An African Adventure

by Isaac Frederick Marcosson

Woven into its fabric is the story of a German conspiracy that was as definite a cause of the Great War as the Balkan mess or any other phase of Teutonic international meddling. Along its highway the American mining engineer has registered a little known evidence of his achievement abroad. The route taps civilization and crosses the last frontiers of progress. The South African end discloses an illuminating example of profitable nationalization. Over it still broods the personality of the man who conceived it and who left his impress and his name on an empire. Attention has been directed anew to the enterprise from the fact that shortly before I reached Africa two aviators flew from Cairo to the Cape and their actual flying time was exactly sixty-eight hours.

The unbroken iron spine that was to link North and South Africa and which Rhodes beheld in his vision of the future, will probably not be built for some years. Traffic in Central Africa at the moment does not justify it. Besides, the navigable rivers in the Belgian Congo, Egypt, and the Soudan lend themselves to the rail and water route which, with one short overland gap, now enables you to travel the whole way from Cape to Cairo.

The very inception of the Cape-to-Cairo project gives you a glimpse of the working of the Rhodes mind. He left the carrying out of details to subordinates. When he looked at the map of Africa,—and he was forever studying maps,—and ran that historic line through it from end to end and said, "It must be all red," he took no cognizance of the extraordinary difficulties that lay in the way. He saw, but he did not heed, the rainbow of many national flags that spanned the continent. A little thing like millions of square miles of jungle, successions of great lakes, or wild and primitive regions peopled with cannibals, meant nothing. Money and energy were to him merely means to an end.

When General "Chinese" Gordon, for example, told him that he had refused a roomful of silver for his services in exterminating the Mongolian bandits Rhodes looked at him in surprise and said: "Why didn't you take it? What is the earthly use of having ideas if you haven't the money with which to carry them out?" Here you have the keynote of the whole Rhodes business policy. A project had to be carried through regardless of expense. It applied to the Cape-to-Cairo dream just as it applied to every other enterprise with which he was associated.

The all-rail route would cost billions upon billions, although now that German prestige in Africa is ended it would not be a physical and political impossibility. A modification of the original plan into a combination rail and river scheme permits the consummation of the vision of thirty years ago. The southern end is all-rail mainly because the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia are civilized and prosperous countries. I made the entire journey by train from Capetown to the rail-head at Bukama in the Belgian Congo, a distance of 2,700 miles, the longest continuous link in the whole scheme. This trip can be made, if desirable, in a through car in about nine days.

I then continued northward, down the Lualaba River,—Livingstone thought it was the Nile—then by rail, and again on the Lualaba through the posts of Kongolo, Kindu and Ponthierville to Stanleyville on the Congo River. This is the second stage of the Cape-to-Cairo Route and knocks off an additional 890 miles and another twelve days. Here I left the highway to Egypt and went down the Congo and my actual contact with the famous line ended. I could have gone on, however, and reached Cairo, with luck, in less than eight weeks.

From Stanleyville you go to Mahagi, which is on the border between the Congo and Uganda. This is the only overland gap in the whole route. It covers roughly,—and the name is no misnomer I am told,—680 miles through the jungle and skirts the principal Congo gold fields. A road has been built and motor cars are available. The railway route from Stanleyville to Mahagi, which will link the Congo and the Nile, is surveyed and would have been finished by this time but for the outbreak of the Great War. The Belgian Minister of the Colonies, with whom I travelled in the Congo assured me that his Government would commence the construction within the next two years, thus enabling the traveller to forego any hiking on the long journey.

Mahagi is on the western side of Lake Albert and is destined to be the lake terminus of the projected Congo-Nile Railway which will be an extension of the Soudan Railways. Here you begin the journey that enlists both railways and steamers and which gives practically a straight ahead itinerary to Cairo. You journey on the Nile by way of Rejaf, Kodok,—(the Fashoda that was)—to Kosti, where you reach the southern rail-head of the Soudan Railways. Thence it is comparatively easy, as most travellers know, to push on through Khartum, Berber, Wady Halfa and Assuan to the Egyptian capital. The distance from Mahagi to Cairo is something like 2,700 miles while the total mileage from Capetown to Cairo, along the line that I have indicated, is 7,000 miles.

This, in brief, is the way you make the trip that Rhodes dreamed about, but not the way he planned it. There are various suggestions for alternate routes after you reach Bukama or, to be more exact, after you start down the first stage of the journey on the Lualaba. At Kabalo, where I stopped, a railroad runs eastward from the river to Albertville, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Rhodes wanted to use the 400-mile waterway that this body of water provides to connect the railway that came down from the North with the line that begins at the Cape. The idea was to employ train ferries. King Leopold of Belgium granted Rhodes the right to do this but Germany frustrated the scheme by refusing to recognize the cession of the strip of Congo territory between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Kivu, which was an essential link.

This incident is one evidence of the many attempts that the Germans made to block the Cape-to-Cairo project. Germany knew that if Rhodes, and through Rhodes the British Empire, could establish through communication under the British flag, from one end of Africa to the other, it would put a crimp into the Teutonic scheme to dominate the whole continent. She went to every extreme to interfere with its advance.