Such gigantic projects take time, but not quite as much time as we sometimes fed inclined to believe when we look at the map and contemplate the terrific difficulties that were to be overcome ere that line should ever have reached such a hard-to-get-at spot as Lake Chad, just north of Nigeria – and from there the hardest part of the route began, for the eastern Sudan (now the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan) was as inhospitable a region as the Sahara.
Capital, however, in the hands of an energetic modem power, especially if it sees a chance of making one hundred cents on the dollar, will dynamite its way through time and space as lightly and easily and usually as ruthlessly as a war tank going through a flock of geese. The Third French Republic, trying to regain the prestige the Second Empire had lost, was energetic enough and the stockings and the hidden old cigar boxes of the French peasants produced the necessary capital. The struggle for the right-of-way from west to east in competition with the right-of-way from north to south was on in all seriousness and the French, who ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century had been fighting with the English and the Dutch for the possession of the land situated between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers, now used that territory as a political can opener with which to get at the contents of the unlimited area of the whole of the Sudan.
I can’t go into the details of all the operations and machinations and the diplomatic steps and the commercial steps and the lying and cheating and horse-dealing and cajoling that took place before France could claim the greater part of the western Sudan as part of their African Empire. Even to-day they keep up the pretence of being merely the temporary administrators of a number of protectorates and mandates, but everybody has gradually learned what that means. The gangsters who have acquired exclusive control over the New York milk racket will probably call their band of cutthroats “The Milk Dealers’ Protection Association.” European nations quick to learn even from our humble highwaymen, have coined the word ‘mandates.’ But the results are about the same.
Geographically speaking, the French have made a wise choice. Most of the Sudan is very fertile, which of course explains that the natives are by far the most intelligent and industrious of all the different Negro tribes that inhabit Africa. Part of the soil is the same sort of loess as that found in northern China and as Senegambia (merely another name for Senegal) is not cut off from the sea by a mountain ridge, the interior has sufficient rainfall to allow the people to raise cattle and corn. The African Negro, by the way, is no rice-eater, but a mealie-eater, “mealie” being a sort of second-cousin to our own corn-mush but a little less delicately prepared. They are also remarkable artists, whose curious bits of sculpture and pottery when exposed in our museums never fail to attract the attention of the multitudes because they look for all the world like the most recent masterpieces of our own futurist painters.
The Sudanese, however, have one great disadvantage from the white man’s point of view. They are ardent followers of the Prophet whose missionaries overran and converted the whole of northern Africa. In the Sudan one race especially, the Fula or Fellatah, a mixture of Negroes and Berbers, who are to be found everywhere south and east of the Senegal River as the dominating class of society, have long been a menace to French authority. But railroads and roads and airplanes and tanks and caterpillar tractors are more powerful than all the Sudras or verses of the Koran. The Fellatahs are learning to drive flivvers. Romance is rapidly making its exit by way of the petrol pump.
Before the French and the English and the Germans settled down in the Sudan, the greater part of this territory belonged to those Charming native princes who had grown rich stealing each other’s subjects and selling them into slavery. Some of these potentates have gained a certain sad fame as among the most picturesque but also the most brutal of bygone despots, The King of Dahomey with his highly efficient army of Amazons is still fresh in the memory of those who as children saw the last of his troops perform at our country fairs; and that may have been one of the reasons why the natives put up so little resistance when the European war ships appeared. No matter how greedy the new white master might be, he was always a great improvement on the black tyrant who had just been deposed.
The greater part of the southern Sudan is cut off from the ocean by the high mountain ridge which follows the coastline of the Gulf of Guinea. This prevents rivers such as the Niger from playing a really important part in the development of the interior, for, like the Congo, the Niger is obliged to take a very roundabout way to avoid the main mass of these hills. Then just before it reaches the coast, it must dig a channel through them, with the result that there are a number of cataracts where they are least wanted (that is, near the sea). While the upper part of the river is apt to be navigable, but there is nobody there to navigate it.