and a vague desire
for territorial expansion prompted Germany to occupy it in 1884.

The south coast, from the Cape to the Tugela River, was much more
attractive. Here the climate was salubrious, the land in many places
fertile, and everywhere fit for sheep or cattle. Here, accordingly, a
small European community, first founded in 1652, grew up and spread
slowly eastward and northward along the shore during the century and a
half from its first establishment. The Dutch settlers did not care to
penetrate the interior, because the interior seemed to offer little to a
farmer. Behind the well-watered coast belt lay successive lines of steep
mountains, and behind those mountains the desert waste of the Karroo,
where it takes six acres to keep a sheep. Accordingly, it was only a few
bold hunters, a few farmers on the outskirts of the little maritime
colony, and a few missionaries, who cared to enter this wide wilderness.

When exploration began, it began from this south-west corner of Africa.
It began late. In 1806, when the British took the Cape from the Dutch,
few indeed were the white men who had penetrated more than one hundred
miles from the coast, and the farther interior was known only by report.
For thirty years more progress was slow; and it is within our own time
that nearly all the exploration, and the settlement which has followed
quickly on the heels of exploration, has taken place. Just sixty years
ago the Dutch Boers passed in their heavy waggons from Cape Colony to
the spots where Bloemfontein and Pretoria now stand. In 1854-56 David
Livingstone made his way through Bechuanaland to the falls of the
Zambesi and the west coast at St. Paul de Loanda. In 1889 the vast
territories between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambesi began to be
occupied by the Mashonaland pioneers. All these explorers, all the
farmers, missionaries, hunters, and mining prospectors, came up into
South Central Africa from the south-west extremity of the continent
over the great plateau. They moved north-eastward, because there was
more rain, and therefore more grass and game in that direction than
toward the north. They were checked from time to time by the warlike
native tribes; but they were drawn on by finding everywhere a country in
which Europeans could live and thrive. It was the existence of this high
and cool plateau that permitted their discoveries and encouraged their
settlement. And thus the rich interior has come to belong, no