In order to get that far north one is obliged to spend an uncomfortable day crossing the Kalahari desert but once this has been left behind one enters into the hilly territory of Rhodesia, so called after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the old British South Africa Chartered Company and one of the earliest prophets of a united South Africa under British domination. That dream has partially come true. The different chartered companies and the former Boer republics and the Kaffir and Zulu nations are now all of them part of the Union of South Africa which was proclaimed in 1910. But as the Boer element which lives in the country districts seems to be gaining on the English element which has been chiefly attached to the cities, there is a violent struggle going on to decide which of the two rival elements shall be the deciding factor. By way of compromise, Capetown has been made the place where the Parliament of the Union meets, but Pretoria, the old capital of the Transvaal Republic, has been promoted to act as the seat of the government.
As for the two unusually large remnants of the ancient Portuguese Empire which continue to separate the U.S.A from the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, Angola in the west and Mozambique in the cast, they are so badly administered that sooner or later they will be taken over by one of their more powerful neighbours. Just now, with agricultural products at a lower price than ever before and cattle-breeding at a complete standstill, the South Africans are not in search of fresh pastures and grain fields. When times return to normal, these Portuguese colonies may be annexed without the firing of a single gun. For South Africa is developing a new race, neither Dutch nor English but purely South African and it is so rich in mineral wealth, in copper and coal and iron and the soil is fertile that it may well develop into a sort of United States on a slightly smaller scale.
At the other side of the strait of Mozambique lies the island of Madagascar which measures 230,000 square miles and is slightly larger than the Republic of France to which it belongs. The population is about 4,000,000. It is a mountainous island and the eastern part, exposed to the trade-winds, has excellent timber which is exported from the harbour of Tamatave, connected by rail with the capital, Antananarivo.
The people look more like Malays than like Negroes. But Madagascar must have been separated from Africa at a very early period in our geological history for none of the usual African animals are to be found on the island.
East of Madagascar lie two little islands which were of great importance when the India trade still followed the route of the Cape. They are Mauritius and Reunion. Mauritius, an old freshwater vegetable station of the Dutch East India Company, is now English and Reunion is French.
As for the other islands which, geographically speaking, belong to Africa, I have already mentioned St Helena, while Ascension, further to the north in the Atlantic, is also a coaling and a cable station. The Cape Verde islands are Portuguese. They lie a few hundred miles west of the coast of Mauretania, now occupied by the insignificant Spanish colony of Rio de Oro. The Canary Islands are Spanish and Madeira and the Azores are Portuguese and Teneriffe, with its well known volcano, is Spanish. As for the island of St Brandon, in which all honest skippers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed as firmly as we ourselves believe in the tables of multiplication, that was situated here too. But no one could ever find out where, because it went to the bottom of the ocean as soon as any vessel came near it and only reappeared when the visitor was gone. That seems to have been a sensible thing to do on the part of an African island. It was the only way it could escape being occupied by a foreign power.
Most continents can be reduced to a few simple images. We say “Europe” and we see the dome of St Peter’s and ruined castles on the Rhine and the silent fjords of Norway and we hear the troika bells of Russia. Asia calls forth pictures of pagodas and masses of little brown men bathing in a wide river and strange temples, ten thousand feet up in the air and the placid symmetry of old Fuji. America means skyscrapers, factory chimneys, an old Indian on a pony going nowhere in particular. Even far-off Australia has its symbols, the Southern Cross, the amiable kangaroo with his inquisitive and intelligent eyes.
But Africa, how shall we reduce that land of contrasts and extremes to a single symbol?
It is a land of torrid heat without any rivers! Yet the Nile is almost as long as the Mississippi and the Congo is only a little shorter than the Amazon River and the Niger just as long as the Hwang Ho. It is a land of torrential rains and insufferable moisture. Yet the Sahara alone, the dryest of all deserts, is larger than all of Australia and the Kalahari is as big as the British Isles.