involved in providing for the demands of this export trade, in addition to the necessities of production for internal trade and consumption, may be estimated from a series of careful official calculations made by the Forestry Department of Southern Nigeria, based upon the output for 1910. These show that the output for that year involved the exploiting of no fewer than 25,227,285 trees! To this work, in itself prodigious, must, of course, be added transport in canoes along the rivers and creeks with which the region is bisected; preparation, and marketing. The processes of preparation of the oil for export vary according to districts and traditional customs. They call for no little skill, patience, and a great variety of forms of activity, while the operations of bartering and purchase among competing local producers and "middle-men" for the markets, involve a constant appeal to enterprise and resourcefulness. The entire population of Southern Nigeria in the oil-palm zone—men, women, and children, for the industry, like all native industries, is a social and family affair, in which each member plays his allotted part—i.e., literally several millions of peoples spend months at a time in various branches of the industry. Thus—the "idle native"!
Let us briefly note how the voluntary labour, the national industry, of these Nigerian peoples affects the interests of the working classes of Europe. European merchants established in Southern Nigeria purchase the raw material from the native communities. They purchase it with European merchandise of all kinds, chiefly cotton goods, of which the Nigerian is a great consumer. Until recently spirits also loomed large in the annual turnover: a highly undesirable trade which is now abolished. A number of other European and American interests are linked up with this native industry. There is the treatment of the raw material in industrial establishments; its transmutation into soap and candles, for instance. There are millions of casks in which the palm-oil is conveyed to Europe. These, taken to pieces, are shipped out in bundles of what are called "staves." The casks need iron hoops, which must also be sent out. They need caulking to be made oil-tight when put together, and there is—or used to be—a considerable trade between Liverpool and Ireland for this purpose in the stems of the common sedge (scirpus
