But In Africa The Land Is Cheap, The Soil Good,
And Free Labor Is To Be Found On The Spot.
Our chief hopes rest
with the natives themselves; and if the point to which
I have given prominence, of
Healthy inland commercial stations, be realized,
where all the produce raised may be collected, there is little doubt
but that slavery among our kinsmen across the Atlantic will,
in the course of some years, cease to assume the form of a necessity
to even the slaveholders themselves. Natives alone can collect produce
from the more distant hamlets, and bring it to the stations contemplated.
This is the system pursued so successfully in Angola.
If England had possessed that strip of land, by civilly declining
to enrich her "frontier colonists" by "Caffre wars",
the inborn energy of English colonists would have developed its resources,
and the exports would not have been 100,000 Pounds as now,
but one million at least. The establishment of the necessary agency
must be a work of time, and greater difficulty will be experienced
on the eastern than on the western side of the continent,
because in the one region we have a people who know none but slave-traders,
while in the other we have tribes who have felt the influence
of the coast missionaries and of the great Niger expedition;
one invaluable benefit it conferred was the dissemination of the knowledge
of English love of commerce and English hatred of slavery, and it therefore
was no failure. But on the east there is a river which may become
a good pathway to a central population who are friendly to the English;
and if we can conciliate the less amicable people on the river,
and introduce commerce, an effectual blow will be struck at the slave-trade
in that quarter. By linking the Africans there to ourselves
in the manner proposed, it is hoped that their elevation
will eventually be the result. In this hope and proposed effort
I am joined by my brother Charles, who has come from America,
after seventeen years' separation, for the purpose. We expect success
through the influence of that Spirit who already aided the efforts
to open the country, and who has since turned the public mind toward it.
A failure may be experienced by sudden rash speculation
overstocking the markets there, and raising the prices against ourselves.
But I propose to spend some more years of labor, and shall be thankful
if I see the system fairly begun in an open pathway which will eventually
benefit both Africa and England.
The village of Kilimane stands on a great mud bank, and is surrounded
by extensive swamps and rice-grounds. The banks of the river
are lined with mangrove bushes, the roots of which, and the slimy banks
on which they grow, are alternately exposed to the tide and sun.
The houses are well built of brick and lime, the latter from Mozambique.
If one digs down two or three feet in any part of the site of the village,
he comes to water; hence the walls built on this mud bank gradually subside;
pieces are sometimes sawn off the doors below, because the walls in which
they are fixed have descended into the ground, so as to leave the floors
higher than the bottom of the doors.
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