West African studies Part 18

European Native Civil officers. clerks. Hausas. police.

Accra 35 206 432 105 Cape Coast 8 69 0 47 Elmina 5 36 50 19

An awful percentage of clerks is 311 for such a country, more clerks than police, only 121 less Government native clerks than soldiers in the army; and you may depend upon it the white officials are clerking away, more or less, too. I always think how very apposite the answer of an official was to the criticism of excessive expenditure: "Sir, there is no reckless expenditure; every J pen has to be accounted for!"

No, I am quite unable to agree that anything but the Crown Colony system is to blame, and that because it is engaged in administering a district with no possibilities in it for England save commercial matters, in which the Crown Colony system is not well informed. I have only quoted these figures to show you that Lagos and the Gold Coast are merely keeping line with Sierra Leone--increasing their expenditure in the face of a falling trade, with a dark trade future before them, on account of French activity in cutting them off from their inland markets, and of their own mismanagement of the native races.

The trade and the prosperity of West Africa depend on jungle products.

There is no more solid reason to fear the extinction of West Africa's jungle products of oil, timber, fibre, rubber, than there is to worry about the extinction of our own coal-fields--probably not so much--for they rapidly renew themselves. Yes, even rubber, though that is slower at it than palm oil and kernel; and at present not one-tenth part of the jungle products are in touch with commerce; and save gold, and that to a very small extent, the mineral wealth of West Africa is untouched. It is not in all regions only t.i.taniferous iron; there are silver, lead, copper, antimony, quicksilver, and tin ores there unexploited, and which it would not be advisable to attempt to exploit until the so-called labour problem is solved. This problem is really that of the co-operation for mutual benefit of the African and the Englishman. In the solution of this problem alone lies the success of England in West Africa, not of England herself, for England could survive the loss of West Africa whole, though doing so would cost her dear alike in honour and in profit. The Crown Colony system which now represents England in West Africa will never give this solution. It necessarily destroys native society, that is to say, it disorganises it, and has not in it the power to reorganise. As I have already endeavoured to show, English influence in West Africa, as represented by the Crown Colony system, consists of three separate cla.s.ses of Englishmen with no common object of interest, and is not a thing capable of organising so difficult a region. All these three cla.s.ses, be it granted, each represent things for the organisation of a State. No State can exist without having the governmental, the religious, and the mercantile factors, working together in it; but in West Africa these representatives of the English State are things apart and opposed to each other, and do not const.i.tute a State. You might as well expect to get the functions of a State, good government, out of these three disconnected cla.s.ses of Englishmen in Africa, as expect to know the hour of day from the parts of a watch before they were put together.

You will see I have humbly attempted to place this affair before you from no sensational point of view, but from the commercial one--the value of West Africa to England's commerce--and have attempted to show you how this is suffering from the adherence of England to a form of government that is essentially un-English. I have made no attack on the form of government for such regions formulated in England's more intellectual though earlier period of Elizabeth, the Chartered Company system as represented by the Royal Niger Company. I have neither shares in, nor reason to attack the Royal Niger Company, which has in a few years, and during the period of the hottest French enterprise, acquired a territory in West Africa immensely greater than the territory acquired during centuries under the Crown Colony system; it has also fought its necessary wars with energy and despatch, and no call upon Imperial resources; it has not only paid its way, but paid its shareholders their 6 per cent., and its bitterest enemies say darkly, far more. I know from my knowledge of West Africa that this can only have been effected by its wise native policy. I know that this policy owes its wisdom and its success to one man, Sir George Taubman Goldie, a man who, had he been under the Crown Colony system, could have done no more than other men have done who have been Governors under it; but, not being under it, the territories he won for England have not been subjected to the jerky amateur policy of those which are under the Crown Colony system. For nearly twenty years the natives under the Royal Niger Company have had the firm, wise, sympathetic friendship of a great Englishman, who understood them, and knew them personally. It is the continuous influence of one great Englishman, unhampered by non-expert control, that has caused England's exceedingly strange success in the Niger; coupled with the ident.i.ty of trade and governmental interest, and the encouragement of religion given by the const.i.tution and administration of the Niger Company. This is a thing not given by all Chartered Companies; indeed, I think I am right in saying that the Niger and the North Borneo Companies stand alone in controlling territories that have been essentially trading during recent years. This a.s.sociation of trade and government is, to my mind, an _absolutely necessary restraint_ on the Charter Company form of government;[73] but there is another element you must have to justify Charters, and that is that they are in the hands of an Englishman of the old type.

