PART III
Reparation and Reform
CHAPTER XII.
The Land and its Fruits.
With the exception of Abyssinia and "Liberia," the whole of Africa is now parcelled out among five European Powers and one State ruled by white South Africans. Of those five European Powers, France is politically responsible for the government of African territories one-third as large again as Europe; the Belgians, who number 7½ millions, are politically responsible for African territories 95 times larger than their own country, the Portuguese who number 5½ millions, are politically responsible for African territories 21 times larger than Portugal. No particular knowledge or prescience are required to predict that this represents an artificial state of affairs which cannot last. A far more important issue, however, than the future distribution of political control in Africa is the policy which the governing elements in the white races intend to apply to Africa in the years and generations to come. The white peoples of the earth have just experienced the severest convulsion in their history. Vast numbers of them are embarked upon uncharted seas. Their mental and spiritual outlook has been profoundly affected. What consequences will these events have upon the peoples of Africa, henceforth associated more closely than ever with Europe and America?
The previous chapters convey, inadequately enough, some notion of the debt of reparation which the white peoples owe to the blacks; some idea of the wrongs which have been inflicted by the former upon the latter. The quarter of a century which preceded the war, witnessed sincere and successful efforts in a number of parts of Africa to establish a different record. I shall have occasion to refer to these efforts in the present chapter. But it will not escape observation that precisely the same period is also noted, not merely for the revival of the old slave trade spirit "swinging back tc power," but for the actual perpetration in other and, unhappily, vaster sections of the Continent, of infamies on a scale exceeding anything the world has seen since the old-fashioned slave trade was abolished. True, that the uprising of the public conscience against the worst of these infamies was evidential of the continued prevalence among the British people of the countervailing spirit which destroyed the old slave trade; and that it also testified to the existence of similar sentiments in individual citizens of other lands. The comfort to be derived from this is real. On the other hand it must not be overlooked that this countervailing spirit which, considered as a national force, is peculiar to Britain, was able to make itself felt effectively as an international influence, only because its manifestations had a basis of historical justification in formal conventions. Where that historical basis was lacking, the national influence could not be exercised; and the anarchy reigning in international relationships precluded reform. Moreover, these events proved to demonstration that even among so naturally generous a people as the French, national protests inspired alike by considerations of humanity and national honour were unable to prevail against the power of sectional interests, although those sectional interests were not wholly French and although the manner in which they were exercised was admittedly disastrous to French national interests.
Such was the general state of the African question when the Great War shattered all the hopes which some of us entertained that the very wrongs of Africa, and the incessant friction resulting among the European Powers politically concerned with Africa through the pursuance of selfish and short-sighted aims, might give rise to another International Conference, which would furnish the occasion for elaborating a native policy towards Africa worthy of civilisation. If such a conference, whose propelling motive would have been a desire to redress wrongs, to guard against their repetition and to avoid causes of international irritation directly or indirectly imputable to their perpetration, could have been held, some of us thought that Europe would have been ministering to the peaceful future of her own peoples as well as to that of the peoples of Africa. It fell to the lot of the author, three years before the Great War, to place this view, which was received with approval, directly before a somewhat unique audience including distinguished men from several European countries, and Englishmen who had been, or were actually then responsible, for the government of tens of millions of Africans. I recall the incident only because of its relevancy to the plea I am desirous of putting forward in the ensuing pages.
For on the morrow of the Great War the peoples of Africa are threatened with the gravest dangers. There is but too much reason to fear that amid the welter of chaos into which Europe as a whole, and every State in Europe, is plunged, opportunity may be taken to enforce policies and practices in Africa which must prove fatal to its inhabitants and, in the ultimate resort, disastrous to Europe. Europe, even that section of it which has been triumphant in arms, is impoverished to a degree which its peoples do not yet fully appreciate because the bill of costs has not yet been presented, and because their Governments are still making lavish promises which they cannot by any possibility fulfil. The triumphant peoples are not yet convinced that it is impracticable for them to live as parasites upon the beaten peoples, without inviting consequences even more detrimental to their interests than the future already holds for them. They still believe that vast sums will be presently available for social improvements without revolutionising the whole economic fabric of society. They have as yet no clear notion of the proportions of the financial millstone around their necks. They have not yet grasped the fact that the purchasing and producing population of Europe has been reduced by something like twenty-five millions. When the ruthless logic of facts comes home, the possessing and ruling classes will be driven to every conceivable expedient to lessen the burden of direct and indirect taxation, in order to retain their privileged position in the State. Africa is a vast reservoir of labour, and preserve of natural riches. The temptation to force that labour into the service of the European Governments, to resuscitate 16th Century colonial conceptions—will be very great. Again, European industries depend for their resurrection and extension upon abundant supplies of raw material—both vegetable and mineral. Africa, especially tropical Africa, is the natural home of products in the highest degree essential to modern industry. The desire to speed-up the supply of these products and largely to increase the output will, again, be very great.
Industrial capitalism and the political interests o( the ruling classes will here find common ground. The drive towards some comprehensive form of forced or slave labour to hasten output will be considerable. These perils are not imaginary. Certain prospectuses and public speeches issued and delivered in this country during the past two years cannot be over-looked: a literature is already growing up on the subject. The "idleness" and "indolence" of the African native are being insidiously taught to a section, at least, of working-class opinion at home, with a view to securing Labour support for policies and practices alike immoral and anti-social. The impression that the Empire "owns" vast estates in Africa, which are lying fallow owing to the incurable sloth of the aboriginal inhabitants is being sedulously propagated. The immunity enjoyed by the Chartered Company of South Africa in its treatment of the native peoples of Rhodesia and the almost complete subordination of the Administration of British East Africa to the capitalist theory of tropical African development, are profoundly disquieting. Nor, in considering these dangers, must we blind ourselves to two facts, which the Great War of 1914-18 has brought out with special prominence. One is that no Government need be deterred in future from imposing an unjust policy upon African peoples through fear of the military risks attendant thereon. The latest inventions in the science of human destruction have removed that brake. Not even a homogeneous people fairly well armed and good shots like the Basutos could offer an effective resistance to modern engines of slaughter. The other fact is the employment of many African troops in the war. Tho European governing classes have now ocular demonstration that their capacity to bend the peoples of Africa to their will through the conscripted African, is limited only by considerations of prudence in thus staking the future of their domination in Africa upon an African militarism. Of this more anon.
