The Great Point That Has Brought The Germans Into Disrepute
With The Natives Employed By Them Is Their Military Spirit, Which
Gives Rise To A Desire To Regulate Everything; And That Other
Attribute Of The Military Spirit, Nagging.
You should never nag an
African, it only makes him bothered and then sulky, and when he's
sulky he'll lie down and die to spite you.
But in spite of the
Germans being over-given to this unpleasant habit of military
regularity and so on, the natives from the Kru Coast and from Bassa
and the French Ivory Coast return to them time after time for spells
of work, so there must be grave exaggeration regarding their bad
treatment, for these natives are perfectly free in the matter.
The French use Loango boys for factory hands, and these people are
very bright and intelligent, but as a M'pongwe, who knew them well,
said: "They are much too likely to be devils to be good too much"
and are undoubtedly given to poisoning, which is an unpleasant habit
in a house servant. Their military force are composed of Senegalese
Laptot, very fine, fierce fellows, superior, I believe, as fighting
men to our Hausas, and very devoted to, and well treated by, their
French officers.
That the Frenchman does not know how to push trade in his
possessions, the trade returns, with the balance all on the wrong
side, clearly show; still he does know how to get possession of
Africa better than we do, and this means he knows how to deal with
the natives. The building up of Congo Francais, for example, has
not cost one-third of the human lives, black or white, that an
equivalent quantity of Congo Belge has, nor one-third of the expense
of Uganda or Sierra Leone. It is customary in England to dwell on
the commercial failure, and deduce from it the erroneous conclusion
that France will soon leave it off when she finds it does not pay.
This is an error, because commercial success - the making the thing
pay - is not the French ideal in the affair. It is our own, and I am
the last person to say our ideal is wrong; but it is not the French
ideal, and I am the last person to say France is wrong either.
There may exist half a hundred or more right reasons for doing
anything, and the reasons France has for her energetic policy in
Africa are sound ones; for they are the employment of her martial
spirits where their activity will not endanger the State, the
stowing of these spirits in Paris having been found to be about as
advisable as stowing over-proof spirits and gunpowder in a living-
room with plenty of lighted lucifers blazing round; and her other
reason is the opportunity African enterprise affords for sound
military training. You will often hear in England regarding French
annexation in Africa, "Oh! let her have the deadly hole, and much
good may it do her." France knows very well what good it will do
her, and she will cheerfully take all she is allowed to get quietly,
as a sop for her quietness regarding Egypt, and she will cheerfully
fight you for the rest - small blame to her. She knows Africa is a
superb training ground for her officers. Sham fights and autumn
manoeuvres have a certain value in the formation of a fighting army,
but the whole of these parlour-games, put together in a ten-year
lump, are not to be compared to one month's work at real war, to fit
an army for its real work, and France knows well the real work will
come again some day - not far off - for her army. How soon it comes
she little cares, for she has no ideal of Peace before her, never
has had, never will have, and the next time she tries conclusions
with one of us Teutonic nations, she will be armed with men who have
learned their trade well on the burning sands of Senegal, and they
will take a lot of beating. We do not require Africa as a training
ground for our army; India is as magnificent a military academy as
any nation requires; but we do require all the Africa we can get,
West, East, and South, for a market, and it is here we clash with
France; for France not only does not develop the trade of her
colonies for her own profit, but stamps trade at large out by her
preferential tariffs, etc.; so that we cannot go into her colonies
and trade freely as she and Germany can come into ours. We can go
into her colonies and do business with French goods, and this is
done; but French goods are not so suitable, from their make, nor
capable of being sold at a sufficient profit to make a big trade.
But France throws few obstacles, if any, in the matter of plantation
enterprise. Still this enterprise being so hampered by the dearth
of good labour is not at the present time highly remunerative in
Africa.
FOREIGN LABOUR. - Several important authorities have advocated the
importation of foreign labour into Africa. This seems to me to be a
fatal error, for several reasons. For one thing, experience has by
now fully demonstrated that the West Coast climate is bad for men
not native to it, whether those men be white, black, or yellow. The
United Presbyterian Mission who work in Old Calabar was founded with
the intention of inaugurating a mission which, after the white men
had established it, was to be carried on by educated Christian
blacks from Jamaica, where this mission had long been established
and flourished. But it was found that these men, although primarily
Africans, had by their deportation from Africa in the course, in
some cases, of only one generation, lost the power of resistance to
the deadly malarial climate their forefathers possessed, and so the
mission is now carried on by whites; not that these good people have
a greater resistance to the fever than the Jamaica Christians, but
because they are more devoted to the evangelisation of the African;
and what black assistance they receive comes, with the exception of
Mrs. Fuller, from a few educated Effiks of Calabar.
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