We never tire of reading the old stories of Portuguese discovery and colonization, and our sympathies are aroused for a people who struggled so heroically to open a new world to the civilization of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But Portuguese effort came to naught, when measured by any modern standard of success. It was baffled by a thousand undreamt of forces. Its failure, however, rendered conspicuous the problem, now more pressing than ever: has the white man a natural mission in Africa? Has not God designed
it as the natural home of the dark race? Are not all our visions of conquest and permanent redemption, through and by means of the white races, but idle outcrops of the imagination, or worse, but figments born of our desire to subdue and appropriate? Can compensation come, in the form of commercial, moral or spiritual advantage, adequate to the great sacrifice to be entailed on humanity by substitution of white energy for that which is native to African soil and climate?
It is not worth while to try to answer these questions in the affirmative by appeals to old historic Egypt, to Greek or Roman occupancy, to Arab and Mohammedan ascendancy, to Portuguese conquest and missionary enterprise, to the weird adventures and sad fates of the school of intrepid explorers which preceded and followed the redoubtable Scotchman, Mungo Park, nor to the long role of efforts and enterprises made by the respective nations of Europe to acquire rich slices of African territory, after Portugal began to lose her commercial grip, and after foreign colonization became a European ambition. No, for as yet nothing appears to show that the white man had a mission in Africa, except to gratify his home ambitions, cater to his European pride, satisfy his desire to pilfer, burn and murder. There is no thought yet manifest that the redemption of Africa involved more than the subjugation of her people and the forcible turning to foreign account of her resources. The question has not as yet been asked by the ethnologist, by the grave student of causes and effects, nor even by the calculating adventurer,—“Is there an African destiny which admits the white races as fair and permanent participants, or one which implies universal good when the seeming laws of God respecting the home of nations are reversed?”
Nor does an affirmative answer to any of the above questions arise out of England’s theft of the Cape of Good Hope, and of that sovereignty she now maintains over the Kimberly diamond diggings and the Vaal river sections. National greed or political finesse may excuse much, as the dark science of diplomacy goes, but they do not make clear how far the natural order of things can be changed with benefit to all concerned. This section of Africa is, however, below the tropics, and perhaps does not involve the problem of races so deeply as the equatorial regions.
Let us therefore turn to the real Africa, for further inquiry—that Africa against which Islamism has dashed itself so repeatedly in its efforts to reach the Equator; that Africa whose climate has beaten back Christianity for three centuries; that Africa amid which science has reveled, but before which legitimate trade has stood appalled—the tropical, the new Africa.
In this connection we come upon an order of events, not to say an era, which favors an affirmative answer to the above questions, which plainly point, not to white encroachment, but to white existence and possibilities in the very midst of a continent apparently destined for other purposes. The very fact that new discoveries in Central Africa have revealed vast populations untouched by civilization has opened the eyes of the world to the usual processes of nation-making afresh. Have any people ever risen out of barbarism without external help? What is civilized Europe to-day but a grand intermingling of Greek, Roman, Vandal, Hun, Goth, Celt, and Saracen? Had even North African influence, in some of its better moods, succeeded in crossing the Equator, who knows whether the savagery of the tropics might not have been extinct to-day, or at least wholly different from what it is?
Again, the order of events have brought forth whole masses of data for comparison, for experiment, for substantial knowledge. Who could separate fiction from fact when running over the old, fantastic chronicles? Until within the last fifty years the light of true scientific knowledge and of keener commercial knowledge had not been shed on the Central African situation. It began to dawn when Laird, in 1841, came home to England from the Niger, more of an adventurer than any predecessor, yet with no wild, discrepant tales, but only hard, practical truths, which commerce welcomed and business enterprise could rely on. Legitimate traffic sprang into line, and British trading houses, doing business on honorable terms and for cash values, planted their agents on the Gambia, the Roquelle, the Gold Coast, the Oil Rivers, at Gaboon and Kabinda, along thousands of miles of coast. German houses sprang up, in honorable rivalry, throughout the same extent, and Hamburg and Bremen steamers fairly outstripped those of Liverpool and Glasgow. France, too, came into competition, took permanent
hold of territory, cultivated reciprocity with the natives, studied tribal characteristics, encouraged agential responsibility, and brought quite to the surface the problem of white occupancy and development.
Out of all this has grown something which is better than theory respecting the destiny of the respective races in Africa, superior far to all former strifes at mere land-grabbing, and empire building, and sovereignty enrichments. European commerce with the west and southern coast of Africa is now carried on by several regular lines of steamers, besides those owned by numerous large trading firms. The British and African Steam Navigation Company is a modern corporation, and employs 22 steamers. Its older rival, the West African Steamship Company, employs 9 steamers. They dispatch at least one ship a week from Liverpool to West African ports. The Woerman line of steamers runs regularly from Hamburg, the Portuguese line from Lisbon, and the French line from Havre. Then there are two London lines—the Union and Donald Curry. These lines go out heavily freighted with miscellaneous merchandise suitable for the African peoples, among which is, unfortunately, a large per cent. of gin and other intoxicants, and their return cargoes consist of rubber, gum copal, palm-oil, palm kernels, ivory, ground-nuts, beeswax, cocoa, coffee, dye-woods, mahogany, etc., gathered up at their various stopping points. All these are indigenous African products, but it will be observed that those which spring from a cultivated soil figure as next to nothing in the list.
Side by side with these practical sea-going and commercial movements went the unfolding of the interior by those indomitable men who sacrificed personal comfort and risked life that inner Africa might be brought to outer view. This volume is, in part, a record of their adventures and pioneering efforts. Their names—the Bakers, Barths, Schweinfurths, Spekes, Grants, Du Chaillus, Pintos, Livingstones, Stanleys, and others—form a roll which for honor outranks that of the world’s greatest generals. They have built for themselves monuments which shall outlast those dedicated to military conquest, because on them the epitaphs will speak of unselfish endeavor in the name of a common humanity.