The economic exploitation of the Upper Nile Valley is an example which ought to be followed by our own colonial administration. Without a resolute purpose, without capital, and without accurate knowledge of the country and its resources, even that English or American company could do nothing. We need all three factors, if we want to make any progress, whether in Eastern or in South-Western Africa, in Kamerun or in Togo. There is only one small point of difference—the alluvial soil of the Nile Valley, accumulated through many myriads of years needs nothing but irrigation to once more make it into arable soil of the first quality. The Nile, wisely regulated, is the magic wand which will, almost instantaneously, change the desert into a fruitful field. This transforming agency is absent in the bush and steppes of German East Africa. It is true that that country possesses numerous streams, but at present their volume of water is subject to no regulation, and none of them is navigable on the same imposing scale as the Nile. In the course of years, no doubt, the Pangani will become an artery of traffic, as also the Rufiji, and perhaps our frontier stream, the Rovuma; but it will not be within the lifetime of the present generation.
The soil of German East Africa, too, cannot be compared with that of Egypt; it is no alluvial deposit, rich in humus, but in general a tolerably poor one, produced by the weathering of the outcropping rocks and not to be rendered fertile by moisture alone. Nevertheless, so far as I am able to judge, the water question remains the cardinal one in our colonial agriculture. At Saadani they have begun at once to do things on the grand scale, breaking up large areas with steam-ploughs, in the hope that wholesale cotton cultivation may put an end to the American monopoly. So far this is very good; the temperature is favourable, and the soil quite suitable for such a crop. One factor only is uncertain: German East Africa, like India, is never able to reckon on a normal amount of atmospheric moisture—and, if the rains fail, what then?
The Dark Continent has often been compared to an inverted plate. The land slopes gently upwards from the sea-shore, the angle of inclination gradually becoming greater, till we have a bordering range of mountains of considerable height. But it is only as seen from the coast that this range can be said to have a mountainous character; once he has crossed it, the traveller finds that, as on the heights of the Harz or the Rhenish slate mountains, he is on a plain almost level with its summit. To carry out the comparison with the plate, we may say that he has now crossed the narrow ledge at the bottom, and is now walking over the horizontal surface within that ledge.
This peculiar conformation has to be taken into account by those engaged in developing our colonies, i.e., in the first place, it is responsible for the fact that the rivers are navigable only to a very slight degree, if at all. In the second place, the greater part of the rainfall is precipitated on the seaward slope of the range, while its other side is almost rainless, which accounts for the arid character of Ugogo and the neighbouring districts. Yet the greater part even of this interior has a soil on which any crops which can be cultivated at all in Equatorial Africa are well able to thrive. The planter there is fortunate in being able to count on the vivifying influence of the tropical sun, which, throughout the year, conjures flourishing fields out of the merest sand. In the south I was able, day after day, to convince myself of the truth of this assertion.
The South has hitherto been the Cinderella of our colonial districts, and I fear it is likely to remain so. The prejudice as to its barrenness has deterred both official and private enterprise. It is true that neither the Mwera Plateau nor the Makonde highlands, nor the wide plains extending behind these two upland areas, between the Rovuma in the south and the Mbemkuru or the Rufiji in the north, can be called fertile. Sand and loam, loam and sand, in the one case, and quartz detritus in the other, are the dominant note of the whole. Yet we have absolutely no reason to despair of this country, for if the native can make a living out of the soil, without manuring and with none of the appliances of our highly-developed intensive farming—if this same native is in a position to export an appreciable fraction of his produce in the shape of sesamum, ground-nuts, rubber, wax, cereals and pulse—it would surely be strange if the white man could not make much more out of the same ground.
One thing, indeed, must never be forgotten: neither this district nor Africa in general is a pays de Cocagne where roast pigeons will fly of their own accord into people’s mouths; work, unceasing, strenuous work, is just as much an indispensable condition of progress as in less happy climates. We have had sufficient opportunity to observe and appreciate this persevering industry in the case of the Makonde, the Yaos, and the Makua. And we may be sure of one thing, that the European planter, whether in the north or the south, on the coast or in the interior, will not have a much easier time than these people. That, however, will do him no harm; on the contrary, the harder the struggle for existence, the more vigorous has been the development of a colony throughout the whole course of human history. The United States of to-day are the standing proof of this assertion; the South African colonies, now developing in a most satisfactory manner, speak no less clearly, and other cases in point might easily be adduced.
The waves are running higher, the König having more breadth of beam than depth, does not roll, but cannot help shipping more seas than she would like. Ought I, in face of this grand spectacle, to let myself be absorbed in useless forecasts of the future? My friend Hiram Rhodes’s taunt about “political childhood” was cruel—yet there was some truth in it, and not as regards the Zanzibar treaty only. We Germans have begun colonizing three hundred years later than other nations, and yet Dick, Tom and Harry are raising an outcry because our colonies, acquired fully twenty years ago, do not yet produce a surplus. The honest fellows think that “South-West” alone ought to be in a position to relieve them from the necessity of paying any taxes whatever. One could tear one’s hair at such folly and such utter lack of the historic sense. Most books are printed in Germany—none are bought, and but few read there. Among these few we can scarcely include any works on colonial history, otherwise it would be impossible that even colonial experts should know so little of those thousand conflicts, difficulties and reverses experienced to their cost by the English in India, in the South Seas, in Africa, and in America, and which over and over again might well have disgusted the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese with their extensive colonial possessions. Unconsciously influenced by the wealth of England and the affluence of Holland, both in great part arising from their foreign possessions, we are apt to forget that three centuries are a period fifteen times as long as our own colonial era, and that at least ten generations of English and Dutch have won by hard, unceasing work what we expect to receive without effort on our part. I am firmly convinced that we shall never learn to appreciate our really splendid possessions till a more thorough system of instruction has supplied the want above referred to—doubly inexcusable in a nation whose intellectual pre-eminence is everywhere acknowledged.
Such historic sense is to be gained by putting two kinds of capital into the colonies—the blood shed for their preservation and development, and the hard cash spent on the utilization of their resources.
To illustrate the extent of the British Colonial Empire and its distribution throughout the world, it is often pointed out that the mother country is seldom without a colonial war of some kind. This is true in the present, and it has also been true in the past: England has in fact always had to fight for her dominions beyond sea. Undoubtedly, this three hundred years’ struggle for possession, which, under her special circumstances has often been for England a struggle for existence, is the principal ground for the peculiarly close and intimate relation between the mother country and the daughter states. Hardly a family but has dear ones buried in Indian or African soil. This fact at first attaches to the country a painful interest, which very soon gives rise to an interest of another sort. The truth of this doctrine has been illustrated in the saddest way for us by the sanguinary war in South Western Africa.
The other kind of capital—the monetary—cannot be discussed in the case of our colonies without touching on the railway question. What complaints have been made of the invincible reluctance of German capitalists to engage in colonial undertakings! I am not myself a wealthy man, but, if I had a million to lose, I should nevertheless hesitate before investing it in a country without means of communication, being entirely devoid of natural ones, while artificial ones are as yet only in the elementary stage. At home, every one is now expecting great things from the new driver of our colonial chariot. Herr Dernburg is a trained financier, and he, perhaps, can succeed where others have failed—in the completion of the great railway system projected long ago, and in procuring the no less necessary financial resources.