“ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!”
In Bulawayo, which is in Matabeleland, stands one of the most
significant and impressive statues in the world. From the middle of
that dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the
bronze image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, his hands
clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in
profound meditation northward over Africa. Cecil John Rhodes was
the dreamer's name, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel
stretching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of
the Mediterranean; a railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa
through the centre and picking up trade all the way.”
If ever a man was a strange blending of dreamer and materialist, of
utopian and buccaneer, of Clive and Hastings with Hawkins and Drake,
it was Cecil Rhodes. In other words, he dreamed great dreams and let
no scruples stand in the way of their fulfilment. Having trekked over
nearly the whole of that vast territory that stretches northward
from the Orange and the Vaal to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, his
imagination saw in this fertile, sparsely settled country virgin soil
for the building up of a new and greater Britain. The predominance
of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, and the fact that the
territory under British control stretched with but a single break
from the mouths of the Nile to Table Bay, gave rise in the great
empire-builder's mind to the project of a trunk-line railway “from
the Cape to Cairo,” and under the British flag all the way. Though
Rhodes's dream of an “All Red” railway was rudely shattered by the
Convention of 1889, which allowed Germany to stretch a barrier across
the continent from the Indian Ocean to the Congo State, he never
abandoned the hope that a British zone would eventually be acquired
through German East Africa, either by treaty or purchase, even going
so far as to open negotiations with the Kaiser to this end on his own
initiative.
It was a picturesque vision, said the men to whom he confided his
dream, but impractical and impossible, for in those days the line
from Alexandria to Assuan and another from Cape Town to Kimberley
practically comprised the railway system of the continent, and five
thousand miles of unmapped forest, desert, and jungle, filled with
hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers, lay between. But
the man who had added to the British Empire a territory greater
than France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had
organised the corporation controlling the South African diamond
fields; who had put down a formidable native uprising by going unarmed
and unaccompanied into the rebel camp; and who was responsible, more
than any other person, for the Boer War, was not of the stamp which is
daunted by either pessimistic predictions or obvious obstacles.
It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of
a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond
fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding
of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of
Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped,
apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to
push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of
Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise—the actual
proof, as it were, of the British occupation. But the Boer War was
scarcely over, the national purse was drained almost dry, and even
the most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous expense and
problematical success of building a railway into the heart of a savage
and unknown country.
Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government for assistance
in this imperial enterprise, for the man who had added Zululand,
Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland
to the empire felt that the empire owed him something in return. He
first laid his scheme before Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, who
said that nothing could be done until he had a closer estimate of
the expense. Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying survey
of the route made in double-quick time, and with the figures in his
pocket hastened back to London. This time the premier sent him to see
Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach,
who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure of national
funds, was frigid and discouraging, but finally relaxed enough to say:
“Get a proper survey made of your proposed railway, with estimates
drawn up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too
unreasonable we will see what can be done.” Fortified with this shred
of hope, Rhodes again betook himself to the country north of the
Zambezi, and, after months of work, hardship, and privation, facing
death from native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sickness,
his men weakened by malaria and his animals killed by the dreaded
tsetse-fly, he returned to England and presented his revised surveys
and estimates to the chancellor of the exchequer. That immaculately
clad statesman negligently twirled his eye-glass on its string as he
regarded with obvious disfavour the fever-sunken cheeks and unkempt
appearance of the pioneer. “Really, Mr. Rhodes,” he remarked coldly,
“I fear it is quite out of the question for her Majesty's government
to lend your scheme its countenance or assistance.” It is a pleasingly
human touch that as the indignant empire-builder went out of the
minister's room he slammed the door so that the pictures rattled on
the wall.
After dinner that night Rhodes strolled over to see a friend of
Kimberley days, a Hebrew financier named Alfred Beit, in whom he found
a sympathetic listener. As Rhodes took his hat to go, Beit casually
remarked, “Look here, Rhodes, you'll want a start. Four and a half
million pounds is a big sum to raise. We'll do half a million of it,
Wernher [his partner] and I.” That meant success. Though ministers of
the Crown turned a cold shoulder to the great imperialist who came to
them with a great imperial enterprise, help came from two German Jews
who had become naturalised Englishmen. The next day the City brought
the total up to a million and a half, and within little more than a
fortnight the entire four and a half millions were subscribed, the
three names, Rhodes, Beit, and Wernher, being accepted by the man in
the street as sufficient guarantee of success. It was in this fashion
that Cecil Rhodes raised the money for another great stride in his
railway march northward.
By 1904 the road had progressed as far as the Victoria Falls of
the Zambezi, where it crosses the river on a wonderful steel-arch
bridge—the highest in the world—its span, looking for all the world
like a frosted cobweb, rising four hundred and twenty feet above the
angry waters. “I want the bridge to cross the river so close to the
falls,” directed Rhodes, “that the travellers will have the spray in
their faces.” “That is impossible,” objected the engineers. “What you
ask cannot be done.” “Then I will find some one who can do it,” said
Rhodes—and he did. The bridge was built where he wanted it, and as
the Zambezi Express rolls out above the torrent the passengers have
to close the windows to keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906
the rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a mining centre
in northern Rhodesia; three years later found it at Bwana M'kubwa, on
the Congo border. Here the task of construction was taken up by the
Katanga Railway Company, and in February, 1911, freight and passenger
trains were in operation straight through to Elisabethville, in the
heart of the Belgian Congo, two thousand three hundred and sixteen
miles north of Cape Town and only two hundred and eighty miles from
the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.
