The Oil Rivers, Which Send
Out The Greatest Quantity Of Trade On The West Coast Possessions,
Subsist Entirely On Palm Oil For It.
Were anything to happen to the
oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be
found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even
at its present density, would starve.
The development of trade is a
necessary condition for the existence of the natives, and the
discovery of products in the forests that will be marketable in
Europe, and the making of plantations whose products will help to
take the place of those he so recklessly now destroys, will give him
a safer future than can any amount of abolitions of domestic
slavery, or institutions of trial by jury, etc. If white control
advances and plantations are not made and trade with the interior is
not expanded, the condition of the West African will be a very
wretched one, far worse than it was before the export slave-trade
was suppressed. In the more healthy districts the population will
increase to a state of congestion and will starve. The Coast
region's malaria will always keep the black, as well as the white,
population thinned down, but if deserted by the trader, and left to
the Government official and the missionary, without any longer the
incentive of trade to make the native exert himself, or the
resulting comforts which assist him in resisting the climate, which
the trade now enables him to procure, the Coast native will sink,
via vice and degradation, to extinction, and most likely have this
process made all the more rapid and unpleasant for him by incursions
of the wild tribes from the congested interior.
I do not cite this as an immediate future for the West African, but
"a little more and how much it is, a little less and how far away."
Remember human beings are under the same rule as other creatures; if
you destroy the things that prey on them, they are liable to
overswarm the food-producing power of their locality. It may be
said this is not the case; look at the Polynesians, the South
American Indians, and so on. You may look at them as much as you
choose, but what you see there will not enable you to judge the
African. The African does not fade away like a flower before the
white man - not in the least. Look at the increase of the native in
the Cape territory; look at what he has stood on the West Coast.
Christopher Columbus visited him before he discovered the American
Indians. Whaling captains, and seamen of all sorts and
nationalities have dropped in on him "frequent and free." He has
absorbed all sorts of doctrine from religious sects; cotton goods,
patent medicines, foreign spirits, and - as the man who draws up the
Lagos Annual Colonial Report poetically observes - twine, whisky,
wine, and woollen goods. Yet the West Coast African is here with us
by the million - playing on his tom-tom, paddling his dug-out canoe,
living in his palm leaf or mud hut, ready and able to stand more
"white man stuff." Save for an occasional habit of going raving or
melancholy mad when educated for the ministry, and dying when he,
and more particularly she, is shut up in the broiling hot,
corrugated-iron school-room with too many clothes on, and too much
headwork to do, he survives in a way which I think you will own is
interesting, and which commands my admiration and respect. But
there is nowadays a new factor in his relationship with the white
races - the factor of domestic control. I do not think the African
will survive this and flourish, if it is to be of the nature that
the present white ideas aim to make it. But, on the other hand, I
do not believe that he will be called upon to try, for under the
present conditions white control will not become very thorough; and
in the event of an European war, governmental attention will be
distracted from West Africa, and the African will then do what he
has done several times before when the white eye has been off him
for a decade or so, - sink back to his old level as he has in Congo
after the Jesuits tidied him up, and as he must have done after his
intercourse with the Phoenicians and Egyptians. The travellers of a
remote future will find him, I think, still with his tom-tom and his
dug-out canoe - just as willing to sell as "big curios" the debris of
our importations to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much
he will ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton's tin, I
cannot imagine, but it will be something stiff - such as he asks
nowadays for the Phoenician "Aggry" beads. There will be then as
there is now, and as there was in the past, individual Africans who
will rise to a high level of culture, but that will be all for a
very long period. To say that the African race will never advance
beyond its present culture-level, is saying too much, in spite of
the mass of evidence supporting this view, but I am certain they
will never advance above it in the line of European culture. The
country he lives in is unfitted for it, and the nature of the man
himself is all against it - the truth is the West Coast mind has got
a great deal too much superstition about it, and too little of
anything else. Our own methods of instruction have not been of any
real help to the African, because what he wants teaching is how to
work. Bishop Ingram would have been able to write a more cheerful
and hopeful book than his Sierra Leone after 100 Years, if the
Sierra Leonians had had a thorough grounding in technical culture,
suited to the requirements of their country, instead of the ruinous
instruction they have been given, at the cost of millions of money,
and hundreds of good, if ill-advised, white men's lives.
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