MUSSOLINI'S AFRICAN DREAM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 170, 20 July 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

MUSSOLINI'S AFRICAN DREAM.

A New Empire In Abyssinia.

SEEKING A PLACE IN THE SUN.

(By A. O'HARE McCORMI'

Africa is the Dark Continent, not only because of the prevailing colour of the inhabitants, but because of the profound obscurity in -which its life is hidden. How much news comes out of Africa? It does not broadcast over the radio or attract the Argus-eyed movie

camera save as a preserve of big game. The lion is probably the most familiar and conspicuous African, not excluding the Lion of Judah, now crying out from the wilds of Ethiopia against the Wolf of Eome, rampant again after'centuries of slumber in a cage on the Capitoline Hill.

The extremities of the Dark Continent belong to the known world, the South African Union as an important outpost ■of the British Commonwealth, the north <coast as a lengthening tourist highway :and a widening zone of European penetration and administration. In between ilies the real Africa, vast, dim, simrnerSng and lost to view in a tropic haze. '•SEhe outer fringe is explored by sportsanen seeking thrills and naturalists seeking specimens. Otherwise it is vaguely 'imagined as desert and jungle.

Now the Testless spotlight swings from America, from Asia and from Europe to rest for an illuminating moment on this Africa nobody knows. The great shadowland behind the ancient civilisations and the new colonies of the Mediterranean littoral looms in the news as a fresh field of European competition. _ Mussolini has discovered Africa. .Xt least he has discovered that if ie is to create an empire it must be out of Africa or nothing. More, that it is Africa now or not at aIL For even of this last continent there remains little that has not been staked off by some European power in the course of the last century or two. Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, England—all iave helped themselves nobly to raw slices of Africa. Not much is left to native rule except the ancient and undeveloped empire of Abyssinia.

The present concentration on this forgotten region represents more than the ambition of Italy to acquire about the only territory that can still be acquired on a. planet pre-empted to the farthest poles. It illustrates something besides the proverbial course of dictatorship, T>y its unchecked momentum constantly driven to extend its power. Something beyond the slow process of civilisation, forever inching up on the -wilderness and gradually destroying and displacing primitive forms of life.

What is happening in Africa reflects the panic mood of Europe. For Italy is not alone at the gates of Abyssinia. The Fascist legions are drawn up on the borders as much to keep others out as to march' in. There is a kind of furtive concentration of rival exploiters. It is as if the hungry nations, like Germany and Japan, and the nations established in Africa, like Belgium and Britain, had all at once remember and closed in on the continental hunting ground lying south of the central sea.

Last Stronghold- Of The Savage. The fate of Africa is to be the last stronghold of the savage at a crisis of civilisation. Still living in the most primitive stage of feudalism, Abyssinia is as much the victim of the industrial crisis as if she had been part of the system which blew up in war, dictatorships and economic and national tribalism. Mechanised nations that have built walls sky-high against commerce with other nations solemnly accuse the Ethiopians of raising obstructions against the "normal flow _of trade." Having worked themselves into such a jam that they are buried under their own mechanisms, the civilised demand at the point of a gun that the barbarians shall relieve them of their intolerable surpluses. Now that it is discovered and coveted, nothing can save Abyssinia from a civilisation which can escape the consequences of its own excesses only by finding fresh sources of raw materials for its factories and fresh dumping grounds for the products manufactured out of these raw materials.

One asks why it has been saved up -to now. How did a State as ancient as Abyssinia avoid through all its millenniums the conquests which Teduccd Egypt? Why was it not partitioned like the neighbouring Somaliland? Why was it not exploited like the Sudan and the Congo or annexed as a colony like Kenya and Tanganyika? How does it happen that, almost alone in Africa, Abyssinia has remained independent of Europe? I put the question to an English diplomat who is something of an expert on colonial development. His answer was interesting. "Undoubtedly Abyssinia would have been gobbled up long ago," he said, "if it had not been a Christian State. Christian nations colonising in the name of religion and civilisation could not very well proceed in the usual manner against a State that professed Christianitv long before they had ever heard of 'the Gospel. The greatest asset and protector of the Ethiopians was Frumentius, the disciple of Athanasius. who converted them in the fourth century to a form of Christianity which they have never changed from that day to this.

