There was a chance of seduction, especially with native races in Africa, but it was a very small chance, and, like many another well-laid scheme, this one failed because its authors did not understand the material which was to be used to work it. It failed in Africa because the African is more than the beast of burden the German Colonists schooled and deluded themselves into thinking. They did not understand the native; and, in a word, the native hates the German, especially the officials. Their methods of colonisation have good points in matter of detail, routine work, etc.; but if colonisation be regarded as something more than the exploitation of a subject race and the passive holding of its territory, they must be written down a failure, for the extraordinary efficiency of the administrative machinery falls far short of compensating for the rottenness of the policy behind it. A nation in whom a much-vaunted _kultur_ has produced an ideal of national life whose highest expression is the atmosphere of a penal settlement, is foredoomed to failure as a coloniser. CHAPTER II SOUTH WEST AFRICA Ever since her acquisition of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, vitally important to her in view of her interests in the East, Great Britain had been unquestionably the supreme Power in the south of the African Continent. With the passing of the Dutch East India Company, Holland had ceased to be a South African Power; while the Portuguese had lost their status. The latter in reality only held an area along the coast of her possessions, a great proportion of the interior, which undoubtedly had once been beneficially occupied by Portuguese, having reverted to savagedom. The southern point of Portuguese South East Africa extended to and included Delagoa Bay and Lourenço Marquez, while the southern boundary of their western Colony was about the 22° S. From the days of its earliest history the Cape Colony was subject to attacks by natives, and the constant raids by hordes of Kafirs caused the Colony to extend its borders and absorb and settle the Hinterland. [Illustration: THE GERMAN COLONIES IN AFRICA, 1914. (Reproduced by permission of _The Times_.)] Up to 1883 the natural course of beneficial occupation and development had been towards the east and north-east borders, over the more fertile and naturally resourceful portions of the country, rather than west and north-west, where a comparatively arid zone intervened. Towards the Orange and Vaal Rivers the hardiest race of pioneers the world has ever seen, the "Voor-trekking" Boers, pressed onwards to escape from subjection to any form of government excepting their own patriarchal control. Their story hardly comes within the scope of this modest work; but it is indissolubly connected with the making of South Africa, and a brief sketch of their history may be permissible.