West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

[To face page 297.

The importance to us of such markets as Africa affords us seems to me to give us one sufficient reason for taking over these tropical African regions. I do not use the word justification in the matter, it is a word one has no right to use until we have demonstrated that our interference with the native population and our endeavours for our own population have ended in unmixed good; but it is a sound reason, as good a reason as we had in overrunning Australia and America. Indeed, I venture to think it is a better one, for the possession of a great market enables thousands of men, women and children to live in comfort and safety in England, instead of going away from home and all that home means; and this commercial reason,—for all its not having a high falutin sound in it,—is the one and only expansion reason we have that in itself desires the national peace and prosperity of the native races with whom it deals.

It seems to me no disgrace to England that her traders are the expanding force for her in Africa. There are three classes of men who are powers to a State—the soldier, the trader, and the scientist. Their efforts, when co-ordinated and directed by the true statesman—the religious man in the guise of philosopher and poet—make a great State. Being English, of course modesty prevents my saying that England is a great State. I content myself by saying that she is a truly great people, and will become a great State when she is led by a line of great statesmen—statesmen who are not only capable, as indeed most of our statesmen have been, of seeing the importance of India and the colonies, but also capable of seeing the equal importance to us of markets.

England’s democracy must learn the true value of the markets that our fellow-countrymen have so long been striving to give her, and must appreciate the heroism those men have displayed, only too often unrequited, never half appreciated by the sea-wife, who “breeds a breed of rovin’ men and casts them over sea.” Those who go to make new homes for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her want of interest.

I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded better, with advantage to all concerned—Malaya, British Guiana, New Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. If you examine the matter I think you will see that all these regions we have failed in are possessed of unhealthy climates, while the regions we have succeeded with are those possessed of healthy climates. The reason for this difference in our success seems to me to lie mainly in our deficiency of statesmanship at home. We really want the humid tropic zone more than other nations do; a climate that eats up steel and hardware as a rabbit eats lettuces is an excellent customer to a hardware manufacturing town, &c. A region densely populated by native populations willing to give raw trade stuffs in exchange for cotton goods, which they bury or bang out on stones in the course of washing or otherwise actively help their local climate to consume, is invaluable to a textile manufacturing town. Yet it would be idle to pretend that our Government has realised these things. Our superior ability as manufacturers, and the great enterprise of our men who have gone out to conquer the markets of the tropics, have given us all the advantages we now enjoy from those markets, but they could do no more; and now, when we are confronted by the expansion of other European nations, those men and their work are being lost to England. Our fellow-countrymen will go anywhere and win anywhere to-day just as well as yesterday, where the climate of the region allows England to throw enough of them in at a time to hold it independent of the home government; but in places where we cannot do this, in the unhealthy tropical regions where those men want backing up against the aggression on their interests of foreign governments, well, up to the present they have not had that backing up, and hence we have lost to England in England the advantages we so easily might have secured.

An American magazine the other day announced in a shocked way that I could evidently “swear like a trooper!” I cannot think where it got the idea from; but really!—well, of course I don’t naturally wish to, but I cannot help feeling that if I could it would be a comfort to me; for when I am up in the great manufacturing towns, England properly so called, their looms and forges seem to me to sing the same song to the great maker of Fate—we must prosper or England dies. And there is but one thing they can prosper on—for there is but one feeding ground for them and all the thousands of English men, women and children dependent on them—the open market of the World. To me the life blood of England is her trade. Her soul, her brain is made of other things, but they should not neglect or spurn the thing that feeds them—Commerce—any more than they should undervalue the thing that guards them—the warrior.

But, you will say, we will not be tied down to this commercial reason as England’s reason for taking over the administration of tropical Africa. My friend, I really think on the whole you had better—it’s reasonable. I grant that it has not been the reason why English missionaries and travellers have risked their lives for the good of Africa, or of human knowledge, but as a ground from which to develop a policy of administering the country this commercial one is good, because it requires as aforesaid the prosperity of the African population; and your laudable vanities in the matter I cannot respect, when I observe right in the middle of the map of Africa an enormous region called the Congo Free State. I have reason to believe that that region was opened up by Englishmen—Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, Grant and Burton. If you had been so truly keen on suppressing Arab slavery and native cannibalism, there was a paradise for you! Yet, you hand it over to some one else. Was it because you thought some one else could do it better? or—but we will leave that affair and turn to the consideration of the possibility of administering tropical Africa, governmentally, to the benefit of all concerned.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] Loanda has now a gas company, and the installation is well under way, under Belgian supervision.