A score of years ago many agreed with me that there was only one solution for our difficulties, a system of extensive coolie-importation. But in those days of excited passions and divided interests, when the export slave-trade and the émigration libre were still rampant on either coast, it was by no means easy to secure a fair hearing from the public. Not a small nor an uninfluential section, the philanthropic and the missionary, raised and maintained the cuckoo-cry, 'Africa for the Africans!'—worthy of its successor, 'Ireland for the Irish!' Others believed in imported labour, which has raised so many regions to the height of prosperity; but they did not see how to import it. And the general vis inertiæ, peculiar to hepatic tropical settlements, together with the unwillingness, or rather the inability, to undertake anything not absolutely necessary, made many of the colonists look upon the proposal rather as a weariness to the flesh than a benefit. A chosen few steadily looked forward to it; but they contented themselves with a theoretical prospect, and, perhaps wisely, did not attempt action.
The condition of the Coast, however, has radically changed during the last two decades. The export slave-trade has died the death, never to 'resurrect.' The immense benefits of immigration are known to all men, theoretically and practically. India and China have thrown open their labour-markets. And, finally, the difficulty of finding hands, for agriculture especially, in Western Africa has now come to a crisis.
Here I must be allowed a few words of preliminary explanation. In this matter, the reverse of Europe, Africa, whose social system is built upon slavery, holds field-work, and indeed all manual labour, degrading to the free man. The idea of a 'bold peasantry, its country's pride,' is utterly alien to Nigritia. The husband hunts, fights, and trades—that is to say, peddles—he leaves sowing and reaping to his wives and his chattels. Even a slave will rather buy him a slave than buy his own liberty. 'I am free enough,' he says; 'all I want is a fellow to serve me.' The natives of the Dark Continent are perfectly prepared to acknowledge that work is a curse; and, so far scripturally, they deem
Labour the symbol of man's punishment.
No Spaniard of the old school would despise more than a negro those new-fangled notions glorifying work now familiar to stirring and bustling North Europe. Nor will these people exert themselves until, like the Barbadians, they must either sweat or starve. Example may do something to stir them, but the mere preaching of industry is hopeless. I repeat: their beau idéal of life is to do nothing for six days in the week and to rest on the seventh. They are quite prepared to keep, after their fashion, 365 sabbaths per annum.
In the depths of Central Africa, where a European shows a white face for the first time, the wildest tribes hold markets once or twice a week; these meetings on the hillside or the lake-bank are crowded, and the din and excitement are extreme. Armed men, women, and children may be seen dragging sheep and goats, or sitting under a mat-shade through the livelong days before their baskets and bits of native home-spun, the whole stock in trade consisting perhaps of a few peppers, a heap of palm-nuts, or strips of manioc, like pipe-clay. This savage scene is reflected in the comparatively civilised stations all down the West African coast, where the inexperienced and ardent philanthrope is apt to suppose that the lazy, feckless habits are not nature-implanted but contracted by contact with a more advanced stage of society.
Again, in many parts of Africa the richest lands, and those most favourably situated, are either uninhabited or thinly peopled, the result of intestine wars or of the export slave-trade. Mr. Administrator Goulsbury, of Bathurst, during his adventurous march from the Gambia to the Sierra Leone River, crossed league after league of luxuriant ground and found it all desert. He says, [Footnote: Blue Book of 1882, quoted in Chap. X.] 'I think the fact has never been sufficiently recognised that Africa, and especially the west coast of the continent, is but very sparsely populated.... It is not only very limited, but is, I believe, if not stationary, actually decreasing in numbers.... I commend this fact to the consideration of those who indulge in day-dreams as to the almost unlimited increase of commerce which they fondly imagine is to be the result and reward of opening up the interior of the country.'
In regions richer than the Upper Gambia the disappearance of man is ever followed by a springing of bush and forest so portentous that a few hands are helpless and hopeless. Such is the case with the great wooded belt north of the Gold Coast, where even the second-growth becomes impenetrable without the matchet, and where the swamps and muds, bred and fed by torrential rains, bar the transit of travellers. The Whydah and Gaboon countries are notable specimens of once populous regions now all but deserted.
Nothing more surprising, to men who visit Africa for the first time, than the over-wealth of labour in Madeira and its penury on the Western Coast. At Bathurst they find ships loading or unloading by the work of the Golah women, whose lazy husbands live upon the hardly-earned wage. They see the mail-steamers landing ton after ton of Chinese rice shipped viâ England. The whole country with its humid surface and its reeking, damp-hot climate is a natural rice-bed. The little grain produced by it is far better than the imported, but there are no hands to work the ground. It is the same with salt, which is cheaper when brought from England: no man has the energy to lay out a salina; and, if he did, its outlay, under 'Free Trade,' would be greater than its income.
Steaming along the picturesque face of the Sierra Leone peninsula, the stranger remarks with surprise that its most fertile ridges and slopes hardly show a field, much less a farm, and that agriculture is confined to raising a little garden-stuff for the town-market. The peasant, the hand, is at a discount. The Sierra Leonite is a peddler-born who aspires to be a trader, a merchant; or he looks to a learned profession, especially the law. The term 'gentleman-farmer' has no meaning for him. Of late years a forcing process has been tried, and a few plantations have been laid out, chiefly for the purpose, it would appear, of boasting and of vaunting the new-grown industry at home. Mr. Henry M. Stanley remarks [Footnote: Coomassie and Magdala, p. 8], 'In almost every street in Sierra Leone I heard the voice of praise and local prayer from the numerous aspirants to clerkships and civil service employ; but I am compelled to deny that I ever heard the sound of mallet and chisel, of mortar, pestle, and trowel, the ringing sound of hammer on anvil, or roar of forge, which, to my practical mind, would have had a far sweeter sound. There is virgin land in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone yet untilled; there are buildings in the town yet unfinished; there are roads for commerce yet to be made; the trade of the African interior yet waits to be admitted into the capacious harbour of Sierra Leone for the enrichment of the fond nursing-mother of races who sits dreamily teaching her children how to cackle instead of how to work.'