West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

We have for Sierra Leone, fortunately, a scientific authority to refer to on this matter of the natural resources of the country, and the amount of the natural riches we may presume we can take into account when arranging fiscal matters. This authority is the report of Mr. Scott-Elliott on the district traversed by the Anglo-French Boundary Commission.[65]

Regarding mineral, the report states “that the only mineral of importance is iron, of which the country appears to contain a very large amount. There is a particularly rich belt of titaniferous iron ore in the hills behind Sierra Leone.”

Titaniferous iron is an excellent thing in its way, and good for steel making; but it exists nearer home and in cheaper worked regions than Sierra Leone.

The soil is grouped by the report into three classes:

“1. That of the plateaux and hills above 2,000, or sometimes descending to 1,000 feet, which is due to the disintegration of gneiss and granite rocks.

“2. The red laterite which covers almost invariably all the lower hills from the sea level to 1,000 or 2,000 feet.

“3. The alluvium, due either to the action of the mangroves along the coast, or to rivers and streams inland.”

These soils are capable of and do produce fine timber, rubber, oil and rice, and the general tropical food stuffs, but these, except the three first, are not very valuable export articles. Whether it is possible to enhance the agricultural value of the alluvium regions by growing tobacco, jute, coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar, for export, is by some authorities regarded as doubtful on account of the labour problem; but at any rate, if these industries were taken in hand on a large scale, a scale sufficient materially to alter the resources of a West African colony, they would require many years of fostering, and it would be long before they could contribute greatly to the resources of such a colony as Sierra Leone, in the face of the organised production and cheaper labour, wherewith the supply now in the markets of Europe could be competed with.

I have had the advantage of associating with German and Portuguese and French planters of coffee and cocoa. These are the planters who up to the present have been the most successful in West Africa. I do not say because they are better men, but because they have better soils and better labour than there is in our colonies. By these gentlemen I have been industriously educated in soils, &c.; and from what I have learnt about this matter I am bound regretfully to say that most of the soil of the English possessions is not really rich, taken in the main. There are in places patches of rich soil; and the greater part of our soil will be all the better this day 10,000 years hence; but at present the soil is mainly sour clay, slime and skin soils, skin soils over rock, skin soils over sour clay, skin soils over water-logged soil. We have, alas, not got the rich volcanic earth of Cameroon, Fernando Po, and San Thome and Principe. The natives who work the soil understand it fairly well, and negro agriculture is in a well-developed state, and their farms are most carefully tended and well kept. The rule along the Bight of Benin and Biafra is to change the soil of the farm at least every third year; this they do by cutting down a new bit of bush, burning the bush on the ground at the end of the dry season, and planting the crops. The old farm is then allowed to grow bush or long grass, whichever the particular district goes in for, until the time comes to work back on that piece of land again, when the bush which has grown is in its turn cut down and the ground replanted. This burning of the trees or grass is clearly regarded by the native agriculturist as manuring; it is practically the only method of manuring available for them in a country where cattle in quantities are not kept. It is a wasteful way with timber and rubber growing on the ground of course; but not so wildly wasteful as it looks, for your Negro agriculturist does not go to make his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate, you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.

The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra, which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are, the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguish agriculture, at any rate, a sufficient agriculture to support the local population; and it is not too much to say you can read on the face of the Accra plain famines to come. There is little reason to doubt that both the African deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari, are advancing towards the Equator. Round Loanda you come across a sand-logged region of some fifty square miles, where you get the gum shed by forests that have gone, humanly speaking, never to return; human agency is largely responsible, it is like sawing the branch of a tree partially through, and then the wind breaks it off. Forest destruction in lands adjacent to deserts is the same thing; the forest is destroyed to a certain extent, an extent that diminishes the rainfall and makes it unable to resist the desert winds, and then—finis.