East Africa
Author(s): J. C. Smuts
Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Mar., 1918), pp. 129-145
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the
Institute of British Geographers)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1779373
Accessed: 18/06/2010 19:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and Blackwell Publishing are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Geographical Journal.
http://www.jstor.org

The Geographical Journal
Vol. LI No. 3 March 1918
EAST AFRICA
General the Rt. Hon. J. C. Smuts
Read at the Meeiing cf the Society, 28 January 1918. Map,page 192.
WHEN
the Royal Geographical Society decided last year to elect
me an Honorary Member I felt very greatly honoured, and I
gladly accepted the distinction which they proposed to confer on me. But
when a little later they proceeded to thrust still greater honour upon me
and invited me to deliver an address, I began to feel some misgivings,
because I am not a geographer, I am not a scientific man, I am not a
traveller j I have none of the distinctions which have brought before you
on former occasions great men in science, in discovery, in statesmanship,
and in other flelds of knowledge. Such geography as I possess is scarcely
worth speaking of, let alone lecturing on before you to-night. And yet on
reflection I found there was something to be said on the other side. If I
am not a traveller in the ordinary sense, I have covered in my lifetime a
good deal of distance. I believe it is generally admitted that fin the Boer
war I covered more country than any other commander in the field on
either side?and my movement was not always in the direction of the
enemy ! In those strenuous days I Iearned to know my South Africa
from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean> as one learns a cquntry only
under the searching test of war. I came to know the unfrequented paths,
the trackless parts of the bush, the wastes where people do not often
go; and I was then something of an authority on the geography of my own
land.
When the present war broke out?-1 am trying to put my claims before
you for speaking here to-night?I proceeded once more on my extensive
travels, and I became something of an expert in the waterless, sandy
wastes of the southern half of German South-West Africa. As for the
Kalahari Desert, over which the movement of men and transport was
supposed to be quite impossible, we did not rest until we had sunk bore-
holes for water for hundreds of miles, and until we had moved a large force
of thousands of mouhted men across an area in which it was thought no
human being could ever move. One of the reasons of our success in that
campaign was that, moving through the Kalahari Desert, we struck the
enemy country at its very heart. I assure you that the travels of Livingstone,
K