Chapter IX: The French in West and North Africa (2)

But in 1909 the temporary peace in Morocco was again rudely broken
by Spanish activity round Melilla—the building of a railway to
secure a new post, La Mar Chica, and to reach and work mineral
deposits. The Riff tribes attacked the Spaniards with results
already described in Chapter V. The ferment among the Moors against
European intervention next took the shape of attacking the Sultan
Mulai Hafid at Fez (1910). To save the Sultan and the Sultan’s
Government (the “Makhzen”) and the European residents from possible
destruction, the French Government sent an expeditionary force from
the Shawia coast region to reach and relieve Fez. This was
accomplished after some difficulty in the spring of 1911, and a
small army or government guard was organized for the Sultan under
French officers.

This and other actions once more aroused German resentment and
intervention on the grounds that France was creating a virtual
protectorate over Morocco without Germany’s consent, and without
compensation to Germany for the possible loss of a profitable field
of commercial development. So the German war vessel, the _Panther_,
was sent to Agadir in the Bay of Sūs to “protect German interests”;
these interests being the mineralogical researches and acquisition
of concessions of the firm of Mannesmann. If we brush aside
diplomatic fictions, the kernel of the matter was this. Germany had
long fixed her desires on the Bay of Sūs or Agadir, that
semi-circular bight of the Moroccan coast south of the Atlas range
and opposite the River and Country of Sūs which is the nearest
approach on the whole Atlantic coast of Morocco to a large and good
harbour protected from the north wind. It was believed in Germany
that Great Britain was too much involved in domestic agitation to be
prepared to go to war over Morocco; and that France would be willing
to stave off trouble with Germany and obtain her consent to the
acquisition of nearly all Morocco by agreeing to a German
protectorate over the Sūs country and Anti-Atlas, thus admitting
Germany as a territorial power in North Africa.

Spain gave Germany some encouragement in this intervention, having
already found the French very grudging in their allotment of Spanish
spheres of influence in the north of Morocco and opposite the Canary
Islands. But had Germany succeeded in her demand for the Sūs country
Spain would have been the first to suffer. The Cape-Jubi-Bojador
region and the Canary Islands might ere long have become German
also.

An attempt was made in Germany to enlist European sympathy on her
side by advancing the plea that this intervention at Agadir stood
for free trade in Morocco. But this important principle had already
been secured by the Anglo-French Convention of 1904 and the
Algeciras Act of 1906; moreover the whole of the bargaining between
France and Germany, since 1906, bore reference to the selfish
advantages which German concessionaires and traders were to obtain
in Morocco to the detriment of (let us say) British, American, or
Belgian competitors. Of course France, in the use she has made of
North, West, and Central Africa and of Madagascar, has been
inexcusably protectionist. She has adopted the thoroughly selfish
policy of colonial exploitation characteristic of Spain and Portugal
in the 16th-18th centuries and of Britain in the 17th to early 19th
centuries. Nevertheless she has spent blood and treasure without
stint in the redemption of North Africa; and in spite of her
protectionist tariff the non-French, European trade with Algeria and
Tunis is very considerable. But a question of even greater
importance than a selfish French use of Morocco rose before Great
Britain in 1911. Not to support France in this diplomatic struggle
meant the establishment of Germany on the Atlantic coast of Morocco,
meant that the Emperor Wilhelm’s half jesting description of himself
at that period as “Admiral of the Atlantic” would become a reality,
with all the consequences which might flow from such a position.

Germany realizing her false position shifted her ground, asked for
reasonable “compensations in Central Africa,” got them, and in
return recognized definitely a French Protectorate over Morocco.
With the exception of the Riff Coast, of Tangier, and of the region
opposite the Canary Islands (which with the exception of Tangier
will become Spanish) France will soon be mistress of Morocco in
name, but probably not in actuality and entirety till many years
have passed. No sensible person need regret this. The condition of
Algeria and Tunis under French direction are a sufficient guarantee
for the future prosperity and happiness of the most interesting
country in Africa—Morocco—under French guidance.

