[73] See Introduction to Folk Lore of the Fjort. R. E. Dennett. David Nutt, 1898.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot water, calls to memory the excellent saying, “As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb,” and goes on.
I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned, though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was early this year a distressing split between Liverpool and myself—whom I am aware they call behind my back “Our Aunt”—and I know they regard me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.
This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain’s axiom, that people always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most insignificant; so its Journal of Commerce went for me. The natural sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its Journal of Commerce. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, “Say what you like, you cannot please all of us;” had it not been for this I should not have written another line on the maladministration of West Africa beyond saying, “Call that Crown Colony system you are working there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one, only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs which I regard as a disgrace to my country.
Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the government there, and the rest of the things—the change of policy arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and look after what one might call domestic expenses—may be things unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid mass of expert knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party, and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in England an unused but great mass of knowledge among men of all classes who have personally dealt with West Africa—yet you do not work from that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round trying to find out “what the place is really like, you know.” I know personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work on diseases—the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her Sacrifices to the Coast—but went and read about West Africa, all by himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he always declares that the only book he found about this particular part was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, “Row on, brave men of Kru!” which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not by nature faddists, doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.
Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers, doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course they naturally don’t know about trade affairs, or whether the Public Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen’s academy system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to and disintegration of the native races it deals with.