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 man from the interior is at least honest, healthy, and free from vice. i am not saying that religion as taught by the missionary has taught vice, but i am declaring emphatically that it has failed to keep the negro from it. why encourage missionaries? as civilisation advances the native must be taught. very well, let him pay for his own teaching, he will value it a great deal more; or, since the merchants want clerks and the white rulers want artisans, let them pay for the native to be taught. but very, very strongly do i feel, when i look at the comfortable, well-fed native of west africa and the wastrel of the english streets, that the english who subscribe to missions are taking the bread from the children's table and throwing it to the dogs.
0605
hundreds and thousands of people are ready to give to missions, but i am very sure not a fraction of them have the very faintest conception of what they are giving to. their idea is that they are giving to the poor heathen who are sunk in the deepest misery. now there is not in all the length and breadth of africa, i will venture to swear, one-quarter of the unutterable misery and vice you may see any day in the streets of london or any great city of the british isles. there is not a tribe that has not its own system of morals and sees that they are carried out; there is not the possibility of a man, woman, or child dying of starvation in all west africa while there is any food among the community. can we say that of any town in england? what then are we trying to teach the native? christianity. but surely a man's god is only such as his mind can appreciate; a high-class mind has a high-class god, a kindly mind a kindly god, and an evil mind an evil god. no matter whether we call that god christ, or by any other name, he will have the attributes the mind that conceives him gives him; wherefore why worry?
of course i know that a large number of people feel that religion comes from without and not from within, and a larger number still say as long as a mission is industrial it is a good thing, and to both of these i can only point out the streets and alleys and tenement houses of the towns of england. it seems to me the most appalling presumption on the part of any nation with such ghastly festering sores at its own heart to try and impose on any other people a code of morals, a system of ethics, a religion, if you will, until its own body is sweet and clean. an industrial mission is doubtless a good thing, but until there are no men clamouring for the post of sandwich-men in london, no women catering to a shameful traffic in piccadilly, i think we should keep the money for our industrial missions at home.
let us look the thing straight in the face. they talk of human sacrifices. are there no human sacrifices in our own midst? we lie if we say there are none. every day we who pride ourselves upon having been a christian nation for the last thousand years condemn little children to a life of utter hopelessness, to a life the very thought of which, in connection with our own children, would make us hide our faces in shuddering horror. so if any man is appealed to to give to missions, i would have him look round and see that everyone in his immediate neighbourhood is beyond the need of help, that there are no ghastly creatures at his own gate that the heathen he is trying to convert would scorn to have at his side. believe me, if christianity is to justify itself there is not yet one crumb to spare from the children's table for the dogs that lie outside.
for the individual missionary i have—in many cases, i must have—a great respect. the trouble to my mind is that christianity presented in so many guises must be a little confusing to the heathen. there are the roman catholics. they are pawns in the great game played by rome; no individual counts. they have given themselves to the missionary service to teach the heathen, and they stay until they die or until they are too sick to be of further use in the land. of course they are helpful, any life that is oblivious of self and is utterly devoted to others must needs be helpful, and they have my deepest respect, because never, never have i been called upon to sympathise with a roman catholic father or sister. they have given their lives, no man can do more, and all i can say is, i would prefer they gave it to the civilising of the submerged folks of their own nations than to civilising the black man.
0609
then at the other end of the social scale are the basel missions. they combine business and religion very satisfactorily in a thoroughly efficient german spirit, and while the missionaries attend to the souls of the heathen and set up schools to teach them not only to read and write, but various useful trades as well, the basel mission factories do a tremendous trade in all the necessaries of life. these basel missionaries are most kindly, worthy people, and to their kindness i owe much. occasionally i have come across a man of wide reading and with clever, observant eyes, but as a rule they are chosen from the lower middle classes among the swiss and germans; very often the missionary spirit runs in the families, and it passes on from father to son, from mother to daughter. these people, too, come out if not for life, like the roman catholics, at least for long periods of years. it is generally believed on the coast, and i have never heard it contradicted, that when a man attains a certain standing he is allowed to marry, even though he is not due for a holiday in europe. they have at headquarters photographs of all the eligible maidens in training for the mission field, and the candidate for matrimony may choose his wife, and she is duly forwarded to him, for the heads of the basel missions, like me, believe in matrimony for africa. and most excellent wives do these basel missionary women make. they bear their children here in west africa where no english woman thinks she can stay more than six months, and their homes are truly homes in the best sense of the word. if example is good for the heathen, then he has it in the basel missions. another thing, they must make the most excellent nucleus for german interests, for no one who has been in a basel mission station or factory can but respect these men and women and little children who make a home and a garden in the wilderness. and what i have said about the basel missions applies to the bremen missions, except that these are more pronouncedly german. but better women may i never hope to meet in this wide world than those in the bremen missions. and in between these two extremes are missionaries of every class and description. against the individuals i have nothing to say, save and except this—i want to discount the admiration given to the “poor missionary.” they are good men i doubt not, but they are earning a living just as i who write am earning a living, or you who read, and to my mind they are earning a living in the halo of sanctity very much more comfortably than the struggling doctor or the poor curate in an east-end parish. whatever their troubles, they have never the bitterness of seeing the ghastly want that they cannot relieve, and if they do not live in england, they have always the joy of making a home in a new country, and that is a joy that those who talk so glibly about exile do not seem to realise.
