African River Life

Abstract

THAT, with our present knowledge of its geography and resources, Africa should be considered the special field for travellers en grand, is not surprising. Nor is it strange that merchants and moneyed men should be attracted to a land so rich in the means and materials of commerce. Immense progress has of late years been made in filling up the blanks for which its maps were notorious up to a very recent generation of school-boys; but the impulse in this direction is not yet expended, and Europe awaits eagerly much-needed enlightenment on the Sahara and Western Soudan, besides those countries of which more is heard, and remains to be heard, in the development of our existing foreign or colonial relations. To the north, Algiers and Egypt; to the south, the Cape of Good Hope and neighbouring territories; and east and west, the coast lines, and outlying islands generally, of the main land, have long since become familiar localities to students of travel and current events. It is only, however, within the last ten or fifteen years that equatorial Africa has been fairly opened out. Across the huge continent Europeans have now placed a broad and continuous girdle, reaching from the mouth of the Congo at Banana to the dominions of the Sultan of Zanzibar. Looked at from west to east, the component parts of this girdle are the French Congo, won to France by M. De Brazza and Belgian concession; the Portuguese Congo, allowed to Portugal in deference to a long-asserted claim, the frequent rejection of which by the English Foreign Office seemed to demand a change of treatment; the Free State of the Congo, founded and acquired by Stanley and a host of explorers and emissaries serving the King of the Belgians, first among promoters of Central African exploration; the wide-spreading German lands obtained from the chiefs of Usagara, Nguru, Useguha, and Ukanio, by three skilful and enterprising negotiators, whose work—like that of the Society of German Colonization—was almost immediately taken under the protection of the Imperial ægis on the signatures being affixed to the Treaty of Berlin; and now the girdle has become deepened by the important addition of the tracts ceded to the chartered Imperial British East African Company. What may be done by the Company dealing with the African Lakes is a problem the solution of which should belong to the combined or separate action of both philanthropists and commercial speculators.

A Visit to Stanley's Rear Guard at Major Barttelot's Camp on the Aruhwimi; with an Account of River Life on the Congo.

By J. R. Werner. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons, 1889.)