"We Had Enough Of Africa." "The reason we did not take Abyssinia when we had the opportunity in the 'sixties," the Englishman added, "was that a protectorate would have involved international complications. At that time the kingdom almost fell into our lap. You recall that, when a British mission was seized and held by the tribes and a punitive expedition was sent in under Sir Kobert Napier, the reigning Emperor, Theodore, committed suicide and the Government collapsed. But we had enough of Africa as it was," he smiled. "Even to control one of the chief sources of the Nile, Lake Tsana, which makes Ethiopia very important to the Sudan, it did not seem worth while to get into a tangle with France and Italy, already camped on the borders. Those were the davs in Africa, as in America a century or two earlier, when you 'occupied' as you explored, without much thought of the rights of the aborigines. There was 110 world press service to advertise vour remoter movements, no League of Nations to make 'occupations embarrassing. Even then, however, British policy took the line adhered to

:k in New York '-'Times.")

The Only Bullet.

WON LONG AGO BY OTHER NATIONS

in a of subsequent treaties and reiterated in the Paris agreement of 1930. It seemed wiser to leave Abyssinia alone than to open a long drawn out dispute as to what power should control it."

A second question immediately suggests itself. If for these or other reasons, Abyssinia has been left alone until 1935, has somehow managed to preserve its sovereignty since the time of the first Menelik, son of the Queen of Sheba, why this reverberating threat to its independence now? What new factors enter into the situation?

The answer to that question is to be found not in Africa but in Europe. And not wholly in Europe; in Asia also, and in the Americas. The more one observes the contemporary moving picture, the more evident it becomes that what appears to take place in one location and with one set of actors is in reality projected somewhere else with a different cast of performers. In this the current show is a good deal like Hollywood, except that Jiere the illusion is real. In the mirror of the Balkans it has long been possible to see Koine and Paris, London and Berlin, much more clearly than these capitals reveal themselves at close range. No one really understands the political strategy of the big powers who lias not watched the backyard practice games down along the Danube. What was true of the Balkans begins to be true of Africa.

Asia, after all. has its own strategy. The old mind of the East baffles and eludes the mind of the West. The present concern of the Occident is not to penetrate Asia, but to defend itself against Asiatic penetration. The longopen doors to America are closed, a fact of linestimated but tremendous influence in the problem of Europe. Africa is tho only outlet, left to the last because the least promising, in many sections uninhabitable for white races. The Mistake Of The Ras Tafari. What we witness to-day is not the advance of Europe on Africa, but a shifting and sharpening of the position of the colonial powers corresponding to the changing balance in the continent. Germany wants her colonies back. England, willing to conciliate the resurgent Reich at anybody's

expense but her own, is determined to resist "the upsetting influence" of German return to the unsettled empire south of the Suez. The British are the predominant African power. _ Look at the map and you will be surprised at the huge bulk of the British dependencies, extended since the war by the mandate over the German colony of Tanganyika. French developments south of the terranean have grown to such importance that the Germans refer to France as "the white annex of a black empire." These powers are not really to Italian expansion in Eastern Africa. They are fully aware that Italy is as poor in territory as they are glutted; and so long as it is Abyssinia and not Tunis or Kenya that is the object of Mussolini's ambition. London and Paris would have looked the otiier way if he had proceeded more cjuietlv and subtly toward his goal. Belgium, though lier African possessions are remote—and she has neither the French nor British interest in the coast of Somaliland, strategic bcoause it impinges on Asia and guards the route to India —opposes the Italian advance. The largest shipments of arms to Addis Ababa are said to come from Belgian factories.

Germany is not sending armies, but she is exerting other forces to secure economic domination; the Nazi putsch in Abyssinia is for concessions. Czechs. Swedes and Swiss are prominent among the peddlers at the door of the besieged capital. The Japanese are already inside. One reason for the present excitement is the exceptional treatment accorded to the Japanese. While Italians and other Europeans are rigidly excluded as colonists, immigrants from Japan have been welcomed, on condition that they inter marry with the natives. The Italians acquired from the French a 10 per cent interest in the single track railroad from Djibuti to Addis Ababa just in time to profit by the rush of Vluir competitors to keep them out. Perhaps it was a mistake on i'.ie part of the Has Tafari, when he bec.im- king o' the kings of Ethiopia in to invite the representatives of all the nations to witness his coronation as the

A Fateful Reminder.

