Tools and the African's Job
By JOHNTAWNEY THE demonstrator said, "So you see, gentlemen, the tractor more than replaces the horse," but the gentlemen did not quite see, for the horse had played no part in their agricultural experience. Indeed, some of them had never seen one until they came to England from East Africa. Under the Tudor oaks of the ancient deer-park the dark visitors looked on with grave attention at the young white men in clean overalls who put the machines through their paces. Sometimes inscrutability gave way to approbation. Men who had learnt, almost at birth, that hunger was near when the steady rhythm of pestles pounding grain in mortars faltered and died away in the villages, cocked a discriminating ear at the quick clatter of the hammer-mill attachment. The augur, boring rapid holes, was a crisply practical demonstration which drew applause. "Five minutes a hole," said the instructor. "It would take a man a good half-hour," and got back a pungent flash of African humour when one of our party answered, "If a man of my country dug a hole that size in half a day, we should think him more wonderful than any machine."
It was a fine display of engineering skill married to the earth. Everyone was impressed, but I don't think the Africans saw any of it as applicable to themselves. They already knew, of course, what machines could do, and were doing, in their own countries, but not in the field of peasant agriculture. Machines were the creatures of corporations and co-operatives, of the broad acres of alienated land. It was, perhaps, signifi- cant that no one even asked the price of the horse-replacing robots.
But it is not only a question of price. A revolution in ideas and practice must take place before large-scale mechanisation can come to Africans in Africa. It is easy to dream of co-operation, seductive to picture wide lands and fat bank- accounts 'providing the setting for innumerable machines and a rapidly-expanding agricultural economy. These things will come, and there is a bright future for community development in African agriculture. But if the individual peasant is to play his part without too heavy a weight of Government control, there can be no swift tide of common progress to wash away the habits of centuries.
For let us make no bones about it; the future of food- production in Africa may be helped, but cannot be determined, by the stimulus of schemes controlled by local Governments or by the extra-territorial influence of colonial corporations. In the final event it is the peasant producer's own initiative that must get the extra from the land. That he must be helped, that he may need a push here and a pull there, is obvious, but the means are not always clearly seen, and enthusiastic planners often lose sight of the individual in the -mass.
The essence of African peasant-cultivation is the little plot, the half-acre in one place, the few square yards in another. Fragmentation of holdings is not only a sign of physical capacity but of individuality and independence. Of reason, too. The small farmer hacks his painful way into the forbidden forest because the virgin, leafy earth will repay his toil with heavier maize-crops from a smaller plot. His dry-weather beans need moisture: so the papyrus is cleared from the valley, though when the rains come there may be floods. His sweet-potato ridges break all the anti-soil-erosion rules, for that is how his forbears got the best results—and your days may not be long in a land where your father's ghost is always ready to be affronted.
These things are facts. They will be changed as time goes on, but not by an over-hasty prescription of communal holdings big enough to justify the use of modern machines. The admission that at present mechanised agriculture is beyond possibility for the African peasant does not postulate a policy of laisser faire until such time as his present ideas adjust them- selves to advancing civilisation. On the contrary, the process of change must be given some acceleration; neither in his own interests nor in those of his country can the African stand still while the world goes by.
An impartial- assessment of the African peasant's agricultural efforts dispels the common idea that his small output is solely due to laziness. Some indolence there may be, as well as indifference and carelessness, but these are mit the main reasons. They are quite simple—lack of incentives to produce more than a man's own family requires, and lack of tools with which to do a bigger job more easily. 'When you have nothing but a clumsy hoe for all your tillage, even a single acre's cultivation becomes a formidable task.
There are techniques in the. use of African hoes. They may scratch the weeds from the surface of the ground or be swept down from a height which gives the soil a good spit's digging. Whatever their task, whatever their design, they remain hoes, unsuitable for half the work imposed upon them. In twenty- two years in East Africa I never saw a spade in use in native cultivation. Once I invited a man to savour. the speed and lightening of toil achieved by pushing a fork into the ground with his foot. He lost his balance. The plough (where holdings are big enough to take one) is virtually unknown over thousands of square miles, and if you asked a man to take a loaded wheel- barrow to a rubbish-dump his instinct would be to place it on his head.
These, again, are facts, but they are capable of early altera- tion. To substitute simple, modern implements for primitive ones is an easier, less dangerous aim at first than too hasty a campaign against ideas of land-tenure and use which are entangled in tribal lore and religion. Less arduous labour, then, through different tools should be the first achievement, and with an easing of toil the way to increased production will be opened, and in its turn that will mean income from the land. For income is essential, not only as an incentive to effort but to dispel the disdain which at present even the barely literate have for a life near the soil. That disdain will go when men realise that agriculture means money and is an, honourable profession; education must wed men more firmly to the earth and cease to breed visions of non-manual employment for all. When this has been done, and not before, Africans will be ready to usher in their own dawn of mechanical agriculture.
I hope the visitors did not feel too hopeless about the future. They could find worse targets for their peoples' aim in the years ahead than the possession of those sleek, all-capable machines. But let there be no dreams of a mechanised agricultural economy springing up overnight in Africa to increase the bounty of the earth. The peasant in his millions still holds the key to plenty, and he must learn to plant his feet firmly on the ground before he climbs into the tractor-seat.
As we drove away from the works, we talked much, in our careful English, about the machines. But after a while the elder of our party relapsed happily into the Swahili tongue for a return to realities we had been discussing on the outward journey. "Tell me." he said. "Why do your people pay no dowry for their wives ? "
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