E. D. Morel

“ Truly a wonderful country, and a wonderful people, a people who with fifty years’ peace will double its numbers, a people whom it is our paramount duty to secure for ever in the undisturbed occupation and enjoyment of the land, precluding the up-growth of a middle-man class of landlord from which the native system is free, and being so free need never be saddled with. ”

“ No one walks abroad. Yet you know as you wander with noiseless footsteps through its curves and labyrinths, escaping for once from your inevitable native attendants (delightful people, but sadly hampering at times) , that behind these thick clay walls and closed doors, the mysterious world of Africa is awake and stirring, that social world with its primitive impulses, but also with its many courtesies and refinements, that world of habit and of thought, guarded with jealous reticence from the alien, unfathomed and unfathomable even by the most experienced of Residents. ”

“ THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE—THE LONG-DISTANCE TRADER
A broad, sandy road, piercing a belt of shea trees, gnarled and twisted, their bark figured like the markings of a crocodile’s back, from which peculiarity you can distinguish the true shea from the so-called “false” shea, or African oak. From the burnt grasses, golden flowers destitute of leaf companionship peep timidly forth as though fearful of such uncongenial surroundings. The heat rays quiver over the thirsty soil, for it is Christmas time and no rain has fallen for nigh upon four months. ”

“ Humanity which is of Nature is, as Nature herself, moral. There is no immodesty in nakedness which “knows not that it is naked.” The Kukuruku girl, whose only garment is a single string of beads round neck and waist, is more modest than your Bond Street dame clad in the prevailing fashion, suggesting nakedness. Break up the family life of Africa, undermine the home, weaken social ties, subvert African authority over Africans, and you dig the grave of African morality. ”

“ The majority, we observe, wear long cross-handled swords in leather scabbards. Some carry thin spears in their hands; one fierce-looking warrior a battle-axe. He seems to have stepped out of the Middle Ages does this particular chief, his horse wearing a metalled protection as in the old days of the Crusaders. But the heart of the procession, moving up slowly, puts an end to these evolutions, and the horsemen range themselves up on either side of the Emir’s residence, their gallant beasts, curvetting and prancing as the “Ah” of the crowd changes into a great roar of sound. ”

“ Long files of oxen, sheep, and goats have been passing through the gates. Every household has been busy getting together presents for friends, making provision for poor relations, bringing forth the finest contents of their wardrobes, preparing succulent dishes for entertainment. Every class of the population has been filled with eager anticipation, agriculturists and weavers, blacksmiths and tanners, dyers and shoemakers. The barbers have plied an active trade, and the butchers likewise. Every face has worn a smile, and the hum of human life has been more insistent than usual. ”

“ As we enter the gates of the city, after a two miles canter from the Residency down a long and dusty road, we find almost deserted streets. Every one is congregating in the square. Soon we enter into it, to see a vast concourse of people clothed in white and blue. They form a living foreground to the walls on either side of the Emir’s residence, which stands at one extremity of the square. Around the mosque, on the left, they are as thick as bees, and, opposite the mosque, some broken hillocky ground is covered with a multitude. ”

“ You are still there as the orange globe mounts the skies, silhouetting, perchance, a group of palms, flooding the crumbling walls of some African village, to whose inhabitants peace has ceased to make walls necessary—a sacrifice of the picturesque which, artistically, saddens—or lighting some fantastic peak of granite boulders piled up as though by Titan’s hand. You are still there when the rays pour downwards from on high, strike upwards from dusty track and burning rock, and all the countryside quivers and simmers in the glow. ”

“ One must have stood at the extremity of the eastern mole and watched the greedy, muddy-coloured sea absorbing like some insatiable monster the masses of grey rock hurled, at all times of the day and every day in the week, into its depths, to appreciate the colossal difficulties of a task which, brought to a successful issue, will always remain an impressive testimony to human perseverance under climatic and other conditions of perennial difficulty. West Africa has certainly never seen anything comparable to it. Nature disputes with man for every inch of vantage. ”

“ Dust mingled with the manure of thousands of oxen, horses, sheep and goats. Dust which converts the glossy skin of the African into an unattractive drab, but which cannot impair his cheerfulness withal. Dust which eats its way into your boxes, and defies the brush applied to your clothes, and finds its way into your soup and all things edible and non-edible. Dust which gets between you and the sun, and spoils your view of the country, wrapping everything in a milky haze which distorts distances and lies thick upon the foliage. ”

“ Towering above most of the councillors, officers of state and heads of leading families by whom he is accompanied, and bearing himself with great dignity, the Emir murmurs some words of welcome. He is dressed entirely in costly white robes and turban; his feet are encased in ostrich-feather sandals, a footgear introduced in the sixteenth century by Mohamma Rimfa, the twentieth Emir of Kano, justly revered for a reign full of years and usefulness, and he carries the silver-mounted staff of office presented to all the ruling Emirs by Sir Frederick Lugard after the British occupation. ”

