. Imagine, if you can, a city of two
hundred thousand people, with the imposing, red-roofed schools and
churches and hospitals and barracks and municipal buildings of, say,
Düsseldorf, and the white-walled, broad-verandaed, bungalow dwellings
of southern California; with concrete wharves and cement sidewalks and
beautifully macadamised roads and many public parks: imagine all this,
I say, dropped down in the midst of a palm grove on one of the hottest
and unhealthiest coasts in the world—that is Dar-es-Salam. The hotel
is, barring the one at Kandy in Ceylon and another at Ancon in the
Canal Zone, the best and most beautiful tropical hostelry I have ever
seen, but, as it is owned and run by the government, for the benefit
of its officials, its manager, a blond, florid-faced, pompadoured
Prussian, was as independent as a hotel clerk in a city where a
presidential convention is going on. Just as in the other German
colonies, I found East Africa to be suffering from a severe attack
of militarism. I saw more sentries and patrols and guards during my
four days' stay in Dar-es-Salam than I did in Constantinople during
the Turkish Revolution. I was lulled to sleep by regimental bugles
and I was awakened by them again at daybreak, and I never set foot
out of doors without meeting a column of native soldiery, their black
faces peering out stolidly from beneath the sun-aprons, their spindle
shanks encased in spiral puttees, their feet rising and falling in the
senseless “parade step” in time to the monotonous “_rechts! links!
rechts! links!_” of the German sergeant. But what struck me most
forcibly about Dar-es-Salam was that it appeared to have no business.
Apparently the soldiers had frightened it away. The harbours of
Mombasa and Zanzibar and Beira and Lourenço Marques are alive with
steamers taking on or discharging cargo (and quite two out of three of
them fly the German flag), and their streets are lined with offices
and warehouses and “factories” (over the doors of many of which are
signs bearing German names), and their wharves are piled high with
bales of merchandise going to or coming from the four corners of the
earth; but in the harbour of Dar-es-Salam, as in all the other German
harbours I visited, the only vessels are white German gun-boats or
rusty German tramps; its streets are lined with government offices
instead of business offices; on its wharves are a few puncheons of
palm-oil, or other products of the bush, and nothing more.
[Illustration: Warundi warriors. German East Africa.
Illustration: Native infantry. German East Africa. A few years ago
these men were just such savages as those shown above.
THE HAND OF THE WAR LORD IN GERMAN AFRICA.]
However much the administration of the German colonies may be open
to criticism, and however slow they may have been in commercial
development, I have nothing but praise and admiration for the
accomplishments of their railway-builders. From Dar-es-Salam I
travelled inland by railway motor-car nearly to Kilamatinde, a
distance of three hundred and seventy miles, through one of the most
savage regions in Africa, over one of the best graded and ballasted
roadbeds I have ever seen. The line is now being pushed forward from
Kilamatinde toward Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, which it will reach,
so the chief engineer assured me, by the summer of 1914. From Ujiji,
which, by the way, is the place where Stanley discovered Livingstone,
a steamer service will be inaugurated to Albertville, on the Belgian
shore of the lake, whence a line is under construction to the
navigable waters of the Lualaba, which is one of the chief tributaries
of the Congo; while another line of steamers will ply between Ujiji
and Kituta, in northeastern Rhodesia, which point the British
Cape-to-Cairo system is approaching. By the close of 1914, in all
probability therefore, the traveller who lands at Dar-es-Salam will
be able to travel by train, with the passage across Lake Tanganyika
as the only interruption, to the Cape of Good Hope, or by train and
river steamer to the mouth of the Congo, and in perfect comfort and
safety all the way. As Walfish Bay, the only harbour in Southwest
Africa worthy of the name, belongs to England, the Germans, finding
themselves unable to buy it and appreciating that a harbourless colony
is all but worthless, promptly set to work and built themselves
artificial harbours at Swakopmund and at Lüderitz Bay, though at
appalling cost. That Germany is exceedingly anxious to acquire
Walfish Bay, and that she stands ready to make almost any reasonable
concession to obtain it, there is little doubt. The mere fact that
Walfish Bay is owned by England is a source of constant aggravation
to the Germans, for it lies squarely in the middle of their Southwest
African coast-line, its roomy roadstead and deep anchorage being in
sharp contrast to the German port of Lüderitz Bay, which is being
rapidly sanded up, and that of Swakopmund, a harbour on which the
Berlin Government has already thrown away several millions of marks.
Lüderitz Bay is already connected with the inland town of Keetmanshoop
by three hundred and fifty miles of narrow-gauge line, and plans are
now under consideration for pushing this southeastward so as to link
up with the South African system near Kimberley, while from Swakopmund
another iron highway, four hundred miles long, gives access to the
Otavi copper-mining country and will doubtless be extended, in the not
far-distant future, to the Rhodesian border, tapping the main line of
the Cape-to-Cairo system in the neighbourhood of the Victoria Falls.
[Illustration: Mr. and Mrs. Powell travelling by railway motor-car in
German Africa.
Illustration: A way-station on the line of the German East African
Railway.
RAILROADING THROUGH A JUNGLE.]
I have laid considerable stress upon the subject of railways,
because it seems to me that in them lies the chief hope of the German
colonies, for wherever the railway goes there goes civilisation.
Throughout the vast and potentially rich regions thus being opened
up by the locomotive the imperial government is pouring out money
unstintingly in the construction of roads, bridges, and reservoirs,
the sinking of artesian wells, the establishment of telegraph
lines and postal routes, the erection of schools and hospitals, in
furnishing trees to the planters and machinery and live-stock to the
farmers, and in assisting immigration. So, if keeping everlastingly at
it brings success, I cannot but feel that the day will come when these
officers and officials, these soldiers and settlers, these traders and
tribesmen, will find their places and play their parts in the Kaiser's
imperial scheme of a new and greater Germany over the sea.