Washington and the Riddle of Peace

by H. G. Wells

“Why not an African Napoleon presently?” said the young man, a little wanting, I thought, in that abject meekness which is the American ideal of colored behavior.

He was imagining, I suppose, something happening in Africa rather after the fashion of the emancipation of Hayti and of great African armies pushing their former rulers back to the sea. But Col. Taylor has recently suggested another possibility, namely, that of France finding herself in the grip of a black Pretorian Guard. It is a just, conceivable fancy—a Pretorian Guard, French-speaking and ultra-patriotic, keeping French Socialists and pacifists and Bolsheviks in their proper place.

I do not believe very much in either of these possibilities nor even in the third possibility of European powers fighting each other with black armies in Africa, but I do perceive that dreams of a world peace will remain very insubstantial dreams, indeed, until we can work out a scheme or at least general principles of action for the treatment of Africa between the Sahara and the Zambesi River, a scheme that will give some sort of a quietus to the jealousies and hostilities evoked by the economic and political exploitations of annexed and mandatory territories upon nationalist and competitive lines in this region of the earth.

For it seems to be the fact that tropical and sub-tropical Africa has another function in the world than to be the home of the great family of negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other products of no great value to the native population. European civilization can scarcely get along without these natural resources of Africa.

Now here we are up against a problem entirely different from the problem that arises in the case of India, Indo-China and China, which is the problem of a politically powerless but essentially civilized population which can be trusted to modernize itself and come into line with the existing efficient powers if only it is protected from oppressive and disintegrating forces while it adjusts itself.

Africa is quite incapable of anything of the sort. Negro Africa is mainly still in a state of tribal barbarism; in the latter half of the nineteenth century its peoples were in a condition of deepening disorder and misery due to the spread of European diseases and to the raiding of the Arab and native adventurers who had obtained possession of modern firearms. The small village communities of tropical Africa were quite unable to stand up against the brigand enterprises of mere bands of ruffians armed with rifles.

The scramble for Africa on the part of the European great powers toward the close of the nineteenth century—a scramble largely dictated by economic appetites—did a little to mitigate the miseries and destruction in progress by establishing a sort of order through large areas of Africa, a sort of order that in some regions was scarcely less cruel than the disorders it replaced. But if continuing access to the resources of Africa is to be maintained, and if a return to the Arab raider and general chaos and massacres is to be avoided, it is clear that in some form the control of the central parts of Africa by the modern civilized world must continue.

But we must be clear upon one point. If that control is to be maintained, as at present it is maintained by various European powers acting independently of one another and competing against one another, in the not very remote future Central Africa is bound to become a cause of war. Central Africa was one of the great prizes before the German imagination in 1914, and it is now held in a state of unstable equilibrium by the chief European victors in the Great War.

As they recuperate the African danger will increase. Africa, next after Eastern Europe and the Near East, is likely to become in the course of a dozen years or so the chief danger region of the world.

It behooves all those who are dreaming of an organized world peace through an Association of Nations to keep this African rock ahead in mind and to think out the possible method of linking this great region with the rest of the world in a universal peace scheme.