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I do not cite this as an immediate future for the West African, but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.
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