The enormous wealth of West Africa—The waste—The need of some settled scheme—Competitive examination for the West-African Civil Service—The men who come after the pioneers—One industry set against another—The climate—The need of women—The dark peoples we govern—The isolation of the cultivated black man—The missionaries—The Roman Catholics—The Basel missionaries—West Africa the country of raw material—An answer to the question, “What shall I do with my son?”—The fascination of Africa.

And so I have visited \'the land I had dreamed about as a little child in far-away Australia. But no, I have never been to that land. It is a wonderful country that lies with the long, long thoughts of childhood, with the desires of youth, with the hopes that are in the heart of the bride when she draws the curtain on her marriage morning. Beautiful hopes, beautiful desires, never to be fulfilled. We know, as we grow older, that some of our longings will never be granted exactly in the way we have expected them to be granted, but that does not mean that good things will not come to us, though not in the guise in which we have looked for them. Therefore, though I have never visited Carlo\'s country, and never can visit it, still I have seen a very goodly land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land worthy of a high place in the possessions of any nation, and yet, I think, a land that has been grievously misjudged.

Why does no one speak of the enormous wealth of West Africa? When America was but a faint dream of the adventurous voyager, when Australia was not on the maps, the west coast of Africa was exploited by the nations growing in civilisation for her wealth of gold, and slaves, and ivory, and the wealth that was there in those long-ago days is there to-day. There is gold as of yore, gold for the working; slaves, but we recognise the rights of man now and use them only as cheap labour; and there is surely raw material and vegetable products that should bring food and wealth to the struggling millions of the older world. The African peasant is passing rich on threepence a day, and within reach of his hand grow rubber and palm oil, groundnuts and cotton, cocoa and hemp, and cocoa-nuts and all manner of tropical fruits. These things, I know, appertain to other lands, but here they are simply flung out with a tropical lavishness, and till this century I doubt if they have been counted of any particular value. If the English colonies of West Africa were cultivated by men with knowledge and patience, bringing to the work but a fiftieth of the thought and attention that is given to such matters in France, the return would be simply amazing. I have seen 25 per cent, of an ignorant peasant community\'s cocoa harvest wasted because there were no roads; I have seen cocoa-nut plantations useless, “because the place isn\'t suitable,” when in all probability some parasite was killing the palms. I have seen lives and money lost in a futile endeavour to teach the native to grow cotton, when the climate and conditions cried out that cocoa was the proper product to be encouraged.



0593

What the portion of West Africa I know well wants is to be worked on some settled scheme, a scheme made by some far-seeing mind that shall embrace, not the conditions of five years hence, but of fifty years hence; the man who works there should be laying the foundations of a plan that shall come to fruition in the time of our children\'s children, that should be still in sound working order in their grandchildren\'s time. The wheat of the Canadian harvest-field may bring riches in a year, the wool of Australia\'s plains wealth in two or three, but the trees of the African forest have taken hundreds of years to their growth, and, when they are grown, are like no other trees in the world. With them none may compare. So may these tropical dependencies of England be when rightly used, they shall come to their full growth. But we must remember they are tropical dependencies. The ordinary Englishman, it seems to me, is apt to expect to gather apples from a cocoa-nut palm, potatoes from a groundnut vine, and to rail because he cannot find those apples and potatoes. He will never find them, and the man who expects them is the man in the wrong place.

I hope some day soon to find there is a competitive examination for positions in the West-African Civil Service. Does any man grumble who has won a place in the Indian Civil Service? I think not. A competitive examination may not be the ideal way of choosing your political staff, but as yet we have evolved none better. The man who passes high in a competitive examination must at least have the qualities of industry and self-denial, and who will deny that these are good qualities to bring to the governing of a subject people?

It is curious to watch English methods of colonisation, and whether we will or no we must sit in judgment upon them. The first men who go out are sometimes good, sometimes bad, but all have this saving grace—that strong spirit of adventure, that dash and go which made England a colonising nation and mistress of the seas. It would be like asking a great cricketer to play tiddly-winks to ask one of the men who fought for Ashanti to take part in a competitive examination. They have competed and passed in a far sterner school. But the men who follow in the footsteps of the pioneers are sometimes made of different stuff. They are often the restless, discontented ones of the nation, men who complain of the land they leave, complain of the land they come to, find no good in West Africa, seek for no good, exaggerate its drawbacks, are glad to regard themselves as martyrs and to give the country an evil name. Such men, I think, a competitive examination would weed out.

