“Africa shall be redeemed. Her children shall perform this mighty work. Her swamps shall be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her children shall do all this. In this amiable task, they may possibly suffer and even perish. We must learn to look on this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature that the weak must be devoured by the strong. But a grateful posterity will cherish their memories. When the future British residents of Timbuktu have their tea gardens in the oases of the Sahara; when hotels and tour guides are established at the sources of the Nile; when it becomes fashionable to go yachting on the lakes of the Great African Plateau; when European noblemen build their country houses in Central Africa, complete with elephant parks and hippopotamus ponds, then young English ladies sitting in their hammocks under palm trees will read with tears in their eyes The Last of the Africans,* and the Niger will become as romantic a river as any in Europe.” *an allusion to the 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans by the United States writer James Fenimore Cooper
Winwood Reade, British explorer, Savage Africa, book published in 1864
a) Explain ONE ideology that the author uses to justify imperialism in the passage.
b) Explain ONE way in which the historical situation of the late nineteenth century might have
affected the vision of Africa’s future outlined by the author in the third paragraph.
c) Explain ONE way in which Europeans in the late nineteenth century attempted to transform the point of view expressed in the passage from being a vision for the future of Africa to being a historical reality.