THE STORY OF WEST AFRICA.*
Is' all writers were like Miss Kingsley, what a pleasant life a reviewer's would be. She is invincibly readable. At least a dozen histories of European action in West Africa, from the days of the Portuguese exploration to the Convention of July, 1898, have been written by able men enough, and read by the writer of these lines ; and every one has left that history a mere string of names and dates. An exception should be made for the brilliant volume in Mr. Lucas's Historical Geography of the British Colonies; but even that does not really succeed in lighting up the past. If you want to know why Europeans went to "the Bight of Benin where for one that goes out there are forty go in," what manner of men they were that went there, and what they did when they got there, there is absolutely no recent book that will en- lighten you half so much as this little volume of Miss Kingsley's ; for she will give you, not the abstract summary of events, but the concrete human instance. To begin with, you will find the African races roughly classified, and will be taught that "the powerful fighting tribes from Ashantee, Dahomey, and Hausaland right down away south to Zulu- land" come of a mixed blood : of the pure negro stock crossed • The Story of West Africa. By Mary H. Kingsley. London : Horace Marshall and Sons. Da 6cL]
with the Moors of the Western Soudan,—that is to say, having a strong infusion of the blood which produced a very remarkable civilisation that in its day came near to overrun Europe. Secondly, her opinion is to be noted that this negro race, pure or mixed, is "a great world-race--a race not passing off the stage of human affairs, but one that has an immense amount of history before it," if only by virtue of its power to survive :—
"The moulding of that history is in the hands of the Euro- peans, whose superior activity and superior power in arts and crafts gives them the mastery ; but all that this mastery gives is the power to make the future of the negro and the European pro- sperous or to make it one of disaster and misery to both alike. Whatever we do in Africa to-day, a thousand years hence there will be Africans to suffer or thrive for it."
Christian Europeans went first to West Afriea in pursuit of a dream ; Prince Henry the Navigator thought not only of commerce, he hoped to find somewhere away south the great Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to gain help from him in the Holy War against the infidel then lodged in Europe. But the commerce too was his care, and a Papal Bull of 1454 granted to Portugal all lands discovered south of Cape Bojador ; so that Portugal had the Coast to itself until the Reformation, "when neither England nor Holland had any goodwill of Rome's to lose." And so English merchant privateers were loosed down the Coast from which in the fifteenth century Edward IV. had kept back the Bristol adventurers. They found Portugal strongly lodged there, busy trading and gold mining : but mining under difficulties. For when a tunnel crumbled the natives set down the collapse to the work of a San- bonsum who lived in the hill, and they would work no more, lest a worse thing should come upon them : and when Portuguese and Dutch tried to reopen mines they fought them off with poisoned arrows. There is a grim story of the Ahboassi mine, which was yielding richly till an earthquake came and blocked the main tunnel with a falling boulder. Those who were entombed stayed there; the rest of the Portuguese escaped, but only to be tracked down, over- powered, and bound, except one who escaped into the bush and saw the fight. One man who fought hard "the natives silenced by the usual device of that country, driving two knives through his cheeks." The captives were then carried to the mine, thrown into a tunnel still open, and buried alive there. In 1874 a party of prospectors were up in that country ; they struck an old tunnel, a terrier with them followed a bolting porcupine into a dark corner, and the dog's master went to fetch it out, when something crackled under his feet, and he saw human skeletons—five of them—" with feet and hands still secured by bonds which crumbled at the touch. In the jaw of one skull was found a rusty piece of iron which on examination proved to be two knife blades corroded out of all shape." Colonel Ellie, who knew the Coast literature thoroughly, appreciated at its value and recorded this grim document.
