The most important town on the coast is Zanzibar, the capital of an old slave-trading sultanate over which the English established a protectorate in 1890. The town was a great center for Arab merchants from all over the Indian Ocean. They were probably responsible for the spread of the Swahili language, the jargon of Zanzibar, which is now spoken all over the east coast of Africa just as Malayan has become the “lingua franca” of the islands of the Dutch East Indies. At the present time a slight knowledge of Swahili is the most valuable asset for anyone wishing to do business along the three thousand miles of the Indian Ocean front and their millions of square miles of hinterland. If he will also bother to learn a little Bantu, the language of all the South African Negroes, he can, with a few words of Portuguese and a smattering of pidgin-Arabic and a sentence or two in Cape Dutch be sure of all of his meals while travelling from one end of the continent to the other.
That closes the chapter on northern Africa, except for the narrow coastal region that lies between the Atlantic and the mountains of the Sudan and the Cameroon mountains. This strip of land has been known these last four hundred years as Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea. I have already mentioned the Guineas when I spoke of slavery, for it was there that the black ivory was gathered ere it was made ready for shipment to the rest of the world. To-day that coast belongs to a number of nations, but none of these settlements is of any interest to anybody except a few stamp-collectors.
Sierra Leone is an old English settlement which, like Liberia just to the west of it, was intended to be a homeland for former slaves. Neither Sierra Leone nor Liberia, with its capital city of Monrovia (so-called after our President Monroe) amounts to anything except sad disappointments in the hearts of a good many perfectly honest men and women who had hoped for better things when they generously offered their money to return the black man to the country of his great-grandfather’s birth.
The Ivory Coast is French and Accra will eventually be a harbor of French Sudanese Empire. Nigeria is also English. The capital is Lagos. Dahomey was an independent native state until the French took it in 1893.
Cameroon was German until the War. It is now a French protectorate. So was and is Togo. The rest is part of the French Congo, making the whole of that part of the world a large French equatorial empire with little foreign enclosures which eventually will be acquired by the French in exchange for either cash or for something some other power may want in another part of the world.
The Dutch East India Company, in order to shorten the voyage from Batavia to Amsterdam, had maintained an overland route of its own by way of Persia and Syria and Alexandria. But every time there was a quarrel between two Mesopotamian potentates the mails and the caravans were so hopelessly delayed that the bulk of the merchandise continued to be sent by way of the Cape.
In order that nothing might interfere with the steady flow of their Indian products, the Dutch thereupon occupied a few harbours along the coast of Guinea which they could also use as slave ports, took St Helena and fortified the Cape.
In 1671 the Dutch, who like all good merchants preferred to have things in writing (think of the absurd comedy of “buying” Manhattan in exchange for $24.00worth of gadgets!) bought the land round the fort of Capetown from the Hottentots. That meant the end of the Hottentots, for, deprived of their land, they were forced to move northward into the region of the Orange River and the Vaal which was occupied by their hereditary enemies, the Bushmen, It seemed a punishment from Heaven that those same Dutch farmers, who had been terribly cruel in their dealings with both Hottentots and Bushmen, should afterwards have suffered a similar fate. For Capetown was occupied by the English in 1795 and then it was the turn of the Boers to move northward. They repeated this manoeuvre a number of times until the year 1902, when the last of their two independent republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State, were definitely annexed by the English.
Capetown, however, has remained the most important harbour of the whole triangle. But the coastal region counts for nothing compared to the tremendously rich interior. This interior consists of a high plateau dotted with low hills called kopjes. On the west this plateau is cut off from the Atlantic by the Komas highlands. On the east it is separated from the Indian Ocean by the Matoppo Mountains and in the south it is cut off from the Capetown region by the Drakensberg Ridge.
None of these mountains has any glaciers. All the rivers therefore of this entire region depend upon rainfall for their water supply. As a result they are wild torrents in the winter and dry, hollow roads in the summer and as they have got to break their way through a mountain ridge ere they reach the sea (with the exception of the rivers in Natal, which therefore is the richest of the different countries that now make up the U.S.A or Union of South Africa) they are of no possible use as roads of commerce to the interior.
In order therefore that the hinterland might have access to the sea, a number of railroads have been constructed. Before the war the most important of these was the one between Pretoria and Lourengo Marques on Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa. Since the War the roads to Swakopmund and Lüderitzland in the former territory of German South-west Africa (now a mandate of the Union) have been finished; and northward one can now go by rail as far as Lake Tanganyika and then, after having crossed the lake by boat, one can take another train from there for the island of Zanzibar.