West Africa

“ First, in West Africa the most valuable asset you have is the native: the more heavily the district there is populated with Africans, and the more prosperous those [Pg 395] natives are, the better for you; for it means more trade. All the gold, ivory, oil, rubber, and timber in West Africa are useless to you without the African to work them; you can get no other race that can replace him, and work them ”

“ So I have taken his advice and I write about what I have seen, and though afterwards I found reason to like much the peasant peoples of West Africa, I did not like the Creoles, as these descendants of freed slaves call themselves. Do I judge them hardly, I wonder? If so, I judge only as all the West Coast judges. They are a singularly arrogant people, blatant and self-satisfied, and much disliked along the Coast from the Gambia to San Paul de Loando. But they have taken advantage of the peace which England has ensured to them, and are prosperous. ”

“ West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse itself for so doing, it need only call us “traders.” I say us, because I am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool traders by a distinguished officer.
This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known to the geographers amongst the classics as Leuce Æthiopia: to their successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. ”

“ It is undoubtedly the wildest bit of West Africa.
The dominant tribes here have, for as far back as we can get evidence—some short four hundred years—been tribes of the Mpongwe stem—the so-called noble tribes. To-day they are dying—going off the face of the earth, leaving behind them nothing to bear testimony in this world to their great ability, save the most marvellously beautiful language, the Greek of Africa, as Dr. Nassau calls it, and the impress of their more elaborate thought-form on the minds of the bush tribes that come into contact with them. ”

“ Nothing in West Africa is more striking than the attitude adopted by the several colonizing Powers towards commerce. At present, Germany is easily in the front rank; her policy towards business men is the most enlightened of any Power, and it is therefore to be the more regretted that her treatment of the natives is not equally far-sighted. Were it so, all students of African questions could view with equanimity her gradual absorption of the whole of Equatorial Africa. ”

“ It is small wonder and small blame to them that their account of West Africa has been a gloomy one, and such it must remain until these men are under a different system: for all the reasons that during the past have caused them to paint the Coast as a place of no value to England, remain still in full force,—as you can see by studying the disadvantages that service in a West African Crown Colony presents to-day to a civilian official.
Firstly, the climate is unhealthy, so that the usual make of Englishman does not like to take his wife out to the Coast with him. ”

“ This brief sketch of the conditions which obtain in West Africa, and more especially in Northern Nigeria, will, I trust, have aroused sufficient interest in my reader to justify me in adding a few words on the nature of some of the problems with which the young British Administrator has to deal in Africa, and the methods by which he endeavours to solve them. ”

“ The day of Africa's agony is being closed up by the simultaneous entrance of Christian churches and civilized colonies, all along her coasts, and through all her interior quarters!
3. You see here also the important fact that the main agency God is employing for the ends I have pointed out, is black men themselves. It is, indeed, in West Africa, as everywhere else in all history, namely, that the primal training, the early preparation come from advanced and superior people. They always plant the germs of a new faith, or are the pioneers of a new civilization. ”

“ It is an object lesson in miniature of what will otherwise be an infinitely greater drain on the resources of England, for West Africa is immensely larger, immensely more densely populated, and immensely more deadly in climate than the West Indies. ”

“ Those who go to make new homes for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her want of interest.
I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded better, with advantage to all concerned—Malaya, British Guiana, New Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. ”

“ West Africa, as some of us have known her, is rapidly changing. Within the memory of most men, there were deserts uncrossed, forests unexplored, tribes of people unknown. To-day every desert has been traversed; to-day we know not only the forests, but nearly every species of tree they contain; we know, and can locate, almost every African tribe, and almost every foot of territory has passed under the control, for the time being at least, of some alien Power. ”

“ Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things, while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African. ”

“ But, as an individual, I have earnestly desired a non-sanguinary evangelization of West Africa. All empire, the world over, in rude countries has been cemented by blood. In Western Africa the tribes universally, save in Liberia, are strong, independent, warlike. Even British prowess, both at Sierra Leone and on the Gold Coast, succumbs at times to their indomitable spirit. And thus you see that, for the establishment of a strong black civilization in Central Africa, a strong and a bloody hand must be used. Color is nothing anywhere. Civilized condition differences men all over the globe. ”

“ Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there since Hanno of Carthage, “Why was I such a fool as to come to such an awful place?” It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. ”

