BOYS' OWN COLUMN.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 242, 12 October 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOYS' OWN COLUMN.

EXPLORATION OF AFRICA. THE GOOD WORK OF DAVID LIVINGSTONE. My Dear Boys,— 4 The name of Africa conjures up visions of black men, -of savages, witch doctors, and jungles, with their wild animals and dreadful illnesses, but nowadays Africa is a country of commerce, and the heart of the "black interior" is gradually being brightened by the light of civilisation. In the early days Africa was a place of dread to everyone. Daring seamen who navigated their ships near her shores would kneel down and pray that the evil spirits which they believed infested the continent would not draw their ships down to the depths of the tropical seas. But noble men like James Bruce, Hugh Clapperton, Sir Samuel Baker, and others ventured into the gloom of the jungles, and brought out information which pushed civilisation further and further into the wilderness. Perhaps the most courageous and thf most wholly unselfish of the African explorers v/as David Livingstone. His object in exploring Africa was not to win tame for himself, but to drfiw British settlers to the land, and, with honest trading, gradually do away with the slave trade. it is astounding the number of slaves who were shipped from Africa. Poor ignorant savages, some of whom were chiefs, kings of their own people, were taken by force to the new world to work, in fear of the whip. Spanish and P ortuguese slave traders in the middle of the seventeenth century were carrying 10,000 slaves a. year from Africa to Brazil, and in the century preceding the American Declaration of Independence, England carriCjd three million slaves to the new world, and threw 250,000 into the Atlantic because they died upon her ships! This clave trading was what Livingstone v/anted to abolish. In order to open up the country he crossed the continent from east to west, after four years of toil and hardship. His magnificent work put Lakes Shirwa, Ngasa and Ngami on to the map, and it was he who discovered the mighty Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, which will some day furnish more power than the Niagara does in America. It is impossible here to deal ignore fully with the adventures of this famous man, but we know that his life work was not wasted, for others followed him, and made Africa the country it is to-day.

Peter