Against these dangers may be set the creation of a new international mechanism—the League of Nations—which may succeed in evolving an international conscience in the affairs of Africa. This is not the place to discuss whether the League, as at present constituted, contains within itself the promise of a fuller growth, or the germs of dissolution. It is sufficient for the purpose of the case which is here being set out that the League has proclaimed as the guiding policy which should determine the future relations between the white races and the black a recognition on the part of the former of an obligation of trusteeship for the latter. As the African peoples were prefigured in 1884 so are they described to-day—the wards of civilisation. Once more the profession is announced, the determination proclaimed. Will its upshot but re-echo the bitter mockery of the past?
The answer to this question will be largely determined by the measure in which the fundamental problems of relationship between Europe and Africa are really understood by the present and rising generation. If they are understood, the lessons derivable from the recent history of Africa will at least have been learned, and ignorance, the parent of error, will be eliminated.
It is, therefore, imperative that in considering the future relationship of the white and black peoples, we should distinguish between the fundamental and the accessory. The first question is not one of method. It is one of principle. The relative merits of "direct" and of "indirect" rule in the administration of African communities, in the form of representation of African communities and of individual Africans in the mechanism of white government; the processes of education; labour regulations; segregation—these problems and many others, weighty as they severally are, are still of secondary importance, because they do not go to the root of the matter.
The root is the land. Are the peoples of Africa to be regarded and treated as land-owning communities? Or is native tenure in land to be swept away? That is the fundamental issue, because in that issue is involved the destinies of the African peoples, and the whole character of the future relations of Africa with the outer-world. As it is resolved, so will the African peoples develop along lines of freedom, or along lines of serfdom. As it is resolved, so will the white peoples be acting as trustees for their black wards, or as exploiters of black labour. The issue underlies the problems of trade, labour, government. It can be approached from different directions, but upon examination these are seen to lead to the same common centre. Divorce the African communities from the land, and you reduce the units composing them to the level of wage slaves. You thereby reproduce in Africa all the vices which lie at the base of social unrest in civilised States. But you reproduce them in infinitely aggravated form. The white proletariat in the mass can never attain to true economic independence until it has won back the rights of the common people to the soil. But it can live, and even prosper, because owing to the improvements in transport, labour-saving appliances and a network of trade relations, it can be fed through external sources. But the prosperity of African communities wholly depends upon the use of their, soil, and by robbing them of the soil you deprive them of the means of life.
Again, the existing land system of a large part of Europe ia a system which has evolved internally by gradual processes, and which internal action can modify, or abrogate altogether. The matter can be solved by the citizens of the State: it is a question for the latter of the conquest of political power, either by revolutionary or evolutionary means. But for an alien race to deprive African peoples of the land, is to strike at the foundations of human liberties, to disrupt the whole conditions of life, and to impose from outside a servitude only maintainable by the constant exercise of brute force. The revolutionary movement sweeping through Europe has various precipitating causes, and responds to mixed and, apparently conflicting motives. Fundamentally it is, consciously and unconsciously, an impulse of the mass of the people to win back the land, the pivot of their economic and human liberties, the nursing-mother of man. Is it precisely at this stage in the evolution of the white races, that the European ruling clashes are to be allowed to reproduce in Africa the confiscatory and monopolistic policy, which for centuries has maintained the peoples of Europe in a condition of economic servitude?
This, then, is the first pre-requisite to the performance of the duties of trusteeship towards the African peoples, that the latter must be guaranteed in the possession of the soil and the enjoyment of its fruits.
••••••
A general conviction that the freedom and progress of the African peoples were dependent upon the possession of the land, inspired the deliberations of the first great African Congress held in 1884–5. The problem was there approached from the standpoint, not of the land itself, but from that of the utilisation and enjoyment of such of the land's fruits as were suitable for external trade. It is useful to recall this first and only attempt to interpret that spirit of trusteeship, which the League of Nations now invokes.
Thirty-five years ago the Powers of Europe, with which were associated the United States, laid down the broad principles which should govern the relations of Europe with an enormous section of tropical Africa, then for the first time in history, brought into direct contact with the political life of Europe. Their spokesmen recalled the fatal political error which had vitiated the discovery and the development of the tropical regions of the American Continent, whose natural wealth had been regarded as the natural property of the pioneering European nations, and the labour of whose inhabitants had been ruthlessly exploited to enrich the national treasuries. They perceived that the antidote to a repetition of that error lay in stressing a principle which constituted its antithesis—the principle of trade. The conception which underlay the colonising efforts of the 16th Century visualised aboriginal populations as a mass of human material with no rights in its soil or in the products of its country, through whose labour those products should be transmuted into revenues for the invading and occupying nation. The framers of the provisions of the Act of Berlin, standing on the threshold of a new experiment in tropical colonisation on a huge scale, visualised the aboriginal populations as sentient human beings, and in proclaiming that the principle of trade should be the basis of the relationship between them and the outer world, they implicitly recognised that those populations were possessed of rights in the soil and its products—the operations of trade involving the proprietorship on both sides of exchangeable articles; of buyers and sellers.
Trade, regarded as a principle in human relationships is one thing. The intrinsic properties of trade, and the methods under which trade is carried on—this is an altogether different thing. The failure to distinguish between the two has tended to obscure issues which are perfectly simple and defined. People who feel strongly in regard to certan forms which trade has assumed in some parts of Africa—the trade in liquor for instance—or who are impressed with the injustice which an African population may suffer in the lowering of the purchase price of African produce by rings and combines on the part of European firms buying that produce; are apt to confuse these and similar evils with the principle itself. The operations of trade need constant regulation and supervision; it is the business of the administrator and the legislator to provide them. But the maintenance of trade itself as the economic factor in the relationship between civilised and primitive communities, producers respectively of commodities desired by both, is synonymous with the recognition that the latter are possessed of elementary human rights. If that principle be set aside, slavery, which is a denial of human rights, must in some form or another necessarily take its place.
That is why the framers of the provisions of the Act of Berlin were profoundly wise in putting in the forepart of their program the right of the native peoples of Central Africa to trade, to sell the produce of their soil against imported European merchandise. Recognition that this natural right was inherent in African communities necessarily implied, as has been already pointed out, recognition that African communities have proprietary rights in the land. But the instrument forged at Berlin in 1885 did not explicitly provide for this. It contained no safeguards against expropriation. It made no attempt to define native tenure. This was, perhaps, natural enough. No one could have supposed that a few years later some thirty millions of Africans would be dispossessed by simple decree, of their proprietary rights in a territory almost as large as Europe. Nevertheless the fact that this danger was not foreseen and provided against, proved of great assistance to King Leopold in defending his African policy, on the ground that the right of a "State" to appropriate "vacant" lands was an established principle of jurisprudence; that the natural fruits of the land thus appropriated became de facto the property of the "State," and that no violation of the Act of Berlin had, therefore, occurred.