As already related, France, or rather—the State being then but the
king—Louis XIV, had become interested in the affairs of Abyssinia
early in the 18th century. This interest was reawakened in the
middle of the next century by the remarkable researches of the
brothers Antoine and Arnaud d’Abbadie, who though of partly Irish
origin were French subjects. The elder brother had explored Brazil,
the younger, Algeria; but both were attracted by the little-known
civilization of Ethiopia and started together in 1838 for Abyssinia.
Between 1838 and 1853 their researches were carried on from Masawa
in the north to the little-known country of Kaffa in the far south;
and, though the results were not entirely published until 1890 (the
publication began in 1860), they gave to France a legitimate claim
(together with the subsidized travels of Borelli in 1890) to an
interest in the affairs and the future of Abyssinia.

In 1857, jealous of the British establishment at Aden, France had
intended to seize the island of Perim, at the mouth of the Red Sea,
but was forestalled by the British. She therefore turned her
attention to the coast opposite Aden, and there purchased from a
native chief (in 1862) the Bay of Obok. This place was not
effectively occupied till 1883, after the break-up of the Egyptian
Sudan empire. France then rapidly pushed her possessions southward
to curtail as much as possible similar British operations in
Somaliland. She thus secured the important bay of Tajurra, French
territory now stretches inland to the vicinity of Harrar. On the
north it is bounded by the Italian colony of Eritrea and in the
interior by Abyssinia and British Somaliland. French Somaliland, as
this possession is called, is about 5,790 sq. miles in extent and is
chiefly important for the comparatively good harbour of Jibuti and
for the fact that it controls the easiest access to Abyssinia.
Indeed the only existing railway which enters Abyssinia and connects
that country with the sea coast starts from Jibuti and is
constructed to the Abyssinian capital, Adis Ababa (275 miles), with
a branch to the old Semitic city of Harrar (altogether about 192
miles of rail on French territory). It was an unfulfilled aspiration
of France in the last decade of the 19th century that a French
Empire should extend across broadest Africa from Senegal to
Abyssinia and the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. This project was to
be essayed in a tentative manner by an expedition organized in the
French Congo in 1894-5 (despite warnings from Great Britain that
such action would be regarded as unfriendly) and led by an officer
who had been very successful in the wars of Upper Nigeria, the brave
Major J. B. Marchand, who advanced (mainly along the course of the
Djur River) with a force of about 150 Senegalese and nine French
officers to Fashoda, on the White Nile. Here they were saved from
possible destruction at the hands of a large force of Dervishes by
Lord Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman. In consequence of the protests
of the British Government, Major Marchand in November 1898 was
instructed to leave Fashoda and retire through Abyssinia to French
Somaliland. This journey up the valley of the Sobat River was
successfully accomplished; and at the end of May 1899 Marchand and
his officers reached Paris, where they received a great ovation.

French interest in the Congo region began in the 18th century,
mainly because of the importance of the servile labour of Congoland
to the French West Indies and the desirability of preventing the
Portuguese from regaining their monopolist hold over the Kongo
kingdom and its commerce. The French Government contrived moreover
to have French Catholic missionaries sent to the Congo and Loango in
place of the Italian Capuchins. The Napoleonic Wars and the
abolition of the slave trade suspended further action; but the idea
of a French control over “Lower Guinea” revived in 1839, at the time
when the government of Louis Philippe was making half-hearted
efforts to found French settlements on the West Coast of Africa. At
this date King ‘Denis’ of the Gaboon, who had shown favour to Roman
Catholic missionaries and to French traders, was induced to transfer
his kingdom to France. The Gaboon, or country of the Mpongwe tribes,
lies to the south of the Cameroon region. Effective possession was
not however taken till 1844, and Libreville, the present capital,
was not founded till 1848, when a cargo of slaves was landed there
from a captured slaving vessel and set free to commence the
population of the new town. Attention was drawn to this French
settlement by the remarkable journeys of a French-American, Paul du
Chaillu, and his making definitely known the characteristics of the
largest known anthropoid ape, the gorilla. The existence of this ape
had been to some extent established by the American naturalist, Dr
Savage, from skulls sent home by American missionaries settled on
the Gaboon estuary; but the gorilla was scarcely made familiar to
the general public, until Du Chaillu came to England with his
specimens[129]. In the early sixties French explorers established
the lower half of the course of the important river Ogowé; and in
the seventies these explorations were extended by other travellers,
who carried the knowledge of the Ogowé to the limits of its
watershed, and passed beyond—unknowingly—to affluents of the Congo.
Among these explorers was the celebrated Savorgnan de Brazza, of
Dalmatian origin but born on a French ship off the coast of Brazil.