“ The man who has once known Africa longs for her. In the sordid city streets he remembers the might and loneliness of her forests, by the rippling brook he remembers the wide rivers rushing tumultuous to the sea, in the night when the rain is on the roof plashing drearily he remembers the gorgeous tropical nights, the sky of velvet far away, the stars like points of gold, the warm moonlight that with its deeper shadows made a fairer world. ”

“ The fascination of West Africa’s historical record is very great, bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black and white. What my German friends would call the Blüth-period of this history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man should read, Mr. Major’s book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of Benin and Biafra after this Blüth-period closed. ”

“ I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in either love or sympathy from Africa,—men that, had England another system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater use to her and Africa than they now are ”

“ Wherein the student, having said divers harsh things of those who destroy but do not reconstruct, recognises that, having attempted destruction, it is but seemly to set forth some other way whereby the West African colonies could be managed.
West Africa, I own, is a make of country difficult for a power with a different kind of culture, climate and set of institutions, and so on, to manage from Europe satisfactorily. ”

“ The local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the nature of their own country and with the language of their fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who, though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants. ”

“ But France has also gained a huge extent of country covering almost the whole of North-West Africa. While much of this is merely desert, there are caravan routes which tap the basin of the Niger and conduct its products to Algeria, conquered by France early in the century, and to Tunis, more recently appropriated. The West African provinces of France have, at any rate, this advantage, that they are nearer to the mother-country than any other colony of a European power ”

“ West Africa probably will never be a pleasant place wherein to spend the winter months, a holiday ground that will serve to recuperate the jaded energies of our poets and painters, like the Alps or Italy; probably, likewise, it will never be a place where we can ship our overflow population; and for the same reason—its unhealthiness—it will be of no use to us as a military academy, for troops are none the better for soaking in malaria and operating against ill-armed antagonists. But West Africa is of immense use to us as a feeding-ground for our manufacturing classes. ”

“ It may be a melancholy undertaking, but all whites going to West Africa should brace themselves to the duty of visiting the cemeteries. What a story the graveyards of West Africa tell! The fair young lives laid down for the comfort of posterity. Men of all walks in life are there—the official and the trader, pitiably aloof in daily life, now lying side by side ”

“ This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified ancestors. ”

“ Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance. ”

“ Dennett. I will speak no further now concerning these schools of Fetish, for Nkissism is the most southern of the West African schools, its domain extending over the whole of the regions once forming the kingdom of Kongo down to Angola. Below Angola, on the West Coast, you come to the fringing zone of the Kalahi desert, and to those interesting people the Bushmen, of whose religion I am unable, with any personal experience, to speak. Below them you strike South Africa. South Africa is South Africa; West Africa is West Africa. ”

“ The health of West Africa, bad though it is, has greatly improved within recent years, and though, of course, the medical profession has so largely contributed to the change, the house-builder, the merchant and the ship-owner have loyally co-operated in an endeavour to lighten the burden of the white man in West Africa. ”

“ It had not, it had the Crown Colony system—and our hope for West Africa is that so powerful a man as he has shown himself to be in other political fields, may show himself to be yet more powerful, and formulate a totally new system suited for the conditions of West Africa, and not content himself with the old fallacy of ascribing failure to the individuals, white or black, government official or merchant or missionary, who act under the system which alone is to blame for England’s present position in West Africa ”

“ The second difference is, that the land in South Africa is worth your having, you can go and domesticate on it; whereas in West Africa you cannot. A failure to recognise these differences is at the root of our present ill-judged West African policy, outside the Royal Niger Company’s domain; by introducing South African methods we are trying to get what is of no use to us, the Landes Hoheit, and thereby devastating what is of use to us, the trade. ”

“ In West Africa there is not one acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into eternity at both ends. ”

“ You will get nothing done in tropical Africa except under the influence of individual men; but your West African Governor, though not controlled by the Councils within the colony, is controlled by a power outside the colony, namely the Colonial Office in London. Up to our own day the Colonial Office has been, except in the details of domestic colonial affairs, a drag-chain on English development in Western Africa. ”

“ Western Africa offers a remarkable, indeed, a unique, field for profitable study in the capacity of aboriginal peoples to develop the natural or cultivable riches of their land as free men and landowners, to the advantage of themselves and of the rest of the world. West Africa is the country of great native export industries, created and maintained by the native communities themselves on their own land, under their own native systems of land tenure and co-operative effort. The most important of these native export industries are the palm-oil and kernel industries, and the cocoa industry. ”