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.
••••••
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 divides a policy designed to provide a sufficiency of fertile land for the requirements of the native population—allowing an ample margin for natural growth—for agricultural and ranching purposes; and a policy which aims by successive encroachments, under one pretext or another, upon the native "reserves," or by shifting native communities from good, arable land to arid or swampy locations, to prevent the increase of a native farming, planting and ranching class working as its own master under the native system of tenure, and thereby gradually to reduce the native population to a landless proletariat working as hired labourers for the white men on the land, or in the mines. There can be no doubt on which side of the line lie duty, justice and (if the average white South African could bring himself to a mental contemplation of the not-far-distant future when South Africa will be mineralogically exhausted) commonsense. Neither unhappily, is there any doubt upon which side of the line average South African opinion is ranged, nor towards which side of the line South African official policy has usually inclined. The Chartered Company's land claim in Southern Rhodesia is the latest and the most striking object lesson open to study in this regard: but it is not an unique phenomenon by any means. Abundant and cheap supplies of African labour—that is the avowed purpose of the controlling spirits of industrial South Africa, as of the financial magnates at home, and their gramophones in the Press, who talk at large about the Empire, but whose conception of imperial responsibilities begins and ends with dividends. Nor, it would seem, is a section of white labour in South Africa above supporting that policy, although if. is actuated in so doing by different, but not by worthier motives.
This demand for cheap and plentiful black labour in colonisable Africa is quite intelligible, and within limits is justifiable. But those limits are exceeded when, in order to realise it, policy is deliberately directed to lowering the human quality and undermining the economic independence of the aboriginal population by uprooting it from the soil, thereby converting land-owning communities, kept self-respecting under their own institutions, into a disrupted mass of shiftable labour. A certain proportion of an aboriginal population, even when settled on the land, is always procurable for external labour except (where it is agricultural) in the sowing, planting or harvest seasons (which will vary according to the crop) if the wages are sufficiently attractive, the treatment fair, and the period of contract of reasonable length. Given those conditions, a smaller section, dissatisfied with agricultural life under the tribal system, is permanently available. It is the business of government to adjust the demand for labour to the requirements of its wards the native population, whose lasting interests ought never to be sacrificed to the exigencies of an alien interest. After all, there is plenty of time! One of the worst curses of the European industrial system is the absurd degree to which custom and competition combine to press upon the lives of the people. It is really due to nothing more respectable than the hurry of the employing class to get rich—the mad rush for large profits rapidly secured, which flows like a destructive virus through the veins of European capitalist society. There is absolutely no need to transplant this disease into colonisable Africa. It is fatal to all the legitimate and stable utilitarian interests of the country. To allow the native population to suffer from its ravages is for the trustee to violate his trust.
Study the work and the utterances of men like Sir Godfrey Langdon and Lord Selborne (when High Commissioner for South Africa). You will find in them the conception of trusteeship in esse. The test of trusteeship, which is merely good government, i.e., government in the interests of the governed, all the governed, in those parts of Africa which are colonisable, or partly colonisable by white peoples, is the determination of the trustees to provide for the free expansion not only of the white population and their descendants, but of the aboriginal population and their descendants, whose numbers and whose ratio of increase are immeasurably greater. There can be no free expansion for the latter without land: but only helotry. Many hold that where in Africa the white man can permanently reside and perpetuate his race, helotry is the pre-destined and necessary lot of the native. The argument is immoral, and like all immoralities it is unsound, because it looks only to the moment and excludes the future from its purview. In this particular case the error lies in the fact that while it is possible to reduce the native population in these parts of the Continent to helotry by expropriating it from the land, it is impossible to maintain it perpetually in that position. And for this reason, that if civilisation brings with it the power to impose helotry, it also automatically generates forces which in course of time acquire a sufficient strength to destroy helotry. The helots of to-day become the rebels of to-morrow, but rebels of a very different calibre to the primitives whose opposition to the original injustice was so easily overcome. The truth is so obvious that it requires no labouring. The human mind cannot be permanently chained, least of all in Africa, where it functions in a vigorous physical tenement, is highly adaptable and imitative; where man is altogether a very vital being. And the subject has another side to it, of which colonisable or semi-colonisable Africa provides many illustrations. I select one: its moral is generally applicable. Within a few hours steaming from Marseilles, you set foot in France's oldest African colony, upon which, owing to its proximity to the homeland, a great nation has been able to bring to bear a continuous and irresistible influence for nearly a century. The results are superficially brilliant. Beneath this surface glitter achieved at enormous financial outlay, a canker gnaws. A proud race has gradually become dispossessed of its land, largely, it is fair to state, through initial mistakes committed with the best of intentions: helotry has replaced economic independence. And after nearly a century of French occupation, this is how one of the deepest students—a distinguished Frenchman—of this subject people, describes their sentiments towards their alien rulers: "Without having lived for a long time among them and having observed them constantly and critically, it would not only be difficult, it would, I think, be impossible, to form even a faint idea of the profound hatred, of the contemptuous aversion which their manners and their speech conceal. …"[1]
"The land question," states the famous report of the South African Native Affairs Committee, "dominates and pervades every other question; it is the bedrock of the native's present economic position and largely affects his social system." If that can be said as to the importance of ownership in land for African peoples in a region where a white people is growing up side by side with the indigenous inhabitants, where the export industries are wholly in the hands of the white population, and where white men are able to undertake at least some forms and some measure of manual labour, and a great deal of immediate supervision; how much more can be said of its importance in the tropical regions of the Continent where the white man is but a bird of passage, and where he is utterly incapable of manual labour? In the former regions, expropriation of the natives leads to an economic servitude, which for reasons already explained, will be accompanied by deeper social wrongs than in Europe: it may develop into actual slavery. In the latter regions it can at best, be but veiled slavery: at its worst it involves a Slave system more ferocious and destructive than any in the history of the world.
Let us examine the question of the land as it affects the inhabitants of tlhe tropical regions of Africa—i.e., roughly, three-fifths of that huge Continent.
