Planning colonies could not be done in a single stroke; it required preparation. But to prevent unforeseen changes, the earlier one acted, the better. Colonization was all about being shameless—get it in hand first, and the rest would be easy to settle afterward.
This was basically the routine of most colonizers. The great powers, especially, excelled at cooking the rice into porridge before anyone could object, and faced with the colonizers' strength, others could only pinch their noses and accept it.
Farabana Village was a village in northern Matabele Province, Zimbabwe.
As East Africa focused on developing Matabele Province, the province had begun to show signs of human habitation. Of course, under East Africa's national conditions, it still appeared exceedingly empty, with villages spaced far apart.
The areas around cities were the opposite. As a more advanced system, cities required greater division of labor and cooperation, so the villages surrounding them were instead more tightly clustered.
Although East Africa was vast and sparsely populated, its road construction had not fallen behind in the slightest, making transportation relatively convenient. If this had been five or six years earlier, when there had not even been a dirt road, that would have been truly difficult. Fortunately, East Africa was dominated by savanna climate, so development was not especially hard, and it was particularly suited to cavalry operations.
East Africa now had no small number of horses either, roughly over eight hundred thousand. But compared with such vast expanses of grassland, that number was still far from enough, especially compared with Mexico and Brazil, which were dominated by similar climates.
Mexico and Brazil both had tropical savanna climates. Though the areas covered by that climate were not as large as in East Africa, Mexico and Brazil ranked second and third in the Americas