entomologist. It does not require the European company promoter and planter; nor Europe's land laws and social customs. These persons and institutions may be thrust upon tropical Africa and maintained there under duress, but while they will assuredly curse the African, Europe will not in the long run benefit from having insisted on implanting them in his country.
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I have dwelt in detail upon the native oil-palm and cocoa industries of Southern Nigeria and the Gold Coast respectively, for the reasons given. But it must not be supposed that this evidence of native enterprise is exceptional, or that the indigenous inhabitants of these particular areas—who are as unlike, racially, as Russians and Portuguese—possess special qualifications which differentiate them from other peoples of tropical Africa. In some parts, particularly in the remote interior of the forest belt, the native communities are backward. But among them all the keen commercial instinct is awake, even if it cannot fully express itself. Nigeria itself is as large as the German Empire before the war, Italy and Holland combined, and a relatively small proportion of it lies within the oil-palm bearing zone. Beyond that zone, in the western and northern provinces, cotton has been cultivated for centuries, in both cases for internal consumption. It is woven into enduring fabrics, beautifully dyed and embroidered. In late years an export trade in cotton lint has grown up through the enterprise of the British Cotton Growing Association. The native farmer, being given an external market for his product, has taken advantage of it to the extent of his capacity, having regard to the requirements of his home market. In certain parts of the central province the native communities, encouraged and helped thereto by the Forestry Department, have planted millions of rubber trees and carefully tend their plantations. They are also planting up their forests with valuable exotic hardwood trees, and the department is training hundreds of intelligent young Africans in the arts of forestry conservation. These rubber plantations are usually communal property, although in some cases individuals have plantations of their own on their family land. The cultivation of cocoa is now taking on a wide extension in the western province, while in the north the advent of the railway has enabled