••••••
Circumstances have combined to create marked divergencies in the conditions generally prevailing in the eastern and in the western portion of tropical Africa respectively. We must look for the explanation in past history. Slavery and the slave trade imposed from outside ravaged both sections of the Continent for centuries. On the west the European was the scourge: on the east, mainly the Arab. The objects pursued differed radically, with corresponding results. On the west, except in Angola, the European system threw no roots into the soil: it did not maintain itself in the mainland as an institution. That was not its purpose. The slavers, and the Governments that employed or encouraged them, had no interests in Africa. Their interests lay outside Africa They were traders in African flesh and blood, not slave owners in Africa, using their slaves on African estates. Neither they, nor their clients, sought the economic development of Africa; but that of America, for which African labour was required. They looked upon Africa as a reservoir of human material tc exploit the soil, not of Africa, but of the New World. The result was, that while the slave trade decimated the population of Western Africa, it did not crush the spirit of its peoples. It did not destroy their independence. In some measure it served to intensify the passion for freedom among them By giving a prodigious extension to internecine warfare and investing it with a distinct economic motive, the slave trade strengthened all the instincts of self-preservation among the native communities. Just because every community lived under the perpetual menace of aggression from its neighbour, it became more wary, more intent upon preserving its liberties, more devoted to its land and homesteads, more sturdy in its defence. And the Western Slave trade had another consequence. It increased the strong commercial trend of mind, the love of barter and bargaining, inherent in the West African peoples. For, examined from the standpoint of its role among the West African peoples whom it affected, the Slave trade was not merely a stimulus to war: it was a stimulus to gain, to profit. Innumerable intermediaries participated in the purchase price which the European slaver, installed on his hulk moored beyond the surf-line, or encamped on shore, haggled over with his African agents and their armed followers when they reached, the coast dragging with them their shackled captives. Those captives had passed from hand to hand along many hundreds of miles in the interior, and contractors and sub-contractors had each claimed their share of commission on the human live-stock. The double effect of centuries of this traffic in West Africa tended thus to accentuate the spirit of independence and the commercial spirit of the native peoples.
The purpose of the Arab slaver and conquisitador in Eastern Africa was wholly different. A certain number of captives were, of course, deported to Arabia and the Levant. But the interests of the Oman Arab of Southern Arabia, who founded the Zanzibar Sultanate and extended domination as far inland as the Great Lakes, were primarily in the soil. True, he was a great trader, and the loss of native life involved in his activities was chiefly caused through the terrible mortality among the carriers who transported the ivory he secured from the interior to the coast. He was ruthless in his warfare. But having achieved his intention in subduing the aboriginal population by force of arms, he settled down in the country, founded rich and prosperous settlements, and laid immense tracts under cultivation, through the labour of his defeated enemies. With this end in view, he maintained the peoples he had conquered under his permanent yoke. It was a despotic but not ordinarily a heavy yoke; for once installed as a conqueror it was his obvious policy that the land he had conquered should be prosperous and peaceable. He became an institution in the country, assembled round him large retinues of slaves and concubines. His rule was patriarchal, but it was permanent. The people remained a beaten people. They became servants. He remained the master and concentrated in his own hands the external trade and the industry of the country. The stigma of serfdom was never lifted from the people he had subjugated in arms. Their power of initiative was undermined.
Portuguese rule, which alternated with Arab rule for three centuries in Eastern Africa, was in many respects similar to the latter in its effects upon the native population, except that it was more destructive. The first period of its activity was marked by all the characteristics which distinguished contemporary Spanish and Portuguese policy in South America—the enslavement of the population and the pillage of the country on behalf of the national treasury. The second period of its activity was cursed by the Slave trade in order to supply the increasing demand of the Brazilian markets. And here, as in Angola, but unlike the rest of Western Africa, the Slave-trading Power was its own purveyor: actually established in and occupying the country: breaking the people. When the Slave trade disappeared, the Portuguese grip upon the East Coast relaxed, and the edifice of Portuguese rule became like the pillars of a building invaded by the white ant—without substance. Thus the combined effect of centuries of Arab and Portuguese domination in the major portion of the eastern part of the African Continent, went to crush the spirit of independence and initiative in the native peoples and to make of them slaves and domestics rather than traders and producers in their own right.
This difference in the history of their contact with the outer world is, in the main, explanatory of the divergence in the economic status of the peoples of East and West Africa to-day. Native export industries may hardly be said to exist in the eastern part of the Continent except in Uganda, and the sytem of European plantations worked by hired, or forced, native labour is the rule. An inherited tendency has inclined the various European Administrations to favour the European planter rather than to promote the far more healthy and potentially promising system of encouraging the native communities to develop their own land. This has been the marked characteristic both of German and of British policy in East Africa. It continues to be that of British policy with consequences which are making for disaster. One visible result can be seen in the economic situation of the European dependencies in West Africa and in East Africa respectively. The export of natural produce from the whole of East Africa—British, German and Portuguese—does not exceed the output of the small West African Protectorates of the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone combined. It would fall below it but for the export of cotton from Uganda, and this, the most considerable of the articles of export from Eastern Africa is a native and not a European industry—i.e., the cotton is grown by the Baganda themselves on their own land, and for their own profit. For in Uganda proper the British Administration has, up to the present, wisely assisted the native population to grow economic products for sale for its own account, although it is constantly pressed to adopt the European plantation system existing in British East Africa proper.
In this connection it is advisable to touch upon a subject on which there is much popular misconception. The idea that tropical Africa can be developed more rapidly by creating a population of thriftless labourers in European employ, instead of keen farmers benefiting from the fruits of their enterprise is altogether unsound.[2] It is unsound, apart from the very doubtful proposition which assumes "rapidity" of development to be synonymous with lasting prosperity. Those who favour the development of tropical Africa by white overseers commanding native labour, can never in the nature of the case be impartial. Unhappily they have the ear of the Government and access to the Press. A far larger material output under the system of native industries is certain, and that policy does undoubtedly coincide with the permanent interest of the dependency viewed even from the strictly utilitarian standpoint. And for these reasons. An African resembles other human beings. If he is working and producing for himself, he will work better and produce more than if he is working for someone else. That is elemental.
