“DARKEST AFRICA” FINALLY DISCOVERED.
Oseba then turned his instruments on Africa. He told his audience that while along the fringe of this half-mythical land there were glimpses of a very ancient movement, the vast interior, until almost yesterday, was a veritable terra incognito, and to-day it is not easy to separate the grain of truth concerning its history from the cartload of fiction.
But Britain was now rolling up the sombre curtain, and opening the doors of her fabulous treasure-house that the “grateful” (?) nations might enter and take rooms.
Africa, the sage told his audience, covered one-fifth of the land surface of the outer globe, and had a population of 150,000,000 souls, or more than live in all the Americas and their islands. It has a doubtful history, thousands of years old. It was once so “civilised” that it housed three-hundred Christian Bishops, yet, to-day there is but a small portion—the Cape—that can claim more than a mere introduction to modern civilisation.
The orator informed the people, as he threw a series of pictures on the canvas, that many of the European nations were striving to extend their borders in Africa, and to the sorrow of the natives, they were now being pretty generally “discovered.”