THE MYSTERY OF AFRICA.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XXI, Issue 1063, 17 April 1890, Page 3

THE MYSTERY OF AFRICA.

It is impossible to read Mr. Stanley's reports of his adventures, and*especially the official one published recently—amasterpiece of unpretentious lucidity, though obviously penned by a self-conscious man—without reflecting once more upon the great mystery of Africa. What is it that throngh all ages has rendered the mass of that grand continent, five times the size of Europe, full of extravagantly fertile regions and of mineral treasures, so useless to mankind? There they are, millions upon millions of rich acres, millions of pounds' worth of treasure, trillions of people physically strong; arid except on a thin coast-line along the Mediterranean, and in a wonderfully narrow valley of the North-eastern corner, the progress of mankind, till within the last fifty years, has been no better for them. Natural riches such as Europe does not possess have served only to keep alive, for the most part in horrible misery, populations which never advance, never improve, build no city, develop no art, found no lasting society—do nothing, in fact, but end lives of terror or rapine by deaths often of exceptional pain and horror. The Africans have not even developed creeds. The old-fashioned explanation, the solidity of the configuration of the continent, which has no internal sea and no deep fiords, is evidently imaginary. Africa is no more solid than Asia, and in some of the thickest and most remote corners of Asia, in Central China, in Samarcand, in the depths of Arabia, in Central ludia, some of the greatest and most independent; civilisations have arisen. If Africa has no sea, it has great lakes ; if it has no fiords, it is penetrated to its very centre by mighty rivers, the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Orange, the Limpopo, the Zambesi, and several more, only one of which has ever attracted a race capable of constructing stone buildings on its banks. So far from the desert and the forest being the obstacle, the deserts have been traversed on camels for ages ; half Africa is capable of cultivation, which itself implies capacity of travel. In large sections of it the population is thick on the ground, and even on the lower grounds, or in the Doabs, where such awful forests as that of the Aruwhimi stretch, there are, as Mr. Drummond testifies, thousands of miles of footpath so incessantly trodden that the natives are never without a guiding line. Another explanation is, that the obstacle is the climate; but that is almost as superficial as the first. Continents are populated by their peoples, not by wandering visitors from elsewhere ; and the climate of Africa, though in places deadly to the European, does not kill its own peoples, who are, for the most part, men of exceptional physical vigor and endurance. That is why the curse of the slave-trade has descended on Africa, and also why her children, though transported to other regions, oppressed, beaten, and half-starved, multiply faster than either of the great colonising races, the Anglo-Saxon and the Spaniard. Ask the British soldier what the Zulu is like as a fighting man, or the British sailor what he thinks of the mere strength of the " nigger " cook, or any doctor in the Louisianiau swamps, or those of Mozambique, how he compares the capacity of negro and white for resisting malaria. Besides, Africa is uot a place, but a wilderness of places, and on its enormous plateaux the climate is often as good as that of Italy, and far better than that cf Bengal, where the people swarm like llies. Sierra JLeone is in Africa, but so also is the Orange Free Staie, where ill-licalth may be said to be un known, and the few people might be excused if, like the savages of Guiana, they held witchcraft to be the only origin of disease. Nor is the better theory of her separateness a full explanation of the uselessncss of Africa. Men could hardly be more separate than the Assyrians, or the Chinese who reared the social order of the earlier Native Empire, or that strange people of EL'ypt who built Luxor and wrote the hieratic books, and who can have borrowed nothing, because they were earlier than all. No civilised man, it is said, not even the Roman, ever discovered the Quorra ; but did any such man ever discover the Nile ? There was, it is suggested, white blood in the first Egyptian, white blood, and therefore the transcendent gift of accumulating knowledge. Granted ; but was there white blood in the subjects of the Jncas, who built, in a seclusion as perfect as that of a separate planet, great cities, smelted metal and worked in them, terraced the mountain sides with watered gardens, invented the quipus, and organised a social polity so ehiborate that the modern Socialists of the Continent, though they do not know it, are but imitators of the old Peruvian ideas? And, finally, the great "Negro" theory, the incompetence said to be always found in the children of Ilam, which is so constantly advanced, docs not always meet the facts. All Africans aie not negroes, or even black men. Brown races, no darker than the races of India, dwell or wander in ala go portion of the continent. The Zulus and a host of such tribes are Asiatic in form, though burlier ; and Stanley relates, in the very report that provokes us to this speculation, that he found " finely formed " tribes, " light bronze " in color, in the very recesses of the horrible forests of the Aruwhimi. Why has not some one clan amidst so many races mastered and civilised the negro tribes, as similar clans mastered and civilised the original Australoids of the Asiatic deltas? They were not impeded, we presume, by modern ideas about the righteousness of conquest, or by any hesitation in using discipline to enforce the needful education.—" Spectator."