Historical circumstances rather than natural advantages have made Lagos the most important commercial emporium of British West Africa and the starting-point of a railway into the interior. It is difficult to see, if the traffic of this railway and its future feeders develops, as there is every reason to believe it will, how the already crowded and circumscribed area of Lagos can possibly prove equal to the demands upon it. Indeed, its physical features are in many respects most disadvantageous for the rôle of the West African Bombay it appears called upon to bear, and it is only by the expenditure of millions which, spread over the Protectorate, would have achieved results of much greater fruitfulness, that Lagos can be converted into a harbour worthy of the name. For Lagos is cursed with a bar which vessels drawing more than fourteen feet cannot cross, and the absurd anomaly, to say nothing of the expense and loss of time and damage to valuable cargo involved, is witnessed of vessels with merchandise consigned to the premier port in Nigeria having to steam 120 miles south of it and there discharge their freight into branch steamers for conveyance to destination. An elusive and sinister obstruction is Lagos bar, strewn with wrecks and hitherto refractory to dredging, which shifts its depths three feet in a single week, while the position of the channels is continually altering. As one surveys the coast-line and notes the two, comparatively speaking, deep and roomy anchorages of Forcados and Old Calabar, one cannot refrain from marvelling somewhat at the curious chain of events which has conspired to concentrate effort and expense upon a place so difficult of access. However, the past cannot be undone, and no doubt there is much to be said in favour of Lagos, or rather of the happenings which have ministered to its selection. Be that as it may, the destinies of Southern Nigeria have for the last five years been in the hands of a Governor of large ideas and enormous energy. Sir Walter Egerton, who, despite numerous disappointments and maddening delays, has pursued with dogged persistence and infinite resource the object dearest to his heart—that of opening the harbour. A comprehensive scheme of works, entailing the construction of two stone moles, one on either side of the entrance, combined with harbour and channel dredging, is proceeding under the direction of Messrs. Coode, Son, and Matthews, and the constant personal supervision of the Governor, in the confident belief that its completion will ensure (combined with dredging) a depth of twenty-seven feet at high water, corresponding to twenty-four feet at low tide. When I was in Lagos a month ago[7] the work on the eastern mole had advanced 4,500 feet seawards, but the western mole is not yet started, and will not be, it is feared, for some time, a further delay having been caused by the foundering of the Axim, with much indispensable material on board.
One must have stood at the extremity of the eastern mole and watched the greedy, muddy-coloured sea absorbing like some insatiable monster the masses of grey rock hurled, at all times of the day and every day in the week, into its depths, to appreciate the colossal difficulties of a task which, brought to a successful issue, will always remain an impressive testimony to human perseverance under climatic and other conditions of perennial difficulty. West Africa has certainly never seen anything comparable to it. Nature disputes with man for every inch of vantage. As the work progresses the sand twists and withes into ever-changing formations; banks arise and disappear only to again re-form; the foreshore on the outer side of the mole grows and swells and rises weekly, threatening to become level with the wall itself and even to overwhelm it; the scour of the sea scoops into the ocean’s floor, thus forcing the advancing mole into deep water, which demands a proportionately larger meal of stone. From out the greyness of the horizon the remains of the Kano, Kittiwake, Egga, and other vessels that once were, lift lamentable spars above the angry breakers. From Abeokuta, thirty miles away, these innumerable tons of granitic boulders must be brought, despatched in “boxes” from the newly-opened quarries to Ebute-Metta by rail. There the “boxes” are lifted from the waggons and hoisted by cranes into lighters, the lighters are towed to the wharf, the “boxes” lifted out of them, run along the mole, and their contents hurled into the sea. Every foot’s advance requires sixty tons of stone. At the accelerated rate of progress now ensured the eastern mole will be finished in four years. The labour and organization required to bring this great work to its present stage—initial steps in West Africa being invariably characterized by endless impediments—have been prodigious. Despite the sombre prognostications one hears in certain quarters, there seems no reasonable doubt that the bar will yield in time, as the forest has yielded, to British genius and pertinacity aided by African muscles, but at a cost which, when the time comes to add up the bill, will prove, I think, much heavier than generally supposed.
Lagos is joined to the mainland by two substantial bridges, one connecting the island with another small island called Iddo, which stands between Lagos Island and the continent, and one connecting Iddo with the continent itself at Ebute-Metta. From thence the railway starts on its way northward, traversing the whole of Yorubaland and tapping the Niger at Jebba.
