You will ofter hear of the vast stretches of country in Africa unowned, and open to all who choose to cultivate them or possess them. Well, those stretches of unowned land are not in West Africa. I do not pretend to know other parts of the continent. In West Africa there is not one acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into eternity at both ends. But as West African land is a thing I should not feel, even if I had the money, anxious to acquire as freehold, and as you can get under native law a safe possession of mining and cultivation rights from the representatives living of the tribe they belong to, I do not think that any interference is urgently needed with a system fundamentally just.
After having said so much on African native property, it may be as well to say what African property consists of. It is not necessary for me to go into the affair very fully, but you will remember, I am sure, the old statement of women and slaves constitute the wealth of an African." The African himself would tell you nine times in ten that women and slaves caused him the lack of it. Still they are undoubtedly a factor in the true Negro's wealth, but to consider them property it is necessary to consider them as property in different classes. Here and now I need only divide them into two classes—wives properly so-called, and male and female slaves. The duty of the slave is to increase directly the wealth of his or her owner—that of the wife to increase it also, but in a different manner, namely, by bringing her influence to bear for his advantage among her own family and among the people of the district she lives in. A big chief will have three or more