Again, the purchasing capacity of an African or arboricultural community growing or gathering and preparing crops for export, is necessarily far greater than the purchasing capacity of an agglomeration of African wage earners. In the former case the equivalent earned represents the value of the crop plus the labour devoted to its production. In the latter case the equivalent merely represents labour, the intrinsic value of the product remaining the property of the white employer. Now the white employer of African labour in a tropical African dependency does not spend his profits in that dependency, but outside it. The native agriculturist, on the other hand, spends his profits in a way which cannot but benefit the revenues of the dependency, because he spends them on the purchase of European merchandise, and that European merchandise pays customs' dues upon entering the dependency. The desire to acquire the products of the outer world is the stimulus which induces the African to grow crops for export. He is not driven to do so from economic necessity.
I fully realise, of course, that neither the argument adduced above, nor any other arguments of a like kind, meet the objections of those who contend that a tropical African dependency should be regarded as a milch cow for the direct enrichment of the protecting European State, or for that of a few individual capitalists within that State. I quite recognise the force and logic of that point of view, but I maintain that it ought not to be allowed to exercise a determining influence upon European Governments responsible for the administration of tropical African territory. I oppose these views to the utmost of my power, and have done so consistently for a quarter of a century. I oppose them because I look upon those who entertain them as representing an element which makes for degradation in human affairs. The just, equitable, understanding government of the primitive, but highly intelligent, adaptable, kindly and politically helpless races of tropical Africa, is one of the finest and most unselfish tasks which remain for white men to fulfil in the world: a task requiring in its performance the utmost patience, much self-repression, ull the high moral qualities indeed. These races cannot escape being sucked into the vortex of white economic expansion. Steam, electricity, aviation, industrial development combine to make it impossible. If to-morrow the Governments washed their hands of them and retired from the country, these races would become the prey of international freebooters far more numerous and infinitely more powerful than the adventurers who fought for supremacy in the Slave trade up and down the West Coast of Africa, ravaged the Carnatic and pillaged the Americas. Such a withdrawal would deprive these races of their only present safeguard—public opinion. But the government of these races can be transformed, from the noble human mission it ought always to be, into an agency of oppression and injustice. This transformation cannot take place without degrading all parties directly affected by it, whether as victims or beneficiaries, and the public opinion which tolerates it.
I oppose, then, the persons and the interests that make themselves responsible for the promulgation of these views and practices for the reason stated, and for the kindred reason that I hold these African races to have as great a right to happiness, peace and security as our own people at home. It is, to my way of thinking, utterly intolerable that they should be exploited, made miserable, dragged down, ill-used, their home and social life broken up, themselves enslaved or destroyed. That is a purely instinctive sentiment for which I am no more responsible than the man who instinctively approaches all questions connected with coloured peoples from the standpoint that the coloured man—the black man—especially is little better than an animal. It is not, I admit, capable of rationalistic defence, whereas the other reason I have advanced is. But such as it is, I hold it and minister to it.
I quite understand, however, that the humanistic appeal is not sufficient to defeat the purposes of those whom I oppose. This became clear to me in the course of the twelve years' agitation against the misgovernment of the Congo. That is why I invariably seek to demonstrate to public opinion, which in the ultimate resort dictates and governs policy, that what is morally wrong, is also foolish and unsound when tested by severely "practical" standards. If I fail in this, it is not because the "practical" case is incapable of convincing demonstration, but because of my own incapacity to establish it. But if it be to the advantage of the European manufacturer and working man that tropical Africa should produce an increasing quantity of raw material, conveyed to Europe to be there turned into the finished article, and should consume an increasing quantity of goods manufactured in Europe to pay for that raw material; then it is to their advantage that the administrative policy applied in tropical Africa should be such as will ensure that result. And if it be to the advantage of the European manufacturer and working man, and the general body of tax-payers that the native communities of tropical Africa should increase in numbers, in prosperity and in intelligence; then it is contrary to their interests that an administrative policy should be applied in those regions calculated to impoverish these communities, to give rise to unrest and to foment wars, thereby decreasing both the numbers and the productivity of the people, and involving the home or local Government in military expenditure.
The long-view and the common-sense view is to regard African communities producing raw material for export as partners with the working classes of Europe in a joint undertaking. The aptness of the description will not diminish, but will gather fresh emphasis in the measure in which the working classes of Europe receive a larger share in the profits derived from industry. The more considerable the output of raw material by these African communities, the greater their purchasing power expressed in terms of European merchandise. Thus the producers of Africa and the producing classes of Europe are partners, and one of the chief hopes which those who wish to preserve the African races from -the cruelties, injustices, and stupidities of the European capitalist system, centres in the increasing recognition of that partnership by the organised forces of Labour in Europe.
••••••
In no part of Africa does the land and its beneficial usage bulk so largely in the economy of the people as in the tropical western part of the Continent, the most populous as it is intrinsically the richest. When the slave-trade received its death blow, an export trade in natural produce, which had preceded the slave-trade in many parts of the west coast and had never been wholly extirpated, revived and extended inland. Thanks to the improved transport facilities of the last thirty years it has attained very large dimensions, much larger than most people suspect. In the territories drained by the Congo and its affluents, the Congo Free State and the French Congo, Leopoldianism, sweeping like a pestilence over the land, has flung back this natural growth for generations, perhaps for centuries; perhaps the damage done is irreparable. But north of the Congo, in the Britieh, French, and German dependencies, European administration has in the main proceeded on rational lines, with corresponding economic results. Although, with the notable exception of Northern Nigeria, little or no legislation directed specifically to safeguarding native rights in land has yet been evolved, the native population has, generally speaking, been left in undisturbed possession of the soil, and has been encouraged to develop its fruits for export purposes in freedom, on its own indigenous land-holding and labour system, and on its own account. The Germans in the Kamerun did, it is true, import East African practices by introducing the plantation system for the cultivation of cocoa, and pursued it for some years with commendable enterprise and scientific care The economic results, however, were anything but brilliant, and the remarkabte achievements of the Fanti and Ashanti farmer in the Gold Coast with the same crop—which I shall refer to later on—had made a profound impression upon German experts who had studied both systems de visu. In their other West African dependency of Togoland the Germans, imitating the policy of the British Administration in Nigeria and the methods of the British Cotton Growing Association in that dependency and in Uganda, had succeeded in getting cotton growing for export started as a native industry by native farmers in their own right.
