FULANI CATTLE.
A rapid multiplication of national schools in Northern Nigeria, so eminently desirable, entirely depends upon the financial support which the Administration, hampered in every direction for lack of funds, is able to contribute. The Imperial Government would be displaying wisdom in making a special grant for the purpose, the present sum available being altogether inadequate for the importance and urgency of the object in view, and in seriously broaching the problem of control over all unofficial educationary agencies in the Protectorate.
CHAPTER XV
COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT
The external, by which I mean non-indigenous, trade of Northern Nigeria plays as yet but an insignificant part in the commercial and industrial activities of the country. It is largely in the hands of one company, the Niger Company, Limited, to the enterprise of whose founder, Sir George Taubman Goldie, is due our possession of the Northern Protectorate. Three or four other commercial houses have extended their operations to the territory, and more will certainly follow. At present the only other European firm, outside the Niger Company, which is doing a large general business is that of Messrs. John Holt & Co., Limited. Another alien commercial element is the Arab trader. His seat of interest is Kano city, where he has been established for several centuries, and where, as already stated, there is a recognized Arab quarter. The trans-desert trade from Tripoli has always been in his hands, but he is now beginning to use the parcel post and the western route largely. Ten thousand parcels, weighing eleven pounds each, were despatched or received by Arab traders during the first half of last year. The Arabs appear to deal in lines of trade with which European firms are not in touch. Several of them have been in England, and the business headquarters of one of them is in Manchester. They are intelligent men, but form an uncertain and not particularly safe element in the affairs of Kano. A representative of these traders who visited me at the house kindly placed at my disposal near the Residency, two miles from the city, gave it as his opinion that the railway would double the trade of the country in five years.
The two principal articles of import at present are cotton goods and salt. The articles of export are shea-nuts or butter, dressed and dyed goat and sheep skins, ostrich feathers, rubber, ground-nuts, gum arabic, hides, gum copal, beeswax, various kinds of oil-beans, cotton, and a fibre resembling, and equal in value to, jute. Tin and other minerals stand, of course, in a different category, and cannot be regarded as “trade.” Of these I formed the opinion that a very large future expansion in the shea-nut trade and ground-nut trade may be legitimately expected. I rode for days through woods of shea, and I found these trees growing abundantly all over the parts of the Niger Province and Zaria Province I visited, and in many parts of the Kano Province. The ground-nut is already cultivated, its cultivation is easy, and the soil in many districts along the Baro-Kano railway is suitable. I see no reason why that railway should not, in parts, and in time, attract to itself a population of ground-nut cultivators, as the Dakar-St. Louis railway has done, and the new Thiès-Kayes railway is doing in Senegal. The industry is at present handicapped because the merchants will not buy the undecorticated nut, and the price offered to the native is not sufficiently attractive to induce him to go to the great labour involved in decortication. Seeing that the Niger ground-nut fetches much higher prices than the Senegal and Gambia nut, it is astonishing that the merchant is not prepared to deal with the nut himself, and to purchase the undecorticated article from the native. The present policy strikes one as short-sighted.
A great many hopes have been engendered touching an immediate and large export of raw cotton consequent upon the termination of the railway. I should be extremely loath to say anything here which would tend to throw cold water upon the commendable enterprise of the British Cotton Growing Association, to which Imperially we owe much, and the problem is one which is affected by so many varying local influences that to dogmatize upon it would be unwise. Enormous quantities of cotton are undoubtedly grown, some districts in the Zaria and Kano Provinces being almost entirely devoted to its production, and many more off the beaten track could be, if transport were available. But at present there are two difficulties, apart from the general difficulties affecting all economic development in Northern Nigeria, to which I shall refer in a moment. One is the question of price. The other is the local demand. In one sense they are inseparable. The local demand for the raw material by local weavers exceeds the supply, and the result is that the price the Association finds itself, either directly or through its agents, the Niger Company, able to pay is insufficient to tempt the growers. To overcome these obstacles the Association relies upon the attraction offered by a permanent market at a fixed price irrespective of local fluctuation; an increased yield per acre through an improvement in the varieties produced, and improvement in methods of cultivation; and the inroads upon the local weaving industry through the increasing import of Manchester cotton-goods. These views may be quite sound, but, granted their soundness, some time must elapse before they become appreciably operative, and I have difficulty myself in believing that any really substantial export of raw cotton is to be looked for in the immediate future. But that the Association’s general line of policy in seeking to develop and expand the existing native-growing industry, as such, is right, and that its labours are calculated to achieve these ends, I am persuaded; while I see no reason to doubt that a considerable export of raw cotton will eventually be the outcome of those labours.[9] Among agricultural products, corn should also figure largely in course of time. The export of dressed goat and sheep skins is steadily increasing. The trade now amounts to over one million skins per annum, of a total home value of £50,000 to £60,000. Until a few years ago it was an entirely trans-desert trade, and the skins were purchased at Tripoli for the American market. Latterly the London and Kano Trading Company have diverted more than half of this trade by the western route, and London is to-day the principal purchaser.