“ As we ride home to the Residency two miles out of the town, uppermost in the mind at least of one of us is the fascination of this strange land, with its blending of Africa and the East, its barbaric displays, its industrial life, its wonderful agricultural development—above all, perhaps, the tour de force of governing it with a handful of White officials and a handful of native troops. ”

“ He does not become, through conversion, an alien in thought, in custom, and in outlook; a foreigner in his own land, a citizen of none. He remains African, attached to his country, looking for inspiration inwards, rather than towards an alien civilization across thousands of miles of unknown seas. No one can fail to be impressed with the carriage, the dignity of the Nigerian—indeed, of the West African—Mohammedan; the whole bearing of the man suggests a consciousness of citizenship, a pride of race which seems to say: “We are different, thou and I, but we are men.” ”

“ Every day brings its own panorama of nature unfolding before your advance; its own special series of human incidents—serious, humorous, irritating, soothing—its own thought waves. And it is not my experience that these long silent hours—for conversation with one’s African companions is necessarily limited and sporadic—induce, by what one would imagine natural re-action, descriptive expansiveness when, pen in hand, one seeks to give substance to one’s impressions. ”

“ Will the irresistible might wielded by the new forces be wisely exercised in the future? Will those who, in the ultimate resort, direct it, abide by the experience and the advice of the small but splendid band of men whose herculean and whole-hearted labours have inscribed on the roll of British history an achievement, [105] not of conquest, but of constructive statesmanship of just and sober guidance nowhere exceeded in our management of tropical dependencies? Will they be brought to understand all that is excellent and of good repute in this indigenous civilization ”

“ Of such men the great Fanti lawyer, John Mensah Sarbah, whose recent and premature death is a calamity for West Africa, was one of the best types. The venerable Dr. E. Wilmot Blyden, whose race will regard him some day as its misunderstood prophet, is another. One could name others. Perchance their numbers are greater than is usually supposed, and are not confined to men of social distinction and learning. And these men wring their hands. They see, and they feel, the pernicious results of a well-meaning but mistaken policy. They appreciate the depth of the abyss. ”

“ As a trial of patience I commend the effort to take a photograph over the ears of a horse who is making strenuous efforts to stand up on its hind legs, while a fine and smarting white dust rises in clouds, entering eyes and mouth, and all round you are people in a fine frenzy of excitement, mingled with apprehension, lest your mount takes it into his head to ride amuck in the midst of them, which he has every appearance of wishing to do. ”

“ In the midst of all these disordered turmoils, when the worship of the true God was being swept aside by a wave of recrudescent paganism, when mosques were being destroyed and desecrated and social lawlessness reigned supreme, little knots of true believers gathered, forming as it were islands in the sea of turbulence and moral abasement, to which Christian Europe added a renewed element of subversion by her demand for slaves, thus intensifying internal warfare by furnishing it with a new and deadly incentive. ”

“ It is hot, dreamily, lethargically hot. All the world seems comatose, the unfolding panorama unreal as if seen through a fog of visionary reverie. But there is nothing fanciful about the rapidly approaching cloud of dust ahead, which emits a swelling murmur of confused sound. It takes shape and substance, and for the next half-hour or so, drowsiness and [108] heat are alike forgotten in the contemplation of a strange medley of men and animals. Droves of cattle, among them the monstrous horned oxen from the borders of Lake Chad, magnificent beasts, white or black for the most part. ”

“ Go where you will, you cannot escape the drum—where human life is. The everlasting drum which heralds the setting sun, which ushers in the morn, which troubles your sleep and haunts your dreams. Borne across the silent waters, booming through the sombre forest, rising from the murmuring town, cheering on the railway cutters—the fascinating, tedious, mysterious, maddening, attractive, symbolic, inevitable, everlasting African drum. ”

“ Indeed, the closer one’s knowledge of African life and the more insight one obtains into the immense sea of human misery heaving beneath the crust of Western civilization, the more one is led to marvel at the shallow commonplaces which picture the African wallowing in degraded barbarism. ”

“ Dawning amid a sleeping town, heralded by the sonorous call of the Muslim priest, which lets loose the vocal chords of human, quadruped and fowl, swelling into a murmur of countless sounds and increasing bustle; it will take you for many hours through desolate stretches, whence human life, if life there ever was, has been extirpated by long years of such lawlessness and ignorance as once laid the blight of grisly ruin over many a fair stretch of English homestead. ”

“ Eyes flash out of the semi-obscurity which is replete with the heavy, dank odour of African humanity when African humanity has been busily at work. In the open doorways a multitude of little fires spring into life, and with them the smell of aromatic wood. ”

“ Probably it would be impossible to convince the average Englishman that the African is a more religious being than himself; or that there is anything incongruous in himself, the Englishman, being at one and the same [25] time the Imperialist ruler of these dark races and their spiritual uplifter. And yet, to what vital extent do spiritual influences mould the society or the policy of Europe? Has not religion—official religion—there taken upon itself very largely the character of a social force, and lost its spiritual significance? Is not its whole trend social rather than spiritual? ”

