A general conviction that the freedom and progress of the African peoples were dependent upon the possession of the land, inspired the deliberations of the first great African Congress held in 1884–5. The problem was there approached from the standpoint, not of the land itself, but from that of the utilisation and enjoyment of such of the land's fruits as were suitable for external trade. It is useful to recall this first and only attempt to interpret that spirit of trusteeship, which the League of Nations now invokes.
Thirty-five years ago the Powers of Europe, with which were associated the United States, laid down the broad principles which should govern the relations of Europe with an enormous section of tropical Africa, then for the first time in history, brought into direct contact with the political life of Europe. Their spokesmen recalled the fatal political error which had vitiated the discovery and the development of the tropical regions of the American Continent, whose natural wealth had been regarded as the natural property of the pioneering European nations, and the labour of whose inhabitants had been ruthlessly exploited to enrich the national treasuries. They perceived that the antidote to a repetition of that error lay in stressing a principle which constituted its antithesis—the principle of trade. The conception which underlay the colonising efforts of the 16th Century visualised aboriginal populations as a mass of human material with no rights in its soil or in the products of its country, through whose labour those products should be transmuted into revenues for the invading and occupying nation. The framers of the provisions of the Act of Berlin, standing on the threshold of a new experiment in tropical colonisation on a huge scale, visualised the aboriginal populations as sentient human beings, and in proclaiming that the principle of trade should be the basis of the relationship between them and the outer world, they implicitly recognised that those populations were possessed of rights in the soil and its products—the operations of trade involving the proprietorship on both sides of exchangeable articles; of buyers and sellers.
Trade, regarded as a principle in human relationships is one thing. The intrinsic properties of trade, and the methods under which trade is carried on—this is an altogether different thing. The failure to distinguish between
