There remains one great nation not yet named in this chapter which also had extensive possessions in Africa until the Great War—Germany. It was not until rather a late date in the story that Germany, under the strong hand of Bismarck, had been welded into a nation at all. The year 1884, when the German Colonisation Society was founded, may be taken as the date when she set to work with the deliberate and avowed purpose of taking her place among the colonising nations. It was less a matter, with her, of shouldering a burden thrust upon her, than of going out of her way to seek the burden, in her fear lest the other nations should possess themselves of all the unclaimed spaces before she could stretch out a hand for them.
Acting from this motive, she obtained, on the west coast of Africa, the large territory of the Cameroons—now, since the Great War, under the French mandate—of German South-West Africa—now under the mandate of the Union of South Africa—and of German East Africa—now under the mandate of Great Britain.
Of all these, the last was perhaps of chief importance from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxon dominance, because there was a small portion of its north-eastern boundary where it joined with the Belgian Congo, and it was just this, and only this, junction which intervened between the Anglo-Saxon protectorate of Uganda on the north and the long lake of which the southern shore was part of Rhodesia. That is to say, that this junction of Germany with Belgium alone prevented an all-British route, by river, lake, or land, from the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope.
With the mandate to Great Britain of German East Africa, which was one of the results of the Great War, that intervention has been removed.
This then, in bare outline, is the way in which the burden of Africa has been distributed on the shoulders of the white men.
SECTION II.—INDIA AND THE FAR EAST
India