As you sit on the observation platform of your electric-lighted
sleeping-car, anywhere along that section of the “Cape-to-Cairo”
between Cape Town and the Zambezi, you rub your eyes incredulously
as you watch the rolling, verdure-clad plains stretching away to the
foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire absence of those
dense forests and steaming jungles which have always been associated,
in the minds of most of us, with Central Africa. The more you see of
this open, homely, rather monotonous country the harder it becomes
for you to convince yourself that you are really in the heart of that
mysterious, storied Dark Continent and not back in America again.
And the illusion is completed by the people, for the only natives you
see are careless, happy, decently clad darkies who might have come
straight from the levees of Vicksburg or New Orleans, while on every
station platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing fellows
in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their flannel shirts open
at the neck, their broad-brimmed hats cocked rakishly—just such types,
indeed, as were common beyond the Mississippi twenty years ago, before
store clothes and the motor-car had spoiled the picturesqueness of our
own frontier.
North of the Zambezi it is a different story, however, for there it is
frontier still, with many of a frontier's drawbacks, for the prices
of necessities are exorbitant and of luxuries fantastic; skilled
workmen can command almost any wages they may ask, and common labour
is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scientifically trained farmer,
and the skilled workman have rich opportunities in this quarter of
Africa, however, for the mineral wealth is amazing, much of the soil
is excellent, and civilisation is advancing over a great area with
three-league boots.
For excitement, variety, and picturesqueness I doubt if the journey
through Barotseland and the Katanga district of the Congo can be
equalled on any railway in the world. It is true that the Uganda
Railway—which, by the way, does not touch Uganda at all—has been
better advertised, but in quantity of game and facilities for hunting
it the territory through which it runs is no whit superior to that
traversed by the “Cape-to-Cairo.” Stroll a mile up or down the Zambezi
from the railway bridge and you can see hippos as easily as you can
at the Zoo in Central Park; in Northwest Rhodesia herds of bush-buck,
zebras, and ostriches scamper away at sight of the train; and as you
lie in your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on lonely
sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see the gleam of the
camp-fires by means of which the railway employees keep them away.
On one occasion, when our train was lying on a siding south of the
Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly exclaimed, “Look
there, gentlemen—look over there!” His excitement was justified, for
from over a screen of bushes, scarcely a biscuit's throw away, a herd
of five giraffes craned their preposterous necks and peered at us
curiously. Once, when I was travelling through Northwest Rhodesia,
our engine struck a bull elephant which had decided to contest the
right of way. As the train was running at full speed, both engine and
elephant went off the track. Returning that way some days later, we
noted that the local station-master had scraped the gargantuan skull
to the bone, filled it with earth, and set it on the station platform
as a jardinière to grow geraniums in. He was an ingenious fellow.
From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern section of the great
transcontinental system was being pushed steadily, if slowly,
southward. The difficulties of river transportation experienced by
the two Sudanese expeditions had proved conclusively that if the
Sudan was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it must be by
rail rather than by river. It was the Khalifa who was unconsciously
responsible for the rapid completion of much of the Sudanese section
of the “Cape-to-Cairo,” for, in order to come to hand-grips with him,
Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway down the desert to
Khartoum at record speed, laying close on two miles of track between
each sunrise and sunset. There it halted for a number of years;
but after the British had done their work, and Khartoum had been
transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fanaticism into a city
with broad, shaded streets, along which stalks law and order in the
khaki tunic of a Sudanese policeman, the railway-building fever, which
affects some men as irresistibly as the _Wanderlust_ does others,
took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was again pushed
southward, along the banks of the Blue Nile, to Sennar, one hundred
and fifty-eight miles south of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910,
of several iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the White
Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika some twelve hundred
miles away.
That a few more years will see the northern section extending
southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and the southern
section northward to Lake Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed,
the plans are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on the
Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders are even now at work.
But when the Victoria Nyanza has been reached by the one section,
and Tanganyika by the other, there will come a halt, for between the
two rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of intervening
territory—and that territory is German.
Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty or purchase, a
railway zone across German East Africa, such as we have obtained
for the Canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much
as though there would never be an all-British railway from the
Mediterranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of Cecil
John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There are several reasons
why Germany is not inclined to give England the much-desired right
of way. First, because between the two nations a bitter rivalry,
political and commercial, exists, and the Germans feel that already
far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the Union Jack;
secondly, because the Germans are, as I have already mentioned in the
preceding chapter, themselves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam,
the capital of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by
means of this line they expect to divert to their own ports the trade
of all that portion of inner Africa lying between Rhodesia and the
Sudan; thirdly, because it is unlikely in the extreme that England
would give Germany such a _quid pro quo_ as she would demand—as,
for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port in German
Southwest Africa, or of the British protectorate of Zanzibar, or of
both; fourthly, because the Germans now have the British in just such
a predicament regarding the completion of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway
as the British have the Germans regarding the completion of the Bagdad
railway. In other words, the only condition on which either country
will permit its rival's railway to be built through its territory is
internationalisation.