CHAPTER VI
THE YORUBAS AND THEIR COUNTRY
The administrative problems which confront the Government of Southern Nigeria in the western, or Yoruba, province are very much more complicated than any to be met with in the central and eastern provinces. They arise partly from the character, at once progressive and unstable, of the Yorubas themselves, partly from the curious divergence in the political relations subsisting between his Majesty’s Government and the various sections of the old Yoruba confederation, partly from the influences working in favour of direct British rule which find favour in the Lagos Legislative Council, but mainly through neglect, disinclination to look a situation not without delicacy in the face, and the absence of any serious effort to map out a definite, consistent policy.
In one respect at least, that of the rapid assimilation of every feature, good, bad, and indifferent, which comes to them from the West with the influx of European religious and social ideas, law, and commercial and industrial activity, the Yorubas (who considerably outnumber them) may be termed the Baganda of West Africa. If this capacity spells true progress for a tropical African people, then the Yorubas are infinitely more progressive than any of the peoples, not of Nigeria merely, but of Western Africa. It is, nevertheless, worthy of remark that, without exception, all the native papers published in Lagos which, if not in every case edited by Yorubas, profess in every case to be the mouthpieces of the “Yoruba nation,” ceaselessly lament the Europeanizing of the country, the decay of the national spirit, the decadence of family authority, and the deterioration of the rising generation without, however—so far as many years’ perusal of their columns can enable one to judge—ever making an attempt to grapple with the problem in a constructive sense, and, in some cases, perhaps unwittingly, contributing not a little to further the processes which they denounce and deplore. In this, their notable characteristic, the Yorubas may have been influenced by environment, for although a considerable portion of the area they inhabit is forest land, much of it is open park-like country, and the whole of it lies outside the deltaic region altogether. It is among the Yorubas that Christian missionary propaganda has obtained most of its converts in West Africa, although none of the ruling chiefs have accepted the Christian faith, and although Islam is now making much more headway than Christianity. Moreover, official Christianity, already represented in Yoruba by as many sects as we have at home, has been riven by the defection of a body, some 3000 strong, I believe, which has constituted itself an independent Church, the real, though not explicitly avowed, motive being a refusal to abide by the monogamous sexual relationship which the Church enforces. With Christian missionary teaching Western education, or, more accurately, and, generally, semi-education (and indifferent at that) has, of course, gone hand in hand, and it is among the Yorubas almost exclusively, so far as Southern Nigeria is concerned, that the problem of the “educated native” and what his part is to be in the future of the country arises and threatens already to become acute.
Nowhere in Africa, it may be confidently asserted, are so many radically different influences, policies and tendencies at work among one and the same people as are observable to-day in this Yorubaland of 28,000 square miles. The situation is really quite extraordinary, and offers an unlimited field of speculation to the student. The natural aptitudes of the Yorubas—of both sexes—are husbandry and trade, not soldiering. But the necessities of tribal defence drove them to concentrate in large centres. These centres have remained and become the capitals of separate provinces, allegiance to the original head having mostly fallen into virtual, in some cases into total, desuetude. Thus we find to-day a series of native towns which for estimated numbers surpass anything to be met with in any part of native Africa—such as Ibadan, 150,000; Abeokuta, 100,000; Oshogbo, 40,000; Ogbomosho, 35,000; Ife, 30,000; Oyo, 40,000; Ijebu-Ode, 35,000; Iseyin, 40,000; some twelve other towns with a population of between 10,000 and 20,000; and twice as many more whose inhabitants number 5000 to 8000. The most surprising contrasts, illustrative of the divergences referred to, are noticeable in these agglomerations of human life—for instance, between Abeokuta, Ibadan, and Oyo. Abeokuta, the capital of the “Egba united Government” (whose authority extends over 1869 square miles), its mass of corrugated iron roofs glaring beneath the rays of the tropical sun, spreading around and beneath the huge outcrop of granitic rock where its founders first settled a hundred years ago, offers the curious picture of a Europeanized African town in the fullest sense of the term, but with this unique feature, that its administration and the administration of the district, of which it is the capital, is conducted by natives—i.e. by the Alake (the head chief) in council.
ONE OF THE SACRED STONE IMAGES AT IFE, THE SPIRITUAL CENTRE OF YORUBALAND.