West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

All persons convicted of offences other than capital, should be, at the discretion of the magistrates, sentenced to a fine, or so many weeks’ labour. The whole of this labour should be devoted to the Public Works Department of the Municipality, not of the State, and above all, should not be sent away up into the hinterland, where there will be no one to look after it as convict labour requires. Quite apart from this, there should be the State Labour Department, whose jurisdiction would extend over both colony and hinterland, and whose white officials should be a distinct line in the service; one or more of these officials should be in every hinterland sub-commissioner’s town. They would be recruiters and drillers of labourers, just as you now have recruiters and drillers of soldiers there; and a requisition should be made to all the chiefs, to draft into this labour army any person, under their rule, who might be anxious to serve as a labourer; and they should also have power to enrol any labour volunteer recruits that might come into the town, provided the chiefs could not show a satisfactory reason against their so doing. This labour army should be divided up into suitably sized gangs, with a head man elected by his gang, and be employed in the transport work required by the Government, or let out by the Government to private individuals requiring labour within the district, or drafted to other English colonies on the Coast, if occasion required, to do certain jobs—I do not say for certain spaces of time, because piecework is the best system for West Africa. An attempt should be made gradually to induce the hinterland chiefs to adopt the Kru social system, wherein every man serves so many years as a labourer, then, about the age of thirty, joins the army and becomes a compound soldier-policeman, ending up in honour and glory as a local magistrate. But it must be remembered that domestic slavery is not a great institution among the Kru tribes, as it is amongst the hinterland tribes in our colonies; the Kru system could not, therefore, be immediately introduced.

We now come to the question of where the revenue is to come from to support this system. There is no difficulty about that in itself; the difficulty comes in in the method to be employed in its collection. When one has a chartered trading company it is, of course, a simple matter; when you have a Crown Colony it is done by means of the custom-house system. The alternative system, however, is not a chartered company; under it individual firms, so long as they can show sufficient capital and good faith, would work the details of their trade out there as freely and privately as in England. I think every effort should be made to do away in West Africa with the custom-house system as it exists in English Crown Colonies. In Cameroon it is better, but in our Crown Colonies and also in the Niger Coast Protectorate it is ruinous to the tempers of ship masters and shippers, and the cause of a great waste of time—decidedly one of the main causes of the undue length of voyages to and from the Coast.

It seems to me that the revenue of our West African possessions must be a charge on the trade; and that this charge should, as much as possible, be collected in Europe from the shippers instead of from their representatives on the Coast. If I were king in Babylon, I would make all the trade to West Africa pass through Liverpool, and pay its customs there to a custom-house of the Grand Council, or through the English ports of the other chambers represented on the Grand Council—each chamber being responsible for the trade of its port. I am aware that this would cause difficulty with the increasing continental trade; but this would be obviated by affiliating Hamburg and Havre to the Council and giving into their hands the collections of the dues at those ports. The Grand Council should fix annually the amount of the trade tax, and it should have at its disposal for this matter the figures sent home by the separate district commissioners in West Africa. The sub-commissioner of a district should know the amount of trade his district was doing, and be paid a commission on it to stimulate his interest. If the goods used in his district were delivered at one warehouse in his town, he would have little difficulty in getting the figures, which he should pass on to the district commissioner, who should forward them to the Grand Council with report in duplicate to the Governor-General, so that that officer might keep his finger on the pulse of the prosperity of each district; similarly, the municipalities should report to him the trade done in the towns under their control.

In addition, the Government, that is to say, the Grand Council, should take over the monopoly of the tobacco import and the timber export. By using tobacco in the same way as European governments use coinage, an immense revenue could be very cheaply obtained. The Grand Council should sell the tobacco to the individual traders who work the West African markets, allowing no other tobacco to be used in the trade; this revenue also could be collected in Europe.

The timber industry should, I think, be under governmental control, both for the sake of providing the Government with revenue and for the sake of protecting the forests from destruction in those districts where forest destruction is a danger to the common weal, by weakening the forest barriers against the Sahara.

The return that the Government should make for these monopolies to the independent trader should be, among other things, transport. In the course of a few years the Government would have in hand a sufficient surplus to build a pier across the Gold Coast surf. It is possible to build piers across the West Coast surf, for the French have done it. I would not advocate one great and mighty pier, that ocean-going steamers could go alongside, for all the Gold Coast ports, but a set of T-headed piers where surf boats or lighters could discharge, and the employment of stout steam tugs to tow surf boats and lighters to and fro between the lighters and the pier.

Then again, every mile of available waterway inland should be utilised, and patrolled by Government cargo boats of the lawn-mower or flat-iron brand, as the Chargeurs-Reunis are subsidised to patrol the Ogowé. On the Gold Coast you have the Volta and the Ancobra available for this; in Sierra Leone and Lagos you have many waterways penetrating inland.

Land transport should also be in the hands of the Government, and goods delivered free of extra charge at the towns of the sub-commissioners; this could be done by the Labour Department. When sufficient surplus revenue was in hand, light railways on the French system should be built, similarly delivering, free of freight, the goods belonging to the inland registered traders, but charging freight for passengers and local goods traffic. A telegraph and postal service should also be another source of revenue, if thrown open at a low charge to the general public. If there is a telegraph office in West Africa, where telegrams can be sent at a reasonable rate, the general public will throw away a lot of money on it in a fiscally fascinating way.

These various sources of revenue will place in the hands of the Grand Council a sufficient revenue, and if that revenue is expended by them in developing methods of transport, I am confident that the trade of the district, in the hands of the private firms, will healthily expand, alike rapidly and continuously, and thereby supply more revenue, which, expended with equal wisdom, will again increase the trade and prosperity of the region, and make West Africa into a truly great possession.

The things I depend on for the development of West Africa, are mainly two. First, the sub-commissioner’s town, acting in fellowship with the chiefs’ council of the district. The example of that town will stimulate the best of the chiefs to emulation; it will by every self-respecting chief, be regarded as stylish to have clean wide streets and shops, a telegraph and post-office, and things like that. Seeing that his elder brother, the sub-commissioner, has a line of telegraph connecting him with the district commission town, he will want a line of telegraph too. By all means let him have it; let him have the electric light and a telephone, if he feels he wants it, and will pay for it; but don’t force these things, let them come, natural like. The great thing, however, in the sub-commissioner’s town is that it should be so ruled and governed that it does not become a thing like our Coast towns now, [sink-holes] of moral iniquity, that stink in the nose of a respectable African—things he hates to see his sons and daughters and people go down into.