Let us look at the map and give you a general outline of where things stand at the present moment.
Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided into seven parts and these I shall now take up, one by one. We begin in the left upper corner, in the north-west, the infamous coast of Barbary which made our ancestors tremble with fear whenever they had to sail past it on their way from northern Europe to the ports of Italy and the Levant. For it was the land of the terrible Barbary pirates and capture by them meant years of slavery until the family at home had borrowed enough money to set their poor cousin free.
This whole territory consists of mountains and quite high mountains, too. And these mountains explain why that country had to develop as it did and why even today it has not yet actually been conquered by the white man. They are very treacherous mountains, full of ambushes and deep ravines, allowing a marauding party to make their attack and disappear without any onr being the wiser.
Aeroplanes and long-distance guns are of comparatively little value here. It was only a few years ago that the Spaniards met with a number of terrible defeats at the hands of the Riff people. Our ancestors preferred to pay an annual tribute to the different Sultans ruling this part of the African coast, rather than risk their navies and their reputations on dangerous expeditions against harbours which no white man had been allowed to visit. They maintained special consuls in Algiers and Tunis whose business it was to arrange for the ransom of their captured subjects and they supported religious organizations which had no other purpose than to look after the fate of the sailors who had been unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Moors.
Politically speaking, this north-western corner of the African continent is now divided into four separate parts, all of which however take their orders from Paris. The process of infiltration and occupation began in 1830. A common, ordinary fly-swatter was the immediate cause of the outbreak of hostilities but the real reason was that old public scandal of the north-western Mediterranean, piracy.
At the Congress of Vienna the European powers had decided that “something must be done” to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. But of course the different powers could not decide who was to undertake the job, for the hero might keep some territory for himself and that would be unfair to the others – the usual story of all diplomatic conferences.
Now there were two Algerian Jews (all business in northern Africa had been in the hands of Jews tor centuries) who had a claim against the French for grain delivered to the French Government in the days before Napoleon – one of those old claims that are for ever cropping up in the chancellories of the Old and New World and that have been the cause of so many misunderstandings during the last two centuries. If nations, like individuals, would only pay their bills as they go along, we surely should all of us be much happier and certainly much safer.
In the course of the negotiations about this little grain bill, the Dey of Algiers one day lost his temper and hit the French consul with his fly-swatter. Then there was a blockade and a shot was fired (probably by accident, but such things are always happening when there are warships about) and an expeditionary force sailed across the Mediterranean and on the fifth of July 1830 the French marched into Algiers and the Dey was taken prisoner and sent into exile and the war was on in all seriousness.
The mountain people founded a leader, a certain Abd-el-Kader, a pious Mohammedan and a man of great intelligence and courage, who held out against the invaders for fifteen years and who did not surrender until 1847. He had previously received the promise that he would be allowed to remain in his own country, but this promise was broken and he was taken to France. Napoleon III however set him free on condition that he would never again disturb the peace of his fatherland and Abd-el-Kader retired to Damascus, where he spent the rest of his days in philosophic meditations and pious deeds and where he died in 1883.
Long before his demise the last revolt in Algeria had been suppressed. Today Algeria is merely another department of France. Its people have the right to choose their own representatives and protect their interests in the French Parliament in Paris. Its young men have the honour to serve as conscripts in the French army, but that is not entirely a matter of choice. But from an economic point of view, the French have done a great deal of excellent work to improve the living conditions of their new subjects.