Then, When You Have Done This,
You May Abandon The French Plan, And Gradually Develop The Trade In
An English Manner, But Not In The English Manner A La Sierra Leone.
But Do Your Pioneer Work First.
There is a very excellent
substratum for English pioneer work on our Coasts in the trading
community, for trade is the great key to the African's heart, and
everywhere the English trader and his goods stand high in West
African esteem.
This pioneer work must be undertaken, or subsidised
by the Government as it has been in the French possessions, for the
West Coast does not offer those inducements to the ordinary
traveller that, let us say, East Africa with its magnificent herds
of big game, or the northern frontier of India, with its mountains
and its interesting forms, relics, and monuments of a high culture,
offer. Travel in West Africa is very hard work, and very unhealthy.
There are many men who would not hesitate for a moment to go there,
were the dangers of the native savagery the chief drawback; but they
hesitate before a trip which means, in all probability, month after
month of tramping through wet gloomy forests with a swamp here and
there for a change, {465} and which will, the chances are 100 to 1,
end in their dying ignominiously of fever in some wretched squalid
village.
Reckless expenditure of money in attempts to open up the country is
to be deprecated, for this hampers its future terribly, even if
attended with partial success, the mortgage being too heavy for the
estate, as the Congo Free State finances show; and if it is attended
with failure it discourages further efforts. What we want at
present in West Africa are three or four Bingers and Zintgraffs to
extend our possessions northwards, eastwards, and south-eastwards,
until they command the interior trade routes. And there is no
reason that these men should enter from the West Coast, getting
themselves killed, or half killed, with fever, before they reach
their work. Uganda, if half one hears of it is true, would be a
very suitable base for them to start from, and then travelling west
they might come down to the present limit of our West Coast
possessions. This belt of territory across the continent would give
us control of, and place us in touch with, the whole of the interior
trade. A belt from north to south in Africa - thanks to our
supineness and folly - we can now never have.
I will now briefly deal with the second sub-division I spoke of some
pages back - the possibility of introducing new trade exports by
means of cultivating plantations. The soil of West Africa is
extremely rich in places, but by no means so in all, for vast tracts
of it are mangrove swamps, and other vast tracts of it are miserably
poor, sour, sandy clay. It is impossible in the space at my
disposal to enter into a full description of the localities where
these unprofitable districts occur, but you will find them here and
there all along the Coast after leaving Sierra Leone. The sour clay
seems to be new soil recently promoted into the mainland from dried-
up mangrove swamps, and a good rough rule is, do not start a
plantation on soil that is not growing hard-wood forest.
Considerable areas on the Gold Coast, even though the soil is good,
are now useless for cultivation, on account of their having been
deforested by the natives' wasteful way of making their farms,
coupled with the harmattan and the long dry season.
The regions of richest soil are not in our possessions, but in those
of Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, namely, the Cameroons and
its volcanic island series, Fernando Po, Principe, and San Thome.
The rich volcanic earths of these places will enable them to compete
in the matter of plantations with any part of the known world.
Cameroons is undoubtedly the best of these, because of its superior
river supply, and although not in the region of the double seasons
it is just on the northern limit of them, and the height of the
Peak - 13,760 feet - condenses the water-laden air from its
surrounding swamps and the Atlantic, so that rain is pretty frequent
throughout the year. When within the region of the double seasons
just south of Cameroons you have a rainfall no heavier than that of
the Rivers, yet better distributed, an essential point for the
prosperity of such plantations as those of tea and tobacco, which
require showers once a month. To the north of Cameroons there is no
prospect of either of these well-paying articles being produced in a
quantity, or quality, that would compete with South America, India,
or the Malayan regions, and they will have to depend in the matter
of plantations on coffee and cacao. Below Cameroons, Congo Francais
possesses the richest soil and an excellently arranged climate. The
lower Congo soil is bad and poor close to the river. Kacongo, the
bit of Portuguese territory to the north of the Congo banks, and
that part of Angola as far as the River Bingo, are pretty much the
same make of country as Congo Francais, only less heavily forested.
The whole of Angola is an immensely rich region, save just round
Loanda where the land is sand-logged for about fifty square miles,
and those regions to the extreme south and south-east, which are in
the Kalahari desert regions.
Coffee grows wild throughout Angola in those districts removed from
the dry coast-lands - in the districts of Golongo Alto and Cassengo
in great profusion, and you can go through utterly uncultivated
stretches of it, thirty miles of it at a time. The natives, now the
merchants have taught them its value, are collecting this wild berry
and bringing it in in quantities, and in addition the English firm
of Newton and Carnegie have started plantations up at Cassengo.
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