Political interest in the Gaboon languished so much on the part of
France that the country was once or twice offered to England in
exchange for the Gambia. However in 1880, the awakening desire to
found a great colonial empire urged France to extend her Gaboon
possessions up the coast, towards the Cameroons, and southward in
the direction of the mouth of that great river, the Congo, the
course of which the explorer H. M. Stanley had just succeeded in
tracing. Even before Stanley’s return, the King of the Belgians had
summoned a number of geographers to Brussels to discuss the
possibility of civilizing Africa by an International African
association. This conference brought about the creation of national
committees, which were to undertake on behalf of each participating
nation a section of African exploration. The French committee sent
De Brazza to explore the hinterland of the Gaboon. While Stanley was
commencing his second Congo expedition for the King of the Belgians
and slowly working his way up the lower river, De Brazza had made a
rapid journey overland to Stanley Pool and the upper Congo, making
treaties for France and planting the French flag wherever he went.
Soon afterwards an English missionary, George Grenfell, discovered
the lower course of the great Mubangi, and French explorers promptly
directed their steps thither. For some years there was keen and even
bitter rivalry between Stanley’s expedition, which gradually became
a Belgian enterprise, and the French explorers under De Brazza; and
when, at the Conference of Berlin in 1884-5, it was sought to create
the Congo Independent State under the sovereignty of the King of the
Belgians, the adhesion of France to this scheme could only be
obtained by handing over to her much of the western and northern
watershed of the Congo, besides giving her a promise that, if the
Congo State were ever to be transferred from the Belgian sovereign
to another Power, France should have the right of preemption. Before
the French had been many years on the Mubangi River (which is one of
the few means of communication between the southern, Bantu part of
Africa, and the northern regions, the “Sudan,” populated by
non-Bantu Negroes, Negroids, Hamites, and Semites[130]), they had
very naturally conceived the idea of pushing northwards to the Shari
river and Lake Chad. In 1890 Paul Crampel was the first European to
cross this mysterious Bantu boundary, to leave the forest regions of
the Congo and lower Mubangi, and enter the more open park-lands of
the central Sudan. But he was attacked and killed (1891) by
suspicious Muhammadan raiders on the river Shari. Another Frenchman,
of Polish descent, M. Dybowski, succeeded in chastising the
murderers of Crampel, and further exploring the Shari. A further
mission under Lieutenant Maistre continued the work of Dybowski, and
was in turn followed by a well-equipped expedition under the command
of the explorer Emile Gentil; which last succeeded in placing a
small armed steamer on the river Shari, and thence reached the
waters of Lake Chad.

By an agreement with Germany in 1892, France secured German
recognition of her sphere of influence over the river Shari, over
the Bagirmi country, and the southern shores of Lake Chad; while, by
a treaty made with the King of the Belgians in 1894, the Belgian
boundary line was drawn at the Mubangi, the Mbomu, and the Nile
watershed. Lastly, by the Anglo-French convention of June 1898,
Great Britain recognized the French sphere to the south and east of
Lake Chad. Thus France obtained European recognition for a
continuous empire stretching from Algiers to the Congo Coast, and
Oran to Dakar—a remarkable outcome of the landing of 37,000 troops
at the Bay of Sidi Ferruj, near Algiers, in the summer of 1830.

In the last decade of the 19th century, the French method of
administering the territories of the Gaboon, Loango and
Congo-Mubangi (grouped since 1888 in one government as “French
Congo”) was infected by the “concessionaire” spirit, which had
unhappily inspired King Leopold II about the same time in his
attitude towards the development of the Congo Independent State.
These monopolist, protectionist ideas were a heritage from the older
style of colonization in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The
great Berlin Conference of 1884 on the Congo question was supposed
to have vetoed them and rendered their recurrence impossible. But no
sooner was this conference over than this monopolist policy was
revived by the Royal Niger Company on the Niger-Benue, by the infant
Congo State on the Congo above Stanley Pool, by the French in
Loango, and (though much more faintly) by the British South Africa
Company in Rhodesia. But it was mainly in the case of the Royal
Niger Company that the monopoly was one which completely crushed out
other trade. That association did not theoretically forbid the
natives to trade with any foreign merchants but itself; it merely
said to outside traders: “Sorry! but this place is ours, and so is
that—in fact the whole river-bank—and we cannot have you trading on
our private land.” The King of the Belgians copied this policy
pretty faithfully on the Congo, and so did the French. The whole of
French Congo, except two or three old-established towns on the
coast, was divided up into concessions, varying from 20 square miles
in extent to 54,000 square miles. The villages and plantations
actually occupied by the natives at the time were recognized as
native property, but this recognition did not necessarily confer on
the natives the right to trade with whom they pleased.

