Secondly, I depend on municipal Government on the lines I have laid down for the Coast towns. The Government of these municipalities would be in the hands of the representatives of the trading firms, and the more important native traders—people, as I hold, perfectly capable of dealing with affairs, and having a community of interests.
The great difficulty in arranging any system for the government of West Africa lies not in the true difficulties this region presents, but in the fictitious difficulties that are the growth of years of mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentation. That great mass of mutual distrust, so that to-day down there white man distrusts white man and black, black man distrusts black man and white, may seem on a superficial review to be justified. But if you go deeper you will find that this distrust is the mere product of folly and ignorance, and is therefore removable.
The great practical difficulty lies in arranging a system whereby the white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the competition among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders, knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years, who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt, which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against adulteration of produce, &c., and to realise that by gaining these things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed to urge further governmental expenditure.
If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they do, I beg them to bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would be all the better for a cheap funeral.
Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town regions—the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised—is a work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department, with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to colour in the officials employed in the municipalities. In the sub-commissioners’ towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they did honest work.
The consideration of the African side of this system of administration is a thing into which—after all the long recitation I have inflicted on you concerning African religion and law—I am not justified in plunging here. I will merely, therefore, lay before you a statement of African Common Law, so that you may see the African principle through which the Landes Hoheit—the government of Africa by Africans—would work. I am confident that the thing—the African principle—is so sound that it could work; there is no need for us to put our Commerce under it, any more than there is need that we should attempt to put the African’s private property under our own law; but a healthy Commerce and a healthy Law should co-operate, and can co-operate.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] Preface by Sir George Goldie to Vandeleur’s Campaigning on the Upper Nile and Niger, 1898.
[78] The time which a man ought to be expected to remain in West Africa is difficult to determine—representatives of trading firms are expected to remain out two years, and the mortality among them is certainly no higher than among the officials with their twelve months’ service. It is contended by the commercial party that it takes a man several months after returning from furlough to get into working order again, that under the twelve months’ system no sooner has he done this than he is off on furlough again, in short that the system is foolish and wasteful in the extreme. On the other hand the advocates of the short service plan contend that a man is not fit for work at all after twelve months in West Africa, and that if he is not definitely ill, he has at any rate lost all energy. Personally, I fancy it depends on the individual, and that with a definite policy the short service plan will be quite safe.