South America and India; therefore the native loses, and
when he has cleared the districts reachable by him, the trade
is finished there, and he has no longer the wherewithal to buy
those things which in the days of his prosperity he has
acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send out the
greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions, subsist
entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to
the oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute
to be found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil
Rivers, even at its present density, would starve. The development
of trade is a necessary condition for the existence of the
natives, and the discovery of products in the forests that will
be marketable in Europe, and the making of plantations whose
products will help to take the place of those he so recklessly
now destroys, will give him a safer future than can any
amount of abolitions of domestic slavery, or institutions of
trial by jury, See. If white control advances and plantations are
not made and trade with the interior is not expanded, the condition
of the West African will be a very wretched one, far
worse than it was before the export slave-trade was suppressed.
In the more healthy districts the population will increase to a
state of congestion and will starve. The coast region’s malaria
will always keep the black, as well as the white, population
thinned down, but if deserted by the trader, and left to the
government official and the missionary, without any longer
the incentive of trade to make the native exert himself, or the
resulting comforts which assist him in resisting the climate,
which the trade now enables him to procure, the Coast native
will sink, via vice and degradation, to extinction, and most
likely have this process made all the more rapid and unpleasant
for him by incursions of the wild tribes from the
congested interior.
I do not cite this as an immediate future for the West
African, but “ a little more and how much it is, a little less and
how far away.” Remember human beings are under the same
rule as other creatures ; if you destroy the things that prey on
them, they are liable to overswarm the food-producing power of
their locality. It may be said this is not the case; look at the
Polynesians, the South American Indians, and so on. You
may look at them as much as you choose, but what you see
there will not enable you to judge the African. The African does
not fade away like a flower before the white man— not in -the
least. Look at the increase of the native in the Cape
territory; look at what he has stood on the West Coast.
Christopher Columbus visited him before he discovered the
American Indians. Whaling captains, and seamen of all sorts
and nationalities have dropped in on him “ frequent and free.
He has absorbed all sorts of doctrine from religious sects ;
cotton goods, patent medicines, foreign spirits, and— as the
man who draws up the Lagos Annual Colonial Report
poetically observes— twine, whisky, wine, and woollen goods.
Yet the West Coast African is here with us by the million
playing on his tom-tom, paddling his dug-out canoe, living
in his palm leaf or mud hut, ready and able to stand more
“ white man stuff.” Save for an occasional habit of going
raving or melancholy mad when educated for the ministry,
and dying when he, and more particularly she, is shut up in
the broiling hot, corrugated-iron school-room with too many
clothes on, and too much headwork to do, he survives in a
way which I think you will own is interesting, and which
commands my admiration and respect. But there is nowadays
a new factor in his relationship with the white races- the
factor of domestic control. I do not think the African will
survive this and flourish, if it is to be of the nature that the
present white ideas aim to make it. But, on the other hand, I
do not believe that he will be called upon to try, for under the
present conditions white control will not become very thorough ;
and in the event of a European war, governmental attention will
be distracted from West Africa, and the African will then do
what he has done several times before when the white eye has
been off him for a decade or so,— sink back to his old level as he
has in Kacongo after the Jesuits tidied him up, and as he must
have done after his intercourse with the Phoenicians and
Egyptians. The travellers of a remote future will find him,
I think, still with his tom-tom in his dug-out canoe just as
willing to sell as “ big curios ” the débris of our importations
to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much he will
ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton s tin, I
cannot imagine, but it will be something stiff—like he asks
nowadays for the Phoenician “ Aggry ” beads. There will
be then as there is now, and as there was in the past,
individual Africans who will rise to a high level of culture,
but that will be all for a very long period. To say that the
African race will never advance beyond its present culture-
level, is saying too much, in spite of the-mass of evidence
supporting this view, but I am certain "he will never advance
above it in the line of European culture. The country he
lives in is unfitted for it, and the nature of the man himself
is all against it— the truth is the West Coast mind
has got a great deal too much superstition about it, and too