All the coast ports of the Gaboon and Loango had long been
frequented by British merchants doing a big trade with Liverpool;
and great was the indignation when they found their commerce with
the interior cut off by French concessionaires who, it may be, had
done nothing to develop the trade of the country. In spirit, of
course, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the
commercial stipulations of the Berlin and Brussels Acts which
followed the Congo Conference of 1884-5. But the French government,
in reply to remonstrances, pointed to the monopoly of the Royal
Niger Company[131]; and the French courts of law gave decisions
adverse to British appellants.

It is only fair to quote the justification for this policy of
concessions, charters, and other documents conferring special
privileges. It is desired—in the interests of the native as well as
of the overruling European government—to attract capital to the
opening-up and the exploiting of the natural riches of Africa,
riches of which the native has remained in utter ignorance for
millenniums of years. To invite investments of capital some security
must be given that the immediate fruits of the investors’ labours
and expenditure will not be unfairly garnered by others who have not
run the like risks. No one questions the right of the native, in a
varying degree, to a fair proportion of the land; the area being
determined by his numbers, degree of civilization, energy,
intellectual capacity, and the extent to which he has already
developed its resources. It would be, for example, a ridiculous
proposition that the 322,450 square miles of German South-West
Africa should be the exclusive heritage of a few thousand nomad
Hottentot and Bushman hunters, or even of sixty thousand Bantu
cattle-keepers; that some Congo forest of ten thousand to thirty
thousand square miles should be assigned in perpetuity to a few
thousand wandering pygmies prowling over it in search of game and
wild bees’ nests; or that the whole of the Sahara with its
phosphates and salt-mines be allotted to the raiding Tawareq and
Tibu. On the other hand, to say in connection with a well-populated,
fairly well-known region like the Niger banks, the Gaboon and Loango
coasts, or the lower Ogowé river, that the natives shall only trade
with concessionaires or with the Government itself, or that one
nation shall be specially favoured in its commerce or trading
relations, is to impose a tyranny which the world at large and the
subject races will no longer tolerate quietly. It does not follow
from this that there is to be no interference with “native” rights,
that “freedom should be free to slay herself,” as has often been the
case in wild countries, where the unthinking inhabitants destroy the
resources of the country without thought for the morrow. It is quite
permissible ethically for the French, the British or any other
government to take possession of some thoroughly backward or very
sparsely populated country in a more or less savage condition, and
rule that country impartially for its own benefit and for its
general usefulness to humanity at large. Under such conditions they
certainly are not obliged by any moral law to attribute to the
nearest native community of savages some large area of uninhabited
forest or metalliferous rock. Such a source of future wealth they
are entitled to administer as a trustee might deal with an estate
for the benefit of a minor or of an imbecile; but only on the
condition of putting the profits derived therefrom into the treasury
of the state or country thus administered, not into the funds,
private or public, of a distant European nation. King Leopold II or
the French Republic were quite justified in declaring the
uninhabited, unexploited, uncultivated forests of French and Belgian
Congo to be “State domains”; but not with the sole purpose in the
one case of swelling the revenues of his own privy purse, and in the
other of enriching political partisans or public servants. The
wealth of these regions need not have gone to some native chief or
tribe dwelling in the vicinity who had had nothing whatever to do
with the getting of the wealth, but should have been attributed to
the whole community of the state or colony in which these forest or
mining areas were situated.

Another grave defect in the earlier administration of French Congo
was the handing over of thousands of natives as veritable serfs of
the glebe to these European concessionaires. This was a wicked
return for the trust they had placed in envoys of France like De
Brazza, who had obtained their adherence to French dominion by
treaty. The result of this policy was that gross abuses ensued,
followed by native risings. At length the French Government was
constrained by European opinion (largely awakened by Mr E. D. Morel)
to look into the affairs of French Congo; and in 1905 the virtual
creator of this dominion, De Brazza, was sent out as a commissioner
to investigate the charges brought against the officials and the
concessionaires. It is believed that De Brazza was horrified at much
of the devastation and depopulation which he saw, as were some other
high-minded French officials who had the courage to publish their
impressions. But De Brazza died at Dakar on his way home, and his
report was never published, though the French Government made
afterwards some changes in matters of administration.