Emperor Haile Selassie. TSie new emperor wanted to be a modern ruler. He signified his desire to break into tin; modern world when he summoned the powers to that strange crowning, at once early Christian and late barbaric, in a capital practically improvised for the occasion, the new buildings unfinished when the visitors arrived and the native huts hidden behind screens of boards. He set out to be a reformer, to abolish slavery, widen the caravan tracks into roads, build a capital.

The chiefs of the four kingdoms and I the four dependencies under the crown scorned these ideas. They were regarded dubiously even by Abyssinian representatives in Paris, Home and Geneva. These envoys had seen civilisation; they fear its demoralising - effects on a people who learned wisdom 1 from Solomon and ever since ha\'e > avoided the perils of progress. "We are a very moral people," said one. "Our codes are strict. We are content in our old ways." Perhaps the invitation was a mistake. All the Governments sent delegates. From England arrived one of the sons of the King, bearing a gift of two. silver sceptres, suitably inscribed in Amharic. That was characteristic of the British, custodians of the status quo, the world's best supporters of tradition. The Italians sent an aeroplane. This was characteristic, too; Young Italy was all for giving the emperor a taste for such modern equipment as she is ready to exchange for the gold and platinum, the copper and

lead, supposed to be buried in the Abyssinian mountains. Every nation came with its offering. And every nation was reminded of an almost forgotten native empire pleasantly placed on a temperate and fertile plateau high above the desert scrub and malarial swamp of equatorial Africa. Its incredible primitiveness was like a summons to the developer.

Italy had not waited for this summons, or even for the advent of Mussolini. For more than half a century she had been cani[>ed on the Red Sea coast. "With France and England she had occupied since 1870 the coastal plain which shuts out Abyssinia from the sea. The French have only a morsel of Somaliland, just enough for a zone of protection surrounding the port of Djibutf, whence they have built the one railway connecting the Abyssinian capital with the outside world. The British own more territory, but its only importance from their point of view lies in the town of Berbera, which stands opposite Aden, in Arabia, and thus gives England control of both outlets of the Red Sea, there and at Suez.

"Protecting" The Colonies. Italian Somaliland is far bigger than the French and British slices put together. At this writing the port of Mogadiscio is the storm centre of Africa, swarming with parched Italian troops, wilting in the equatorial heat, and workmen building roads, camps and aerodromes. It is desert country just the same, worthless except for black nomad tribes. Somewhere in the hinterland is a line of wells, including Wal-Wal, the only water supply in a wide belt of desert and scene of the clash between native troops and Italian patrol whereon the present swelling offensive movement is based.

Such border incidents are a commonplace of colonial administration in Africa. It is quite true, as the Italians claim in arguing that there is no responsible Government in Abyssinia, that more than 200 raids have been made in recent years by Abyssinian tribes in the neighbouring British terri-

Exercising First Option.

Tory of the Sudan. Also true is it that the British have not mobilised for war as a result of these incursions. Nor did the French make an incident out of the murder 011 their frontier this year of Lieutenant Bernard and his native ;>uard. The difference is that neither French nor British want more territory. The'ltalians frankly do. Their other East African colony, Eritrea, smaller than Somalia, offers more promise to tjie colonist. The Red Sea port of Massaua steams on the coast, but the

capital, Asmara, occupies part of the liigli tableland which is the characteristic feature of Central Ethiopia. The plateau whereon it stands, now desolated and depopulated as the result of the Abyssinian-Egyptian wars of the last century, was "once a fertile plain —the Plain of a Thousand Villages —and could be developed again into a rich agricultural district. To-day there are ten times as many soldiers in Eritrea as there are colonists, and in all of East Africa Italian settlers number only a few thousand. Mussolini declares that they are few because the country is unsafe; it is to "protect" the colonics that the armies are mustered on a frontier as far from Italy as the Philippines are from the United States. Frontier? Is it merely because the boundaries are not properly demarcated that o'n the maps sold in Italy there is 110 line to indicate where Italian territory ends and Abyssinian begins? If the troops march toward the border by the Roman map I have before me, they will never stop until they reach Addis Ababa.

