DR. KARL KUMM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3381, 23 November 1911, Page 7

DR. KARL KUMM.

EXPLORER AND MISSIONARY.

AFRICA’S POSSIBILITIES

Dr. Karl Kumm, Ph.D., F.R.G.S., of the Soudan United Mission, and a wellknown African explorer, arrived in Auckland last week. In the course of an interview Dr. Kumm spoke with nnich enthusiasm of the great possibilities before the African continent, which had enormous natural wealth as yet hardly touched by European enterprise. Not only, he said, were the richest gold and diamond mines in the world to be found in South Africa, but there was also gold in East Africa, the Congo, the Nile V alley, and in many other localities besides. The largest tin deposit in the world was at Bukuru, in Northern Nigeria, and this had only been worked for the past threo years. The deposit, however, was so rich that fifty companies, with £7,000,000 capital, were now working it. The backbone of the countinent was an enormous iron deposit, consisting of an entire plateau of ironstone, in which there were vast untouched beds of coal. There was excellent coal in Natal, in East Africa, and the Congo, and bitumen in the Niger territory. An enormous deposit of copper had been found inland from Portuguese West Africa, and a railway was being built to open it up. The largest part of the continent belonged to Britain, and Britain’s African colonies had and always would have, a population chiefly composed of negroes. Many of the inland tribes were unusually fine people, and all increased in numbers with great rapidity, in spite of sleeping sickness, fever, war, and other advoise influences. For five centuries incessant war had been waged between the Moslems and Pagans, with hundreds of thousands slain every year, yet the poulation of Africa stood at from I ~i) to 200 millions. He felt sure that with a cessation of war and of epidemics the negroes would overflow the bounds of Africa and attempt to occupy other regions on the earth.