As the saying went, "How could one allow another to snore beside one's bed?" South Africa was exactly that kind of situation for East Africa. Yet during the South African War at the end of the nineteenth century, East Africa truly lacked the means to swallow up all of South Africa.
Britain was the primary factor. Cape Town's importance to Britain was self-evident. The British Royal Navy had maintained a long-term presence there, while East Africa's naval strength was weak in the nineteenth century, leaving it with no possibility of bypassing the Cape of Good Hope to attack it.
Although the East African Navy had completed its initial construction by then, it operated only along the eastern coast and in the Western Indian Ocean. As for the East African West Coast, East Africa had not yet annexed all of Angola and was mainly confined to the harsh region of Namibia.
It was not until the twentieth century that East Africa's Atlantic Fleet entered a fast track of development and ultimately grew into East Africa's main maritime force.
Even if it had risked attacking Cape Town, doing so would have brought East Africa more loss than gain at the time, and might have provoked a fierce British response.
East Africa's occupation of Transvaal and Orange had still fallen within what the British could accept. After all, Britain had never attached much importance to those lands, which belonged to the Boers.
But the rest of South Africa was different. If East Africa had continued advancing southward in the nineteenth century, it would have been little different from declaring all-out war on Britain.
In the nineteenth century—or rather, before the First World War—Britain's power was beyond question. If Britain had drawn off part of its strength to focus on East Africa, it would