These stretch all the way from Abyssinia in the north to the Zambesi River in the south where the territory known as South Africa begins. The northern part of this region is inhabited by Hamites, for the Abyssinians and the Somalis, although they have kinky hair, are not Negroes. The southern part consists of Negroes and a great many Europeans.
The Abyssinians are Christians of a very old vintage, having been converted as early as the fourth century, almost 400 years before we had a single Christian community in central Europe. Their Christian sentiments, however, did not prevent them from making perpetual war upon their neighbours, in the year 525 they even crossed the Red Sea and conquered the southern part of Arabia, the Arabia Felix of the Romans (in contrast to the Arabia Deserta of the interior). It was this expedition which had made the young Mohammed realize the necessity for a strong and united Arab fatherland and which had started him upon his career as the founder of a religion and a world-empire.
One of the first things his followers did was to drive tic Ethiopians away from the coast towns of the Red Sea and to destroy their business relations with Ceylon and India and far-away Constantinople. After that defeat Ethiopia became a sort of Japan which took no further interest in outside affairs until the middle of the last century when the different European powers began to cast longing glances in the general direction of the peninsula of Somaliland, not because Somaliland was of any possible value, but because it was situated on the Red Sea which soon would be merely an extension of the Suez Canal. France was the first to arrive upon the scene and to occupy the harbour of Djibouti. The English, after a punitive expedition against the Emperor Theodore of Abyssinia, during which that extraordinary monarch killed himself rather than fall into the hands of his enemies, took British Somaliland which, situated just opposite Aden, gave them command of the gulf of that name. The Italians took a slice north of the French and British possessions with the intention of using the coastal region as a base of supplies from where to conduct a glorious expedition against Abyssinia.
This glorious expedition took place in the year 1896 and on that occasion the Italians lost 4500 white and 2000 native troops, with a slightly smaller amount of prisoners. Since then the Italians left their Abyssinian neighbours alone, although they are now the owners of another part of Somaliland, south of the British settlement.
In the end, of course, Abyssinia will go the way of Uganda and Zanzibar. But the difficulties of transport, not overcome by the single railroad line from Jibuti to Addis Ababa and the broken-up nature of the entire Abyssinian plateau which makes it a natural fortress, together with the realization that those black men will under circumstances fight with great bitterness, for sofar saved that ancient kingdom from the usual annexation by one of her European neighbors.
South of Abyssinia and east of the Congo lie the three great African lakes. Of those the Nyasa sends tributaries to the Zambesi, while Lake Victoria is responsible for the River Nile and the Tanganyika Lake connects with the Congo, suggesting that this region most be the highest part of Africa. The investigations of the last fifty years completely bear this out. Kiliman-jaro, south-east of Lake Victoria, is 19,000 feet high and Mount Ruwenzori (the Mountain of the Moon of Ptolemy, which Stanley rediscovered some twenty centuries later) to 16,200 feet, with Kenya(17,000) and Elgon (14,000) close seconds.
This whole region was originally volcanic, but the African volcanoes have not been working at their trade for a good many centuries. Politically the entire territory is divided into a number of sub-divisions, all of them, however, under British rule. Uganda, a cotton-growing country, became a protectorate in 1899.
The former possessions of the British East Africa Company, now Kenya Colony, were made part of the Empire in 1920, while the erstwhile holdings of the German East Africa colony became a British mandate in 1918 and are now part of Tanganyika territory.