CHAPTER XXV—THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITIES
The enormous wealth of West Africa—The waste—The need of some settled scheme—Competitive examination for the West-African Civil Service—The men who come after the pioneers—One industry set against another—The climate—The need of women—The dark peoples we govern—The isolation of the cultivated black man—The missionaries—The Roman Catholics—The Basel missionaries—West Africa the country of raw material—An answer to the question, “What shall I do with my son?”—The fascination of Africa.
And so I have visited 'the land I had dreamed about as a little child in far-away Australia. But no, I have never been to that land. It is a wonderful country that lies with the long, long thoughts of childhood, with the desires of youth, with the hopes that are in the heart of the bride when she draws the curtain on her marriage morning. Beautiful hopes, beautiful desires, never to be fulfilled. We know, as we grow older, that some of our longings will never be granted exactly in the way we have expected them to be granted, but that does not mean that good things will not come to us, though not in the guise in which we have looked for them. Therefore, though I have never visited Carlo's country, and never can visit it, still I have seen a very goodly land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land worthy of a high place in the possessions of any nation, and yet, I think, a land that has been grievously misjudged.
Why does no one speak of the enormous wealth of West Africa? When America was but a faint dream of the adventurous voyager, when Australia was not on the maps, the west coast of Africa was exploited by the nations growing in civilisation for her wealth of gold, and slaves, and ivory, and the wealth that was there in those long-ago days is there to-day. There is gold as of yore, gold for the working; slaves, but we recognise the rights of man now and use them only as cheap labour; and there is surely raw material and vegetable products that should bring food and wealth to the struggling millions of the older world. The African peasant is passing rich on threepence a day, and within reach of his hand grow rubber and palm oil, groundnuts and cotton, cocoa and hemp, and cocoa-nuts and all manner of tropical fruits. These things, I know, appertain to other lands, but here they are simply flung out with a tropical lavishness, and till this century I doubt if they have been counted of any particular value. If the English colonies of West Africa were cultivated by men with knowledge and patience, bringing to the work but a fiftieth of the thought and attention that is given to such matters in France, the return would be simply amazing. I have seen 25 per cent, of an ignorant peasant community's cocoa harvest wasted because there were no roads; I have seen cocoa-nut plantations useless, “because the place isn't suitable,” when in all probability some parasite was killing the palms. I have seen lives and money lost in a futile endeavour to teach the native to grow cotton, when the climate and conditions cried out that cocoa was the proper product to be encouraged.
What the portion of West Africa I know well wants is to be worked on some settled scheme, a scheme made by some far-seeing mind that shall embrace, not the conditions of five years hence, but of fifty years hence; the man who works there should be laying the foundations of a plan that shall come to fruition in the time of our children's children, that should be still in sound working order in their grandchildren's time. The wheat of the Canadian harvest-field may bring riches in a year, the wool of Australia's plains wealth in two or three, but the trees of the African forest have taken hundreds of years to their growth, and, when they are grown, are like no other trees in the world. With them none may compare. So may these tropical dependencies of England be when rightly used, they shall come to their full growth. But we must remember they are tropical dependencies. The ordinary Englishman, it seems to me, is apt to expect to gather apples from a cocoa-nut palm, potatoes from a groundnut vine, and to rail because he cannot find those apples and potatoes. He will never find them, and the man who expects them is the man in the wrong place.
I hope some day soon to find there is a competitive examination for positions in the West-African Civil Service. Does any man grumble who has won a place in the Indian Civil Service? I think not. A competitive examination may not be the ideal way of choosing your political staff, but as yet we have evolved none better. The man who passes high in a competitive examination must at least have the qualities of industry and self-denial, and who will deny that these are good qualities to bring to the governing of a subject people?
It is curious to watch English methods of colonisation, and whether we will or no we must sit in judgment upon them. The first men who go out are sometimes good, sometimes bad, but all have this saving grace—that strong spirit of adventure, that dash and go which made England a colonising nation and mistress of the seas. It would be like asking a great cricketer to play tiddly-winks to ask one of the men who fought for Ashanti to take part in a competitive examination. They have competed and passed in a far sterner school. But the men who follow in the footsteps of the pioneers are sometimes made of different stuff. They are often the restless, discontented ones of the nation, men who complain of the land they leave, complain of the land they come to, find no good in West Africa, seek for no good, exaggerate its drawbacks, are glad to regard themselves as martyrs and to give the country an evil name. Such men, I think, a competitive examination would weed out.