There would seem to be a good future for a trade in hides, especially if Kano becomes a slaughter-centre for cattle for the southern markets. The possible obstacle to this is partly political and partly ethnological, and the first, at least, is worthy of special attention on the part of the Administration. Virtually all the herds in the Hausa States are the property of the Fulani. Now the Fulani M’Bororo, as already pointed out, is a nomad, and it is very doubtful if he will ever be anything else. Indeed, his very calling necessitates that he should be continually on the move to seek out pasture-land, according to the seasons, and the localities he knows. But the more the Protectorate is organized the more ill at ease will the nomad Fulani become, especially as he dislikes most intensely the jangali or cattle-tax, at the best of times an unsatisfactory tax to enforce, and one which, moreover, operates unfairly towards the small herdsman. Here the ethnological peculiarity comes in. The Fulani is very fond of his cattle. He does not breed them for slaughter, but because he literally loves them. He knows every one of them by name, and lavishes as much attention upon them as he does upon his children. This is peculiar to him not in Nigeria only but all over Western Africa. Often have our officers in Northern Nigeria found it impossible to resist the pitiful appeal of some old Fulani herdsman or his wife, begging with eyes full of tears for the restitution of a favourite ox or heifer taken with others under the “jangali” assessment. The dual problem must be thought out or the M’Bororo will silently disappear into the vastness of Africa, as the Shuwa—his nomadic colleague of Bornou—has already partly disappeared from Nigeria. Fulani migration eastwards towards the Nile valley is a marked phenomenon of the last ten years, both as regards French and British territory in West Africa. Khartoum now numbers some 5000 Sokoto Fulani alone. The disappearance of the Fulani M’Bororoji from the Hausa States would not only arrest any development of the cattle and hides trades, but would be an incalculable loss to Hausa agriculture for the reasons given in a previous chapter.
The forest resources of the country are as yet practically untapped, for lack of adequate transport. They are not as rich in Northern as in Southern Nigeria, because the forests are much fewer, but there are very extensive gum-copal forests in Bornu; there is a good deal of rubber in Bauchi and in some other provinces, the Benue region especially abounding in rubber, copal, and fibres of great value. The Muri province is particularly rich. A forestry department organized on the lines of Southern Nigeria is urgently needed. But in this, as in almost everything else, the Administration is hampered for lack of funds.
There can be no doubt whatever, that Northern Nigeria has immense potentialities but they are not going to be developed in a day, or in a decade, and no useful purpose can be served by pretending otherwise. The very vastness of the country and the natural difficulties of communication preclude rapidity in development. In West Africa the game is generally to the tortoise, not to the hare. And several factors must ever be borne in mind. Northern Nigeria, as already stated, is a remarkably self-sufficing country, one part of it supplying the wants of another; peopled with born traders busily occupied in furthering the needs of a comprehensive internal traffic. For instance, the river-borne traffic of the Benue, both up and down, is entirely in the hands now of Nupe and Kakandas trading on behalf of native merchants, mostly Yorubas, at Lokoja. There is an active overland trade between the Benue region, north towards Kano and Bauchi, south with Southern Nigeria right down to Calabar on the ocean. Native merchants from the north import cloth, sheep and cattle, and corn, taking away cash, galena and silver from the Arifu native mines. Between district and district, province and province, all over the country there is a ceaseless interchange of commercial commodities. That is one factor to take into account. Another is that we must revolutionize our ideas as to general conditions and capabilities for labour, proportionately to the needs and extent of population. The belief that the majority of the inhabitants of Northern Nigeria pass their time in idleness, or what approximates to idleness, is a pure delusion. Even from the European standpoint, which is not and cannot be the African’s from climatic causes alone, the Northern Nigerian, speaking generally, is the reverse of idle. Moreover, if on the one hand our political administration tends to root the people in the soil and increase the area under cultivation; on the other hand, our roads and railways and the opening of the tin mines tend to take the people off the land and to create an increasing class of casual, floating labour which cannot itself provide for its own sustenance, and has to purchase its food requirements. The economic consequence is a steadily ascending price of foodstuffs in the neighbourhood of all the great centres. From this the farmer benefits, but at the expense of an increase in the production of raw material for the export trade with Europe. The Northern Nigerian farmer will grow the crop which it pays him best to grow, and if he sees a larger profit in corn for local consumption than in ground-nuts or cotton for export, he will grow corn. These economic questions do not appear to me to be given their due proportion in the estimates which are made. The whole country is in a state of transition, and it must be given breathing space in which to adjust itself. Patience and statesmanship are the main necessities of the moment. Sir Henry Hesketh-Bell, who takes a keen interest in all questions of economic development, may be trusted to do all that is humanly possible to encourage the commercial progress of the territory.