All along the Guinea coast, castles or forts or fortified stations had been held by various nationalities from the time of the first exploration, but these led to no effective advance, for the forest lay behind, dense, difficult to penetrate, because of the purely physical obstacles, and made trebly difficult by the presence of fevers and savage men. Only in these latter years has that forest been penetrated, and the land of half-breed Mohammedan negroes to the north been controlled. As we might expect, that land was first reached by the least difficult natural way, the one great river, the Niger; it is now being organized, connected by railway with the coast, and brought into the world system as a region which may supply cotton for European manufacture, while the forest districts of the Niger Delta still remain almost unexplored.
The land south of the equator corresponding to this Sudan region of the Senegal and the Upper and Middle Niger is also acquiring importance. As land farther and farther north from the southern coast of Africa has been organized, it has been increasingly expensive and wasteful to keep up communications only by a lengthy railway to a part in the far south ; the open plateau lies nearer the east than the west, and is separated from the west for some distance by the dry area of the Kala hari, so that ports farther and farther north on the eastern coast have become of importance; but each of these is also successively farther and farther from Europe, and it is now becoming probable that the region of the Upper Zambezi may be more economically reached from that west coast claimed centuries ago by the Portuguese.
Thus Africa, long occupied only by barbarous peoples, unknown and unexplored because of the geographical conditions, has lately naturally and inevitably been partitioned among the peoples that matter, and those who matter most have had most say in the partitioning. But still the native races remain ; they are still for the most part pastoral, and their treatment constitutes a problem which is not yet solved.