English trade began with legitimate traffic, and from the voyages of Mr. Jobson Miss Kingsley produces details of its daily working. A charter was given to a "Company of Merchant Adventurers" in 1588 for the Guinea trade, but this simply meant that other Englishmen were forbidden to trade there; and the merchants had to make good their footing against Dutch, Portuguese, and French on the Coast, for in those days might was right from Senegal to Cameroon. The Portuguese had a local offer out of a hundred crowns for every Frenchman's head. Not only that, but English "interlopers" came in, and the Merchant Adventurers grew " greatly tired of it," and with- drew about the same time-1621—as a Dutch Company was started under the patronage of the States-General. Fresh charters were issued, and under Charles II. they led to war with the Dutch. In 1672 the Royal African Company was in a very thriving condition, dealing in slaves and gold-dust. But as the French Navy increased this prosperity vanished, the African Company had to petition Parliament, and by way of a new experiment the Guinea trade was thrown open to all merchants who should pay a duty of 10 per cent. to the Com- pany. This was the beginning of sorrows. The duty could not be levied, and the "interlopers" were, to speak plainly, no better than pirates. Hitherto the slave trade, though it had grown large, was not barbarous. "There were doubtless bard cases under it before, but the men and women exported to America and the West Indies by the Company were mainly criminals sold by the natives instead of being killed for their crimes, and the slaves were carefully transported." The Company had its establishment of trading stations, and its legitimate traffic to consider, and was bound to live at peace with its neighbours. The interlopers, who had no stake in the country, inaugurated kidnapping, and, moreover, the competition "led undoubtedly to the fostering of ware that were raiding wars made to gain slaves." And yet the traffic was deliberately encouraged by Parliament. Why ? The answer is worth noting :— " Truly learned and pious men then regarded it as good because by it the Africans were brought in touch with Christi- anity. Their feeling on the subject was precisely the same as that which people have to-day who think that methods them- selves not good are yet made so by bringing the African in touch with civilisation. There was doubtless in those days a deplorable amount of cant. Slaver and anti-slaver alike used Scriptural texts as weapons against each other, but Parliament represented the honest conviction that the more Africans given the chance of becoming Christians the better, and never mind how."
We cannot follow out the rest of Miss Kingsley's narration, which tells how the African Company was crushed out by the subsidised French and Dutch Companies, how its successor continued till 1821, when the Crown took over West Africa, and in seven years also grew "greatly tired of it." Then came the era of government by a Committee of merchants, and the lamentable episode of Maclean, whom Parliament threw to the wolves. Many have tried, and none more sincerely than Miss Kingsley, to redress by posthumous tributes the injustice that was done; but the example is not encouraging. It is only fair to note that he, the only genuine ruler before Sir George Goldie whom England sent to West Africa, was selectee by the merchants at a time when England as a nation had determined to abandon her interests and her obligations on the Coast. That is the moral of Miss Kingsley's book. Our position was won for us by merchant adventurers, who went there at peril of their lives,—from the natives, from pirates (whose engaging history Miss Kingsley recounts with enormous gusto), and, above all, from the deadly climate; it was held by them in spite of their rulers, and it is now, after long centuries, admitted to be worth holding as one of the world's great markets that we cannot see closed against us. And in the last part of her book Miss Kingsley, after recounting the labours and courage of explorers, emphasises the work that has been done for England in the most valuable region open to us—that of the Niger—by two merchants. Of these the first, Macgregor Laird, the wise pioneer of com- merce on the Niger, was a merchant pure and simple ; the second, Sir George Goldie. was a soldier-statesman directing the affairs of a Company of merchants, but incidentally ruling a great territory and fighting a brilliant campaign in obedi- ence to a very simple principle,—" making treaties with the African chiefs and sticking to those treaties, observing his side of them and, when necessary, seeing to it that the chiefs observed theirs." That is the way to begin,—the permanent condition. For the further development two things are needed : first, that life in those countries should be made more possible for Europeans, and Mr. Chamberlain is wisely calling in science to that end,—the merchants again assisting by the establishment of a school of tropical medicine ; secondly, that we should understand the mind of the peoples we have to deal with, and Miss Kingsley would have science called in for this also, the science of anthropology. Her own work in that field needs no fresh praise; and the conclusions which she laid down in her West African " Studies " are remarkably borne out by the notable words of a very different observer among very different races. Stevenson wrote from Samoa to a lady about to take up mission work :—
" Always remember the fable of the Sun, the Storm, and the Traveller's Cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder. Barbarous as the customs may seem, always bear them with patience, always judge them with gentleness, always find in them some seed of good ; see that you always develop them ; remember that all you can do is to civilise the man in the line of his own civilisation, such as it is. And never expeet. never believe in tbaumaturgic conversions. They may do very well for St. Paul ; in the case of an Andiunan islander they mean less than nothing. In fact, what you have to do is to teach the parents in the interests of their great-grand- et en."
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