how nice it must be to be able to get about in cars, omnibuses
and railway trains again ! ” Is it ? Well I don’t think so, and
I do not feel glad over it. Similarly, we will take an African
case of ingratitude. A white friend of mine put himself to
an awful lot o f trouble to save the life of one of his sub-traders
who had had an accident, and succeeded. It had been the
custom of the man’s wife to bring the trader little presents of
fowls, etc., from time to time, and some time after the accident
he met the lady and told her he had noticed a falling off in her
offerings and he thought her very ungrateful after what he had
done for her husband. She grunted and the next morning she
brings in as a present the most forlorn, skinny, one-and-a-half-
feathered chicken you ever laid eye on, and in answer to the
trader’s comments she said : “ Massa, fo sure them der chicken
no be ’ticularly good chicken, but fo sure dem der man no
be ’ticularly good man. They go ” (they match each other).
I have referred at great length to the Krumen because of
their importance, and also because they are - the natives the
white men have more to do with as servants than any other ;
but methods of getting on with them are not necessarily
applicable to dealing with other forms of African labourers,
such as plantation hands in the Congo Français, Angola, and
Cameroon. In Cameroon the Germans are now using largely“
the Batanga natives on the plantations ; the Duallas, the great
trading tribe in Cameroon River, being too lazy to do any
heavy work ; and they have also tried to import labourers from
Togo Land, but this attempt was not a success, ending in the
revolt o f 1894, which lost several white lives. The public work
is carried on, as it is in our own colonies, by the criminals in
the chain-gang. The Germans have had many accusations
hurled against them by people of their own nationality, but on
the whole these “ atrocities ” have been much exaggerated and
only half understood ; and certainly have not amounted to
anything like the things that have gone on in the “ philanthropic
” Congo Free State. The food given out by the German
Government is the best Government rations given on the whole
West Coast. When they have allowed me to have some of
their native employes, as when I was up Cameroon Mountain;
for example, I bought rations from the Government stores for
them, and was much struck by the soundness and good quality
o f both rice and beef, and the rations they gave out to those
Dahomeyans or Togolanders who revolted was so much more
than they could, or cared to eat, that they used to sell much
o f it to the Duallas in Bell Town. This is not open to the
criticism that the stuff was too bad for the Togolanders to
eat, as was once said to me by a philanthropic German who
had never been to the Coast, because the Duallas are a rich
tribe, perfectly free traders in the matter, able to go to the
river factories and buy provisions there had they wished to, and
so would not have bought the Government rations unless they
were worth having. The great point that has brought the
Germans into disrepute with the natives employed by them is
their military spirit, which gives rise to a desire to regulate
everything ; and that other attribute of the military spirit,
nagging. You should never nag an African, it only makes
him bothered and then sulky, and when he’s sulky he’ll lie
down and die to spite you. But in spite of the Germans
being o v e r - g i y e n to this unpleasant habit of military regularity
and so on, the natives from the Kru Coast and from Bassa and
the French Ivory Coast return to them time after time for spells
o f work, so there must be grave exaggeration regarding their
bad treatment, for these natives are perfectly free in the
matter.
The French: use Loango boys for factory hands and these
people are very bright and intelligent, but as a M’pongwe,
who knew them well, said : “ They are much too likely to be
devils to be good too much ” and are undoubtedly given to
poisoning, which is an unpleasant habit in a house servant.
Their military force are composed o f Senegalese Laptot, very
fine, fierce fellows, superior, I believe, as fighting men to our
Hausas, and very devoted to, and well treated by, their French
officers.
That the Frenchman does not know how to push trade in his
possessions, the trade returns, with the balance all on thé
wrong side, clearly show ; still he does know how to get
possession of Africa better than we do, and this means he
knows how to deal with the natives. The building up of
Congo Français for example, has not cost one-third o f the
human lives, black or white, that an equivalent quantity of
Congo Beige has, nor one-third of the expense of Uganda or
Sierra Leone. It is customary in England to dwell on the
commercial failure, and deduce from it the erroneous conclusion
that France will soon leave it off when she finds it does
not pay. This is an error, because commercial success-^
the making the thing pay— is not the French ideal in
the affair. It is our own, and I am the last person to say our
ideal is wrong ; but it is not the French ideal, and I am the
last person to say France is wrong either. There may exist
half a hundred or more right reasons for doing anything, and
the reasons France has for her energetic policy in Africa are