- 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.
The Congo Free State have imported as labourers both West Indian
negroes - principally Barbadians - and Chinamen. In both cases the
mortality has been terrible - more than the white mortality, which
competent authorities put down for the Congo at 77 per cent., and
the experiment has therefore failed. It may be said that much of
this mortality has arisen from the way in which these labourers have
been treated in the Free State, but that this is not entirely the
case is demonstrated by the case of the Annamese in Congo Francais,
who are well treated. These Annamese are the political prisoners
arising from the French occupation of Tong-kin; and the mortality
among one gang of 100 of them who were employed to make the path
through swampy ground from Glass to Libreville - a distance of two
and a half miles - was seventy, and this although the swamp was
nothing particularly bad as swamps go, and was swept by sea-air the
whole way.
Even had the experiment of imported labour been successful for the
time being, I hold it would be a grave error to import labour into
Africa. For this reason, that Africa possesses in herself the most
magnificent mass of labour material in the whole world, and surely
if her children could build up, as they have, the prosperity and
trade of the Americas, she should, under proper guidance and good
management, be able to build up her own. But good guidance and
proper management are the things that are wanted - and are wanting.
It is impossible to go into this complicated question fully here,
and I will merely ask unprejudiced people who do not agree with me,
whether they do not think that as so much has been done with one
African tribe, the Krumen - a tribe possessing no material difference
in make of mind or body from hundreds of other tribes, but which
have merely been trained by white men in a different way from other
tribes - that there is room for great hope in the native labour
supply?
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