Western Africa offers a remarkable, indeed, a unique, field for profitable study in the capacity of aboriginal peoples to develop the natural or cultivable riches of their land as free men and landowners, to the advantage of themselves and of the rest of the world. West Africa is the country of great native export industries, created and maintained by the native communities themselves on their own land, under their own native systems of land tenure and co-operative effort. The most important of these native export industries are the palm-oil and kernel industries, and the cocoa industry. As both of them have attained their highest development in British Protectorates—the former in Southern Nigeria, the latter in the Gold Coast and Ashanti—it is doubly suitable that they should bo selected for comment in a volume not free from criticisms of maladministration in other parts of British protected Africa.
West Africa is the natural home of the oil-palm, of which there are many varieties. From time immemorial this tree has played a daily and vital part in the domestic economy of West African communities. Its fruit is a staple article of food. Variously treated in accordance with the special purpose in view, it is used medicinally for cleansing the body, as a disinfectant, an insecticide, a rust remover, and as a substitute for yeast in the making of bread. When fresh, its leaves are employed to dress wounds; when dry, as tinder; pounded with other substances, prophylactically; with the mid-ribs, as roofing material, for the manufacture of rope, baskets, nets, mats, and brooms. The male flower is burnt into charcoal and used as a dressing for burns. The stalks of the fruit-branches are beaten out to make sponges. The shell of the kernel is an admirable fuel. The "cabbage" or growing plant is a succulent vegetable. Mixed with the juice of other palms it provides a sustaining beverage known as palm wine.
Apart from its being an article of consumption, the fruit is an article of extensive internal trade between village and village, market and market. One community will be specially trained in preparing the oil for consumption; another for different purposes. Some communities are deficient in the tree, and eagerly exchange other commodities for the fruit. As one travels along the roads and by-ways of this populous region,[3] the commonest 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 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 lacustris). The kernels are sent home in canvas bags, and millions of such bags must be manufactured in Europe and dispatched to Nigeria. There is the handling, haulage, cartage, and distribution of this bulky produce at the European end; its conveyance to the railway depot and the store; its re-shipment to other parts of the world. There are the mills erected to crush the kernels. These details are merely illustrative of the argument already advanced as to the community of interest between the African producers of raw material and the working classes of Europe. The industry of the one feeds the industry of the other.
Reduce the Southern Nigerian communities from the position of producers in their own right of the fruits of the soil and of free traders in that produce, and you make them, in the words of Mr. Thompson, the chief conservator of the Nigerian forests, "slaves on their own land." If the precepts of elementary morality forbid such a policy, so do the principles of elementary common-sense. In these days the latter consideration requires, perhaps, exceptional accentuation.
••••••
The rise and growth of the cocoa industry in the Gold Coast and Ashanti is one of the most romantic episodes in the history of tropical cultivation. If such results had been achieved under the ægis of Europeans, the financial and commercial Press would have taken care to familiarise all of us with the result. But as the enterprise is wholly due to the African farmer, the world, specialists apart, knows little or nothing of it. The "man in the street" continues to accept the interested falsities about the invincible indolence of the "nigger." The real sin of the African native, let it be emphasised once again, is not his indolence, but the fact that he is capable of putting his land to fruitful use, for his own profit, working as his own master. It is this which gravels, as Mark Twain used to say, your exploiting capitalist and your grasping syndicates in Europe. As one of his kind is recently reported to have exclaimed at a public meeting: "It is time the natives were made to understand that they have got to work, not for themselves, but for the white man." Precisely. The entire philosophy of your modern slaver is epitomised in that single sentence.
In the early eighties of last century, a native of Accra, a town on the Gold Coast, returned from a term of employment on the European-managed cocoa plantations on the Spanish Island of Fernando Po. He brought back some cocoa pods with him and sowed the seeds on his own family land. The first consignment of native-grown cocoa was exported from the Gold Coast to Europe in 1885. It weighed 121lbs. and was valued at £6 1s. In 1895 tihe export had risen to 28,906lbs., valued at £471. In 1905 the export was 11½ million pounds, valued at £186,809. In 1913 the export amounted to 113¼ million pounds, valued at £2,484,218! The quality of the article produced in the last few years has well-nigh kept pace with the quantity. In 1908 only 5 per cent, of the Gold Coast cocoa was "good quality," 15 per cent, was "fair," and 80 per cent, "common." In 1912 the proportions were 35 per cent, "good," 50 per cent, "fair," and 15 per cent. " common." In 1913 the crop showed a further considerable improvement, the situation then being that "90 per cent, of Gold Coast is marketable anywhere, and only 10 per cent, thoroughly common and unfit for manufacture of a better class." In thirty years the Gold Coast and Ashanti farmers have placed this small British dependency of under 50,000 square miles, much of it unsuitable to cocoa cultivation, at the head of the cocoa-producing countries of the world. The Gold Coast now grows over 30 per cent, of the total world supply, its output being twice as great as that of Brazil, which is the next largest producer. In twenty-five years the small Gold Coast farmer—the despised West African native who sits in the sun all day, opening his mouth for a ripe banana to fall into it when moved to hunger—has outpaced Brazil, the West Indies, Ecuador, and San Thome as a tropical cultivator. He has shown what he can do under an honest administration, as a landowner, and working for himself. Every yard of land put under cocoa cultivation has been won from the hungry forest. The jungle has had to be cut down, cleared, planted and kept cleared—and with the most primitive of tools. Anyone who has had personal experience of the tropical African forest will appreciate what this means. Indeed, the native farmer in his enthusiasm is endangering the rainfall by a too wholesale destruction of the forests, and has to be checked in his own interest. In the early years of the industry every barrel of beans had to be rolled along hundreds of miles of tracks, which only by courtesy were called roads, to the port of shipment. The only assistance the native farmer has had is the technical assistance afforded by an under-staffed, hard-working Agricultural Department, which has done admirable work in distributing masses of leaflets in the native languages, containing cultural directions, in supplying sprays, issuing recommendations for dealing with insect pests, making such judicious representations as have encouraged careful farmers and stimulated careless ones, and so on; and the help of Cadbury Bros., who have established buying centres in the country, created one or two model farms, and given a practical incentive to careful cultivation by paying higher prices for the better prepared article.
