Apart from religious questions there is probably no subject upon which it is more difficult to secure reasonable discussion and study than the subject of drink; none upon which it is more easy to generalize, or which lends itself more readily to prejudice and misunderstanding of the real points at issue. That moral reformers in England and elsewhere should feel strongly about drink is natural enough. A considerable proportion of the population of this country, of France, Germany, Belgium, and other European States live wretched and unhealthy lives. They are over-worked, under-fed, herded in insanitary tenements with insufficient space, ventilation, and light, under conditions which preclude decency and breed moral and physical diseases. Their horizon is one dead, uniform, appalling greyness from birth to death. Who can feel surprise that people thus situated should seek momentary forgetfulness in drink? The drink problem in Europe is not a cause but an effect. The cause lies deep down in the failure-side of our civilization, and statesmen worthy of the name are grappling with it everywhere. Those of us who think we see beyond an effect, are striving to prevent the reproduction in tropical Africa of this failure-side of our civilization. We are striving to maintain the economic independence of the West African; to ensure him a permanency of free access to his land; to preserve his healthy, open-air life of agriculturist and trader, his national institutions, his racial characteristics and his freedom. We are endeavouring to show him to the people of Europe, not as they have been taught by long years of unconscious misrepresentation to regard him, but as he really is. We feel that if we can protect the West African from the profounder economic and social perils which encompass him on every side; from the restless individualism of Europe; from unfair economic pressure threatening his free and gradual development on his own lines; from the disintegrating social effects of well-meaning but often wrongly informed and misdirected philanthropic effort; from political injustice—that if we are able to accomplish this even in small measure, the question of drink, while requiring attention, becomes one of secondary importance. The West African has always been a moderate drinker. From time immemorial he has drunk fermented liquors made from various kinds of corn, and from different kinds of palm trees. It is not a teetotal race, as the North American race was. It is a strong, virile race, very prolific.
Unfortunately this question of drink has been given a place in the public mind as regards Southern Nigeria altogether disproportionate to the position it does, and should, hold. It has been erected for many sincere, good people into a sort of fetish, obscuring all the deeper issues arising from the impact upon the West African of civilization at a time when civilization has never been so feverishly active, so potent to originate vast changes in a few short years. The temperance reformer in England strikes, often blindly, at “drink” anywhere and everywhere on the same principle, utterly oblivious to physiological and climatic differences; he cannot see beyond or behind the subject which specially interests him and which has become his creed. The use of intoxicants of some kind is common to humanity all over the world. It responds to a need of the human body. Christ Himself did not condemn its use, since He Himself, the Sacred Writings tell us, changed water into wine at a marriage feast. Excessive indulgence in liquor, like indulgence in any other form of human appetite, is a human failing. It is not the drink which is an evil, but the abuse of it. The abuse of liquor nine times out of ten is the outcome of social discomfort and unhappiness, a way of escape, like a narcotic, from the pangs of conscience, or of misery. People who concentrate merely upon effects are unsound guides when constructive measures are required. The temperance reformer in England approaches the question of drink in West Africa from the subjective point of view which characterizes the home outlook upon most questions lying outside the home latitudes. Saturated with his home experience, the English temperance reformer places the West African in the same economic and social setting as the European and argues on parallel lines. To that mode of reasoning, three-fourths of the evils which civilization has inflicted upon coloured races may be traced. Nothing is more curious or more saddening to observe than the unfailing success of such methods of thought translated into public action, in their effect upon home sentiment. Consumption sweeping through the ranks of a coloured people as the consequence of the educationary and religious processes of Europeanism may make a holocaust of human victims. The public remains indifferent. European marriage laws; European ethics, or nominal ethics, in the matter of sex relationship; the European individualistic social system grafted upon the communal life of a coloured people—these things may produce widespread human misery and immorality. The public is cold and unconcerned. European interference and innovation in social customs and usages essential to the well being, to the political and racial needs of a coloured people in one stage of development, but repugnant to European twentieth-century notions, may cause social disturbance and widespread anarchy which those who are responsible for such interference can never themselves witness, let alone suffer from. It is virtually impossible to arouse popular interest. For these and kindred disasters are very largely brought about by the uninstructed zeal of God-fearing, Christian men and women in Europe who judge other countries by their own, other peoples by their own people, other needs by their own needs, with the best of intentions and with the purest of motives; and outside a small band of students, ethnologists and experienced officials, the public mind is scandalized and even incensed if any one ventures to doubt the excellent results necessarily flowing from disinterested action. It is disinterested: therefore it must be right. That is the popular belief and the general fallacy.
Poor Mary Kingsley, who knew her West Africa as few have ever known it and who had the true scientific mind, fought hard against this ingrained characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. But she fought in vain. Despite her charity, the geniality and the humour in which she clothed her truths, she had against her the whole weight of what is called the philanthropic school of home opinion, responsible for so much good and yet for so much unconscious harm.
“The stay at home statesman,” she once said, “think that Africans are all awful savages or silly children—people who can only be dealt with on a reformatory, penitentiary line. This view, you know, is not mine ... but it is the view of the statesmen and the general public and the mission public in African affairs.”
And again:—
“The African you have got in your mind up here, that you are legislating for and spending millions in trying to improve, doesn’t exist; your African is a fancy African.... You keep your fancy African and I wish you joy of him, but I grieve more than I can say for the real African that does exist and suffers for all the mistakes you make in dealing with him through a dream thing, the fiend-child African of your imagination. Above all, I grieve for the true negro people whose home is in the West Coast....”
No, you cannot excite public interest in these matters. But mention the liquor trade, describe the Nigerian as an infant in brain, incapable of self-control, down whose throat wicked merchants are forcibly pouring body and soul destroying drink which a wicked Administration taxes in order to raise revenue. Public sentiment responds with alacrity. It becomes at once a popular cry, and the most inconceivable distortions of native character and native life pass muster. Oppose that view and it will be a miracle if you emerge with any shred of reputation you may once have possessed. Stones from episcopal catapults will whistle round your ears. Scribes, utterly ignorant of the country whose inhabitants they portray in an absurdly false light, and who make their living by going shuddering around in professional temperance circles, will hint darkly that somewhere in the dim back of beyond your attitude is dictated by personal interest. A certain type of missionary will denounce you from the housetops, ransack the Bible for quotations to describe the extent of your fall from grace, and end up by praying the Almighty for the salvation of your soul. You will be described as a man who cynically ministers to the degradation of the negro. People who believed in you will ponder sadly over your moral declension. You may consider yourself lucky if your best friend does not cut you in the street. To disparage the Administration, to describe the English gentlemen who serve it in Nigeria as callous onlookers while a people sinks down before them in ruin and decay; to paint the sober Nigerian as a drunken brute—all this is permissible. But the deafening clamour which arises, the protesting and outraged indignation which obtains if a humble voice is heard to deny the accuracy, and to resent, in the public interest, these sweeping charges against White and Black alike, beggars description. You find yourself denounced to the whole world as a cruel libeller of godly men, and much else besides. It would be humorous if it were not pathetic, because amidst all this froth and fury the vital problems arising out of European contact with West Africa are obscured, and a force which, instructed and directed in the right way, might be of untold benefit is wasted on a sterile issue.
The onslaught upon Southern Nigeria in the matter of the liquor traffic carried on by that sincere, but tactless, misinformed and pugnacious cleric, Bishop Tugwell, and the bulk of his assistants in West Africa, aided by the Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee at home, is a typical example of the harm which lack of perspective and muddle-headedness can do to a good cause. The liquor traffic is common to the whole of West Africa and requires constant and vigilant attention. For more than a century, long before the bulk of the coast line was occupied by the Powers in a political sense, spirits had been exported to West Africa from Europe together with cotton goods, woollen goods, beads, ironware, hardware, haberdashery, perfumery, salt, tobacco and a host of other articles. At first the trade was untaxed. As European political influence extended, the various Administrations found it necessary to control the traffic by placing an import duty upon spirits at the port of entry. In this policy Great Britain has always led; the other Powers have always lagged. When interior penetration from the coast began and the scramble for Western Africa was well on its way, Great Britain’s influence was responsible for the proposal that the import should be prohibited beyond a certain geographical limit interiorwards. Thus Northern Nigeria was excluded from the accessible zone of European spirit import. By general consent the trade has been looked upon as a potential danger, if unregulated, and nowhere has the determination to prevent it from becoming an active evil been so clearly recognized as in Southern Nigeria; by successive increases of duty, and, as I shall show, by so adjusting taxation as virtually to penalize spirits of high potency in favour of spirits of weak strength. The Governor-General of French West Africa, M. Ponty, told me only last autumn at Dakar, how he desired to bring the French duties up to the British level, and what difficulties he was experiencing in doing so. Now the existence of a permanent, outside influence, whatever its origin, directed at encouraging the Administration in this course could only be to the good. While differences of opinion must exist as to the relative importance of the matter compared with other problems of administration, I have met no one who would not regard a policy of letting in spirits free, as wrong. I have met no one who is not convinced that it is right to tax the trade just as high as it can be taxed, up to the point, that is, when people will still buy and not be driven to illicit distilling, which in the West African forest could not be suppressed. If Bishop Tugwell and his friends had concentrated upon the potentiality of the danger, and had given every help and assistance to the Administration to cope with it, supplying the Administration with such information as they might possess of a specific, controllable, accurate character, it would have been difficult to over-estimate their usefulness from this particular point of view.
But the course they have been pursuing for the last few years has been quite different. It has been so illogical, so lacking in judgment and sobriety, and so pronouncedly foolish and unjust, as to disgust every fair-minded man who has looked into the facts for himself. Instead of common-sense and reasonable debate, there has been violent and senseless denunciation accompanied by the grossest misstatements. The Administration, urged perpetually to increase the tax, has been cursed with bell, book and candle for the automatic result in swelling the proceeds of revenue derived from these increases. What was demanded as a moral duty has, in its inevitable result, been stigmatized as a crime, and the very men who clamoured for more taxes, have denounced the effect of them. A trade forming from time immemorial, as already stated, part of the general barter trade of the West Coast has become identified in the public mind with a particular British dependency, the very one where official vigilance has been specially exercised. A difficult and complicated economic and fiscal problem has been handled in so unintelligent a manner that it has degenerated into systematic and silly abuse of British officials, who have no more to do with the existence of the traffic than has the Duke of Westminster who presides over the Native Races and Liquor Traffic United Committee. These officials of ours, some of whose difficulties I have attempted to portray, have actually been accused—nay, are still being—of encouraging the trade in every possible way, of forcing it upon the people, of thriving on the drinking habits of the native. Fanaticism has even gone the length of stating that they are “financially interested” in the traffic, as though they received a percentage from Government on the revenue derived from taxing the article! The very Commission which Lord Crewe sent out to investigate the charges persistently brought, has been assailed with unmeasured vituperation for the crime of having rendered a truthful report on the evidence produced, and the public at home has been asked to believe that these Commissioners, the Political and Judicial Staff of the Protectorate, the Medical Staff, the Roman Catholic missionaries[15]—the most numerous in the Protectorate—together with prominent natives and independent outside witnesses as well, are either deliberate perjurers or incompetent observers; although the accusers’ testimony was hopelessly, even pitifully, inadequate when brought to the test of public examination and inquiry. In an official pamphlet issued by the Native Races Committee the statements of Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, the Chairman of the Commission, as recorded in the minutes of evidence, have been reproduced in mutilated form, presumably in order to carry conviction of his bias with the public. Those who can stoop to such methods do irreparable injury to a good cause. What in its origin was undoubtedly a movement of a genuine philanthropic character, has been converted into an agitation which has so incensed authorized Native opinion, that Mr. Sapara Williams, the leading Native member of the Legislative Council of Southern Nigeria and a fearless critic of the Government, found it necessary to voice the feelings of the community in the following vigorous language uttered in the Legislative Council itself:—