That there will ever be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean
to the Cape seems to me exceedingly doubtful, for the political,
territorial, and financial obstacles are many, and not easily
to be disposed of; but that the not-far-distant future will see
the completion, under international auspices, of this great
transcontinental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as that the
locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar-frost on the rails
disappears before the sun. Rhodes always said that the success of such
a system must largely depend on the junctions to the east and west
coasts, which would affect such a line very much as tributary streams
affect a river. A number of such feeders are already in operation and
others are rapidly building. Beginning at the north, the main line
of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is tapped at Cairo by the railways from Port
Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the Sudan, a constantly
increasing stream of traffic flows in over the line from Port Sudan,
a harbour recently built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda
Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on the Indian Ocean
and Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza, whence there is a steamer
service to Entebbe in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German
East Africa, the Germans are rushing a railway through to Ujiji, on
the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer-in-chief assuring me that
it would be completed and in operation by the summer of 1914. From
Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and Rhodesia
Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic inland to its junction
with the main line at Bulawayo. Still farther south a line from the
Portuguese possession of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system
at Mafeking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while Kimberley is the
junction for a line from Durban, in Natal, and De Aar for feeders from
East London and Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope.
From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, a railway has
already been pushed nearly five hundred miles into the interior
of German Southwest Africa which will eventually link up with the
“Cape-to-Cairo” in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running through
German territory practically all the way. Still another line is being
built inland from Lobito Bay in Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to
join the transcontinental system near the Congo border, nearly half
of its total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. It is
estimated that by means of this line the journey between England and
the cities of the Rand will be shortened by at least six days. It
will be seen, therefore, that the “Cape-to-Cairo” system will have
eleven great feeders, eight of which are already completed and in
operation, while all of the remaining four will be carrying freight
and passengers before the close of 1914.
When the last rail of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is laid, and the last spike
driven, its builders may say, without fear of contradiction, “In
all the world no road like this.” And in the nature of things it is
impossible that there can ever be its like again, for there will be
no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to conquer. It will
start on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean and end under the
shadow of Table Mountain. In between, it will pass through jungle,
swamp, and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants play
by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew up the slopes of
snow-capped mountains, meander through the cultivated patches of
strange inland tribes, stride long-legged athwart treacherous,
pestilential swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval forests,
and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept veldt, until it
finally ends in the great antipodean metropolis on the edge of the
Southern Ocean. On its way it traverses nearly seventy degrees of
latitude, samples every climate, touches every degree of temperature,
experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the swamp-lands of
the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver will lean gasping from his
blistered cab; at Kimberley, in the highlands of the Rand, he
will stamp with numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his
half-frozen fingers.
The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo Limited at the Quay
Station in Alexandria, in response to the conductor's cry of “All
aboard! All aboard for Cape Town!” can lean from the window of his
compartment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty outlines
of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments of antiquity which were
hoary with age when London was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was
yet to be founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he will
pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city beside which Athens
and Rome are ludicrously modern; at Assuan he will catch a glimpse
of the greatest dam ever built by man—a mile and a quarter long and
built of masonry weighing a million tons—holding in check the waters
of the longest river in the world; at Khartoum, peering through
the blue-glass windows which protect the passengers' eyes from the
blinding sun glare, he can see the statue of Gordon, seated on his
bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in search of the
white helmets that came too late; at Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled
by the shimmering waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior
the greatest of all fresh-water seas; at Ujiji he will see natives
in German uniforms drilling on the spot where Stanley discovered
Livingstone. He will hold his breath in awe as the train rolls out
over the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him
the mightiest cataract in the world—an unbroken sheet of falling,
roaring, smoking water, two and a half times the height and ten times
the width of the American Fall at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see
the great pits in the earth which supply the women of the world with
diamonds; in the outskirts of Johannesburg he will see the mountains
of ore from which comes one-third of the gold supply of the world. And
finally, when his train has at last come to a halt under the glass
roof of the Victoria Terminal in Cape Town, with close on six thousand
miles of track behind it, the traveller, if he has any imagination and
any appreciation in his soul, will make a little pilgrimage to that
spot on the slopes of Table Mountain known as “World's View,” where
another statue of that same bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, this
time guarded by many British lions, stares northward over Africa. He
will take his stand in front of that mighty memorial and, lifting
his hat, will say: “You, sir, were a great man, the greatest this
benighted continent has ever known, and if one day it is transformed
into a land of civilisation, of peace, and of prosperity, it will be
due, more than anything else, to the great iron highway, from the
Nile's mouth to the continent's end, which is the fulfilment of your
dream.”