The first reason Italy moves now is that she fears others are getting ahead of her. She has long considered herself as holding the first option on Abyssinia. Twice, once in the 'Eighties, again in the 'Nineties, she has endeavoured by force to establish a formal protectorate over the ancient empire. The first time England intervened. Shortly afterward the two Governments signed a treaty dividing the kingdom of Menelik into spheres of influence as Persia was once divided, but when Italy tried to take possession of her sphere in 1896 her troops suffered at the hands of the Abyssinians the terrible defeat of Adowa. This humiliation, unforgotten on either side, plays its .part in the present conflict. Abyssinia remembers how easily she dealt with the halfhearted expedition of forty years ago and Mussolini believes he has to prove Italian prowess before his demands will be respected. Many Italians complain that . all Mussolini wants is a victory. But that is to put his aims too low. It is generally recognised in Italy that the East African expedition is the Duce's personal enterprise. At the outset everybody with any authority opposed it—the leaders of the party, the general staff of the army, the Cabinet, financial and business opinion. Certainly the people were, and are, against the idea of war, particularly for anything as remote and uncoveted as the wilds of Africa.

There is still no popular enthusiasm for the venture, except perhaps among the Ballila and their baby brothers, the new Black Shirt infantry called the Sons of the Wolf, who learn to march and walk at the same time. But in six months of agitation and preparation the country has become accustomed to the thought of conquest across the Mediterranean. The troops embark with unfeigned cheerfulness on their unknown mission. The population, with the fundamental fatalism of a very old nation, shrug as they cheer or grumble. "The Duce must know what he's after,"' is the common comment.

Xobody really knows what is in Mussolini's mind. On two occasions this month he has told the writer that he does not mean war, and undoubtodlv he hopes to avoid it if he can. But it is fair to deduce from the evidence that he is convinced that some rower, presumably Japan or Germany, is bound to acquire the upper hand in Abyssinia, wherefore lie lias deliberately embarked on a campaign to gain control for Italy. Circumstances made the move sudden and the method highhanded.

Bold and Loud Improvisation. The whole affair has the effect of bold and loud improvisation, and that, one suspects, is what it is. Dominion in East Africa has for years been an objective of Italian policy, but the chance to attain that goal was seized abruptly, without finesse, because by the time Mussolini was free to move the time to move had passed.

What changed his position was the Franco-Italian agreement signed in Rome on January 8. The reconciliation of France and Italy was a momentous event for Abyssinia, until then saved from serious European penetration by the watchful jealousy of these rival Powers. France blocked and undermined the efforts of Italy to gain influence by means of conciliation. It is easy to understand why Abyssinians to-day single out the Italians for special hostility, hard to see how shaking the mailed "list, if it is not a preface to conquest, can win the "co-operation" Italy keeps 011 demanding of the bristling Emperor. Indisputably, however, without French interference, relations between Koine and Addis Ababa would have been better. If the Rome pact had been concluded ten years ago the present picture of Europe would be different and Italy would be in control of the development of East Africa.

In the End He Will Succeed. " Now belatedly, perhaps too late, France tacitly acquiesces in the Italian plan. For now a sense of emergency pushes Italy into threatening where she might have persuaded. Had Mussolini intended >var, he would not have blustered so much; an enemy bent on business does not trumpet his arrival. He intended to intimidate. Instead, he has roused the dangerous anger of the Ethiopian tribes. lie lias alarmed his friends iri Europe. He has excited expectations in his own country that he must satisfy.

Such bold plays are extremely risky for the player. Mussolini's personal prestige is deeply involved in the success of this adventure. Having gone almost as far as lie can in domestic reorganisation and development, the next step is> inevitable. But it is not ambition only that drives him toward the path of empire, 011 which so many dictators betore him have stumbled. Under any Government, nothing can long prevent nations like Italy, Germany and Japan from exploding somewhere. And nothing long can save the undeveloped remnants of the earth's surface from the pressure of civilisation.

The League of Nations, if sufficiently backed by public opinion, may listen to the appeal of Haile Selassie against the barbarous methods of the civilised. Temporarily, Italy may fail in her attempt to colonise and develop Italians at the expense of Ethiopians. In the end she will succeed. What Europe has endurance and energy enough to wrest from Africa she will take, by one means or another —preferably, of course, the other. The alternative is an impounded Europe seeking relief in war or pressed down to constantly lower levels, of life