I confess I like the African on the whole, a thing I never expected to do when I went to the Coast with the idea that he was a degraded, savage, cruel brute; but that is a trifling error you soon get rid of when you know him. The Kruboy is decidedly the most likeable of all Africans that I know. Wherein his charm lies is difficult to describe, and you certainly want the patience of Job, and a conscience made of stretching leather to deal with the Kruboy in the African climate, and live. In his better manifestations he reminds me of that charming personality, the Irish peasant, for though he lacks the sparkle, he is full of humour, and is the laziest and the most industrious of mankind. He lies and tells the truth in such a hopelessly uncertain manner that you cannot rely on him for either. He is ungrateful and faithful to the death, honest and thievish, all in one and the same specimen of him.
Ingratitude is a crime laid very frequently to the score of all Africans, but I think unfairly; certainly I have never had to complain of it, and the Krumen often show gratitude for good treatment in a grand way. The way those Kruboys of gallant Captain Lane helped him work Lagos Bar and save lives by the dozen from the stranded ships on it and hauled their “Massa” out from among the sharkey foam every time he went into it, on the lifeboat upsetting, would have done credit to Deal or Norfolk lifeboat men, but the secret of their devotion is their personal attachment. They do not save people out of surf on abstract moral principles. The African at large is not an enthusiast on moral principles, and one and all they’ll let nature take its course if they don’t feel keen on a man surviving.
Half the African’s ingratitude, although it may look very bad on paper, is really not so very bad; for half the time you have been asking him to be grateful to you for doing to, or giving him things he does not care a row of pins about. I have quite his feelings, for example, for half the things in civilised countries I am expected to be glad to get. “Oh, how nice it must be to be able to get about in cars, omnibuses and railway trains again!” Is it? Well I don’t think so, and I do not feel glad over it. Similarly, we will take an African case of ingratitude. A white friend of mine put himself to an awful lot of trouble to save the life of one of his sub-traders who had had an accident, and succeeded. It had been the custom of the man’s wife to bring the trader little presents of fowls, etc., from time to time, and some time after the accident he met the lady and told her he had noticed a falling off in her offerings and he thought her very ungrateful after what he had done for her husband. She grunted and the next morning she brings in as a present the most forlorn, skinny, one-and-a-half-feathered chicken you ever laid eye on, and in answer to the trader’s comments she said: “Massa, fo sure them der chicken no be ’ticularly good chicken, but fo sure dem der man no be ’ticularly good man. They go” (they match each other).
I have referred at great length to the Krumen because of their importance, and also because they are the natives the white men have more to do with as servants than any other; but methods of getting on with them are not necessarily applicable to dealing with other forms of African labourers, such as plantation hands in the Congo Français, Angola, and Cameroon. In Cameroon the Germans are now using largely the Batanga natives on the plantations; the Duallas, the great trading tribe in Cameroon River, being too lazy to do any heavy work; and they have also tried to import labourers from Togo Land, but this attempt was not a success, ending in the revolt of 1894, which lost several white lives. The public work is carried on, as it is in our own colonies, by the criminals in the chain-gang. The Germans have had many accusations hurled against them by people of their own nationality, but on the whole these “atrocities” have been much exaggerated and only half understood; and certainly have not amounted to anything like the things that have gone on in the “philanthropic” Congo Free State. The food given out by the German Government is the best Government rations given on the whole West Coast. When they have allowed me to have some of their native employés, as when I was up Cameroon Mountain, for example, I bought rations from the Government stores for them, and was much struck by the soundness and good quality of both rice and beef, and the rations they gave out to those Dahomeyans or Togolanders who revolted was so much more than they could, or cared to eat, that they used to sell much of it to the Duallas in Bell Town. This is not open to the criticism that the stuff was too bad for the Togolanders to eat, as was once said to me by a philanthropic German who had never been to the Coast, because the Duallas are a rich tribe, perfectly free traders in the matter, able to go to the river factories and buy provisions there had they wished to, and so would not have bought the Government rations unless they were worth having. The great point that has brought the Germans into disrepute with the natives employed by them is their military spirit, which gives rise to a desire to regulate everything; and that other attribute of the military spirit, nagging. You should never nag an African, it only makes him bothered and then sulky, and when he’s sulky he’ll lie down and die to spite you. But in spite of the Germans being over-given to this unpleasant habit of military regularity and so on, the natives from the Kru Coast and from Bassa and the French Ivory Coast return to them time after time for spells of work, so there must be grave exaggeration regarding their bad treatment, for these natives are perfectly free in the matter.
The French use Loango boys for factory hands, and these people are very bright and intelligent, but as a M’pongwe, who knew them well, said: “They are much too likely to be devils to be good too much” and are undoubtedly given to poisoning, which is an unpleasant habit in a house servant. Their military force are composed of Senegalese Laptot, very fine, fierce fellows, superior, I believe, as fighting men to our Hausas, and very devoted to, and well treated by, their French officers.
