BENIN CITY TO-DAY. BINI CHIEFS SITTING OUTSIDE THEIR NEW COURT HOUSE.
(Photo by Sir Walter Egerton.)
No more striking object lesson in the capacity for real progress along indigenous lines possessed by the Southern Nigerian pagan could be sought than a comparison between the Bini people of 1897 and the Bini people of to-day. A powerful tribe now numbering some 150,000 and inhabiting the Central Province, the Binis had long been the slaves, so to speak, of a theocracy which had succeeded in denaturalizing the original native state-form and in obtaining an over-mastering hold over the people. The King’s superstitions made him a puppet in its hands. The murder of several British officials was followed by the capture of the city, and the occupation of the country. Though mild in comparison with the autodafés and kindred pursuits of the Spanish Inquisition and the long persecution of the Jews which have distinguished other priesthoods in cultured surroundings that call for a certain sobriety of judgment in discussing the priesthood of primitive Benin, the latter had succeeded in inspiring a reign of terror throughout the country. No man’s life was safe, and Benin city, the capital, was a place of abominations. The priesthood were rightly broken, but the authority of the chiefs maintained, and despite one single administrative error, which, if not repaired, may occasion trouble later on, the Binis have become one of the most prosperous and law-abiding people in the Protectorate. They have co-operated so efficiently with the Forestry Department that throughout the Benin territory no tree can be unlawfully felled without the Forest Officer being informed. They are planting up their forest land with valuable timber trees. Supplied by the department with seeds, shown how to make nurseries and to supervise transplanting, but doing their own clearing, planting, and upkeep, no fewer than 700 villages have established communal rubber plantations of Funtumia elastica which they are increasing year by year. Many of the trees—of which there are one and a quarter millions whose present estimated value at a low computation is £165,000—are now of tappable size. Their share in the licence fees paid by European lease-holders engaged in the timber and rubber industry in Bini territory supplies the Bini communities with a further source of income. So greatly do these intelligent people appreciate the efforts of the Administration to enrich their country that when a little while ago they started tapping operations in their rubber plantations under the supervision of the Forestry Officer, the chiefs and villagers insisted that a third share should go to Government, and, despite the Governor’s objections, they would consent to no other arrangement. This has now become embodied in law. The Forestry Department undertakes to dispose of the rubber from the communal plantations, the profits being divided as to one-third for the paramount chiefs, one-third for the village community, and one-third for the Administration. From their increased revenues the chiefs of Benin city, “the city of blood,” as it used to be termed, have already built for themselves a substantial court-house of stone and brick and furnished their capital with a proper water-supply, putting down four miles of piping—thus saving the labour of thousands of persons who had daily to trudge to and from the river—and finding the money for a reservoir, a pumping station, and public hydrants.
Such surprising results in the short space of fourteen years are at once a tribute to British rule and to the negro of the Nigerian forests. Many obvious morals suggest themselves.
CHAPTER V
LAGOS AND ITS PORT—THE FUTURE BOMBAY OF WEST AFRICA
Early in the seventies, a decade after the British occupation, Lagos, for more years than one cares to remember an important export centre of the slave trade, was a small settlement inhabited by Yoruba and Bini agriculturists and traders. The Hinterland, threatened by Dahomeyan invasions from the west and Fulani inroads from the north, distressed by internal struggles between various sections of the Yoruba people rebelling against the central authority, was in a state of perpetual ferment. Severed from the mainland, maintaining themselves from hand to mouth, and swept by disease, the few British officials led an unenviable existence. A small three-roomed house protected from the rains by an iron roof harboured the Governor, and the members of his staff were glad to accept the hospitality of European merchants earning a precarious if lucrative livelihood by trading with the natives in palm oil, kernels, ivory, and cotton.
To-day Lagos is a picturesque, congested town of some 80,000 inhabitants, boasting many fine public buildings and official and European and native merchants’ residences, churches, wharves, a hospital, a tramway, a bacteriological institute, a marine engineering establishment, to say nothing of cold storage and electric light plant, hotels, a racecourse, and other appurtenances of advanced civilization. Like every other part of West Africa that I have seen, Lagos is full of violent contrasts. Every variety of craft—the tonnage of the place is something like 250,000 tons per annum—is to be observed in the water and every variety of dress in the busy streets, from the voluminous robes of the turbaned Mohammedan to the latest tailoring monstrosities of Western Europe. The Yoruba lady with a Bond Street hat and hobble skirt; her sister in the infinitely more graceful enfolding cloths of blue or terra-cotta, with the bandanna kerchief for head-gear; opulent resident native merchants or Government clerks in ordinary English costume; keen-featured “uneducated” traders from whose shoulders hang the African riga—a cosmopolitan crowd which includes Sierra Leonean, Cape Coast, and Accra men, attracted by the many prospects of labour an ever-increasing commercial and industrial activity offers to carpenters, mechanics, traders’ assistants, and the like. Here a church thronged on Sundays with African ladies and gentlemen in their finest array; here a mosque built by the local and rapidly increasing Yoruba Muslims at a cost of £5,000. Here a happy African family laughing and chattering in a tumbledown old shanty within close proximity to a “swagger” bungalow gay with brilliant creepers; there a seminary where a number of young ladies, looking supremely uncomfortable in their European frocks, supplemented by all the etceteras of Western feminine wardrobes, their short hair frizzled out into weird contortions, are learning as fast as their teachers can make them those hundred and one inutilities which widen the breach between them and their own beautiful, interesting land. A certain kind of prosperity is writ large over the place, but there is good reason to believe that economic pressure in its different forms, none more acutely felt than the ascending price of foodstuffs, is beginning to bear hardly upon the poorer classes, and the political and social atmosphere of the town is not altogether healthy.