“ It is queer how you accommodate yourself to philosophy, or how philosophy accommodates itself to you. After all, every road leads to Rome; and there is a certain amount of exhilaration in not knowing what particular Rome it may be, or through what twists and turns the track may lead you on the way thither. No homesteads now, and the risen sun had warmed the birds into silence. ”

“ ON AFRICAN MODESTY AND AFRICAN COURTESY
Each twenty-four hours brings its own series of events and its own train of thoughts following upon them. A new incident, it may be of the most trivial kind, sets the mind working like an alarum; a petty act, a passing word, have in them revealing depths of character. Nature seems such an open book here. She does not hide her secrets. ”

“ Direct rule would, of necessity, involve an enormous, directly paid, native staff. For its every action the Government would be compelled to accept responsibility, and its members would, perforce, be largely composed of the class of native—the most undesirable type, it may be added—from which the policemen and soldiers are now recruited. Putting aside the question of expenditure altogether, can any sane man, disposed to look the facts squarely in the face and knowing anything of the country, contemplate with equanimity the consequences of such a régime? ”

“ For the swift wings of night are already felt, and the sun has just dropped behind the curtain of implacable forest.
One by one, in twos and threes, in struggling groups, the workers scramble up the slope on to the path—or what remains of it from the floods—which skirts the village. It grows dark. One is vaguely aware of many naked, shadowy, mostly silent figures on every side of one ”

“ In pleading for the slow but sure policy everywhere in Nigeria, and in pleading that where in Nigeria national life has already expanded through the exercise of its own internal forces into organized communities, possessing their own laws and customs, their own machinery of government and their own well-defined characteristics, that national life shall be protected, preserved and strengthened to enable it to bear the strain of new conditions, one is pleading, it seems to me, for the true welfare of the people and for the highest concept of Imperialism. ”

“ The women cooking the breakfast, or picking or spinning cotton, or attending to the younger children, or pounding corn in large and solid wooden mortars, pulping the grain with pestles—long staves, clubbed at either end—grasped now in one hand, now in the other, the whole body swinging with the stroke as it descends, and, perhaps, a baby at the back, swinging with it; or separating on flat slabs of stone the seed from the cotton [113] lint picked the previous day. This is a people of agriculturists, for among them agriculture is at once life’s necessity and its most important occupation. ”

“ Yes, you may, in this land of many memories, and mysteries still unravelled, pass, within the same twenty-four hours, the flourishing settlement with every sign of plenty and of promise, and the blackened wreck of communities once prosperous before this or that marauding band of freebooters brought fire and slaughter, death to the man, slavery to the woman and the infant—much as our truculent barons, whose doughty deeds we are taught in childhood to admire, acted in their little day. ”

“ At the same time the basis is laid for a land revenue which, with the years, will be the chief source of income of the Government—the healthiest form of income, perhaps, for any Government. For the first time in the history of West Africa, the art of governing the native on native lines has become consecrated in British legislation and the pernicious tradition of applying the law of England to African land questions has been set aside. It is impossible to exaggerate the potentialities for good of such a departure from crude, ignorant and unscientific precedent. ”

“ It is bad for the Empire and for the forces making for just native government within the Empire, that public opinion should be led to believe that Southern Nigeria is a thing to be ashamed of rather than to be proud of—which ought legitimately, on the facts, to be the case.
It is bad for public policy and the integrity of public life that a Commission of Inquiry should be dragged in the mud when it has recorded the truth. ”

“ This is the apex of the delta, and here the Niger is, indeed, majestic. From each of these main channels of discharge spring countless others, turning and twisting in fantastic contours until the whole country is honeycombed to such an extent as to become converted into an interminable series of islands. The vastness of the horizon, the maze of interlacing streams and creeks, winding away into infinity, the sombre-coloured waters, the still more sombre unpenetrable mangrove forests—here and there relieved by taller growth—impress one with a sense of awe. ”

“ The West African native has two classes of enemies, one positive, the other unconscious. The ranks of both are not only recruited from members of the white race: they are to be found among members of the West African’s own household. The first class corresponds to the school of European thought concerning tropical Africa, whose adherents object to the West African being a land-owner, and whose doctrine it is that in the economic development of the country the profits should be the exclusive appanage of the white race, the native’s rôle being that of labourer and wage-earner for all time. ”

“ Nothing to my mind is more pitiable than to visit school after school in West Africa, filled with little boys and girls and big boys and girls in an alien dress, to see the denationalizing process going on day after day and nothing whatever done to stop it. In the case of the women it is not only dignity and nationalism which are concerned, but decency as well. The national dress of the women in West Africa is classical and graceful, and although leaving more of the body exposed than is usual at home (except in the ballroom) it lacks suggestiveness. ”