That the Frenchman does not know how to push trade in his possessions, the trade returns, with the balance all on the wrong side, clearly show; still he does know how to get possession of Africa better than we do, and this means he knows how to deal with the natives. The building up of Congo Français, for example, has not cost one-third of the human lives, black or white, that an equivalent quantity of Congo Belge has, nor one-third of the expense of Uganda or Sierra Leone. It is customary in England to dwell on the commercial failure, and deduce from it the erroneous conclusion that France will soon leave it off when she finds it does not pay. This is an error, because commercial success - the making the thing pay - is not the French ideal in the affair. It is our own, and I am the last person to say our ideal is wrong; but it is not the French ideal, and I am the last person to say France is wrong either. There may exist half a hundred or more right reasons for doing anything, and the reasons France has for her energetic policy in Africa are sound ones; for they are the employment of her martial spirits where their activity will not endanger the State, the stowing of these spirits in Paris having been found to be about as advisable as stowing over-proof spirits and gunpowder in a living-room with plenty of lighted lucifers blazing round; and her other reason is the opportunity African enterprise affords for sound military training. You will often hear in England regarding French annexation in Africa, “Oh! let her have the deadly hole, and much good may it do her.” France knows very well what good it will do her, and she will cheerfully take all she is allowed to get quietly, as a sop for her quietness regarding Egypt, and she will cheerfully fight you for the rest - small blame to her. She knows Africa is a superb training ground for her officers. Sham fights and autumn manoeuvres have a certain value in the formation of a fighting army, but the whole of these parlour-games, put together in a ten-year lump, are not to be compared to one month’s work at real war, to fit an army for its real work, and France knows well the real work will come again some day - not far off - for her army. How soon it comes she little cares, for she has no ideal of Peace before her, never has had, never will have, and the next time she tries conclusions with one of us Teutonic nations, she will be armed with men who have learned their trade well on the burning sands of Senegal, and they will take a lot of beating. We do not require Africa as a training ground for our army; India is as magnificent a military academy as any nation requires; but we do require all the Africa we can get, West, East, and South, for a market, and it is here we clash with France; for France not only does not develop the trade of her colonies for her own profit, but stamps trade at large out by her preferential tariffs, etc.; so that we cannot go into her colonies and trade freely as she and Germany can come into ours. We can go into her colonies and do business with French goods, and this is done; but French goods are not so suitable, from their make, nor capable of being sold at a sufficient profit to make a big trade. But France throws few obstacles, if any, in the matter of plantation enterprise. Still this enterprise being so hampered by the dearth of good labour is not at the present time highly remunerative in Africa.
FOREIGN LABOUR. - Several important authorities have advocated the importation of foreign labour into Africa. This seems to me to be a fatal error, for several reasons. For one thing, experience has by now fully demonstrated that the West Coast climate is bad for men not native to it, whether those men be white, black, or yellow. The United Presbyterian Mission who work in Old Calabar was founded with the intention of inaugurating a mission which, after the white men had established it, was to be carried on by educated Christian blacks from Jamaica, where this mission had long been established and flourished. But it was found that these men, although primarily Africans, had by their deportation from Africa in the course, in some cases, of only one generation, lost the power of resistance to the deadly malarial climate their forefathers possessed, and so the mission is now carried on by whites; not that these good people have a greater resistance to the fever than the Jamaica Christians, but because they are more devoted to the evangelisation of the African; and what black assistance they receive comes, with the exception of Mrs. Fuller, from a few educated Effiks of Calabar.
The Congo Free State have imported as labourers both West Indian negroes - principally Barbadians - and Chinamen. In both cases the mortality has been terrible - more than the white mortality, which competent authorities put down for the Congo at 77 per cent., and the experiment has therefore failed. It may be said that much of this mortality has arisen from the way in which these labourers have been treated in the Free State, but that this is not entirely the case is demonstrated by the case of the Annamese in Congo Français, who are well treated. These Annamese are the political prisoners arising from the French occupation of Tong-kin; and the mortality among one gang of 100 of them who were employed to make the path through swampy ground from Glass to Libreville - a distance of two and a half miles - was seventy, and this although the swamp was nothing particularly bad as swamps go, and was swept by sea-air the whole way.
Even had the experiment of imported labour been successful for the time being, I hold it would be a grave error to import labour into Africa. For this reason, that Africa possesses in herself the most magnificent mass of labour material in the whole world, and surely if her children could build up, as they have, the prosperity and trade of the Americas, she should, under proper guidance and good management, be able to build up her own. But good guidance and proper management are the things that are wanted - and are wanting. It is impossible to go into this complicated question fully here, and I will merely ask unprejudiced people who do not agree with me, whether they do not think that as so much has been done with one African tribe, the Krumen - a tribe possessing no material difference in make of mind or body from hundreds of other tribes, but which have merely been trained by white men in a different way from other tribes - that there is room for great hope in the native labour supply? And would not a very hopeful outlook for West Africa regarding the labour question be possible, if a régime of common sense were substituted for our present one?
This is of course the missionary question - a question which I feel it is hopeless to attempt to speak of without being gravely misunderstood, and which I therefore would willingly shirk mentioning, but I am convinced that the future of Africa is not to be dissociated from the future of its natives by the importation of yellow races or Hindoos; and the missionary question is not to be dissociated from the future of the African natives; and so the subject must be touched on; and I preface my remarks by stating that I have a profound personal esteem for several missionaries, naturally, for it is impossible to know such men and women as Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp, of the Gold Coast, Mme. and M. Jacot, and Mme. and M. Forget, and M. Gacon, and Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, and many others without recognising at once the beauty of their natures, and the nobility of their intentions. Indeed, taken as a whole, the missionaries must be regarded as superbly brave, noble-minded men who go and risk their own lives, and often those of their wives and children, and definitely sacrifice their personal comfort and safety to do what, from their point of view, is their simple duty; but it is their methods of working that have produced in West Africa the results which all truly interested in West Africa must deplore; and one is bound to make an admission that goes against one’s insular prejudice - that the Protestant English missionaries have had most to do with rendering the African useless.