Africa

discovered two new lakes, Manyara and Eiassi, occupying parts of the East

African valley system. This region was again traversed in 1893-1894 by

Count von Gotzen, who continued his route westwards to Lake Kivu, north of

Tanganyika, which, though heard of by Speke over thirty years before, had

never yet been visited. He also reached for the first time the line of

volcanic peaks north of Kivu, one of which he ascended, afterwards crossing

the great equatorial forest by a new route to the Congo and the west coast.

Valuable scientific work was done in 1893 by Dr J.W. Gregory, who ascended

Mount Kenya to a height of 16,000 ft. In 1893-1894 Scott Elliot reached

Ruwenzori by way of Uganda, returning by Tanganyika and Nyasa, and in 1896

C. W. Hobley made the circuit of the great mountain Elgon, north-east of

Victoria Nyanza. In 1899 Mount Kenya was ascended to its summit by a party

under H. J. Mackinder. The exploration of Mount Kilimanjaro has been the

special work of Dr Hans Meyer, who first directed his attention to it in

1887.

The region south of Abyssinia proper and north of Lake Rudolf, being

largely the basin of the Sobat tributary of the Nile, was traversed by

several explorers, among whom may be mentioned Capt. M. S. Wellby, who in

1898-1899 explored the chain of small lakes in south-east Abyssinia, pushed

on to Lake Rudolf, and thence traversed hitherto unknown country to the

lower Sobat. Donaldson Smith crossed from Berbera to the Nile by Lake

Rudolf in 1899-1900, and Major H. H. Austin commanded two survey parties

between the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Lake Rudolf during 1899-1901. Meantime

in south Central Africa the Barotse country had been partly made known by

the missionary F. Coillard, who settled there in 1884, while the middle and

upper Zambezi basin were scientifically explored and mapped by Major A. St

H. Gibbons and his assistants in 1895-1896 and 1898-1900. In the same

period the Congo-Zambezi watershed was traced by a Belgian officer, Capt.

C. Lemaire, who had ascended one of the upper tributaries of the Kasai.

In the early years of the 19th century the first recorded crossing of

Africa took place. That crossing and all subsequent crossings had been made

either from west to east or east to west. The first journey through the

whole length of the continent was accomplished in the two last years of the

century when a young Englishman, E. S. Grogan, starting from Cape Town

reached the Mediterranean by way of the Zambezi, the central line of lakes

and the Nile. Other travellers followed in Grogan's footsteps, among the

first, Major Gibbons.

Additions to topographical knowledge were made from about 1890 onwards by

the international commissions which traced

Work of international commissions and surveying parties.

the frontiers of the protectorates of the European powers. On several

occasions the labours of the commissions disclosed errors of importance in

the maps upon which international agreements had been based. Among those

which yielded valuable results were the Anglo-French commission which in

1903 traced the Nigerian frontier from the Niger to Lake Chad, and the

Anglo-German commission which in 1903-1904 fixed the Cameroon boundary

between Yola, on the Benue, and Lake Chad. These expeditions and French

surveys in the same region during 1902-1903 resulted in the discovery that

Lake Chad had greatly decreased in area since the middle of the 19th

century. In 1903 a French officer, Capt. E. Lenfant, succeeded in

establishing the fact of a connexion between the Niger and Chad basins.

Subsequently Lenfant explored the western basin of the Shari, determining

(1907) the true upper branch of that river.

In East Africa a German-Congolese commission surveyed (1901-1902) Lake

Kivu and the volcanic region north of the lake, R. Kandt making a special

study of Kivu and the Kagera sources, while the Anglo-German boundary

commission of 1902-1904 surveyed the valley of the lower Kagera, and fixed

the exact position of Albert Edward Nyanza. Much new information concerning

the border-lands of British East Africa and Abyssinia between Lake Rudolf

and the lower Juba was obtained by the survey executed in 1902-1903 by a

British officer, Captain P. Maud.

While political requirements led to the exact determination of frontiers,

administrative needs forced the governments concerned to take in hand the

survey of the countries under their protection. Before the close of the

first decade of the 20th century tolerably accurate maps had been made of

the German colonies, of a considerable part of West Africa, the Algerian

Sahara and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, mainly by military officers. A British

naval officer, Commander B. Whitehouse, mapped the entire coastdine of

Victoria Nyanza. Government and railway surveys apart, the chief points of

interest for explorers during 1904-1906 were the Ruwenzori range and the

connexion of the basin of Lake Chad with the Niger and Congo systems.

Lieut. Boyd Alexander was the leader of a party which during the years

named surveyed Lake Chad and a considerable part of eastern Nigeria,

returning to England via the Shari, the Ubangi and the Nile. Two members of

the party, Capt. Claud Alexander and Capt. G. B. Gosling, died during the

expedition. The Ruwenzori Mountains proved a great source of attraction.

Sir H. H. Johnston had in 1900 ascended beyond the snow-line to 14,800 ft.;

in 1903 Dr J. J. David had reached from the west to a height he believed to

exceed 16,000 ft.; and in the same year Capt. T. T. Behrens, of the Anglo-

German Uganda boundary commission, fixed the highest summit at 16,619 ft.

During 1904-1906 some half-dozen expeditions were at work in the region.

That of the duke of the Abruzzi was the most successful. In the summer of

1906 the duke or members of his party climbed all the highest peaks, none

of which reaches 17,000 ft., and determined the main lines of the

watershed. Major Powell-Cotton, a British officer who had previously done

good work in Abyssinia and British East Africa, spent 1905-1906 in a

detailed examination of the Lado enclave and the country west of Ruwenzori

and Albert and Albert Edward lakes. This expedition was specially fruitful

in additions to zoological knowledge.

Archaeological research, stimulated by the reports of Thomas Shaw,

British consular chaplain at Algiers in 1719- 1731, by James Bruce's

exploration, 1765-1767, of the ruins in Barbary, and by the French conquest

of Egypt in 1798, has been systematically carried out in North Africa since

the middle of the 19th century (see EGYPT and AFRICA, ROMAN.) In South

Africa the first thorough examination of the ruins in Rhodesia was made in

1905, when Randall-MacIver demonstrated that the great Zimbabwe and similar

buildings were of medieval or post-medieval origin. (F. R. C.)

VII. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

The eagerness with which the nations of western Europe partitioned Africa

between them was due, as has been seen, more to the necessities of commerce

than to mere land hunger. Yet, except in the north and south temperate

regions, the commercial intercourse of the continent with the rest of the

world had been until the closing years of the 19th century of insignificant

proportions. In addition to slaves, furnished by the continent from the

earliest times, a certain amount of gold and ivory was exported from the

tropical regions, but no other product supplied the material for a

flourishing trade with those parts. To their Asiatic and European invaders

the Africans indeed owed many creature comforts—the introduction of maize,

rice, the sugar cane, the orange, the lemon and the lime, cloves, tobacco

and many other vegetable products, the camel, the horse and other

animals—but invaluable to Africa as were these gifts they led to little

development of commerce. The continent continued in virtual isolation from

the great trade movements of the

Causes of isolation.

world, an isolation due not so much to its poverty in natural resources, as

to the special circumstances which likewise caused so large a part of the

continent to remain so long a terra incognita. The principal drawbacks may

be summarized as: (1) the absence of means of communication with the

interior; (2) the unhealthiness of the coast-lands; (3) the small

productive activity of the natives; (4) the effects of the slave trade in

discouraging legitimate commerce. None of these causes is necessarily

permanent, that most difficult to remove being the third; the negro races

finding the means of existence easy have little incentive to toil. The

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39