These facts speak for themselves on what may be termed the moral issue. But, once again, the utilitarian aspect may be stressed with advantage. I will not repeat the arguments already advanced in this respect. There is, however, one point which may be usefully noted compare this system of native industries with the attempt at the direct employment of European capital in the agricultural and arboricultural development of the African tropics. A company is formed in Europe; land is leased or sold to it in Africa; large sums are invested, a European staff at necessarily high wages is appointed, and further expense entailed in housing it; native labour is engaged at great cost, relatively speaking, is generally unsatisfactory in quality, perhaps unprocurable without official pressure, or in other words, it is more or less forced, with resultant internal economic dislocation, the immediate effect of which is seen in a shortage of food supplies. The Government is forced to import food into a natural granary. This means expense. Revenue, instead of being devoted to increase the general productivity and prosperity of the country, is used to bolster up an artificial economic experiment. The upshot, sooner or later, is political turmoil, risings, bloodshed. And when everything has been done that can be done to make this artificial venture a success, in the interest not of the dependency's revenues, not of the inhabitants of the dependency, but of a small group of Europeans, the venture is more often than not a failure and the capital invested is lost. Who, then, has benefited? All the parties concerned are worse off than they were before the experiment was started. It may be said: "But a native industry can also fail." It can, undoubtedly. A virulent disease may, for example, sweep the native cocoa farms in the Gold Coast to ruin; or production may at a given moment so exceed demand that prices will fall below the figure at which the native finds it worth his while to plant cocoa, or even keep his plantations in existence. A phenomenon of the latter kind occurred some time ago in connection with the Sierra Leone coffee industry, which never, however, attained large proportions. The native population may be temporarily inconvenienced. Its purchasing power, expressed in terms of European merchandise, will rapidly fall. But an event which would cause widespread distress and unemployment, almost amounting to an economic catastrophe necessitating measures of government relief, among a population divorced from its land, leaves no permanent impression upon a population which remains in possession of the land. The land is turned to other uses, that is all. The people grow more remunerative crops. For a time they may even confine themselves to putting an increased area under food cultivation. So long as the people possess the land, they may suffer a diminution of their externally acquired wealth by such an adverse tide of fortune. But their existence and their future are secure. They can live, and they can prosper.
No one wishes to stultify European enterprise in the African tropics. But just as Europe is beginning to perceive that the unequal distribution of communally produced wealth is at the bottom of the preventible social misery identified with what is called "civilisation," so has the time arrived when a concensus of experienced opinion in Europe might be expected to recognise that the form which European enterprise assumes in the tropical regions of the earth, must adapt itself to local conditions. Tropical Western Africa needs the assistance which Europe is able to give to its peoples and to its economic development in the shape of railways, good roads, improved waterways, harbours, ocean and river craft, technical instruction, internal security, medical and sanitary services. It needs the European-trained administrator, the merchant, or the buyer for the European manufacturer, the engineer, forestry officer, 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.
••••••
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 the population to find a profitable return by placing extensive areas under ground or pea-nut cultivation. In Sierra Leone ginger is cultivated by the native communities, and the kola tree is exploited as well as the oil-palm. There is a large timber industry in Southern Nigeria and in the Gold Coast mainly in native hands, although European licencees also have a share in this industry, the native communities receiving a portion of the licence fees, which are spent under administrative supervision and in conjunction with the recognised Native Councils upon improving the sanitation of the native towns, constructing water conduits and so on. The prosperity of the tiny Gambia (4,505 square miles) is wholly dependent upon the cultivation of the ground nut, which involves much hard work.
Throughout British West Africa the authorities have given to the principle of trusteeship its only just and wise interpretation. The consistent policy of the Government has been to assist the growth of native industries, to encourage the native communities to work their land for their own profit. With hardly an exception, every administrator from British West Africa examined before the West African Lands Committee, expressed himself in favour of this policy, and the more experience he had of the country the more emphatic was ihis testimony. And, observe the economic results! A year before the war, M. Yves Guyot, the French colonial director of agriculture, made an exhaustive personal inquiry into the British West African dependencies. His impression may be gathered from the following passages in his published report:
There is no more fascinating history than the spread among the dark races—regarded as altogether primitive—of a cultivation hitherto thought to be within the capacity only of white peoples. … Everywhere else, cultivation of this kind has come from the initiative of Europeans; such is the case with coffee in Brazil, with tea in Ceylon, rubber in the Malay archipelago, Ceylon, and Brazil, cocoa on the East Coast of Africa. Here in West Africa it is the black man who has done everything; the introduction and the development of these cultivations are the results of his initiative and of his agricultural ability. Government action came later on. …
Why? Because the West African native has been left in possession of his land and has been regarded and treated as a trader, cultivator and producer in his own right. It should be added that, with the lamentable exception of the French Congo, the French have pursued much the same policy in their West African dependencies—at least in practice. I make that reservation because, in theory, their land legislation is in many respects incompatible with the preservation of native rights in land. In practice to-day many hundreds of square miles in Senegambia are under ground-nut cultivation by native communities who benefit, as their neighbours in the Gambia, from the fruits of their labour; and the same holds good in the other French dependencies.