In 1911 Germany, in return for acknowledging a French Protectorate
over Morocco, obtained from France important territorial advantages
in French Congo—about 107,000 square miles—giving Germany (1) a
strip on the south of Corisco Bay and a large piece of the Osheba
country, which permits her to surround the Spanish possession of Rio
Muni (she also acquired from France rights of pre-emption over the
Rio Muni); (2) a long strip down the valley of the river Sanga to
the main Congo River opposite Lukolela; (3) the Laka and Baya
countries east of the Cameroons watershed; and (4) a strip of land
communicating with the Mubangi river. In return, Germany ceded to
France a piece of land (6450 sq. miles) along the left bank of the
lower Shari. It was generally rumoured that Germany had asked for
the whole left bank of the Mubangi from Libenge down to the Congo,
and the whole of French Congo between the Mubangi, the Congo and the
Atlantic coast. If she did so, other circumstances caused her to
modify her demands. In any case she has succeeded in cutting off
French Congo from the Mubangi-Shari-Chad territories, so far as
uninterrupted land communication is concerned. She has ringed the
tree in the hope that it may some day fall to her. But if it does,
it will only be in return for an equivalent in some other direction,
perhaps a rectification of the Lorraine frontier.

Even with the loss of her Gaboon-West Congo territory, France would
still possess a magnificent and compact African Empire exceeding in
extent that of any other European Power, or at any rate superior in
continuous area—an empire of something like 3,100,000 square miles,
stretching from Senegal and Morocco to the frontiers of Egypt and
the Egyptian Sudan, from Algiers and Carthage to the Belgian Congo
and the vicinity of Uganda; besides her valuable foothold on the
Gulf of Aden, and the possession of Madagascar (presently to be
described), which compensates her for the want of colonies in South
and East Africa. In the regions north of the Mubangi-Wele—a river
which Germans, Englishmen and Belgians were the first to discover,
but the whole of the north bank of which from the Mbomu confluence
to the Congo confluence is now owned by France—Frenchmen have reason
to be proud of their country’s record. As already related, it was
French explorers who first solved the mystery of the passage from
the Congo watershed to that of the Shari-Chad; and several French
explorers paid with their lives for their temerity. To enquire into
and avenge the death of Paul Crampel, a French commissioner, Emile
Gentil (subsequently, until 1908, Governor of French Congo) had
penetrated down the Shari River, from the Congo basin, till he had
reached the far-famed country of Bagirmi. Here he induced the
much-harried native sultan to accept French protection, and placed a
French resident at his court. Bagirmi was then invaded by Rabah
Zobeir, who had made himself Sultan of Bornu. The Bagirmi sultan and
the French resident had to flee before the army of Rabah; but after
two years’ fighting, in which at first the French met with several
reverses, Rabah was defeated and slain in a great battle in which
the Foureau-Lamy[132] expedition, which had come from Algiers, were
joined by the remnant of the Voulet-Chanoine column from Senegal,
and a river flotilla from the Mubangi-Congo. For two years more,
however, the French forces in Bagirmi had to fight Rabah’s sons and
successors; but the last of these was defeated and slain (on the
borders of Bornu) in the early part of 1902.

