The German Colonies are marked in solid black.
CHAPTER XIX.
GERMANY'S COLONIAL EMPIRE.
About the year 1880 the rulers of Germany began to think of founding a colonial empire. There were many reasons why it seemed to them advisable that they should extend their dominion overseas. Germany had become a great manufacturing nation, and she needed new markets in which to sell her surplus goods, and tropical lands which would give her large and cheap supplies of the raw material for making them. Further, many of her people, anxious to better themselves, were emigrating to America,[120] where they were lost to Germany. It was thought that, had she possessed colonies, Germans would have settled in them instead of going to America, and thus would not have reduced the strength of the Fatherland. Many patriotic Germans wished to see their country a great naval power, and they knew that colonies could neither be obtained nor maintained without a big navy. They, therefore, were in favour of colonial expansion, because it would force Germany to become powerful on the seas.
About this time the attention of the world was specially directed to Africa. The travels of Livingstone[121] and Stanley[122] and other explorers, British, French, German, and Italian, were revealing the "Dark Continent" as a new sphere for the expansion of the European Powers. Almost immediately they began to "peg out their claims." A number of clever writers in Germany began to point out to their fellow-countrymen that unless they set up a colonial empire they would be left behind in the race. Before long they had persuaded the people that overseas trade, ships of war, and colonies were the three things that Germany must provide herself with, or be content to continue as a second-rate Power. Most of the writers thought that colonies could be obtained in a lawful way, but a historian[123] who had great influence on the ruling classes taught openly that the best method of winning a colonial empire was to defeat and despoil Britain. This teaching suited the German mind exactly, and gradually it gained such ground that it became almost a national policy.
In 1886 what is known as the "great scramble for Africa" began, and Germany played her part in it. In Eastern Africa her explorers had made many important discoveries, and as far back as 1860 one of them said, "I am persuaded that in a short time a colony established in East Africa would be most successful, and after two or three years would become self-supporting." Not, however, until 1884 was an attempt made to set up a German colony in this part of the world. In that year three German political agents, in the disguise of needy travellers, crossed over from Zanzibar to the mainland, and began making treaties by which the local chiefs signed away their country.
Some of these treaties were not worth the paper they were written on, for the chiefs were vassals of the Sultan of Zanzibar, who was under British protection. Nevertheless, a German fleet was sent to Zanzibar, and the Sultan was forced, at a price of £200,000, to yield up his territory on the mainland from Cape Delgado to a line drawn from the mouth of the Umbe River to the Victoria Nyanza. The British afterwards proclaimed a protectorate over the remainder of the Sultan's African dominions.
At the beginning of the present war German East Africa covered an area of 364,000 square miles—that is, it was almost double the size of Germany, and had an estimated population of over 7½ millions, the whites numbering a little over 5,000. From the low-lying coast lands it rises to lofty and irregular mountains, which form the outer buttress of a plateau some 3,000 or 4,000 feet in height. From the middle of this plateau streams are thrown off north to the Victoria Nyanza,[124] west to Lake Tanganyika,[125] and east to the Indian Ocean. Parts of this plateau are mere desert, waterless and scrub-covered, with loose shingle, dried-up water-courses, and bare, fantastic rocks. Other parts are well watered and fertile, and in these favourable regions the Germans have developed agriculture greatly. Prior to the war, rubber, copal, bark, fibre, teak, mahogany, coffee, tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, etc., were largely grown and exported; gold, coal, graphite, iron, salt, and precious stones were mined; and ivory was obtained from the elephants, which still roam the forests in large numbers. When the war began, German East Africa was making good and steady progress.
The Germans did not win the colony without considerable fighting with the natives, and one of the risings which took place in 1904 cost East Africa the lives of about 120,000 men, women, and children. The Germans have no genius for dealing with natives; their brutal, blustering methods are certain to provoke strife wherever they obtain a foothold. They have, however, a genius for organizing, and this is seen in the towns which they have built, and the eight fairly good harbours which they have constructed on the coast. The name of the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, means "the harbour of peace;" it is a good port and a delightful place. German East Africa suffered a great shock when the Uganda railway was built by the British and the trade of the lake region was thus captured. The Germans replied by building two lines which gave the quickest access to British Central Africa and to the Southern Congo.
