sight to be observed is that of men and women carrying palm-oil in pots or pans on their heads. The thick, orange-coloured strong-smelling stuff is on sale at every little village market. Guilds exist, not in Southern Nigeria only, but probably in every part of West Africa where the oil-palm grows, to protect the tree from being "tapped" for the wine at the wrong time. There are professional oil-palm climbers—climbing the tree is a hazardous experiment for all but the expert, for it rises a sheer 40 to 60 feet without a branch, and the fruit is at the top. There are also professional palm-wine preparers. "It is impossible to exaggerate," writes an experienced District Commissioner, "the important part this sovereign tree fills in the life of the country … it provides the people among whom it flourishes with meat and drink, and with nearly all the simple necessaries of daily life." It is these oil-palm forests which the gentlemen of the Empire Resources Development Committee desire the British State to lay claim to and exploit, with armies of native labourers—the proprietors of the trees converted into British Government employees—for the dual benefit of British company promoters and British tax-payers! So much for the domestic rôle of the oil-palm.
About the middle of last century some British trading firms began the experiment of purchasing the oil from the native and putting it on the home market. A demand then arose for the oil obtained from the kernels, which is of a different quality and put to different uses.
From these small beginnings the export trade in palm oil and kernels arose. To-day it gives employment directly and indirectly to many tens of thousands of European and American working men, and is the principal freight-feeder of hundreds of steamers employed in the West African carrying trade. The native population eagerly availed itself of the opening offered to it for trade, as it has invariably done all over Western Africa in similar circumstances. In the seven years preceding the war the native communities of Southern Nigeria alone, gathered, prepared and conveyed to the European trading stations on the rivers, palm-oil and kernels to the value of twenty-four millions sterling. In the same period the Gold Coast produced these articles to the value of nearly two million sterling, and Sierra Leone to the value of just over four million sterling. How immense is the aggregate of labour
