It is also stated in some data that under the reign of Leopold II, the Congo Gold suffered a population loss exceeding ten million, which is enough to show the wealth of the previous life of Congo Gold. In fact, the area of the previous Belgian Congo was much larger than that of Congo Gold, especially in the east and south where the population was most concentrated.

However, these areas all fell into the hands of East Africa. Ernst optimistically estimated that the total Black population in East Africa should be around 15 million, and this is just an optimistic estimate.

Because after the South African War, East Africa's rule over the native Blacks had entered the most "brutal" phase to alleviate the pressure of population growth in East Africa.

Now East Africa already has a large population with a high growth rate. With a population of more than fifty million and a high growth rate, even Ernst himself is unclear about the extent to which East Africa's population has expanded. However, it is certain that by 1900, East Africa's non-Black population will definitely rank third in the world, surpassing the United States, only after Tsarist Russia.

Apart from the population pressure, what follows is East Africa's major infrastructure. Just the East African Grand Canal project alone is enough to put Ernst side by side with Emperor Yang of Sui, not to mention the roads, railways, and urban construction.

In this situation, East Africa doesn't even need to export Blacks externally. The local Blacks will head toward extinction due to heavy labor tasks and an imbalance in population structure, so compared to East Africa, Belgium's genocide is nothing.

Thus, when Ernst reads the diary on Naples, he remains completely unaffected, showing no sympathy for the experiences of the Chinese under Belgian rule.

After all, the situation of the Chinese under Belgian rule is much better than in their previous lives. Leopold, in his previous life, also introduced Chinese immigrants from the Far East Empire to fill the labor gap in the Zaire colony (the former name for Congo Gold). The overburdened Chinese immigrants were eventually forced to traverse the rainforest of the Zaire colony and escape to other countries' colonial territories.

One can imagine how brutal Belgian rule over the Chinese was in their previous life, considering that in the 19th century the Chinese were epitomes of hard work and resilience.

Under the influence of East Africa, the Belgian colony now behaves quite conservatively, at least there has never been a case of Chinese within Belgium escaping to East Africa.

Of course, this is not a concern for Ernst, a mature and cold-blooded politician. He is more interested in the impact East Africa has on Africa's population.

Nowadays, under Belgian rule, the Chinese have become the main local population, not to mention Sigmaringen's royal territory and East Africa, these two great nations of Chinese immigrants.

Of course, Sigmaringen's royal territory and East Africa are countries where Dehua and Chinese intermarry, so the situation is very different from Belgium. In the future, it's impossible for a mainstream Chinese ethnicity to exist in these two countries; there will only be differences in the proportion and degree of mixed races.

Ernst doesn't care about the current number of Chinese in Africa; he is more interested in knowing how many pure Black people are left in Africa.

Ernst thought that if Blacks within East Africa were calculated at fifteen million, and all these fifteen million were males, they would essentially self-destruct over time.

In other words, in the future, African Blacks would only exist in West Africa. According to previous life data on Africa's population, at the end of the 19th century, the total population of Africa was over ninety million.

Now East Africa occupies 43% of Africa's land, which was the main gathering place of Blacks in their previous lives. So excluding the native Blacks in East Africa, Africa's total population would decrease by at least 40%.

That is about forty-five million, and from the remaining forty-five million, we still have to subtract the Arab cultural regions in North Africa, including Egypt and Algeria, Libya. Previously these countries also had twenty million people, and if we include Abysinnia as a mixed Black and White population, then it's estimated at thirty million. In this way, the population left for West Africa might be less than fifteen million!

Of course, this number is likely unreliable because it's unreasonable to cut it in half due to East Africa. After all, before East Africa, West Africa had always been more developed than East Africa's indigenous civilizations.

Additionally, East Africa has exported a significant population to West Africa, so the total Black population in West Africa should be over twenty million and less than thirty million.

If this is the case, then the current Black population across Africa is estimated to be comparable to the United States in the 21st century and may even be less than the Black population in the US.

In the 21st century, the Black population in mainland America is forty-seven million. Currently, Blacks in East Africa combined with those in West Africa might just reach this number.

Additionally, it's necessary to consider further that the future for Blacks in Sigmaringen and Belgian Congo is bleak, and the Black population in West Africa will only decrease.

And a Black population of less than thirty million in West Africa is a compelling number. After all, the development of colonies requires a large population, but now the total population in West Africa just matches that of France, indicating the level of sparsity in West Africa today.

Of course, there are gains and losses. The total population of Africa will not change drastically due to the steep decline in the Black population.

The current total population in East Africa has reached or even surpassed the entire population scale of Africa in the 19th century, just that most have been replaced with Europeans and Far Easterners.

Thinking that 1900 is approaching, Ernst also feels that it's time for a new round of census on the population and other data in East Africa.

At the same time, East Africa should also pay attention to the population in West Africa and other regions, which would facilitate East Africa's layout across the African continent in the future.

...

Conducting a census is a complex task, especially as the population scale in East Africa further increases, the difficulty and amount of calculation further escalates.

Therefore, compared to the census, attention to other fields is more pressing and convenient, and investments in education have already started to show results.

With the trend of setting up large-scale schools in previous East Africa, by 1898, the number of universities in East Africa had further increased, almost doubling in less than a year. The number of university students also increased to more than 52,000. If quasi-higher education is included, it directly surpassed 100,000, making it the country with the most institutions of higher education and university students in the world, exceeding the United States, Germany, and other Europe and America countries. And this is just the initial stage of East Africa's university expansion.

"By the time the construction of universities in all provinces is completed before 1900, the number of university students in East Africa is expected to exceed 160,000, further widening the gap with other countries around the world."

"Currently, the increase in the number of university students can be attributed primarily to two aspects: first, the existing universities have expanded their enrollment scale, and second, newly built universities have started enrollment."

The average number of students enrolled in each university in East Africa is only about six or seven hundred, far from comparable to universities in previous lives. Frankly speaking, a single university in a previous life could accommodate the current total number of university students enrolled in all universities in East Africa, and the total number of staff in universities nationwide in East Africa is only less than eight thousand, with only more than three thousand teachers. The teacher-student ratio is about one to seventeen.

So, even if East Africa's higher education is at a mid-level globally, it can fully be regarded as elite education. After all, East Africa cannot be compared only with European and American countries. There are other regions and countries with higher education institutions too, and East Africa has a gap with Europe and America, but other regions and countries also have a gap compared to East Africa.

However, one thing is very good; that is, East Africa's universities from the start have adopted a strategy focused on sheer numbers. East Africa, as an agricultural country that has not yet successfully transformed, already ranks among the world's leading nations in terms of higher and basic education popularity.

This is also one of the vital reasons why East Africa heavily exploited Black slaves after the South African War. The proportion of education expenditure alone makes East Africa the number one in the world, surpassing Germany.