The case of the Congo Free State and of the French Congo reveal in the most conclusive fashion how indissolubly connected in African economy are the problems of Afro-European trade and of African labour required for the purposes of that trade, with the ownership of land. In destroying Afro-European trade in the Congo regions on the plea that the African peoples possessed no proprietary rights in the raw material of Africa—i.e., in the fruits of the soil, King Leopold and the French Government implicitly denied to the native communities of the Congo any proprietary rights in the land itself. But as all these denials, both explicit and implicit, of African rights, and the corresponding assertion of alien rights, meant nothing unless African labour could be utilised on behalf of the alien claimant to the soil's products, so the claim to those products was seen to involve a claim alike to the land and to the labour of the African. With the land and its products went the man.
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Where trade, expressed in a large export of produce which has been paid for in goods and cash, is not present as a factor in the relationship between white man and black, the possession of land is just as essential to the native population, although the problem takes on a different complexion. Conditions in colonisable South Africa, in tropical West-Central Africa, in tropical East Africa, and in Mediterranean North Africa, vary enormously. Nevertheless in every section of the Continent the same truth holds good—possession of land is for the African community as for the individual African, the criterion of human liberties, protection against poverty and serfdom, the sheet-anchor of material, mental and spiritual development.
It would be absurd to pretend, of course, that the problem of tho land as it presents iteelf to-day in imperial South Africa, can be envisaged from the same standpoint as in British West Africa. Imperial South Africa comprises an area of 1,204,827 square miles, containing an indigenous population of 6,872,164; the average density being a fraction over 5. British West Africa covers 445,234 square miles with an indigenous population of over 20 millions; the average density being a fraction over 45. The line of demarcation between trusteeship and exploitation in imperial South Africa is the line which
