FORMER INDIFFERENCE 9 



in Africa are controlled, we should at once find 

 ourselves confronted by an expenditure from which 

 any but the wealthiest among the European Powers 

 might well shrink back aghast. I cannot refrain, 

 therefore, from reflecting that although much has 

 been said and much written regarding the condition 

 of neglect and moral abandonment in which 

 Livingstone and Oswell found the Zambezi in 

 1851, at that time the eyes of Europe were 

 glancing across the Mediterranean with but a 

 languid interest. They only developed a gleam 

 of covetousness some years later, when, in the 

 partition of the great continent, it was tardily found 

 that occupation at all events, if not actual internal 

 development, formed the indispensable qualification 

 for permanent possession. What did we care for 

 the Zambezi, or, indeed, any other portion of 

 Central or South Central Africa, forty years ago ? 

 How many of us at that time possessed an accurate 

 idea as to where these regions lay ? It is as though 

 with the awakening of European interest in East 

 Africa as a whole, Portugal struggled hard to fall 

 into line with other colonising nations ; and what- 

 ever may have been the condition of her East 

 African Colony when, in 1888, light commenced to 

 stream fi:om Great Britain into Mombasa, I should 

 be loth to say that she had not bestirred herself 

 since, and done her best to improve the condition 

 of the Zambezi Valley, as well as to purify the 

 fountains of her entire colonial administration. 



The future of Zambezia twenty years hence wiU 

 wholly depend upon what she does now, and the 

 same is no doubt true of the province as a whole. 