There must be continuity of service. That is a foregone conclusion. At present England thinks so little of the land that is hers that she puts a man in a place but for a year, and the political officer has no chance of learning the conditions and needs of the people over whom he rules; he is a rolling stone perpetually moving on. Then it is the height of folly to set one industry against another. All should surely, in a new country, be worked for the common good. For instance, there is a railway running between Kumasi and Sekondi, a Government railway, and behind Kumasi lies a vast extent of country unexplored and unexploited, with hardly a road in it. One would have thought that it would simply be wisdom and for the good of the whole community that the railway which is Government property should be used for the opening up of the country behind. Such is the plan in Canada; such is the practice in Australia. But in West Africa Government holds different views. Ashanti wants to build a road to the Northern Territories, a road such as the Germans have made all over Togo, but Government, instead of using the railway to further that project, charge such exorbitant freight on the road material, that the road-making has come to a standstill. It is typical of the country. Each department is pitted against the other, instead of one and all working for the good of the whole. The great mind that shall be at liberty to plan, that I fear sometimes lest the Germans and French have found, has yet to come.



0597

There are many prejudices to break down, and first and foremost is the prejudice against the climate. Now I am not going to say that West Africa is a health resort, though I went there ill and came away in the rudest health. Still I do recognise that a tropical climate is hard for a European, more especially, perhaps, for people of these northern isles, to dwell in. A man cannot afford to burn the candle at both ends there, and if he would keep well he must of necessity live in all soberness and temperance. He does not always do that, but at present, whatever his illness is due to, it is always set down to the climate, and he is always sure of a full measure of pity.

Once I stayed for a short time next to a hospital, and the Europeans in the little town were much exercised because that hospital was so full. At last it occurred to me to ask what was the matter with the patients. I was not told what was the matter with them, but I found that the only one for whom anyone had much pity was the gentleman who had D.T. But even the worst of them you may be sure would have full measure of pity in England. “Poor fellow, that awful climate!”

Doctors tell me fever is rife, and I feel they must know more about it than I do, but it has been discovered in England that a life in the open air is an almost certain preventive of phthisis, and I cannot help thinking that a sane and sober life in the open air day and night would be a more certain preventive against fever than all the quinine and mosquito-proof rooms that were ever dreamt of. Observe, I say, a sane and sober life; and a sane and sober life means most emphatically that a man does not rush at his work and live habitually at high pressure. For this is a temptation that the better-class of man is peculiarly liable to in West Africa. “Let us succeed, let us get on, and let us get home”; and who, in the present conditions, can blame him for such sentiments. They are such as do any man credit, but they very often, in a hot climate more especially, spell destruction as surely as the wild dissipation of the reckless man who does not care. And there is only one cure for that—the cure the French and Germans are providing. The women must be encouraged to go out. Every woman who goes and stays makes it easier for the woman who follows in her footsteps, and I can see no reason why a woman should not stand the climate of West Africa as well as she does that of India. Women are the crying need; quiet, brave, sensible women who are not daunted because the black cook spoils the soup, or the black laundryman ruins the tablecloth, who will take an intelligent view of life, and will make what is so much needed—a home for their husbands. I know there are men who say that Africa is no place for a woman. I have met them again and again. Some of those men I respected very much; some I put in quite another category. The first evidently regarded a wife as a precious plaything, not as a creature who was helpmeet and friend, whose greatest joy must be to keep her marriage vows and share her husband\'s life for good or ill, whose life must of necessity be incomplete unless she were allowed to keep those marriage vows. The other sort, I am afraid, like the freedom that the absence of white women gives them, a freedom that is certainly not for the ultimate welfare of a colony, for the mingling of the European and the daughter of Ham should be unthinkable. It is good for neither people.



0601

And here we come to the great difficulty of a tropical dependency, the question that as yet is unanswered and unanswerable. What of the dark peoples we govern? They are a peasant people with a peasant people\'s faults and a peasant people\'s charm, but what of their future? The native untouched by the white man has a dignity and a charm that there is no denying; it seems a great pity he cannot be kept in that condition. The man on the first rung of civilisation has points about him, and on the whole one cannot help liking him, but the man who has gathered the rudiments of an education, as presented to men in an English school on the Coast, is, to my mind, about as disagreeable a specimen of humanity as it is possible to meet anywhere. He has lost the charming courtesy of the untutored savage, and replaced it by a horrible veneer of civilisation that is blatant and pompous; and it is only because I have met such men as Dr Blyden and Mr Olympia that I am prepared to admit that education can do something beyond spoiling a good thing. Between black and white there is that great, unbridgeable gulf fixed, and no man may cross it. The black men who attain to the higher plane are as yet so few and scattered that each must lead a life of utter intolerable loneliness, men centuries before their time, men burdened with knowledge like Galileo, men who must suffer like Galileo, for none may understand them, and the white man stands and must stand—it is inevitable—too far off even for sympathy.

All honour to those men who go before the pioneers; but for them, as far as we can see, is only bitterness.

The curious thing is that most people who have visited West Africa or any other tropical dependency will recognise these facts, and yet England continues to pour into Africa a continuous stream of missionaries. Why? For years Christianity has been taught on the Coast, and it is now a well-recognised fact that on the Coast dishonesty and vice are to be found, while the............