Faidherbe was also one of those men who get possessed by a belief in the future of West Africa, regardless of any state of dilapidation they may find it in, and who have the power of infusing their enthusiasm into the minds of others; and he roused France to the importance of Senegal, saying prophetically, “Our possession on the West Coast of Africa is possibly the one of all our colonies that has before it the greatest future, and it deserves the whole sympathy and attention of the Empire.”
These were words more likely to inspire France or any other reasonable Power with a desire to give Senegal attention, than those used by the previous French visitor there, M. Sanguin, in 1785, who, speaking of the island of St. Louis, says it consists entirely of burning sands on whose barren surface you sometimes meet with scattered flints thrown out among their ballast by ships, and the ruins of buildings formerly erected by Europeans; but he remarks it is not surprising the sands are barren, for the air is so strongly impregnated with salt, which pervades everything and consumes even iron in a very short space of time. The heat he reports unpleasant, and rendered thus more so by the reflection from the sand. If the island were not all it might be, one might still hope for better things ashore on the mainland, but not according to M. Sanguin. The mainland is covered with sand and overrun with mangles, not the sort, you understand, that vulgar little English boys used to state their mothers had sold and invested the money in a barrel organ, but what we now call mangroves; then, mentioning that the St. Louis water supply was the cause of most of those maladies which carry off the Europeans so rapidly, that at the end of every three years the colony has a fresh set of inhabitants, M. Sanguin discourses on the charms of West African night entertainments in a most feeling and convincing way, stating that there was an infinity of gnats called mosquitoes, which exist in incredible quantities. He does not mind them himself, oh dear no! being a sort of savage, he says, totally indifferent to the impression he may create in the fair sex, so that, if you please, he smears himself over with butter, which preserves him from the mosquitoes’ impertinent stings. How he came by a sufficiency of butter for this purpose I won’t pretend to know; but he knew mosquitoes, for impertinent is a perfect word for them. M. Sanguin, however, was not the sort of man, with all his ability and enterprise, to advertise Senegal successfully to France. Whatever Frenchman would care to go to a land where he needs must be sufficiently indifferent to the fair sex to smear himself with butter! Dire and awful dangers and miscellaneous horrors, even to being carried off by maladies among mangles in an atmosphere stiff with mosquitoes, but not that!
Now Faidherbe was different. Remember to the honour of the man he started with the above-described environment, but he took the grand tone and did not dwell on local imperfections; the burning sands of Senegal he mentioned, as all who know them are, by a natural constraint, forced, as Azurara would say, to do, but he said our intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us;[50] and with such words, to his credit and to the credit of La France, he spoke to her heart; and he spoke truly, for with all its failures, with all the fearful loss of the lives of Frenchmen, Senegal is a grand thing, and it is a great thing for France, for from it has risen her masterdom over the Western Soudan—a work also inaugurated by Faidherbe, through his support of Lieutenant Maze, who reached the Niger. Practical in his work, Faidherbe was also—by rebuilding the fort at Medina—the annexation of the Oulof country (1856); the institution of a battalion of native Tirailleurs (1857); the telegraph line between St. Louis and Goree (1862); the construction of the harbour at Darkar and the erection of a first-class lighthouse at Cape Verd (1864); and the annexation of the kingdom of Cayore (1865). A grand record! and one that would be grander for France were it not for the mismanagement that followed Faidherbe’s rule in commercial and financial matters.
The want of financial success in her enterprise in West Africa is a matter that has constantly irritated France. She is continually saying: “English possessions on that Coast pay, why should not mine?” It is not my business to obtrude on her an answer, I merely dwell on the subject because I clearly see there are creeping nowadays into our own methods of managing Africa, those very same causes of financial failure that have afflicted her, namely, too high tariffs, too exaggerated views of the immediate profits to be got from those regions, and certain unfair methods of dealing with natives.
