African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 497: Chapter 175 Training

East Africa, as a mixed-race country, faces an awkward problem in the future, which is the lack of historical and cultural heritage.

Historical and cultural heritage is actually very important. For example, the East Asian cultural circle, the Arab cultural circle, the Turkic cultural circle, etc., represent influence and political interests, all of which are connected through historical and cultural attributes.

So how should East Africa’s cultural roots be positioned in the future? Should it lean toward the German or the Far East in terms of historical culture? This is definitely not what Ernst wants.

East Africa has its own interests and will also have its own values and core interests in the future. Although Ernst has special feelings for Germany and the Far East, East Africa has in fact emerged independently from these two civilizations.

A single tree does not make a forest. If East Africa wants to expand its historical and cultural influence, it cannot be dominated by German and Far Eastern cultures, so it needs to proactively expand its cultural regions with similar attributes to East Africa.

In Ernst’s view, Bosnia and the Lan Fang Republic are two very good experimental zones. If these two regions can be made to have population and cultural attributes similar to East Africa, then in the future they will naturally lean towards East Africa emotionally.

Take the current Lan Fang Republic, for example. It is a purely Chinese country, so culturally and emotionally it naturally leans toward the Far East, rather than the German-Chinese mixed East Africa. However, if East Africa transforms the Lan Fang Republic’s population attributes to be like its own, then it will inevitably lean towards East Africa in the future.

East Africa has always considered the Indian Ocean direction as its core interest in the maritime aspect for the future, with Nanyang being a focus. Historically, the Far East is very likely to be East Africa’s competitor or challenger to this core interest, as both the United States and the United Kingdom have deeply experienced.

Similarly, the German regions, including Germany and Austria, are also important to East Africa. Especially at present, having two big brothers in front is very important for East Africa, while East Africa’s importance to these two countries is not very obvious.

In the eyes of the two countries, East Africa’s status is akin to how the British view Canada and Australia. Do they really think they are on par with the locals?

Thus, for Ernst, mixing things up in Bosnia has a very important purpose, which is to plant a mine in the sphere of influence of the Austria-Hungary Empire (Bosnia is not yet part of the Austria-Hungary Empire’s territory). This mine is the mixed-race population, and if the Austria-Hungary Empire has no designs on Bosnia, this mine will never be triggered. Conversely, if they do, it gives East Africa leverage over the Austria-Hungary Empire.

Even if the Austria-Hungary Empire doesn’t bite the bullet with Bosnia, East Africa still manages to plant a stake in the Balkans, whose importance needs no elaboration, and it can only be advantageous to East Africa.

Bosnia and the Lan Fang Republic are only the first steps for East Africa; more regions will be transformed by East Africa in the future. Of course, the prerequisite is to first get past the Anglo-French hurdle.

...

Maputo.

The Portuguese watched with interest the results of the French training. On the open ground, one hundred Blacks squatted on the ground with their hands on their heads, their upper bodies stripped bare.

Slap... slap... slap...

On the training ground in Maputo, the French instructor Wilson wielded his whip harshly on the disobedient African soldiers, mercilessly driving them, leaving bloodstains on their bare backs.

”Damn things, does it mean we really have to babysit these damn Blacks for them to learn to follow orders? They can’t even learn to keep formation at the simplest level.”

Wilson was on the verge of going mad; two months of training had utterly broken him. Initially, Wilson was full of confidence. As an excellent French instructor, he had trained many difficult and foolish French soldiers. None were impossible to handle, and in less than a month under him, they all became outstanding soldiers.

Then he was assigned to Mozambique. According to Wilson’s thinking, Blacks are human too. No matter how bad they are, they couldn’t possibly be worse than mules in the military.

After three days, Wilson realized he was wrong. A week later, he realized he might have taken on an unparalleled task. A month later, Wilson lay flat, no longer pursuing the goal of turning these Blacks into a French-style force, and now Wilson was completely broken.

The French instructors were quite furious about drilling the Blacks because the Blacks’ cultural level was so low that even basic training was difficult, let alone complex training.

However, the French instructors were too inattentive, which is a realistic problem faced by armies in many backward regions. Of course, one has to admit that African natives are somewhat too backward.

African soldiers in tribal civilizations, due to the level of civilization development, and not even having a mature language, lacked many basic concepts that would be common sense in later generations’ eyes.

The organizational ability can be said to be almost nonexistent. To be fair, this was not entirely the fault of the Blacks but rather due to the French instructors getting the direction wrong. In fact, Blacks can coordinate in battles, especially with small groups, as seen in cooperative activities like hunting, where a few Blacks using primitive bows and spears can cast an unerasable shadow over the animals on the plains.

As for when the numbers grow larger, indeed, Blacks do not perform well because, in this era, many African tribes having just a dozen people was common. Due to low productivity levels, a region could only support so many people, and like lion prides, Blacks would self-divide based on prey numbers. The vast majority of Blacks did not engage in agriculture and hadn’t developed any nomadic traits.

Therefore, in Africa, it’s considered top-level civilization for the factions that have developed some form of primitive statehood to represent advanced productivity, but these primitive state forms are actually not large in scale and are at best super-large tribes. Many that seemed large on the map actually included numerous independent small tribes. From Ernst’s perspective, these Black civilizations remain on par with those from thousands of years ago, akin to the level of the Yanhuang Tribe in the Far East.

The Yanhuang Tribe was a tribal alliance, with Yanhuang serving as the overlord among tribes, but the subordinate tribes could still be regarded as independent units. The African countries essentially play the role of tribal overlords, although calling them tribal overlords elevates them, as many do not possess the rallying power they claim to have, and their risk resistance is only slightly better than average tribes.

In the past, when the East African Army was still a colonial military force, the mercenaries and instructors from Heixinggen Military Academy had also found the formation of new immigrant army units quite troublesome.

It was common for many people to be unable to tell left from right and have no clear sense of direction. Curiously, however, while many struggled with left and right, they could clearly distinguish north, south, east, and west.

In contrast to the French expectations for Black forces, East Africa does not have as high demands for the Black Corps, knowing well that many East African natives were incapable of being effectively taught even by past-life Far East instructors. Ernst did not believe the East African Army had the capacity to train the Black Corps into a regular army.

However, not all Blacks are like the underperforming ones faced by the French and East African soldiers. In fact, the Blacks in Abyssinia and North Africa were quite formidable, to the extent that both the Arab Empire and Europe incorporated North African Blacks into their military forces. Abyssinia was once the overlord of the Red Sea, waging a thousand-year-long war with the Arabs. In the past, the Nubians from the Sultanate region had even launched counterattacks against Egypt, illustrating how a competitive environment facilitates the development of civilization.

To quickly form combat capabilities for these Blacks, East Africa adopted a very simple training model: as long as they could load ammunition and pull the trigger and comprehend commands to advance and retreat, then ugly running, awkward movements, or poor aiming were not issues.