Upper Nile

But he delayed, and once again, as they had so often done, the Germans profited by British procrastination.

Carl Peters, founder of German East Africa, restlessly seeking new empires to conquer, was at this time leading a German expedition through Uganda to the Upper Nile Valley to rescue a German, Emin Pasha, who was there beleaguered by fanatical Moslems.

Peters happened to obtain some of Jackson's letters regarding Uganda, and was not a man to neglect opportunity.

He quickly marched to the capital, and in February eighteen ninety concluded a treaty with the king, thanks to the help of the French missionaries who preferred even German rule to English Protestantism.

A negligent and somewhat timid French cabinet had allowed England in 1882 to occupy Egypt.

But France had never accepted the British occupation as definitive, and French opinion found comfort in Mr. Gladstone's pledge that the British had not entered Egypt to stay.

The upper Nile Valley, known as the Eastern or Egyptian Sudan, was held by fierce Arab tribesmen, and Abyssinia's hardy mountaineers would not be easily conquered.

But at any rate, no rival European power had possession.

I mean, look, we're just trying to enable access and show that it's possible and then open up the corridor so that other people can use it.

You've delivered, if I'm not wrong, something within the vicinity of about 600 tons of aid to Upper Nile.

Would proving that the corridor is openable change the attitude of a big organization like WFP?

WFP ended up flying, I think, within a week or two, the same exact missions that we were flying.

But when we were done, obviously, we didn't continue to coordinate with them.

They just decided to do it on their own.

I mean, look, I think those people, you got to understand that the Upper Nile region, you had people approaching IPC level five.

So it was a desperate situation.

Meantime we pass to other examples of the general practice.

The Dinka of the Upper Nile.

The Dinka are a congeries of independent tribes in the valley of the White Nile, whose territory, lying mostly on the eastern bank of the river and stretching from the sixth to the twelfth degree of north latitude, has been estimated to comprise between sixty and seventy thousand square miles.

They are a tall, long-legged people, rather slender than fat, with curly hair and a complexion of the deepest black.

Considering then the great antiquity of this race, it naturally follows that if these stories are not original with the Bushmen, they are at least so modified as to bear no resemblance to Egyptian, Phoenician, or any other ancient race which the Bushmen may have come in contact with.

Herodotus described a race on the Upper Nile which corresponds with later depictions of the Bushmen in tropical and southern Africa.

I agree with what the South African Folklore Journal stated 20 years or more ago, that with the, quote, vast strides South Africa is making in the progress of civilization, the native races will either be swept away or so altered as to lose many of their ancient habits, customs, traditions, or at least greatly to modify them, end quote.

Knowing that by a collection of this kind, these stories could best be preserved, and feeling that others had not read them i began this collection ten years ago there is so much done now to preserve what is still bushman folklore that i feel this small volume is indeed only a small addition to the folklore world south african folklore is the south african folklore journal says in its very nature plain and primitive in its simplicity not adorned with the wealth of palaces and precious stones to be met with in the folklore of more civilized nations, but descriptive in great measure of the events of everyday life among those in a low state of civilization, and with the exception of evidences of moral qualities, and of such imagery as is connected with the phenomena of nature, very little that is grand or magnificent must be looked for in it." Bain gives a story related by a kaffir, which shows, quote, the distribution of animals after the creation, end quote.

B. Clarence and an historical article treating of the British in South America by Colonel Howard Vincent.

The Geographical Journal for April contains several articles of interest, including The First Crossing of Spitsbergen by Sir W. Martin Conway, Two Years' Travel in Uganda, Unyoro, and on the Upper Nile by Lieutenant C. F. S. Vandeler, The Southern Borderlands of Afghanistan, by Captain A. H. McMahon, The Perso-Balloch Boundary, by Colonel Holditch, and The River Odor.

The last article of the volume is by Professor A. W. Andrews on The Teaching of Geography in Relation to History.

This article has a special interest to members of the National Geographic Society, inasmuch as it is in line with the course of afternoon lectures recently completed.

They are not UN staff nor paid for their work.

Their warning comes amid a resumption of armed conflict in several parts of South Sudan in Upper Nile, Jonglei and Unity states, with clashes and civilian deaths also recorded in Western and Central Equatoria states.

Today's concerns over renewed atrocities are in line with the UN Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, which sets out eight warning signs of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

The Commission finds most of these indicators are present and intensifying at once in South Sudan, it said.

and negotiations are in progress to bring the Abyssinians into the Greek church.

About twenty years ago, the Egyptians occupied the whole of the Upper Nile, even to the Great Lakes and the Valley of the Red Sea.

Abyssinia lay between these possessions, and the Khadive desired to conquer it.

He sent two large armies, which marched up the eastern branches of the Nile to Abyssinia.

About the same time, a Rabi Pasha, then an officer in the Egyptian army, conspired with El Mahdi and seized Cairo, the Khedive and English retiring to Alexandria.

Sir Garnet Wolseley was sent to command the English and Indian armies, and at the Battle of Tel el-Kabir, September 1882, Arabi was defeated and taken prisoner.

He was subsequently sent to Ceylon, but the disaffection in the Upper Nile continued to extend, and soon the whole population of the Sudan and Upper Nile was gathered under the banner of the prophet El Mahdi.

He defeated four expeditions, and in 1883, General Hicks Pasha, with an Anglo-Egyptian army of 10,000, was sent against him.

But when he does put in an appearance, he will greet you with such charming assurance that you feel angry with yourself for having been led into commenting upon the lapse of time.

On the particular afternoon which I am now about to describe to you, we had arranged to meet at my hotel and then to go on together to call upon the de Etrebille, who were just off to Cairo and the Upper Nile.

He had promised to be with me at three o'clock, and, as usual, at twenty minutes past the hour he had not put in an appearance.

Now, I flatter myself that I am a punctual man in every respect, and when one is ready to go out, a twenty minutes' wait is an annoyance calculated to test the serenest temper.

It's not an easy task to put together from the many unrelated accounts of excavations in Africa all that has been discovered as to the black man's past, but it is safe to say that every discovery has tended to confirm the accounts of African civilization, which have come down to us as legends from antiquity.

There existed, of course, until quite recent times, a high civilization among the blacks of the Upper Nile.

From Arab books, many of the details of this country's customs and government have been gathered and translated into French.

Lady Lugard's book, A Tropical Dependency, gives perhaps the best popular accounts of these records.

For centuries, historians shook their heads over this as an example of imagination running away with fact when suddenly it was discovered that Herodotus was perfectly right.

Similarly, his tales of the ancient empire south of Egypt are being verified from the monuments built by the very people of whom the historian wrote to celebrate their victories and honor their gods.

The most ancient inscriptions along the Upper Nile have not yet been deciphered.

The story of the land of the blacks is pretty well known, however, as far back as the eighth century before Christ.