In attempting, however, to account for the trade from the French possessions in West Africa being proportionately so small to the immense area of country, the make of the country and its native inhabitants must be taken into consideration. Enormous districts of the French possessions are, to put it mildly, not fertile, and capable of producing in the way of a marketable commodity only gum, which is gathered from the stems of the acacia horrida. It is an excellent gum, and there is plenty of this acacia, and other gum-yielding acacias, but pickers are not so plentiful, particularly now French authorities object to native enterprise taking the form of raiding districts for slaves to employ in the industry. Other enormous districts, however, are as fertile as need be, and densely forested with forests rich in magnificent timber and rubber wealth. The inhabitants, a most important factor in the prosperity or otherwise, of West African regions, are varied, but roughly speaking, we may say France possesses the whole of the tawny Moors, and tawny Moors have their good points and their bad. Their good point, from our present point of view, is their commercial enterprise. From the earliest historical account we have of them to the present day, it has been their habit to suck the trade out of the rich and fertile districts, carry it across the desert, and trade it with the white Moors, who, in their turn, carried it to the Mediterranean and Red Sea ports. The opening of the West Coast seaboard trade, inaugurated by the Portuguese, has acted as a commercial loss to the tawny Moors during the past 400 years, and must be held, in a measure, accountable for the decay of the great towns of Timbuctoo, Jenne, Mele, and so on, though only in a measure, for herein comes the bad point of the inhabitants of the Western Soudan, from our point of view, namely, their devotion to religious differences and politics, which prevents their attending to business. As this state of internecine war came on about the same period as the opening to the black Moors and negroes of a market direct with European traders in the Bight of Benin, it hurried the tawny Moors to commercial decay. Timbuctoo never recovered the blow dealt her by the Moorish conquest in 1591. At the breaking up of the Empire of Askia the Great, revolt and war raged through the region, Jenne revolted in the west, an example followed by the Touaregs Fulah and Malinkase tribes. Both north and south were thrown into confusion, and Timbuctoo, their intermediary, finding her commerce injured, rebelled in her turn. She was conquered and brutally repressed by the Moorish conquerors in 1594. A terrible dearth provoked by a lack of rain visited the town, and her inhabitants were reduced to eating the corpses of animals, and even of men. This was followed by the pestilence of 1618,[51] but through this arose any quantity of wars and upheavals of political authority among the tawny Moors in the early days of European intercourse with the West African Coast. They assumed a more acute, religious form in our own century, or to be more accurate just at the end of the eighteenth, when Shazkh Utham Danfodio arose among the Fulahs as a religious reformer, and a warrior missionary. He was a great man at both, but as a disturber of traffic still greater, a thing that cannot be urged to so great an extent against the other great Muslam missionary Umaru l’Haji. Still his gathering together an army of 20,000 men in 1854-55, and going about with them on a series of proselytizing expeditions against any tribe in the Upper Niger and Senegal region he found to be in an unconverted state, was little better than a nuisance to the French authorities at that time. Danfodio’s affairs have fallen into the hands of England to arrange, and very efficiently her great representative in West Africa, the Royal Niger Company, has arranged them. But for our Danfodio and his consequences, France has had twenty, and she has dealt with them both gallantly and patiently. But there will always be, as far as one can see, trouble for France with her tawny Moors, now that the sources of their support are cut off from them by many of the districts they once drew their trade from—the sea-board districts of the Benin Bight, like Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos, in the English Niger—being in the hands of a nation whose commercial instincts enable it to see the benefits of lower tariffs than France affects. Even were our tariffs to be raised to-morrow, the trade would again begin to drain back into the hands of its old owners, the tawny Moors, for the Western Soudan is being pacified by France. If some way is not devised of providing the tawny Moors with trade sufficient to keep them, things must go badly there, owing to the unfertility of the greater part of their country and the increase of the population arising from the pacification of the Western Soudan, which France is effecting. I will dwell no longer on this sketch of the history of the advance of France in Western Africa. We in England cannot judge it fairly. Nationally, her honour there is our disgrace; commercially, her presence is our ruin.
Two things only stand out from these generalisations. The Royal Niger Company shows how great England can be when she is incarnate in a great man, for the Royal Niger Company is so far Sir George Taubman-Goldie. The other thing that stands out unstained by comatose indifference to the worth of West Africa to England is her Commerce as represented by her West Coast traders, who have held on to the Coast since the sixteenth century with a bulldog grip, facing death and danger, fair weather and foul. Fine things both these two things are, but they do not understand each other; they would certainly not understand me regarding their affairs were I to talk from June to January, so I won’t attempt to, but speak to the general public, who so far have understood neither Sir George Goldie, nor the West Coast trader, nor for the matter of that their mutual foe France, and I beg to say that France has not been so destructive an enemy to England there as England’s own folly has been as incarnate in the parliamentary resolution of 1865; that the achievements of France in exploration in the Western Soudan make one of the grandest pages of all European efforts in Africa; that the influence of France over the natives has been, is, and, I believe, will remain good. “Our intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us,” said Faidherbe. So far as the natives are concerned, this has been the policy of France in Western Africa. So far as diplomatic relations with ourselves, humanly speaking, it has not; but diplomacy is diplomacy, and the amount of probity—justice—in diplomacy is a thing that would not at any period cover a threepenny-bit. It is a form of war that shows no blood, but which has not in it those things which sanctify red war, honour and chivalry. Nevertheless, diplomacy is an essential thing in this world; it does good work, it saves life, it increases prosperity, it advances the cause of religion and knowledge, and therefore the World must not be hard on it for its being—what it is. Personally, I prefer contemplating other things, and so I turn to Commerce.
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