Edmund Dene Morel

“ And, too, the peoples of Europe have for the past four and a half years been so fed with lies; history has been so cynically falsified to serve the momentary interest of Governments; changes so revolutionary in the structure of European policy and sociology have occurred; misery so profound and loss of life on so huge a scale have eventuated—that the collective reasoning power has got out of focus. It is at such times of cataclysmic upheaval that the dark forces in the nations see their opportunity, and if public opinion be not vigilant, make haste to use it. ”

“ In its permanence resides its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It breaks the spirit. It attacks the African at every turn, from every point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural pursuits and occupations, claims his whole time, enslaves him in his own home.
Economic bondage and wage slavery, the grinding pressure of a life of toil, the incessant demands of industrial capitalism—these things a landless European proletariat physically endures, though hardly. ”

“ The tropical African is essentially a creature of moods; a child of joy and a child of sorrow; a being of strong emotions which must find an outlet. He likes to dance, to linger chatting over camp fires, to vary his life according to the seasons. In his natural state the twin emotions of joy and sorrow merge into one another. The African woman will cry bitterly over her dead child, exclaim that the sorrow is sweet because it is not hopeless, mingle with her lamentations many loving messages of appeal to the dead. ”

“ Perhaps when the restless and selfish individualism of Europe has given place to more generous and nobler concepts of human sociology; when much of what has passed for statesmanship in Europe, is seen to have been naught but the petty and vain preoccupations of vulgar minds; when the European peoples, emancipated from the social tyrannies which throttle their freedom and impair their vision are capable of gazing out upon wider horizons then, perhaps, the conditions will be born, out of which a policy of this kind may arise and endure. ”

“ In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred the African in heaps. The African has Survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has.
In the process of imposing his political dominion over the African, the white man has carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the other. The African has resisted, and persisted. ”

“ Under this system no member of an African community is ever in want. If a member of an African family—using the word in its African signification—emigrates for a time, his heritage in the land is waiting for him when he returns. No man starves or can starve. There are no paupers in Africa, except where the white man has created them, either deliberately and for his own purposes, by expropriating the people from their ancestral lands; or, stopping short of that, has allowed European legal ideas and practices with their conception of freehold and mortgage to bring a pauper class into existence. ”

“ If the sanction of the League were obtained for the neutralisation of the African tropics, we should have the collective moral forces of civilisation arrayed in opposition to the Power, or Powers, which sought to infringe that neutrality: and there is no force carrying greater weight which humanity at its present stage of ethical development can invoke. If civilisation is incapable of rising, to the height of a self-denying ordinance affecting the most helpless section of the human race, the hopes centred in a League of Nations are mere illusions. ”

“ To destroy these activities; to reduce all the varied, and picturesque, and stimulating episodes in savage life to a dull routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends; to dislocate social ties and disrupt social institutions; to stifle nascent desires and crush mental development; to graft upon primitive passions the annihilating evils of scientific slavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilised man, unrestrained by convention or law; in fine, to kill the soul in a people—this is a crime which transcends physical murder. ”

“ The root is the land. Are the peoples of Africa to be regarded and treated as land-owning communities? Or is native tenure in land to be swept away? That is the fundamental issue, because in that issue is involved the destinies of the African peoples, and the whole character of the future relations of Africa with the outer-world. As it is resolved, so will the African peoples develop along lines of freedom, or along lines of serfdom. As it is resolved, so will the white peoples be acting as trustees for their black wards, or as exploiters of black labour. ”

“ Here is no constructive policy, but a destructive one. Nothing is being built up, except the ephemeral fortunes of a few white men. The future, viewed from the broad standpoint of both European and African interests, is being undermined all the time.
The folly of the conception is palpable. If it be true in an economic sense, as true it is, that the "asset" of a tropical African dependency is primarily, the native; a system which enfeebles and impoverishes the native is suicidal, always from the same utilitarian point of view. ”

“ Now consider the picture of a tropical African dependency—take British East Africa as typical—where policy is directed to ensuring that a dozen or so European concessionaires shall earn large dividends. The first call upon the labour of the country is for work on the plantations and estates of these concessionaires. As a result native villages decay. The population is unable to feed itself. The Administration has to import foodstuffs at great expense. The people sink immeasurably in the scale of their self-respect. They are reduced to a proletariat with no rights. ”

“ As the mists of fratricidal passion lessen, our gaze travels eastwards and vainly strives to read the purpose which lurks beneath the mask of imperturbable impassivity which meets us. Do we detect behind it no more than an insurance against white exploitation, or do we fancy that we perceive the features of an imperialism as ruthless as our own has been, which shall mould to its will the plastic myriads our own actions have wrenched from age-long trodden paths of peace? ”

