At the end of the eighteenth century Africa as a whole was still very far from losing its pre-colonial independence. Indeed, the only large area of theoretically dependent territory was that comprised within the Ottoman empire – Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers – and even here the central authority had declined so far that the system could almost be described as rule by locally based military élites of foreign origin. The pashas of Timbuktu had a similarly theoretical relationship to Morocco, as did the Mazruis of Mombasa and various other East African coastal dynasties to the Albusaid Imams of Oman. European dependencies in Africa were in comparison very small. There was Mozambique Island, with its cluster of trading outposts and its nearly Africanised prazo-holders in the lower Zambezi valley. There was Angola, with its two slightly garrisoned trade routes running inland from Luanda and Benguela. There were the fortified warehouses and slave-pens of Dutch, Danes and British on the Gold Coast and the Gambia, and of the French on the Senegal. And, in a class by itself, the Dutch colony at the Cape, soon to be taken over by the British, where the trekboers had expanded by the end of the century about half way to the Orange River. Such dependent areas were neither the most important nor the most dynamic of African polities. Except for the Cape, none of them was expanding, and some were obviously wearing away.