There must be continuity of service. That is a foregone conclusion. At present England thinks so little of the land that is hers that she puts a man in a place but for a year, and the political officer has no chance of learning the conditions and needs of the people over whom he rules; he is a rolling stone perpetually moving on. Then it is the height of folly to set one industry against another. All should surely, in a new country, be worked for the common good. For instance, there is a railway running between Kumasi and Sekondi, a Government railway, and behind Kumasi lies a vast extent of country unexplored and unexploited, with hardly a road in it. One would have thought that it would simply be wisdom and for the good of the whole community that the railway which is Government property should be used for the opening up of the country behind. Such is the plan in Canada; such is the practice in Australia. But in West Africa Government holds different views. Ashanti wants to build a road to the Northern Territories, a road such as the Germans have made all over Togo, but Government, instead of using the railway to further that project, charge such exorbitant freight on the road material, that the road-making has come to a standstill. It is typical of the country. Each department is pitted against the other, instead of one and all working for the good of the whole. The great mind that shall be at liberty to plan, that I fear sometimes lest the Germans and French have found, has yet to come.
There are many prejudices to break down, and first and foremost is the prejudice against the climate. Now I am not going to say that West Africa is a health resort, though I went there ill and came away in the rudest health. Still I do recognise that a tropical climate is hard for a European, more especially, perhaps, for people of these northern isles, to dwell in. A man cannot afford to burn the candle at both ends there, and if he would keep well he must of necessity live in all soberness and temperance. He does not always do that, but at present, whatever his illness is due to, it is always set down to the climate, and he is always sure of a full measure of pity.
Once I stayed for a short time next to a hospital, and the Europeans in the little town were much exercised because that hospital was so full. At last it occurred to me to ask what was the matter with the patients. I was not told what was the matter with them, but I found that the only one for whom anyone had much pity was the gentleman who had D.T. But even the worst of them you may be sure would have full measure of pity in England. “Poor fellow, that awful climate!”
Doctors tell me fever is rife, and I feel they must know more about it than I do, but it has been discovered in England that a life in the open air is an almost certain preventive of phthisis, and I cannot help thinking that a sane and sober life in the open air day and night would be a more certain preventive against fever than all the quinine and mosquito-proof rooms that were ever dreamt of. Observe, I say, a sane and sober life; and a sane and sober life means most emphatically that a man does not rush at his work and live habitually at high pressure. For this is a temptation that the better-class of man is peculiarly liable to in West Africa. “Let us succeed, let us get on, and let us get home”; and who, in the present conditions, can blame him for such sentiments. They are such as do any man credit, but they very often, in a hot climate more especially, spell destruction as surely as the wild dissipation of the reckless man who does not care. And there is only one cure for that—the cure the French and Germans are providing. The women must be encouraged to go out. Every woman who goes and stays makes it easier for the woman who follows in her footsteps, and I can see no reason why a woman should not stand the climate of West Africa as well as she does that of India. Women are the crying need; quiet, brave, sensible women who are not daunted because the black cook spoils the soup, or the black laundryman ruins the tablecloth, who will take an intelligent view of life, and will make what is so much needed—a home for their husbands. I know there are men who say that Africa is no place for a woman. I have met them again and again. Some of those men I respected very much; some I put in quite another category. The first evidently regarded a wife as a precious plaything, not as a creature who was helpmeet and friend, whose greatest joy must be to keep her marriage vows and share her husband's life for good or ill, whose life must of necessity be incomplete unless she were allowed to keep those marriage vows. The other sort, I am afraid, like the freedom that the absence of white women gives them, a freedom that is certainly not for the ultimate welfare of a colony, for the mingling of the European and the daughter of Ham should be unthinkable. It is good for neither people.