I am perfectly aware that the natives of Lagos and other Crown Colonies in West Africa are, and have long been, anxious for the Chartered Company of the Niger to be taken over by the Government, as they pathetically and frankly say, "so that now the trade in their own district is so bad, it may get a stimulus by a freer trade in the Niger," and the native traders not connected with the Company may rush in; while officials in the Crown Colonies have been equally anxious, as they say with frankness no less pathetic, so that they may have chances of higher appointments. I am equally aware that the merchants of England not connected with the Niger Company, which is really an a.s.sociation of African merchants, desire its downfall; yet they all perfectly well know, though they do not choose to advertise the fact, that three months Crown Colony form of government in the Niger territories will bring war, far greater and more destructive than any war we have yet had in West Africa, and will end in the formation of a debt far greater than any debt we now have in West Africa, because of the greater extent of territory and the greater power of the native States, now living peacefully enough under England, but not under England as misrepresented by the Crown Colony system. I am not saying that Chartered Companies are good; I am only saying they are better than the Crown Colony plan; and that if the Crown Colony system is subst.i.tuted for the Chartered Company, which is directly a trading company, England will have to pay a very heavy bill. There would be, of course, a temporary spurt in trade, but it would be a flash in the pan, and in the end, an end that would come in a few years' time, the British taxpayer would be cursing West Africa at large, and the Niger territories in particular. Personally, I entirely fail to see why England should be tied to either of these plans, the Crown Colony or the Chartered Company, for governing tropical regions. Have we quite run out of constructive ability in Statecraft? Is it not possible to formulate some new plan to mark the age of Victoria?

FOOTNOTES:

[60] _Industrial and Social Life of the Empire._ Macmillan and Co.

[61] For Lagos, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia from 1892 to 1896, 2,364,266.

[62] Forty-eighth annual report Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, 1898.

[63] Increase.

Expenditure on police and gaols, 1896 31,504 " " " 1887 3,037 28,467

Expenditure on transport 1896 10,091 " " " 1887 3,298 6,793

Expenditure on public works 1896 6,736 " " " 1887 1,417 5,319 ------ Aggregate increase 40,579

[64] "The Liquor Traffic in West Africa," _Fortnightly Review_, April, 1898.

[65] _Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous, No. 3, 1893._ G. F. Scott Elliott M.A., F.L.S., and C. A. Raisin, B.Sc.

[66] French colonies--

Imports. Exports 1896. 1897. 1896. 1897.

Senegal 1,047,000 1,167,000 783,000 845,000 French Guinea 185,000 240,000* 231,000 201,000*

Ivory Coast 186,000 188,000 176,000 189,000 Dahomey 389,000 330,000 364,000 231,000 French Congo 192,000 ** 190,000 **

* For nine months only.

** No statistics.

Trade of Dahomey and the Ivory Coast for the first three months of 1898--

Imports. Exports. Total trade.

Ivory Coast 58,658 58,560 117,518 Dahomey 84,064 72,771 156,835

German possessions--

Imports. Exports.

1895. 1896. 1897. 1895. 1896. 1897.

Togoland 117,000 94,000 99,000 152,000 83,000 39,000 Cameroon 283,000 268,000 * 204,000 198,000 *

--------------------------------------------- Total 400,000 362,000 * 356,000 281,000 *

* No figures for calendar year. _Board of Trade Journal_, September, 1898.

[67] _Colonial Annual_, No. 88, Gold Coast for 1892, published 1893.

[68] Ditto, No. 188.

[69] _Ashanti and Jaman._ Constable, 1898.

[70] _Lagos Standard_, September 7, 1898.

[71] _Lagos Weekly Record_, September 10, 1898.

[72] _Lagos Weekly Record_, August 27, 1898.

[73] See Introduction to _Folk Lore of the Fjort_. R. E. Dennett. David Nutt, 1898.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CLASH OF CULTURES

Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot water, calls to memory the excellent saying, "As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb," and goes on.

I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned, though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was early this year a distressing split between Liverpool and myself--whom I am aware they call behind my back "Our Aunt"--and I know they regard me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.

This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain's axiom, that people always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most insignificant; so its _Journal of Commerce_ went for me. The natural sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its _Journal of Commerce_. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, "Say what you like, you cannot please all of us;" had it not been for this I should not have written another line on the maladministration of West Africa beyond saying, "Call that Crown Colony system you are working there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one, only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs which I regard as a disgrace to my country.

Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the government there, and the rest of the things--the change of policy arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and look after what one might call domestic expenses--may be things unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid ma.s.s of expert knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party, and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in England an unused but great ma.s.s of knowledge among men of all cla.s.ses who have personally dealt with West Africa--yet you do not work from that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round trying to find out "what the place is really like, you know." I know personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work on diseases--the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her Sacrifices to the Coast--but went and read about West Africa, all by himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he always declares that the only book he found about this particular part was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, "Row on, brave men of Kru!" which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not by nature faddists, doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.

Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers, doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course they naturally don't know about trade affairs, or whether the Public Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen's academy system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to and disintegration of the native races it deals with.

Now when I say England is behaving badly to the African, I beg you not to think that the philanthropic party has increased. I come of a generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors; for, whatever else they were, they were not humbugs; and the generation that is round me now seems to me in its utterances at any rate tainted with humbug. I own that I hate the humbug in England's policy towards weaker races for the sake of all the misery on white and black it brings; and I think as I see you wasting lives and money, sowing debt and difficulties all over West Africa by a hut tax war in Sierra Leone, fighting for the sake of getting a few shillings you have no right to whatsoever out of the African,--who are you that you should point your finger in scorn at my tribe? I as one of that tribe blush for you, from the basis that you are a humbug and not scientific, which, I presume you will agree is not the same thing as my being a philanthropist.

I had the honour of meeting in West Africa an English officer who had previously been doing some fighting in South Africa. He said he "didn't like being a b.u.t.terman's n.i.g.g.e.r butcher." "Oh! you're all right here then," I said; "you're out now for Exeter Hall, the plane of civilisation, the plough, and the piano." I will not report his remarks further; likely enough it was the mosquitoes that made him say things, and of course I knew with him, as I know with you, butchery of any sort is not to your liking, though war when it's wanted is; the distinction I draw between them is a hard and fast one. There is just the same difference to my mind between an unnecessary war on an unarmed race and a necessary war on the same race, as there is between killing game that you want to support yourself with or game that is destructive to your interests, and on the other hand the killing of game just to say that you have done it. This will seem a deplorably low view to take, but it is one supported by our history. We have killed down native races in Australasia and America, and it is no use slurring over the fact that we have profited by so doing. This argument, however, cannot be used in favour of killing down the African in tropical Africa, more particularly in Western Tropical Africa. If you were to-morrow to kill every native there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist, geologist, mineralogist, &c., but a place of no good to any one else in England.

This view, however, of the profit derivable from and justifying war you will refuse to discuss; stating that such profit in your wars you do not seek; that they have been made for the benefit of the African himself, to free him from his native oppressors in the way of tyrannical chiefs and b.l.o.o.d.y superst.i.tions, and to elevate him in the plane of civilisation. That this has been the intention of our West African wars up to the Sierra Leone war, which was forced on you for fiscal reasons, I have no doubt: but that any of them advanced you in your mission to elevate the African, I should hesitate to say. I beg to refer you to Dr.

Freeman's opinions on the Ashantee wars on this point,[74] but for myself I should say that the blame of the failure of these wars to effect their desired end has been due to the want of power to re-organise native society after a war; for example, had the 1873 Ashantee war been followed by the taking over of Ashantee and the strong handling of it, there would not have been an 1895 Ashantee war; or, to take it the other way, if you had followed up the battle of Katamansu in 1827, you need not have had an 1874 war even. Dr. Freeman holds, that if you had let the Ashantis have a sea-port and generally behaved fairly reasonably, you need hardly have had Ashantee wars at all. But, however this may be, I think that a good many of the West African wars of the past ten years have been the result of the humbug of the previous sixty, during which we have proclaimed that we are only in Africa for peaceful reasons of commerce, and religion, and education, not with any desire for the African's land or property: that, of course, it is not possible for us to extend our friendship or our toleration to people who go in for cannibalism, slave-raiding, or human sacrifices, but apart from these matters we have no desire to meddle with African domestic affairs, or take away their land. This, I own, I believe to have honestly been our intention, and to be our intention still, but with our stiff Crown Colony system of representing ourselves to the African, this intention has been and will be impossible to carry out, because between the true spirit of England and the spirit of Africa it interposes a distorting medium. It is, remember, not composed of Englishmen alone, it includes educated natives, and yet it knows the true native only through interpreters.