Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of Africa, from Greece to Great Britain. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses, came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, and grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war to-day but of the menace of wars to-morrow.Īlways Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. Particularly to-day most men assume that Africa lies far afield from the centres of our burning social problems, and especially from our present problem of World War. Yet there are those who would write world-history and leave out this most marvelous of continents. ‘Semper novi quid ex Africa,’ cried the Roman proconsul and he voiced the verdict of forty centuries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |