Dawn in darkest Africa

by John H. Harris

When Lord Sanderson’s Commission took up the study of contract coolie labour, the areas appealing for labour included the Gold Coast colony, and the Government Secretary of the mines, Mr. Cogill, put in a plea that the colony should be allowed to recruit labour for its mines from India. In this plea he was supported by Sir John Rodger and the Acting-Governor, Major Bryan. This application is not easy to understand, for everyone knows, or should know, that Indian labour generally is unsuited to mining work. There is, however, some reason to believe that the inspiration of this plea came from sources requiring indentured labour from other parts of the world, and that the demand for Indian coolie labour was put forth in the hope of establishing necessity and thereby paving the way for a less acceptable demand.

The bulk of labour in West Africa is employed under indenture or contract, the majority of the latter being for three years, but a great deal of unskilled labour is employed on a yearly, or in some colonies—particularly the Portuguese—a five years’ contract. The latter are paper contracts, and in practice may mean anything or nothing at all. Very few unskilled labourers in Africa are prepared to accept willingly a single contract of longer duration than one or at the most two years, and if a contract system exists whereby labourers are bound for longer periods at a single service, it may be generally assumed that some form of pressure or intrigue has been at work.

Now that public attention is being focussed upon labour conditions, it becomes increasingly imperative that Governments should lay down the broad lines upon which they are prepared to allow contract labour. Nor must the labourer only be considered, the employer has the right to be heard in framing such conditions. In spite of much evidence to the contrary, I am still inclined to the belief that, as a class, the employers of labour everywhere in Africa detest as much as anyone labour conditions which are unfair. Even the Portuguese planters of San Thomé hate the slavery they practice, but by a long series of blunders they have been led into their present position.

The greatest care requires to be exercised if contract labour is to be kept free from the taint of slavery. The Indian authorities, in spite of every precaution, frequently find that the most reprehensible practices attach to the recruitment of labour for the East and West Indies. In the African continent, where domestic slavery is so widely prevalent, the need for watchfulness is a hundredfold greater.

RECRUITING

The conditions which govern the immigration of indentured labour should differ but little from those which cover local contracts, with the one exception that local labour contracts should always be of short duration—never longer than a year. Contracts for over-sea labour must be longer to cover the cost of transport, but even these are seldom satisfactory to either employer or employee for a period longer than three years. The Jamaican and Fiji indenture, which in practice involves a contract of ten years, is for many reasons highly objectionable.

The chief danger is beyond question with the recruiters. In India these men according to Mr. Broun,—an Indian Civil servant of large experience—“are the worst kind of men they could possibly have. They are generally very low class men.” They seem to bribe, deceive and bully by turns, anything indeed to bring the Indian coolie into their toils. In Portuguese West Africa the recruiter has for years been a slave-trader pure and simple, purchasing slaves from the Congo rebels, and also from the chiefs in the Rhodesian borderland. The Portuguese Government has now issued a regulation that all such recruiters must be duly licensed. In Belgian, German and French colonies, recruiting is undertaken very largely by Government officials.

Recruiting—whether by the irresponsible recruiter, the licensed agent, or by the Government official—calls for the closest attention of the Administration. The official will demand from a chief, the unofficial recruiter will bribe him for a given number of labourers; in the former case the chief fears to refuse, in the latter he becomes a party to a form of slavery.

The German official carries this operation through with the least amount of sentiment. I asked a planter in the Cameroons whether he obtained all the labour he wanted with a fair amount of ease. He looked at me in astonishment, and replied, “With ease, of course. I only notify the Government that I want labour and they bring it to me!” On another occasion, when I was discussing Portuguese administration with a French cotton planter from the Cunene, he began roundly abusing the Portuguese Government, and upon my inquiring wherein they differed from the German administration across the river, he replied, “The Germans stand no nonsense over labour. If the native villages are small and distant from the planters, they just burn down the villages and drive the natives nearer the planters. The Government can then quite easily make a list of the able-bodied men and supply them as they are required.” How far this may be a general characteristic of German treatment of native races, I cannot say, but what I have seen of German colonial methods does not impress me that their occupation is far removed from a sort of military despotism. In the matter of official recruitment of labour, the Germans are by far the most vigorous of any of the West African Powers. In this official recruitment the individual labourer concerned has very little say indeed; that he should desire to enjoy his freedom is apparently no concern of anyone, all he knows is that he has to work for the white man for a given period, and in German South West Africa the “contract” must be made “as long as possible.”

DOMESTIC SLAVERY