“ It is really due to nothing more respectable than the hurry of the employing class to get rich—the mad rush for large profits rapidly secured, which flows like a destructive virus through the veins of European capitalist society. There is absolutely no need to transplant this disease into colonisable Africa. It is fatal to all the legitimate and stable utilitarian interests of the country. To allow the native population to suffer from its ravages is for the trustee to violate his trust. ”

“ To imagine that European political and economic systems can be set up in Africa and applied to the government of Africans without giving rise, sooner or later, to the same demands as are made upon the government of Europeans in Europe is to imagine a vain thing. ”

“ In twenty-five years the small Gold Coast farmer—the despised West African native who sits in the sun all day, opening his mouth for a ripe banana to fall into it when moved to hunger—has outpaced Brazil, the West Indies, Ecuador, and San Thome as a tropical cultivator. He has shown what he can do under an honest administration, as a landowner, and working for himself. Every yard of land put under cocoa cultivation has been won from the hungry forest. ”

“ On the contrary, the utilitarian motive of preservation steps in. The interest of the conqueror is to conserve—for no African land is of use to the white man without black labour. Injustice, cruelty—these may persist. But self-interest stops short at destruction. The purpose in hand has the character of permanence—whether the object be white settlement or political control.
But the motives and circumstances operating in the Congo differed absolutely in those vital respects. The beneficiaries aimed at no work of permanence, no constructive national task. ”

“ That economic purpose requires that the African producer of raw material for the world's markets shall be encouraged to produce, by the consciousness that he will obtain the equivalent not only for his labour, but for the value of the article his labour has produced. It requires that the industrial classes of Europe shall find in tropical Africa an ever-widening market for the absorption of their output. This cannot be if African labour is exhausted and impoverished, because—if for no other reason—African purchasing capacity in the goods of Europe is thereby diminished. ”

“ Nigeria would become another Congo. You cannot steal the land of the natives of tropical Africa, degrade them from the position of agriculturists and arboriculturists in their own right, lay claim to possession of their actual and potential wealth, destroy their purchasing power, deny them the right to buy and sell by denying their ownership in the natural or cultivated products of their own country, which their labour alone can make accessible to the outer world, and impose upon them the duty of harvesting their products for you as a "tax." ”

“ The African has it in him to become a real Christian which, perhaps, the European under the present social system has not. Meantime, Islam is in Africa a preservative of racial self-respect. To pursue in Mohammedan Africa a truly African policy, reviving ancient centres of learning, binding the African peoples to their land in intensified bonds of reverence, heralding the dawn of an African renascence, raising African universities instead of African levies—here, indeed, would be a work worthy of great international minds. ”

“ If that can be said as to the importance of ownership in land for African peoples in a region where a white people is growing up side by side with the indigenous inhabitants, where the export industries are wholly in the hands of the white population, and where white men are able to undertake at least some forms and some measure of manual labour, and a great deal of immediate supervision; how much more can be said of its importance in the tropical regions of the Continent where the white man is but a bird of passage, and where he is utterly incapable of manual labour? ”

“ The white proletariat in the mass can never attain to true economic independence until it has won back the rights of the common people to the soil. But it can live, and even prosper, because owing to the improvements in transport, labour-saving appliances and a network of trade relations, it can be fed through external sources. But the prosperity of African communities wholly depends upon the use of their, soil, and by robbing them of the soil you deprive them of the means of life. ”

“ It must be at great pains to show that the policy of encouraging forms of European enterprise which convert African labour into a dividend-producing force for the individual European, is sheer economic waste of the potentialities of African labour: whereas the full potentialities of African labour can be secured for the economic purpose of Europe by encouraging forms of European enterprise in which the African figures, not as a hired servant, but as co-operator and partner. ”

“ True, once secured, they are not sent to work in plantations; they are not lashed and kicked and tortured. They are sent to camps where they are taught to kill men—black men in Africa, white men in Europe; they are well fed and indulged. All the same they are slaves in every moral sense.
There is the issue of white government in Africa. The French example cannot fail to be imitated by other Powers with African possessions. Nothing is more certain than that British militarists will want to impose conscription upon the native peoples in the British Protectorates. ”

“ The case of the Congo Free State and of the French Congo reveal in the most conclusive fashion how indissolubly connected in African economy are the problems of Afro-European trade and of African labour required for the purposes of that trade, with the ownership of land. In destroying Afro-European trade in the Congo regions on the plea that the African peoples possessed no proprietary rights in the raw material of Africa—i.e., in the fruits of the soil, King Leopold and the French Government implicitly denied to the native communities of the Congo any proprietary rights in the land itself. ”