Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/164

 of the Negro against the foreigner. In this they are aided by the Mahdi. The work of the Mahdi is largely a missionary enterprise. The dervishes who accompany his army are religious fanatics, and desire the overthrow of the Christians and Emin Pacha as earnestly as the slave-trader. Religious fanaticism is therefore united with the greed of the slave-trader to drive out the Christians from the lake region.

Aroused by these reports, and influenced by these views, Cardinal Lavigerie, for twenty years Bishop of Algiers and now Primate of Africa, last summer started a new crusade in Belgium and Germany against slavery and the slave-trade. The cardinal has organized societies, and is raising a large fund to equip two armed steamships for Lake Tanganyika and Lake Nyassa, the headquarters of the slave-trade, and offers, if necessary, to head the band himself. The Pope has engaged in the work, has contributed liberally to this fund, and sent three hundred Catholic missionaries to Central Africa. The slave-trade is carried on with arms and ammunition furnished by European traders. Without these arms, the slave-trade could not be successfully carried on, for the Negroes could defend themselves against slave-traders armed like themselves. While the demand for slaves continues, the slave-trade will exist, and will not cease until the factories of European nations are planted in the interior of Africa.

We are told in Phillips's "Ore Deposits" that the precious metals do not appear to be very generally distributed in Africa. More thorough research may show that this view is incorrect, and that there are large deposits of iron, copper, gold, and other metals in many parts of the continent. Gold is found on the Gold Coast, in the Transvaal, in the Sudan, and in Central Africa, but is only worked in surface diggings, excepting in the Transvaal; but near all these washings, gold nuggets of large size, and the quartz rock, have been discovered. In Transvaal the mines were worked a long time ago, probably by the Portuguese, then abandoned and forgotten. Recently they have been rediscovered, and worked by the English. In the Kaap goldfield in the Transvaal, three years ago, the lion and zebra, elephant and tiger, roamed undisturbed in the mountain solitudes, where there is now a population of 8,000, with 80 gold-mining