The next enemy to be grappled with and overcome—the last, so far as
one can foresee, of the strong Mussulman states of Central
Africa—was the country of Wadai, situated to the north-east of
Bagirmi and a region which had been for a century or more the chief
focus of slave-raiding and trading in Central Africa, besides being
singular in that region for its secular hatred and distrust of the
white man, in whom the Arabized ruling classes of Wadai saw not only
the hated Christian infidel but the eventual opponent of the slave
trade, out of which Wadai had amassed wealth since the seventeenth
century. The French entered into relations with Wadai in 1900, and
interfered in its civil wars. But incited by the agents of the
Senussi sheikh[133], the Wadai ruler attacked the French outposts on
the Shari in 1904 and carried off many negro prisoners. Another
motive for their hostility was that France had given refuge to a
claimant for the Wadai throne—Asil, subsequently Sultan of Wadai.
Between 1904 and 1911 fighting between the French and a section of
the Wadaian peoples—mostly the Maba negroids and the Massalit
Arabs—continued until the French had conquered the whole country and
installed Asil on the throne of Wadai under the guidance of a French
resident who has since (1912) deposed him for cruelty. They
themselves took over the direct government of the southern
provinces, the negro countries of Dar Runga and Dar Sila, so long
the hunting-grounds for the slave-raiders; so much so, that their
once abundant negro population was reduced to a few thousand
miserable savages. In this long warfare against the strongest and
most fanatical of Muhammadan negro states, the French lost numerous
officers of note and displayed qualities of resource and heroism
that promise well for a nation which can produce at the present day
such officers and non-commissioned officers. As in the case of the
British, the rank and file of their armies on these campaigns were
Africans, mainly Senegalese.

The conquest of Bagirmi and Wadai naturally secured to the French
the more sparsely populated country of Kanem, inhabited mainly by
those Tibu negroids whose race extends right across the Sahara to
the hinterland of Tripoli. Now that Italy is in occupation of
Cyrenaica, and Turkey can no longer supply arms and ammunition to
Wadai for the campaign against the interfering white man, it is
unlikely that French rule will be seriously contested any more in
the heart of the Central Sudan; so long, that is, as Britain rules
to the eastward. Quite possibly a great strategic future may lie
before Kanem and Wadai, and the lands of the French Mubangi
province; for through these regions may pass the trunk line of
Trans-African railways, the route which will connect South Africa
with Tangier and with Alexandria. The conquest of Wadai by the
French has been the final and the most crushing blow directed at the
African slave trade of Islam, and it has been carried out with a
lavish expenditure of money and bravery at a distance of something
like 1,500 miles from the nearest civilized base, a feat almost
without parallel in African history. It may well serve as a pendant
and an effacement to that brief lapse from the policy of a civilized
Power during which something like a new form of slavery was
established by France in Western Congoland.

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FRENCH AFRICA

Plate IV.

W. & A.K. Johnston, Limited, Edinburgh & London.

EXPLANATORY NOTE

[gray] _Area of French Possessions in 1880_
[pink]   ”    ”    ”    _Colonies and Protectorates in 1912_

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Footnote 122:

It might be advisable at this juncture to explain clearly about
the Fula power in French Nigeria and Senegambia. The Ful or Fulbe
people appeared first in the 13th century in West African history
as peaceful cattle-keepers on the lower Senegal; but as a matter
of fact they had probably reached the Upper Niger and Senegal many
centuries before. The Western Fulbe had become Muhammadans at
quite an early date—between the 12th and 15th centuries. Those in
the more eastern part of Nigeria remained pagan in some
settlements down to the 19th century, and are pagan even still.
About the 16th century those of the Senegal began to emigrate as
cattle-keepers into the cooler highlands of Futa Jallon, and
became the ruling power on this upland two hundred years later. At
the same period—the beginning or middle of the 18th century—they
likewise founded dynasties of Muhammadan kings in Futa Toro and
Bondu (south of the Upper Senegal). In 1802, a Fula religious
mystic and _imam_ or religious preacher, Othman Dan Fodio, arose
like a Mahdi in Eastern Nigeria (Sokoto), called on the Muhammadan
Fulas of the central Sudan to join with him in a holy war, and in
a few years conquered a vast Fula Empire, which was almost
conterminous with the British (Northern) Nigeria of to-day. Fired
no doubt by this example another Fula ‘sheikh’ or holy man—Ahmadu
Lobo, in the country of Masina, between Timbuktu and Jenné—about
1813 attacked with his followers the vestiges of Moorish power on
the Upper Niger, the “Roumas” (as they were called, from their
having come originally from Andalusia—“Rome”) and took all power
from them, creating in Central Nigeria between Jenné and Gao the
powerful Fula kingdom of Masina, which lasted until about 1861,
when Ahmadu Ahmadu, the last Fula Emperor of Masina, was attacked
and killed by a rival Fula Mahdi from the west.

