My African Journey

by Winston Churchill

Unless these new elements in the economic life of mankind can be scientifically and harmoniously controlled and assimilated, great and novel dangers menace alike the Asiatic and the European he supplants. On the one hand we see the possible exploitation under various unhealthy conditions of immense masses of Asiatic labour, to the moral injury of the employer and to the degradation and suffering of the employed; on the other the overturn of the standards of living laboriously achieved or long obstinately battled for among Europeans. Superadded to these we must foresee the confusion of blood, of manners, of morals, amounting, where operative upon any extensive scale, almost to the disintegration of the existing order of society. And behind—very close behind—lie the appeals to force, by mobs or Empires, to decide in a brutal fashion the brutal question which of two sets of irreconcilable interests shall prevail. It is not easy to measure the degree of political instability that will be introduced into international relations, when the subjects of a powerful military and naval State are continually exposed to penal legislation and open violence, and into private life when the white artisan is invited to acquiesce in his own extinction, in virtue of laws which he himself controls, by a competitor whom, he believes, he could strike down with his hands.

Yet the Asiatic, and here I also include the African native, has immense services to render and energies to contribute to the happiness and material progress of the world. There are spacious lands whose promise can never be realized, there are unnumbered harvests which can never be garnered, without his active co-operation. There are roads and railways and reservoirs which only he can make. There are mines and forests which will slumber for ever without his aid. The mighty continent of tropical Africa lies open to the colonizing and organizing capacities of the East. All those new products which modern industry insistently demands are offered in measureless abundance to the West—if only we could solve the Sphinx's riddle in its newest form.

And is it after all beyond our reach to provide, if not a perfect, at any rate a practical answer? There ought to be no insuperable difficulty, in the present state of political knowledge and social organization, in assigning different spheres to the external activity of different races. The Great Powers have partitioned Africa territorially; is it beyond the wit of man to divide it economically? The co-operation of many different kinds of men is needed for the cultivation of such a noble estate. Is it impossible to regulate in full and intricate detail the conditions under which that co-operation shall take place? Here white men can live and thrive; there they cannot. Here is a task for one, there the opportunity of another. The world is big enough. [I write as the stream of the Nile bears me between the immense spaces of beautiful, fertile, unpopulated country that lie north of the Albert Lake.] There is plenty of room for all. Why cannot we settle it fairly?

It must be noted that the question of Asiatic immigration presents itself to the Imperial point of view in several quite distinct forms. There are, first of all, colonies which stand on the basis of a white proletariat, and whose inhabitants, rich and poor, employers and employed, are all Europeans. The right of such colonies to forbid the entry of large numbers of Asiatics, and to preserve themselves from the racial chaos and economic disturbance inseparable from such immigration, cannot be denied, although its exercise ought no doubt to be governed by various prudential and other considerations. But these colonies differ markedly from those where the mass of the population is not white, but black. Again, there are colonies which possess responsible government, and where the number of the white middle-class inhabitants very largely exceeds the Asiatic community. It is evident that these stand in a wholly different position from that of places like the tropical Protectorates of East and West Africa.

Indeed, it may be contended that the very fact that the native of British India will undoubtedly, wisely or unwisely, rightly or wrongly, be refused access in any large numbers to several South African and all Australian Colonies by their respective Governments, makes it all the more desirable that the Imperial Government should afford in the tropical Protectorates outlet and scope to the enterprise and colonizing capacity of Hindustan. And, as I have written, these countries are big enough for all. There is no reason why those Highland areas which promise the white man a home and a career, and where alone he can live in comfort, should not, as a matter of practical administration, be in the main reserved for him. Nor, on the other hand, why the Asiatic, if only he does not teach the African natives evil ways—a contingency which must not be forgotten—should not be encouraged to trade and settle as he will in the enormous regions of tropical fertility to which he is naturally adapted. Somewhere in this direction—I do not wish to dogmatize—the immediate course of sound policy would seem to lie, and, guided by the lights of science and tolerance, we may easily find it.