0613
“but we must have the negroes taught reading and writing and trades,” said a man to me once when we were discussing the missionary question; and i agree it is necessary, but i do not see why i am to regard the teacher as on a higher plane than he who teaches the same in england. and as for the religion that is taught, the only comment i have to make upon it is that no man that ever i heard of would take a mission boy or a christian for a servant when he could get a decent heathen. finally, considering the amount of destitution and terrible want in the streets of england, if i had my way i would put a heavy tax on all money contributed for the conversion of the heathen. before it was allowed to go out of the country i would if i could take heavy toll, and with that toll give the luckless children of my own colour a start in life in the colonies.
finally, west africa is the country of raw material. it should be england's duty so to work that country that it be complementary to england, the great manufacturing land. the peasant of the gold coast burning the bush to make his cocoa plantations is absolutely necessary to the girl fixing the labels on the finished product; her very livelihood depends upon him. the nearer these two are brought together in a commercial sense the better for both, and what we say of cocoa we may say of palm oil and groundnuts and other vegetable fats, of rubber, of hemp, of gold, of tin. this country which produces with tropical luxuriance should be, if properly worked, a source of immense wealth to the nation that possesses it.
and as we rise in the social scale, think of the openings this country, thickly populated, well cultivated, flourishing, would offer for the young men of the middle classes seeking a career. a political service like the civil service of india, officered by men who have won places there by strenuous work and high endeavour, who are proud of the positions they have won, and a busy mercantile community, serving side by side with these political officers, would go some way to answering the question on the lips of the middle-class father, “what shall i do with my son?” the work of women is widening every day, and i, who honestly believe that an ordinary woman may go where an ordinary man can, may with profit take up work even as a man may do, see scope for the women of the future there too, not only as wives and helpmeets to the men, but as heads of independent enterprises of their own.
i have finished my book, ended the task that i have set myself to do, and i hope i have been able to convey to my readers some of the fascination that africa has always held for those who have once visited her shores. but hitherto it has been the fascination of the mistress, never of the wife. she held out no lure, for she was no courtesan. a man came to her in his eager youth asking, praying that she would give him that which should make all life good; and she trusted and opened her arms. what she had to give she gave freely, generously; there was no stint, no lack. and he took. her charm he counted as a matter of course, her tenderness was his due, her passion was for his pleasure; but the fascination he barely admitted could not keep him. though she had given all she had no rights, and when other desires called he left her, left her with words of pity that were an injury, of regret that were an insult.
but all this is changing. africa holds. 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. even the languor and the heat he longs for, the white foam of the surf on the yellow sand of the beaches, the thick jungle growth densely matted, rankly luxuriant, pulsating with the irrepressible life of the tropics. all other places are tame. the fascination that he has denied comes back calling to him in after years. thus “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” this mistress he will have none of has spoiled him for all else. and here the analogy fails. africa holds, and the man whom she holds may yield to the fascination not only without shame, but with pride. before her lies a great future; to the man who knows how to use her gifts she offers wealth and prosperity. to be won easily? well, no. these gifts lie there as certainly as there is a sky above us, as that the sun will rise to-morrow, but there lie difficulties in the way, obstacles to be overcome. africa offers the opportunities—success is for the
“one who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
never doubted clouds would break,
never dreamed though right were worsted wrong would
triumph,
held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
sleep to wake.
now at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time
greet the unseen with a cheer!
bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'strive and thrive!' cry 'speed—fight on—'”
