1984 Is GEORGE ORWELL'S YEAR; and any centenaries which may be commemorated in 1984 run the risk of being overshadowed by his melancholy musings on the future in his celebrated anti-utopian novel. To be sure, the consequences of the West African Conference of Berlin, which opened on Novemeber 15, 1884 at Bismarck's official residence in the Wilhelmstrasse and, after short break for Christmas and the New year, closed on February 26, 1885, were melancholy enough. But there was an element of hope in it: an element, perhaps, which was reflected in another anti-utopia, the centenary of whose publication some, maybe, will be commemorating in the United States in six years time. This was Caesar's Column. A Story of the Twentieth Century by Minnesota Populist Ignatius Donnelley. In this bizarre but prophetic story of urban terrorism in Europe and America, Donnelley's narrator comes from Africa and, early in the novel, gives picture of an African state century after the Berlin Conference, which illustrates the roseate hopes with which some endowed the Congo Free State, ill-named and ill-starred, that emerged from the Conference. He reports new lines of railroad; steamship fleets upon the great lake;... large colonies of white men, settling states, upon the higher lands of the interior; of their colleges, books and newspapers; and particularly of dissertation upon the genius of Chaucer, written by Zulu Professor, which had created considerable interest among the learned societies of the Transvaal.' Henry Morton Stanley, the pseudo-American whose explorations of the Congo and journalistic publicizing of them had been powerful force behind the calling of the Berlin Conference, read Donnelley's Caesar's Column; was delighted to learn that its narrator lived in an African village named Stanley; and called it a powerful story ... small seedling of good may, or ought, to come from it.2 Did, however, any seedling of good come from the West African Conference of Berlin, the first international conference to concern itself with Africa, at which fifteen Powers were represented: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States of America, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden and Norway, and Turkey? And if it did, how has this seedling germinated during the last century?