But the course of these reflections has carried me a good deal farther than the politics of Nairobi would seem to justify; and I hasten to return to the question with which I started: "Can the Highlands of East Africa be made 'a white man's country'?" Let us examine this by a fresh process. As one rides or marches through the valleys and across the wide plateaux of these uplands, braced by their delicious air, listening to the music of their streams, and feasting the eye upon their natural wealth and beauty, a sense of bewilderment overcomes the mind. How is it they have never become the home of some superior race, prosperous, healthy, and free? Why is it that, now a railway has opened the door and so much has been published about them, there has not been one furious river of immigration from the cramped and insanitary jungle-slums of Europe? Why, most of all, are those who have come—the pioneers, the men of energy and adventure, of large ambitions and strong hands—why are they in so many cases only just keeping their heads above water? Why should complaint and discontent and positive discouragement be so general among this limited class?

I have always experienced a feeling of devout thankfulness never to have possessed a square yard of that perverse commodity called "land." But I will confess that, travelling in the East African Highlands for the first time in my life, I have learned what the sensation of land-hunger is like. We may repress, but we cannot escape, the desire to peg out one of these fair and wide estates, with all the rewards they offer to industry and inventiveness in the open air. Yet all around are men possessing thousands of fertile acres, with mountains and rivers and shady trees, acquired for little or nothing, all struggling, all fretful, nervous, high-strung, many disappointed, some despairing, some smashed.

What are the true lineaments concealed behind the veil of boundless promise in which this land is shrouded? Are they not stamped with mockery? Is not the eye that regards you fierce as well as bright? "When I first saw this country," said a colonist to me, "I fell in love with it. I had seen all the best of Australia. I had prospered in New Zealand. I knew South Africa. I thought at last I had struck 'God's own country.' I wrote letters to all my friends urging them to come. I wrote a series of articles in the newspapers praising the splendours of its scenery and the excellence of its climate. Before the last of the articles appeared my capital was nearly expended, my fences had been trampled down by troops of zebra, my imported stock had perished, my title-deeds were still blocked in the Land Office, and I myself had nearly died of a malignant fever. Since then I have left others to extol the glories of East Africa."

These second thoughts err, no doubt, as much on the side of extravagant depression as the first impression was over-sanguine. But that there is a rude reverse to the East African medal is a fact which cannot be disputed, and which ought not, in the interests either of the immigrant or of the country to be concealed. It is still quite unproved that a European can make even the Highlands of East Africa his permanent home—that is to say, that he can live there without sensible degeneration for fifteen or twenty years at a stretch without ever returning to the temperate zones; still less that he can breed and rear families through several generations. The exhilaration of the air must not lead people to forget that an altitude of from five to eight thousand feet above the sea-level is an unusual condition, producing results, not yet ascertained, upon the nervous system, the brain, and the heart. Its coolness can never remove the fact that we are upon the Equator. Although the skies look so familiar and kindly with their white fleecy clouds and passing showers, the direct ray of the sun—almost vertical at all seasons of the year—strikes down on man and beast alike, and woe to the white man whom he finds uncovered! Although sheep and oxen multiply so rapidly, although crossing them with imported stock produces in each generation astonishing improvements in quality, they are subject to many perils little understood and often fatal. And if the landscape recalls to the pensive traveller the peaceful beauties of gentler climes at home, let him remember that it nurses with blithe fecundity poisonous reptiles, and pest-spreading insects, and terrible beasts of prey.

There is no reason, however, for doubting that modern science possesses, or will discover, the means of eradicating or mitigating many of these evils. As the development of the country and the scientific investigation of tropical agriculture and tropical disease proceed, the difficulties which beset the early settler will gradually be removed. He will learn how to clothe and house himself; what to plant, what to breed, and what to avoid. The spread of East Coast fever, now carried by the ticks from one animal to another, and carried by the infected animals from one district to another, will be arrested, and controlled by a proper system of wire-fencing and quarantine. Remedies will be discovered against the various diseases which attack sheep or horses. Zebra, rhinoceros, buffalo, and other picturesque and fascinating nuisances will be driven from or exterminated within the settled areas, and confined to the ample reserves of uninhabited land. The slow but steady growth of a white population will create a market for local agricultural produce. The powerfully equipped Scientific Departments, the Veterinary and Forestry Departments, and the Department of Agriculture newly established on a considerable scale, will be able to guide and assist the enterprise of the new-comer, and save him from repeating the ill-starred experiments of the pioneer. Roads will improve, and railways and mono-rail tramways will extend. Step by step life and the means of living will become easier and more secure. Still it will not be proved that the pure-bred European can rear his children under the Equatorial sun and at an elevation of more than six thousand feet; and till that is proved "the white man's country" will remain a white man's dream.