This personage was ’Omaru bin Saidi, a Fula of Futa Toro, who had
spent some years in Mekka and Medina, and had acquired the
reputation of a holy man and a doctor of religion. On his return
to West Africa he was received with great respect by the Fula
princes of Futa Jallon, and with their support he rallied to the
cause of Islam the Fula-negro peoples of Futa Toro and Bondu—the
Takrur, Torobe, or “Toucouleurs” as they came to be called. Al
Hajji ’Omaru (as he was called), after his return from the
pilgrimage (Al Hajj) to Mekka was unsuccessful in his attack on
the French (1857), and so turned his army against his fellow
Moslems of the Upper Niger. Two years after the defeat and death
of Ahmadu Ahmadu, the Fula Sultan of Masina, ’Omaru himself
perished at Bandiagara, in the Masina kingdom. The Toucouleur
power was, however, maintained by his sons and successors till it
finally fell in 1892 with the capture of Segu on the Niger by a
French force.

Footnote 123:

It is averred that this name is a contraction of Idolos. The
islands would appear to have been named by the early Portuguese
navigators Ilhas dos Idolos from the idols or fetishes which were
very prominently in use.

Footnote 124:

Of Arab descent, born near Maskara in Western Algeria.

Footnote 125:

In 1861, there were 112,229 French settlers in Algeria, and 80,517
Italians, Spaniards, Maltese, Germans, and Swiss; in all, 192,746
European colonists, as against about 650,000 in 1910. It is a
common mistake among British writers on political economy to
assert that the French are not good colonizers, though they have
Eastern Canada, Louisiana, Algeria and Tunis before their eyes.
There are now some 340,000 thriving French inhabitants of Northern
Africa between Morocco and Tripoli, who will play a considerable
part yet in Mediterranean politics.

Footnote 126:

This title arose of course from the Bey (Beg) or Colonel
commanding the Turkish army of occupation. The present dynasty was
founded in 1706 by the Bey, Hussein bin ’Ali, who was really a
renegade Cretan Greek.

Footnote 127:

This now forgotten bone of contention was, in the autumn of 1898,
sold by the Italian Company to the French Railway Company of
Bône-Guelma-et-Tunisie.

Footnote 128:

Some of the latter performed really gallant services, and
afterwards passed into the military and police forces organized by
the French.

Footnote 129:

Now in the British Museum of Natural History.

Footnote 130:

The Mubangi is the name given to the western and southern course
of the river which is known as the Wele in its upper waters, and
was discovered by Schweinfurth in 1871.

Footnote 131:

The invidious analogy of the Royal Niger Company was soon
afterwards disposed of by its charter being redeemed for £900,000,
and the Niger being thrown open to general trade.

Footnote 132:

Major Lamy was killed in the battle which also cost Rabah his
life.

Footnote 133:

At the end of the 18th century there was born at Mostaganem in
West Algeria from an Arab family in that place, Muhammad-bin-Ali,
further named As-Sanusi (Senussi), after a celebrated saint of
Tlemsan. He went as a young man to Mekka, and there achieved a
reputation for holiness and learning. Here also he made the
acquaintance of Muhammad Sharif, a negro prince from Wadai, who
afterwards became Sultan of that country. In the middle of the
19th century As-Sanusi returned to N. Africa and settled in the
Cyrenaica, but finding the Turks suspicious he changed his
head-quarters to Jaghbub in 1860, just inside the Egyptian
borders, thirty miles from Siwa. Here he died soon after his
arrival, and as a religious leader he was succeeded by his second
son, Al-Mahdi. Al-Mahdi Senussi II renewed the relations with
Wadai, where his father’s sect numbered many adherents, and in the
last quarter of the 19th century removed his head-quarters to Al
Jof in the Kufra oasis, midway between Cyrenaica and the Sudan.
Senussi refused to countenance the revolt of the Mahdi in the
Egyptian Sudan, but between 1899-1902 interfered strenuously in
the Central Sudan to prevent the advance of the French, especially
towards Kanem and Wadai. But his efforts were fruitless, and he
died in or near Wadai in 1902. His nephew and successor, Senussi
III, wandered about for some time in the borderland between Wadai
and Kordofan, and finally betook himself to the Kufra oasis in the
Libyan desert, where he now resides. The Senussiites profess a
purified form of the Muhammadan faith, are rigid abstainers from
alcohol and tobacco, but are above all an honest, industrious
folk, who have done much of late years to improve the conditions
of life in the Saharan and Libyan oases.