THE WHITE MAN'S WAR FOR CIVILISATION IN AFRICA BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S. LATE OF THE AMERICAN CONSULAR SERVICE IN EGYPT WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1919 Copyright, 1912, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS To MY CHEERFUL, UNCOMPLAINING AND COURAGEOUS COMRADE ON THE LONG AFRICAN TRAIL MY WIFE The unknown lands are almost all discovered. The work of the explorer and the pioneer is nearly finished, and ere long their stern and hardy figures will have

For assistance in the preparation of this book I am grateful to many people. To the editors of Collier's , The Outlook , The Review of Reviews , The Independent , The Metropolitan , Travel , and Scribner's my thanks are due for their permission to use such portions of this volume as originally appeared in their magazines in the form of articles. I also desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Right Hon. James Bryce, O.M., for permission to avail myself of certain data contained in his admira

With the exception of the negro republic of Liberia (on whose frontiers, by the way, France is steadily and systematically encroaching), the little patches of British and Spanish possessions on the West Coast, and the German colonies of Kamerun and Togoland, France has unostentatiously brought under her control that enormous tract of African soil which stretches from the banks of the Congo to the shores of the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Valley of the Nile. Algeria has b

This empire which has come under the shadow of the tricolour is, above all else, a white man's country. Unlike India and Tripolitania and Rhodesia and the Sudan, Morocco is a country which is admirably adapted for European colonisation, being blessed with every natural advantage that creation has to offer. Its only objectionable feature is its people. Lying at the western gateway of the Mediterranean, where the narrowed sea has so often proved a temptation to invasion, its Atlantic ports within

That is why I went to the Ziban, that strange and almost unknown zone of oasis-dotted steppes in southernmost Algeria. Hemmed in between the Atlas Mountains and the Great Sahara, it forms the real Algerian hinterland, a region vastly different in people, manners, and customs from either the desert or the littoral. Here, in this fertile borderland, where the red tarbooshes and baggy trousers of the French outposts are the sole signs of civilisation, is the home of the Ouled-Naïls, that curious ra

Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of

IN ZANZIBAR THERE is no name between the covers of the atlas more redolent of romance and adventure. Ever since Livingstone entered the African jungle on his mission of proselytism; ever since Stanley entered the same jungle on his quest of Livingstone; and ever since the railway-builders began to run their levels and lay their rails along the trail blazed by them both, Zanzibar has been the chief gateway through which Christianity, civilisation, and commerce have entered the Dark Continent. Tho

When a poor imitation of order has been restored and the luggage has been rescued and sorted, you start for the hotel—there is only one deserving of the name—with a voluble hotel-runner clinging to your arm as though afraid you would break away, and followed by a miniature safari of porters balancing trunks, hat-boxes, kit-bags, gun-cases, bath-tubs, and the other impedimenta of an African traveller on their turbaned heads. Returning the ostentatious salute of the tan-coloured sentry at the head

In Morocco, East Africa, and the Congo; in Turkey, Persia, and Malaysia; in Hayti, Brazil, and the Argentine; on the shores of all the continents and the islands of all the seas, German merchants and German money are working twenty-four hours a day building up that oversea empire of which the Kaiser dreams. The activities of these pioneers of commerce and finance are as varied as commerce and finance themselves. Their guttural voices are heard in every market place; their footsteps resound in ev

It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious a

The Rhodesia-bound traveller who escapes landing at Beira in a basket is fortunate, for it has a poorly sheltered harbour and neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, so that in the monsoon months, when the great combers come roaring in from the Indian Ocean mountain-high, there is about as much chance of getting the steam tender alongside the rolling liner as there is of getting a frightened horse alongside a panting automobile. If a dangerous sea is running, the disembarking passenger is put into a cyl

If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well as in name its people will have to face and solve the great national problems of race and colour. Of these, the former are, if not the more important, certainly the more pressing. Two of the four provinces of the Union, remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a third is bound by the closest ties of blood and tradition to the Dutch people; while only one of the four is British in sentiment and population. Many intelligent people with

“I am the wife of the legal adviser to the Crown,” said a sweet-faced little Irishwoman. “My husband and I would be so pleased if you would come up to our bungalow for dinner. You can have no idea how good it seems to see a white face again.” “Oh, I say, then you must promise to breakfast with me,” urged a tall young Englishman in immaculate white linen, who, it proved, was the superior judge of the colony. “You won't disappoint me, will you, old chap? I'm dying to hear what's going on in the wo