••••••
Before proceeding to describe the character of African land tenure, it may be desirable to sum up the conclusions which are warranted by the facts set forth in the preceding pages. Wherever they have received fair play the peoples of tropical Africa have shown themselves to be possessed of the requisite capacity, energy and enterprise to exploit the vegetable resources of their soil which the modern industrial development of Europe demands. They are doing so with no other incentive to labour than is provided by their own marked aptitude for agriculture, arboriculture, and commercial dealing, the volume of whose expression synchronises with transport facilities on land and on the interior waterways. Viewed, then, from the standpoint of strict justice and impartiality, these peoples are fulfilling the obligations which the controlling alien Power has conferred upon them by ensuring internal peace, and by protecting them from the rapacity of an exploiting capitalism. They are doing all that can be legitimately expected of, or claimed from, them. For it is their industry which pays the expenses of the alien administration, the salaries of its officials, the works of public utility, the interest on loans; and it is their industry which provides employment and profit both in Europe and in West Africa for European commercial undertakings, and procures employment for European labour in Europe. It is, therefore, the plain and obvious duty of the alien Power to preserve for these peoples and their descendants liberty of access to, and enjoyment of, the land. Licences to work timber or tap wild rubber can be granted to Europeans, with the consent of the native communities themselves, on payment of licence fees in those communities shall share, without inflicting injustice upon the latter. But grants of lands to European individuals or syndicates made by the Government, as in British East Africa, or by native chiefs incapable of fully apprehending the result of their actions, as was beginning at one time to threaten the Gold Coast, involving surface rights over large areas of land for prolonged periods, are calculated to prevent or to restrict the growth of native industries, to disorganise and break up the native system of land tenure and co-operative labour. They are thus morally indefensible, politically unwise, economically unsound. The latter policy is sometimes defended at home on the ground of expediency and of justice to the British taxpayer. Neither plea survives investigation. The British dependencies in West Africa, where this vicious policy does not happily obtain, do not cost the British taxpayer a farthing. They would cost him a good many if a policy were adopted within them which would result in the destruction of the native industries, and in fierce conflicts from one end of the country to the other. As for the argument of expediency, what does it mean? At its best, it means that the economic devlopment of the areas of the Empire should be hastened. At its worst it means that, regardless of the major interest of the State and of the interests and rights of the native population, special privileges and monopolies over the soil, its products and the labour of the community, should be conferred upon private, sectional interests in England. A Government which yields to that argument is betraying its trust, primarily towards the African peoples under its protection, secondly towards its European subjects. I have already examined the argument of accelerated development on its moral side. I would add this on its material side. The assertion is occasionally made that, under the system of economic exploitation by the natives on their own account, specific natural products do not give the full yield that they might under the system of European exploitation with hired native labour. It is a pure assumption of more than doubtful accuracy. I have never known a case where the allegation that natural produce was going to waste owing to native "lethargy," substantiated by evidence proving that the fact of such wastage, if fact it were, was not due to local circumstances such as an inadequate local labour supply, social requirements, character of the soil, atmospheric conditions, insect pests, transport difficulties, and so on, of which those who advanced it were ignorant, or had failed to take into account. It is often argued that the agricultural and arboricultural methods of the African are capable of improvement. The statement is undoubtedly true. It applies with equal force to the land of Britain. There is no difference of opinion among British agricultural experts as to the capacities for improvement in the methods of British agriculture. As for British arboriculture it is still an almost entirely neglected field of British home enterprise. We can afford to be patient with the African if he has not yet attained perfection. Why, it is only since the beginning of the 18th century that the rotation of crops has been practised in England! But the Kano farmers in Northern Nigeria have understood rotation of crops and grass manuring for at least five hundred years.
To advance such truisms as an excuse for robbing the native communities of their land, degrading farmers in their own right to the level of hired labourers urged on by the lash, and conferring monopolistic rights over the land and its fruits to private corporations, is to make truth the stalking horse of oppression and injustice. The statement of fact may be accurate. The claim put forward on the strength of it is purely predatory.
Those who urge this and kindred arguments only do so to assist the realisation of their purpose. That purpose is clear. It is to make of Africans all over Africa a servile race; to exploit African labour, and through African labour, the soil of Africa for their own exclusive benefit. They are blind to the cost in human suffering. They are indifferent to the fact that in the long run their policy must defeat its own ends. They care only for the moment, and for the objects of the moment they are prepared to sacrifice the future. But since their purpose is selfish, short-sighted and immoral it must be striven against without pause or relaxation. There can be no honest or safe compromise with these people and their policy. A great moral issue is involved. But although that issue comes first, and must come first, itis not the only issue.
For a time it may be possible for the white man to maintain a white civilisation in the colonisable, or partly colonisable, areas of the African Continent based on servile or semi-servile labour: to build up a servile State. But even there the attempt can be no more than fleeting. The days of Roman imperialism are done with for ever. Education sooner or later breaks all chains, and knowledge cannot be kept from the African. The attempt will be defeated in the north by Islam, which confers power of combination in the political sphere, and a spiritual unity which Europe has long lost in the mounting tides of her materialism. It will fail in the south through the prolificness of the African,[4] through the practical impossibility of arresting his intellectual advance and through race admixture, which is proceeding at a much more rapid rate than most people realise. In the great tropical regions the attempt must fail in the very nature of things, if for no other reason, because it can only be enforced by employing the black man, trained in the art of modern warfare as the medium through which to coerce his unarmed brother. The former will be well content to play that part for a period more or less prolonged, but when he becomes alive to his power the whole fabric of European domination will fall to pieces in shame and ruin. From these failures the people of Europe will suffer moral and material damage of a far-reaching kind.
And the criminal folly of it! The white imperial peoples have it in their power, if their rulers will cultivate vision and statesmanship enough to thrust aside the prompting of narrow, ephemeral interests—anti-national in the truest sense—to make of Africa the home of highly-trained and prosperous peoples enriching the universe as their prosperity waxes, dwelling in plains and valleys, in forests and on plateaux made fruitful by their labours, assisted by science; a country whose inhabitants will be enterprising and intelligent, loving their land, looking to it for inspiration, co-operating faithfully in the work of the world, developing their own culture, independent, free, self-respecting, attaining to higher mental growth as the outcome of internal evolutionary processes. Why cannot the white imperial peoples, acknowledging in some measure the injuries they have inflicted upon the African, turn a new leaf in their treatment of him? For nearly two thousand years they have professed to be governed by the teachings of Christ. Can they not begin in the closing century of that era, to practise what they profess—and what their missionaries of religion teach the African? Can they not cease to regard the African as a producer of dividends for a selected few among their number, and begin to regard him as a human being with human rights? Have they made such a success of their own civilisation that they can contemplate with equanimity the forcing of all its social failures upon Africa—its hideous and devastating inequalities, its pauperisms, its senseless and destructive egoisms, its vulgar and soulless materialism? It is in their power to work such good to Africa—and such incalculable harm! Can they not make up their minds that their strength shall be used for noble ends? Africa demands at their hands, justice, and understanding sympathy—not ill-informed sentiment. And when these are dealt out to her she repays a thousandfold.
- ↑ "Recherches sur la constitution de la propriété térritoriale dans les pays musulmans, et subsidairement, en Algérie." Worms (Paris: Franck)
- ↑ It is even beginning to be seen to be unsound in certain Southern States of the American Union among a negro population, over whom the taint of slavery still lingers. In those States where the better class labour is beginning to acquire land, the plantation system is going downhill fast. Experience is showing that where the negro works his own land better results are being obtained, even from poor soil, than from plantation labour on good soil.
- ↑ The average density of the population in Southern Nigeria is 98 to the square mile a considerable proportion of the surface area is uninhabitable—but in many districts the density is very much greater, reaching to nearly 400 per square mile in some places.
- ↑ In 1917 the population of the Union of South Africa amounted to 1,467,457 whites and 6,872,164 blacks and coloured. In 1865 the proportion of white to black and coloured in the Cape Province was 36; in 1911, 23. In 1880 the proportion of white to black and coloured in the Orange Free State was 46; in 1911, 33.